"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

It was quite an event when they had their first meal of Troan food. The flavors were indescribable. Lorenzen grew aware of how impoverished most human languages are with respect to taste and smell sensations-but there were hints of ginger and cinnamon and garlic. He grinned and suggested: "Perhaps the soul of Escoffier isn't in Paradise at all; maybe he was given special permission to fly around the Galaxy and see what he could whomp up."
Thornton frowned, and Lorenzen flushed-but how do you apologize for a joke? He said nothing, but winced when he remembered the incident.
Hamilton only permitted half the men to eat that meal, and observed them closely during the day that followed.
Now and then animals were seen, most of them small fleeting shapes that scuttled through the long grasses on the edge of the burned area; but once a herd of bigger quadrupeds, the size of ponies, wandered past: grayish-green, scaled, with long hoofed legs and earless reptilian heads. Umfanduma cursed with his impatience to get a closer look.
"If the reptiles have developed that far," he said, "I'll give odds there are no mammals."
"Reptiles in a glacial period?" asked Fernandez skeptically. "Not that big, my friend."
"Oh, not reptiles strictly speaking, but closer to that stage than terrestrial mammals. There are cold and warm seasons here, I'm told, so they must have warm blood and well-developed hearts; but they certainly don't look placental."
"That's another argument in favor of there being no intelligent life here," said Lorenzen. "It looks as if this planet is wide open, just waiting for man."
"Yes ... just waiting." Avery spoke with a sudden surprising bitterness. "Waiting for mines and cities and roads, for the hills to be leveled and the plains filled up with people. For our dogs and cats and cows and pigs to wipe out the infinite variety of native life. For noise and dust and crowding."
"Don't you like the human race, Ed?" asked Gumus-lugil sardonically. "I thought your job required you to."
"I like the human race in its proper place ... which is Earth," said Avery. "Oh, well," He shrugged and smiled. "Never mind."
"We've got a piece of work to do," said Hamilton. "It's not our department to worry about the consequences."
"A lot of men have said that throughout history," replied the psychman. "Soldiers, executioners, scientists building atomic bombs. Well-" He turned away, sighing.
Lorenzen grimaced. He remembered the green rustling stillness of the Alaskan woods, the stark wild glory of the Lunar peaks. There was little enough of that left in the Solar System, few enough places where you could be alone. It did seem a pity that Troas-
After a week, the monkeys were brought in. Umfanduma checked them carefully, killed and dissected them, ran analyses with the help of Hideki. "All normal," he reported. "I found some types of native bacteria in their bloodstream, living harmlessly and completely sterile; apparently they can't reproduce in the chemical conditions of the terrestrial body. You wouldn't even get a fever from them."
Hamilton's lean gray head nodded. "All right," he said at last, slowly. "I guess we can go out."
He led the way. There was a brief ceremony of planting the flag of the Solar Union. Lorenzen stood bareheaded with the rest, the wind ruffling his hair under an alien sky, and thought that in this big lonely landscape the whole affair was a little ridiculous.
For a couple of days the site boiled with activity as camp was set up, men and robots working around the clock. There was always light, from the green or red sun or both, or from the great shield of Sister, high in a sky that burned with an unbelievable glory of stars. The work was hampered by friction between men, though it seemed strange that they should quarrel when they were as isolated as men had ever been. But it went on. A neat circle of collapsible shelters grew up around the clustered boats; the main generator began to throb and there was electric light; a well was tapped, a sterilizing unit built, and there was running water; a ring of detectors and alarms and guns was drawn about the camp. The shelters became sleeping quarters, a mess hall, a sick bay, several laboratories, a machine shop. Their metal half-cylinders looked harsh and out of place in the soft landscape.
After that, Lorenzen found himself rather a fifth wheel. There wasn't much for an astronomer to do. He set up a telescope, but between the suns and the satellite there was always too much light for effective study. In the scurrying busyness of the camp, he began to feel homesick.
He went in their one aircar with some others to the Scamander, to take a closer look and gather specimens. The river was enormous, a slowly rolling brown sheet; when you stood on one reedy bank, you couldn't see the other. The fish, insects, and plants didn't interest him much; as a zoological layman, he was more for the larger animals, paraphylon and astymax and tetrapterus. Hunting was easy; none of them seemed to have known anything like man and a rifle bowled them over as they approached curiously closer. Everybody wore a sidearm, for there were carnivores, you could hear them howling at night-but there was really nothing to fear from them.
There were no tall trees; the low scrubby growths which dotted the plains were incredibly tough; an ax would hardly dent them and you needed an AH torch to cut them down. The biological team reported them-on the basis of dendrochronology-to be some centuries old. They wouldn't be of much use to man; he'd have to bring his own seedlings and use forced-growth techniques if he wanted lumber. But the catalogue of edible plants and animals grew apace. A man could be set down here naked and alone, and if he knew anything at all about flint-working he could soon be comfortable.
Then what had happened to the men of the Da Gama?
It could not have been Junior's own environment. It wasn't that alien; as far as wild beasts and disease went, it looked safer than some parts of Earth even today. Now in the warm season, the days were bright and the rains were merely cool; there would be snow in winter, but nothing that fire and furs couldn't stave off. The low carbon dioxide content of the air required a slight change in breathing habits, but it was easily, almost unconsciously made. The lighting was weird-sometimes greenish, sometimes reddish, sometimes a blend of both, with double shadows and the colors of the landscape shifting with the suns-but it was not unpleasing, surely nothing to cause madness. There were poisonous plants, a couple of men got a bad rash from merely brushing one herb, but anyone with half a brain could soon learn to avoid those types. The land was quiet, speaking only with a sough of wind and rush of rain and thunder, remote cry of animals and beat of wings in the sky-but that too was only a relief after the clangor of civilization.
Well-
Lorenzen puttered with his instruments, measuring the exact periods of revolution and rotation for the planet and the heavenly bodies. The rest of the time he helped out, awkwardly, where he could, or talked to men off duty, or played games, or sat around and read. It wasn't his fault, this idleness, but he felt obscurely guilty about it. Maybe he should consult Avery. The psychman seemed rather a lost soul himself.
Twelve of Junior's thirty-six-hour days slipped past. And then the aliens came.

CHAPTER VII
A telescope swinging on its clockwork mounting. Sudden shapes moving in its field. A photocell reacts, and the feedback circuit holds the 'scope leveled on the approaching objects. As they come nearer, an alarm is tripped and a siren skirls into the quiet air.
Friedrich von Osten jumped from the cot on which he had been dozing. "Lieber Gott!" He grabbed a rifle, and loosened the magnum pistol at his waist as he ran from the tent. Other men were sticking their heads out of the shelters, looking up from their work, hurrying to their posts at the machine gun emplacements.
Von Osten reached the command post and poised on the edge of its trench, raising his field glasses. There were ... yes ... eight of them, walking steadily toward the camp. It was too far yet to see details, but sunlight flashed hard off metal.
He picked up the intercom mike and said harshly: "Stand by all defense stations, Iss Captain Hamilton dere?"
"Speaking. I'm up in the bow of Boat One. They look like ... intelligence ... don't they?"
"Ja, I t'ink dey are."
"All right. Stand by. Keep them covered, but don't shoot till I say so. That's an order. No matter what happens, don't shoot till I tell you to."
"Even if dey open up on us?"
"Yes."
The siren rose to a new note. Alarm stations! General alert!
Lorenzen ran for the shack assigned to him. The camp was a scurrying confusion, shouts and thud of feet, dust swirling up to dull the drawn guns. The aircar shot overhead, rising for a bird's-eye look. Or tetrapterus eye? thought Lorenzen wildly. There are no birds here. This isn't our world.
He entered the shelter. It was crowded with a dozen men, untrained in militechnics and assigned here mostly to keep them out of the way. Avery's round face gaped at him; the light of Lagrange I, streaming in the window, looked ghastly on his skin. "Natives?" he asked.
"I ... suppose so." Lorenzen bit his lip. "Seems to be half a dozen or so, coming on foot. What the hell are we s-s-scared of?"
Thornton's long gaunt face thrust out of a shadowed corner. "There is no point in taking chances," he said. "No telling what those ... things ... intend, or what powers they command. 'Be ye therefore wise as serpents-' "
" '-and harmless as doves,' " finished Avery.
"But are we?" He shook his head. "Man is still adolescent. And this reaction is ... childish. Fear of the unknown. With all the energies we have to use, we're still afraid. It's wrong."
"The Da Gama" said Thornton tightly, "did not come back."
"I don't think ... simple planet-bound natives, without so much as a city, could have been ... responsible," said Avery.
"Something was," said Lorenzen. He felt cold. "They might have weapons-b-b-bacterio-logical-"
"It's childish, I tell you, this fear." Avery's voice wobbled. "We've all got to die sometime. We should greet them openly and-"
"And talk to them, I suppose?" Thornton grinned. "How good is your Lagrangian, Avery?"
There was silence. The noise outside had died away, now the whole camp lay waiting.