"Blish, James - Watershed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

"In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years .before their
official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off.
Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle
return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the
cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest
abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by
farming that way. Furthermore the method was totally de-
structive to the topsoil.
"But did they learn? No. Even after they achieved space-
flight, that method of farming was standard in most of the re-
maining jungle areaseven though the bare rock was show-
ing through everywhere by that time."
Hoqqueah sighed. "Now, of course, there are no jungles.
There are no seas, either. There's nothing but desert, naked
rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor airor so the people
would view it, if there were any of them left. Tapa farming
wasn't solely responsible, but it helped."
Gorbel shot a quick glance at the hunched back of Lt. Aver-
dor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to
avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the
other pantropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he
wasn't required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved
those were Corbel's crossesbut the strain of dodging even
normal intercourse with the seal-men was beginning to tell on
him.
Sooner or later, Averdor was going to explode. He would
have nobody to blame for it but himself, but that wouldn't
prevent everybody on board from suffering from it.
Including Corbel, who would lose a first-class navigator and
adjutant.
Yet it was certainly beyond Corbel's authority to order
Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He could only suggest
that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for
the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the
stoniest stares Corbel had ever seen, even from Averdor, with
whom the Captain had been shipping for over thirty Galactic
years.
And the worst of it was that Corbel was, as a human being,
wholly on Averdor's side.
"After a certain number of years, conditions change on any
planet," Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipper-like
arm to include all the points of light outside the greenhouse.
He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding
program. "It's only logical to insist that man be able to change
with themor, if he can't do that, he must establish himself
somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the Earthlike
planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not
in the biological sense."
"Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike pla-nets
in the first place?" Corbel said. "Not that I know much about