"Murray Leinster - The Mad Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

sickly, fever-ridden existence. All mankind desired the highlands, and men
forgot their two centuries of peace.
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live and
breathe. Those forced to remain at sea level died in the poisonous air.
Meanwhile, the danger zone crept up as the earth fissures tirelessly poured out
steady streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within 500 feet of sea
level. The lowlands went uncultivated, becoming jungles unparalleled since the
first carboniferous period.
Then men died of sheer inanition at 1,000 feet. The plateaus and mountaintops
were crowded with folk struggling for footholds and food beyond the invisible
menace that crept up, and up--
These events occured over many years, several generations. Between the
announcement of the International Geophysical Institute that carbon dioxide in
the air had increased from .04% to .1% and the time when at sea level 6% of the
atmosphere was the deadly gas, more than 200 years intervened.
Coming gradually as it did, the poisonous effect of the deadly stuff increased
insidiously. First lassitude, then heaviness of brain, then weakness of body.
The human population of the entire world slowly declined to a fraction of its
former size. At last there was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but the
danger level continued to rise.
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to the
poison, or face extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that
had wiped out entire races and nations, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased
in size to secure the oxygen of life, but the poison, inhaled at every breath,
left the few survivors sickly and perpetually weary. Their minds lacked energy
to cope with new problems or communicate knowledge.


So after 30,000 years, Burl crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus


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growths. He was ignorant of fire, metals, or the uses of stone and wood. A
single garment covered him. His language was a meager group of a few hundred
labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things.
There was no wood in the scanty territory his tribe furtively inhabited. With
the increase in heat and humidity the trees had died out. Those of northern
climes went first: oaks, cedars, and maples. Then pines, beeches, cypresses, and
finally even jungle forests vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their
kin, flourished in the new, steaming atmosphere. The jungles gave place to dense
thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns again.
Then fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before on a planet of torrid
heat and perpetual miasma, on whose surface the sun never shone directly because
of an ever-thickening bank of clouds hanging sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang
up. About the dank pools festering over the earth's surface, fungus growths
clustered. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrous forms and
malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, they spread over the land.
The grasses and ferns gave way to them. Squat footstools, flaking molds,