"The Haters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

so-and-so's, Captain."
"You have restricted objectives," said Grayson. McGant's dirty so-and-so's, of
course, were the inhabitants of his native Mars. Kerman's "them" were the
officers of the Interplanetary Transport Service, who had fired him for
perfectly justifiable reasons.
Grayson himself wasn't so petty. The "them" that he was going to show was
nothing less than the entire human race.
He studied the films, running them through three more times, looking for any
clue that might hint at an advanced but concealed state of civilization, for any
sign that the intelligence of the highest race, the A-race, was above what he
called the ape-man stage. There was nothing.
The intelligent ones were not particularly impressive-looking. They were about
five feet high, rather slender in build, and not at all humanoid in appearance.
They looked like walking lizards, which they were not. Their jaws protruded and
their foreheads receded, as if they relied more upon their teeth than upon their
brains. And Grayson had learned that in an enemy you had to fear brains more
than anything else.
Completely sane or not, McGant was right. After an hour, Grayson gave the
signal, and the ship spiralled in for a landing. It settled down on a smooth
grassy plot that was red and gray with small growing plants.
They got out, their weapons ready, and looked around them. There was nothing
startling, and Grayson wondered why he couldn't shake off the feeling of danger.
The plants were unusual, of course, but no more unusual than those of a planet
like Venus, for instance. Tall gray trees, red and gray bushes, blue grass. They
were fixed where they grew, as plants should be, and Grayson saw no reason to
fear them. Still, tests had to be made.
A couple of the men, directed by McGant, were already gathering samples to make
them. They took specimens of the air, the soil, they took the leaves and bark of
different plants. In the ship itself, Stratton, the biochemist, who was a very
kindly and gentle person except when he took a notion that the Universe was
persecuting him, fed the materials through the electrono-chemical tester system.
This read off their important characteristics in no more than the time that a
human analyst would have taken to focus a microscope.
"No poisons and no very bad skin irritants," he reported, "except on one of the
larger species of trees, and I don't think there'll be much trouble, Captain, in
getting an antitoxin to control that. Some of the grasses produce mild
allergens, but our drugs should handle them."
No danger from that source then. As for the animalsЧGrayson heard the click of a
gun going off, and saw a blue animal leap out of the grass and lie still. Kerman
and a couple of others were assembling specimens of the larger species. Another
crew was collecting the planetary equivalent of insects. Soon they would get
together numerous representative types of animal life, study how the creatures
reacted, find out how easy they were to kill. Another electronic analyzer would
dissect them and report all their important characteristics to the waiting men.
An hour later, the summarized reports began to come in. By the end of the
afternoon, a hundred small species and a dozen of the larger ones had been
analyzed. There was nothing to be afraid of.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew had not been idle. Under Grayson's direct
orders, a dozen of them were scouting at low levels in their one-man
helicopters. If the planet was as rich in the different metals as it seemed to