"H. Beam Piper - First Cycle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

other as though on opposite sides of a merry-go-round mounted on the rim of a gigantic Ferris-wheel,
each slightly bulging toward the other. At the center of their inner, or opposing, hemispheres-, high
mountains had pushed outward, surrounded by concentric ranges of lower mountains raised by the tilt of
the rock strata, sloping back into wide plains which extended to the terminator-zones, which were
jumbled badlands of great, shattered boulders. On each, at the point antipodal to the other, the crust had
sunk into a deep depression, around which chains of great mountains had been formed.

In the early stages of their formation, one of this pair had received most of the water available. Thus it
differed from its twin in that it was covered by a vast ocean, broken only by the tops-of the mountain
chain around the central depression on the outer hemisphere, which formed a circle of small island
continents, the largest about three million square kilometers in area. The inner hemisphere, the side
always facing the twin, had a permanent high tide, which just covered the top of the great peak at the
center.

On the sister planet, the central depression of the outer hemisphere was a shallow, brackish sea; there
was a chain of lakes and marshes encircling the terminator or Horizon Zone, and another circle of lakes
around the central peaks of the inner hemisphere.

On both planets life emerged, quickly on the water world, more slowly on the arid one. Seaweed sprang
up from the marshes, wind and spray borne spores invaded the land, and the green of plant life spread
over the mineral reds and yellows and browns and grays. Animal life followed. The world-ocean of the
water planet sent wave after wave of invaders ashoreтАФsea-worms which evolved into earthworms,
mollusks, crustaceans, and then a vertebrate fish which developed the ability to breathe air and became
an amphibian. On the arid planet, vertebrate life never developed in the central sea; but a crawling
slugoid, twenty-five centimeters long, which had invaded the land, developed some of its muscles into
cartilage. After another million years, the cartilage hardened to bone.

With some superficial modification, this was the situation on the twin planets when, in the 572nd year of
the Primary Dispersion, the Greater Terran Federation space-cruiser Franklin, G.T.F.H. 17649,
Captain Absalom Carpenter, came out of hyperspace at the perimeter of the Canis Venatici star-cluster
and picked up the binary system on her scanners.

By custom, commanders of G.T.F. Space Navy Exploration and Discovery vessels named newly
discovered planetary systems either for themselves or for their ships, mistresses, wives, or pet dogs.
Absalom Carpenter, G.T.F.S.N.E.&.D. Captain, Commanding, was, however, an odd number even in a
service not noted for robot-like conformity. The breast of his dress tunic was polychromatic with
decoration and campaign and battle ribbons, but he valued them, even the blue one with the silver stars,
far less than the single Lit. D. which the University of Montevideo had awarded him for his Internal
Clues to the Probable Dates and Identities of the Secondary and Tertiary Authors of the Iliad and
the Odyssey. So, following some private association-path through the legends of ancient Hellas, he
named the yellow star Elektra. The red dwarf, obviously, was named Rubra, and he called the watery
planet on which the expedition first landed Thalassa, and its arid companion Hetaira.

Chapter Two

By the end of the first billion years, the coastal marshes of Equatorial Thalassa teemed with life. Pools
and channels were clogged with water-grasses and water-ferns. Great banyan-like trees dipped their
branches, sending out new roots to gain additional resistance to storms and floods. Fish-like and
worm-like and snake-like things swarmed the waters; beasts ran and crawled on the silted floors, or flew
or scampered among the branches.