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

NAUDSONCE
The sun warmed Mark Howell's back pleasantly. Underfoot, the mosslike stuff was soft and yielding, and
there was a fragrance in the air unlike anything he had ever smelled. He was going to like this planet; he
knew it. The question was, how would it, and its people, like him? He watched the little figures advancing
across the fields from the mound, with the village out of sight on the other end of it and the combat-car
circling lazily on contragravity above.

Major Luis Gofredo, the Marine officer, spoke without lowering his binoculars:

"They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long; six of them are carrying it on poles, three to a side, and
a couple more are walking behind it. Mark, do you think it could be a cannon?"

So far, he didn't know enough to have an opinion, and said so, adding:

"What I saw of the village in the screen from the car, it looked pretty primitive. Of course, gunpowder's
one of those things a primitive people could discover by accident, if the ingredients were available."

"We won't take any chances, then."

"You think they're hostile? I was hoping they were coming out to parley with us."

That was Paul Meillard. He had a right to be anxious; his whole future in the Colonial Office would be
made or ruined by what was going to happen here.

The joint Space Navy-Colonial Office expedition was looking for new planets suitable for colonization;
they had been out, now, for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploring expedition. They
had entered eleven systems, and made landings on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to
Terra-type. There had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra during the Cretaceous
Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there
had been Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would be a fine planet, but at present it was
undergoing an extensive glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with forests of gigantic trees; it would have
been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty, especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had
just gotten as far as clubs and coup-de-poing axes. Contact with them had entailed heavy ammunition
expenditure, with two men and a woman killed and a dozen injured. He'd had a limp, himself, for a while
as a result.

As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, and the rest had been the sort that get colonized
by irreconcilable minority-groups who want to" get away from everybody else. The Colonial Office
wouldn't even consider any of them.

Then they had found this one, third of a GO-star, eighty million miles from primary, less axial inclination
than Terra, which would mean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half land surface. On
the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for specimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and
the organic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorer dreams of finding, except for one
thing.

It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were civilized enough to put it in Class V,
and Colonial Office doctrine on Class V planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the natives had to be
established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteed in a treaty of some sort with somebody more
or less authorized to make one.