The Forgotten Planet

by Murray Leinster

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  _The FORGOTTEN PLANET_

  By MURRAY LEINSTER

  [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright had been renewed.]

  ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  THE FORGOTTEN PLANET Copyright, 1954, by Murray Leinster An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc.

  _The Forgotten Planet_ is based upon _Mad Planet_ and _Red Dust_ (copyrighted Amazing Stories 1926, 1927), and _Nightmare Planet_ (copyrighted 1953 by Gernsback Publications Inc.).

  To Joan Patricia Jenkins

  NATURE'S MISLEAD MADHOUSE!

  Beneath dense gray clouds through which no sun shone lay a forgottenplanet. It was a nightmare world of grotesque and terrifyinganimal-plant life. Gigantic beetles, spiders, bugs and ants filled theputrid, musty earth--ready to kill and devour anything in sight.

  There were men amidst this horror--men who cringed and ran from theravening monsters and huddled in the mushroom forests at night.

  Burl was one of these creatures. But one day inspiration hit Burl. Hewould find a weapon--he would fight back.

  And with this idea the first step was taken in man's most desperateflight for freedom in this most horrible of all worlds. But it was onlya first step.

  About the characters in this book:

  This is something of an oddity among fiction stories, because some ofits characters may be met in person if you wish. Down at the nearestweed-patch or thicket you are quite likely to see a large and unusuallyperfect spider-web with a zig-zag silk ribbon woven into its center. Itsengineer is the yellow-banded garden spider (_Epeira Fasciata_) whoseabdomen may be as big as your thumb. I do not name it to impress you,but to suggest a sort of science-fiction experience.

  Take a bit of straw and disturb the web. Don't break the cables. Simplytap them a bit. The spider will know by the feel of things that youaren't prey and that it can't eat you. So it will set out frighteningyou away. It will run nimbly to the center of the web and shake itselfviolently. The whole web will vibrate, so that presently the spider maybe swinging through an arc inches in length, and blurred by the speed ofits swing. You are supposed to be scared. When you are alarmed enough,the spider will stop.

  That spider, very much magnified, is in this book with crickets andgrasshoppers and divers beetles you may not know personally. But this isnot an insect book, but science-fiction. If the habits of the creaturesin it are authentic, it is because they are much more dramatic andinteresting than things one can invent.

  Murray Leinster

  _PROLOGUE_

  The Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the planet, which hadno name. It was an admirable planet in many ways. It had an ampleatmosphere and many seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that aperpetual cloud-bank hid them and most of the solid ground from view. Ithad mountains and continents and islands and high plateaus. It had dayand night and wind and rain, and its mean temperature was within therange to which human beings could readily accommodate. It was rather onthe tropic side, but not unpleasant.

  But there was no life on it.

  No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Noteven bacteria struggled with its stones to turn them into soil. So therewas no soil. Rock and stones and gravel and even sand--yes. But no soilin which any vegetation could grow. No living thing, however small, swamin its oceans, so there was not even mud on its ocean-bottoms. It wasone of that disappointing vast majority of worlds which turned up whenthe Galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it becausenothing had lived there before.

  Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless. Its air was germ-freeand breathable. But it was of no use whatever for men. The only possiblepurpose it could serve would have been as a biological laboratory forexperiments involving things growing in a germ-free environment. Butthere were too many planets like that already. When men first traveledto the stars they made the journey because it was starkly necessary tofind new worlds for men to live on. Earth was over-crowded--terribly so.So men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of newworlds, but presently they were searching desperately for new worldswhere life had preceded them. It didn't matter whether the life was meekand harmless, or ferocious and deadly. If life of any sort were present,human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men couldnot live where there was no other life.

  So the Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made sure that the world had no life uponit. Then it made routine measurements of the gravitational constant andthe magnetic field and the temperature gradient; it took samples of theair and water. But that was all. The rocks were familiar enough. Nonovelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-ship putits findings on a punched card, six inches by eight, and went hastily onin search of something better. The ship did not even open one of itsports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the _Tethys'_visit except that card. None whatever.

  No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.

  Nearly a millenium later, however, the Seed-Ship _Orana_ arrived. Bythat time humanity had spread very widely and very far. There werecolonies not less than a quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, andEarth was no longer over-crowded. There was still emigration, but it wasnow a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries before. Some ofthe first-colonized worlds had emigrants, now. Mankind did not want tocrowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excusefor such monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.

  Now, too, the star-ships were faster. A hundred light-years was a shortjourney. A thousand was not impractical. Explorers had gone many timesfarther, and reported worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond. Butstill the great majority of discovered planets did not contain life.Whole solar systems floated in space with no single living cell on anyof their members.

  So the Seed-Ships came into being. Theirs was not a glamorous service.They merely methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life. TheSeed-Ship _Orana_ landed on this planet--which still had no name. Itcarefully infected it. It circled endlessly above the clouds, dribblingout a fine dust,--the spores of every conceivable microorganism whichcould break down rock to powder, and turn that dust to soil. It was alsoa seeding of moulds and fungi and lichens, and everything which couldturn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of lifecould grow. The _Orana_ polluted the seas with plankton. Then it, too,went away.

  More centuries passed. Human ships again improved. A thousandlight-years became a short journey. Explorers reached the Galaxy's veryedge, and looked estimatingly across the emptiness toward other islanduniverses. There were colonies in the Milky Way. There werefreight-lines between star-clusters, and the commercial center of humanaffairs shifted some hundreds of parsecs toward the Rim. There were manyworlds where the schools painstakingly taught the children what Earthwas, and where, and that all other worlds had been populated from it.And the schools repeated, too, the one lesson that humankind seemedgenuinely to have learned. That the secret of peace is freedom, and thesecret of freedom is to be able to move away from people with whom youdo not agree. There were no crowded worlds any more. But human beingslove children, and they have them. And children grow up and need room.So more worlds had to be looked out for. They weren't urgently neededyet, but they would be.

  Therefore, nearly a thousand years after the _Orana_, the Ecology-Ship_Ludred_ swam to the planet from space and landed on it. It was agigantic ship of highly improbable purpose. First of all, it checked onthe consequences
of the _Orana's_ visit.

  They were highly satisfactory, from a technical point of view. Now therewas soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungiwhich throve monstrously. The seas stank of minuscule life-forms. Therewere even some novelties, developed by the strictly local conditions.There were, for example, paramoecia as big as grapes, and yeasts hadincreased in size until they bore flowers visible to the naked eye. Thelife on the planet was not aboriginal, though. All of it was descendedand adapted and modified from the microorganisms planted by theseed-ship whose hulk was long since rust, and whose crew were merelynames in genealogies--if that.

  The _Ludred_ stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than eitherof the ships that had visited it before. It dropped the seeds of plants.It broadcast innumerable varieties of things which should take root andgrow. In some places it deliberately seeded the stinking soil. It putmarine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high ground.And when all its stable varieties were set out it added plants whichwere genetically unstable. For generations to come they would throwsports, some of which should be especially suited to this planetaryenvironment.

  Before it left, the _Ludred_ dumped finny fish into the seas. At firstthey would live on the plankton which made the oceans almost broth.There were many varieties of fish. Some would multiply swiftly whilesmall; others would grow and feed on the smaller varieties. And as alast activity, the _Ludred_ set up refrigeration-units loaded withinsect-eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants hadgrown enough to furnish them with food. Others would allow theircontents to hatch only after certain other varieties had multiplied--tobe their food-supply.

  When the Ecology-Ship left, it had done a very painstaking job. It hadtreated the planet to a sort of Russell's Mixture of life-forms. Thereal Russell's Mixture is that blend of the simple elements in theproportions found in suns. This was a blend of life-forms in which someshould survive by consuming the now-habituated flora, others by preyingon the former. The planet was stocked, in effect, with everything thatit could be hoped would live there.

  But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which neededparental care had any chance of survival. The creatures seeded at thistime had to be those which could care for themselves from the instantthey burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals. Trees andplants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kindsof insects could be planted. But nothing else.

  The _Ludred_ swam away through emptiness.

  There should have been another planting centuries later. There shouldhave been a ship from the Zoological Branch of the Ecological Service.It should have landed birds and beasts and reptiles. It should haveadded pelagic mammals to the seas. There should have been herbivorousanimals to live on the grasses and plants which would have thriven, andcarnivorous animals to live on them in turn. There should have beencareful stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits atintervals of a century or so to make sure that a true ecological balancehad been established. And then when the balance was fixed men would comeand destroy it for their own benefit.

  But there was an accident.

  Ships had improved again. Even small private space-craft now journeyedtens of light-years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveledhundreds. Liners ran matter-of-factly on ship-lines tens of thousands oflight-years long. An exploring-ship was on its way to a second islanduniverse. (It did not come back.) The inhabited planets were all membersof a tenuous organization which limited itself to affairs of space,without attempting to interfere in surface matters. That tenuousorganization moved the Ecological Preparation Service files to Algol IVas a matter of convenience. In the moving, a card-file was upset. Thecards it contained were picked up and replaced, but one was missed. Itwas not picked up. It was left behind.

  So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came toprepare it for ultimate human occupancy. It circled its sun, unheededand unthought-of. Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There werehazy markings in some places, where high plateaus penetrated its clouds.But that was all. From space the planet was essentially featureless.Seen from afar it was merely a round white ball--white from itscloud-banks--and nothing else.

  But on its surface, on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But thisfact did not matter for a very long time.

  Ultimately, it mattered a great deal--to the crew of the space-liner_Icarus_. The _Icarus_ was a splendid ship of its time. It borepassengers headed for one of the Galaxy's spiral arms, and it cut acrossthe normal lanes and headed through charted but unvisited parts of theGalaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, veryfew accidents known to happen to space-craft licensed for travel off thenormal space-lanes. It suffered shipwreck in space, and its passengersand crew were forced to take to the life-craft.

  The lifeboats' range was limited. They landed on the planet that the_Tethys_ had first examined, that the _Orana_ and the _Ludred_ hadseeded, and of which there was no longer any record in the card-files ofthe Ecological Service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave.They could not signal for help. They had to stay there. And the planetwas a place of nightmares.

  After a time the few people--some few thousands--who knew that there wasa space-liner named _Icarus_, gave it up for lost. They forgot about it.Everybody forgot. Even the passengers and crew of the ship forgot it.Not immediately, of course. For the first few generations theirdescendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which had noname--the forgotten planet--did not encourage the cherishing of hope.

  After forty-odd generations, nobody remembered the _Icarus_ anywhere.The wreckage of the lifeboats was long since hidden under the seething,furiously striving fungi of the soil. The human beings had forgotten notonly their ancestors' ship, but very nearly everything their ancestorshad brought to this world: the use of metals, the existence of fire, andeven the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine. They lived in thelowlands, deep under the cloud-bank, amid surroundings which wereriotous, swarming, frenzied horror. They had become savages.

  They were less than savages, because they had forgotten their destiny asmen.