The Ludred stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than either of the ships that had visited it before. It dropped the seeds of plants. It broadcast innumerable varieties of things which should take root and grow. In some places it deliberately seeded the stinking soil. It put marine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high ground. And when all its stable varieties were set out it added plants which were genetically unstable. For generations to come they would throw sports, some of which should be especially suited to this planetary environment.
Before it left, the Ludred dumped finny fish into the seas. At first they would live on the plankton which made the oceans almost broth. There were many varieties of fish. Some would multiply swiftly while small; others would grow and feed on the smaller varieties. And as a last activity, the Ludred set up refrigeration–units loaded with insect–eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants had grown enough to furnish them with food. Others would allow their contents to hatch only after certain other varieties had multiplied—to be their food–supply.
When the Ecology–Ship left, it had done a very painstaking job. It had treated the planet to a sort of Russell's Mixture of life–forms. The real Russell's Mixture is that blend of the simple elements in the proportions found in suns. This was a blend of life–forms in which some should survive by consuming the now–habituated flora, others by preying on the former. The planet was stocked, in effect, with everything that it could be hoped would live there.
But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which needed parental care had any chance of survival. The creatures seeded at this time had to be those which could care for themselves from the instant they burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals. Trees and plants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kinds of insects could be planted. But nothing else.
The Ludred swam away through emptiness.
There should have been another planting centuries later. There should have been a ship from the Zoölogical Branch of the Ecological Service. It should have landed birds and beasts and reptiles. It should have added pelagic mammals to the seas. There should have been herbivorous animals to live on the grasses and plants which would have thriven, and carnivorous animals to live on them in turn. There should have been careful stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits at intervals of a century or so to make sure that a true ecological balance had been established. And then when the balance was fixed men would come and destroy it for their own benefit.
But there was an accident.
Ships had improved again. Even small private space–craft now journeyed tens of light–years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveled hundreds. Liners ran matter–of–factly on ship–lines tens of thousands of light–years long. An exploring–ship was on its way to a second island universe. (It did not come back.) The inhabited planets were all members of a tenuous organization which limited itself to affairs of space, without attempting to interfere in surface matters. That tenuous organization moved the Ecological Preparation Service files to Algol IV as a matter of convenience. In the moving, a card–file was upset. The cards it contained were picked up and replaced, but one was missed. It was not picked up. It was left behind.
So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came to prepare it for ultimate human occupancy. It circled its sun, unheeded and unthought–of. Cloud–banks covered it from pole to pole. There were hazy 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 its cloud–banks—and nothing else.
But on its surface, on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But this fact 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 bore passengers headed for one of the Galaxy's spiral arms, and it cut across the normal lanes and headed through charted but unvisited parts of the Galaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, very few accidents known to happen to space–craft licensed for travel off the normal space–lanes. It suffered shipwreck in space, and its passengers and 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 had seeded, and of which there was no longer any record in the card–files of the Ecological Service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave. They could not signal for help. They had to stay there. And the planet was a place of nightmares.
After a time the few people—some few thousands—who knew that there was a 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 their descendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which had no name—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 not only their ancestors' ship, but very nearly everything their ancestors had brought to this world: the use of metals, the existence of fire, and even the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine. They lived in the lowlands, deep under the cloud–bank, amid surroundings which were riotous, swarming, frenzied horror. They had become savages.
They were less than savages, because they had forgotten their destiny as men.
1
Mad Planet
In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a fashion which Burl remembered as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. Surely he had never wondered what his great–grandfather had thought, and most surely of all he never speculated upon what his many–times–removed great–grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the Icarus. Burl had never heard of the Icarus. He had done very little thinking of any sort. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effort to contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. When horror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because there wasn't much but horror to think about.
At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by the generic name of "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head, three man–heights high, great toadstools hid the gray sky from his sight. Clinging to the yard–thick stalks of the toadstools were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had been parasites themselves.