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.