When I was a teenager in the '90s, my father supplied me with a lot of pulp sci-fi digests he’d been holding onto for decades. These were mags from the '60s and '70s mostly, primarily old copies of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a few other similar publications.
The story I’ve been reminded of lately is one that I read in one of those books long ago. It was about the crew of a small starship, with maybe a dozen or so people upon it, who’ve been assigned to survey a remote planet. There’ve been multiple survey ships sent to this planet over the last few centuries, but for some reason they all refused to turn in a report on the planet.
This team arrives and sets up camp on the planet on a plain near a dormant volcano. During the course of their excavations, they discover that the volcano has erupted several times in recent memory, and they find human remains in the rock deposits from each of those eruptions.
Shortly afterward, one of the women of the crew gives birth. The child grows to adulthood within a week and falls in love with the captain, and has a child with him. Several other children are born to the crew in the same time and rapidly grow to adulthood. These children describe the planet itself as being their third parent, and subsequently pair off amongst themselves to produce a third generation.
Ultimately, the volcano becomes active and shows signs that it’s about to erupt, and the children gather in the plain where the lava flow is expected to fall, set up an elaborate dinner for themselves, and force their parents away to safety before the mudslide kills them where they sit. As the team leaves the planet, they mutually decide to delete their records and give no comment about the nature of the planet.
Does this sound familiar to anyome?