"Clark Ashton Smith - Master of the Asteroid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

Master of the Asteroid

Clark Ashton Smith





Man's conquest of the interplanetary gulfs has been fraught with many
tragedies. Vessel after vessel, like venturous motes, disappeared in the
infinite -- and had not returned. Inevitably, for the most part, the lost
explorers have left no record of their fate. Their ships have flared as
unknown meteors through the atmosphere of the further planets, to fall like
shapeless metal cinders on a never-visited terrain; or have become the
dead, frozen satellites of other worlds or moons. A few, perhaps, among the
unreturning fliers, have succeeded in landing somewhere, and their crews
have perished immediately, or survived for a little while amid the
inconceivably hostile environment of a cosmos not designed for men.

In later years, with the progress of exploration, more than one of the
early derelicts has been descried, following a solitary orbit; and the
wrecks of others have been found on ultraterrene shores. Occasionally --
not often -- it has been possible to reconstruct the details of the lone,
remote disaster. Sometimes, in a fused and twisted hull, a log or record
has been preserved intact. Among others, there is the case of the Selenite,
the first known rocket ship to dare the zone of the asteroids.

At the time of its disappearance, fifty years ago, in 1980, a dozen
voyages had been made to Mars, and a rocket base had been established in
Syrtis Major, with a small permanent colony of terrestrials, all of whom
were trained scientists as well as men of uncommon hardihood and physical
stamina.

The effects of the Martian climate, and the utter alienation from
familiar conditions, as might have been expected, were extremely trying and
even disastrous. There was an unremitting struggle with deadly or
pestiferous bacteria new to science, a perpetual assailment by dangerous
radiations of soil, and air and sun. The lessened gravity played its part
also, in contributing to curious and profound disturbances of metabolism.

The worst effects were nervous and mental. Queer, irrational
animosities, manias or phobias never classified by alienists, began to
develop among the personnel at the rocket base.

Violent quarrels broke out between men who were normally controlled
and urbane. The party, numbering fifteen in all, soon divided into several
cliques, one against the others; and this morbid antagonism led at times to
actual fighting and even bloodshed.

One of the cliques consisted of three men, Roger Colt, Phil Gershom