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

welcome. The vessel's hull was partly buried in the stony soil, and had
been crumpled and even slightly fused, though not broken, by its plunge.
The manhole lid was so thoroughly jammed and soldered that it was
impossible to effect an entrance without the use of a cutting-torch.

Enormous, withered, cryptogamous plants with the habit of vines, that
crumbled at a touch, were clinging to the hull and the adjacent rocks. In
the light snow beneath the skeleton-guarded port, a number of sharded
bodies were lying, which proved to be those of tall insect forms, like
giant phasmidae.

From the posture and arrangement of their lank, pipy members, longer
than those of a man, it seemed that they had walked erect. They were
unimaginably grotesque, and their composition, due to the almost
non-existent gravity, was fantastically porous and unsubstantial. Many
other bodies, of a similar type, were afterwards found on other portions of
the planetoid, but no living thing was discovered. All life, it was plain,
had perished in the trans-arctic winter of Phocea's aphelion.

When the Selenite had been entered, the party learned from a sort of
log or notebook found on the floor, that the skeleton was all that remained
of Edmond Beverly. There was no trace of his two companions; but the log,
on examination, proved to contain a record of their fate as well as the
subsequent adventures of Beverly almost to the very moment of his own death
from a doubtful, unexplained cause.

The tale was a strange and tragic one. Beverly, it would seem, had
written it day by day, after the departure from Syrtis Major, in an effort
to retain a semblance of morale and mental coherence amid the black
alienation and disorientation of infinitude. I transcribe it herewith,
omitting only the earlier passages, which were full of unimportant details
and personal animadversions. The first entries were all dated, and Beverly
had made an heroic attempt to measure and mark off the seasonless night of
the void in terms of earthly time. But after the disastrous landing on
Phocea, he had abandoned this; and the actual length of time covered by his
entries can only be conjectured.--

* * *

Sept. 10th. Mars is only a pale-red star through our rear ports; and
according to my calculations we will soon approach the orbit of the nearest
asteroids. Jupiter and its system of moons are seemingly as far off as
ever, like beacons on the unattainable shore of immensity. More even than
at first, I feel that dreadful suffocation illusion, which accompanies
ether-travel, of being perfectly stationary in a static void.

Gershom, however, complains of a disturbance of equilibrium, with much
vertigo and a frequent sense of falling, as if the vessel were sinking
beneath him through bottomless space at a headlong speed. The causation of
such symptoms is rather obscure, since the artificial gravity regulators