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

are in good working order. Colt and I have not suffered from any similar
disturbance. It seems to me that the sense of falling would be almost a
relief from this illusion of nightmare immobility; but Gershom appears to
be greatly distressed by it, and says that his hallucination is growing
stronger, with fewer and briefer intervals of normalcy. He fears that it
will become continuous.

* * *

Sept. 11th. Colt has made an estimate of our fuel and provisions and
thinks that with careful husbandry we will be able to reach Europa. I have
been checking up on his calculations, and find that he is altogether too
sanguine. According to my estimate, the fuel will give out while we are
still midway in the belt of the asteroids; though the food, water and
compressed air would possibly take us most of the way to Europa.

This discovery I must conceal from the others. It is too late to turn
back. I wonder if we have all been mad, to start out on this errant voyage
into cosmical immensity with no real preparation or thought of
consequences. Colt, it would seem, has lost the power of mathematical
calculation: his figures are full of the most egregious errors.

Gershom has been unable to sleep, and is not even fit to take his turn
at the watch. The hallucination of falling obsesses him perpetually, and he
cries out in terror, thinking that the vessel is about to crash on some
dark, unknown planet to which it is being drawn by an irresistible
gravitation. Eating, drinking and locomotion are very difficult for him,
and he complains that he cannot even draw a full breath -- that the air is
snatched away from him in his precipitate descent. His condition is indeed
painful and pitiable.

* * *

Sept. 12th. Gershom is worse -- bromide of potassium and even a heavy
dose of morphine from the Selenite's medicine lockers, have not relieved
him or enabled him to sleep. He has the look of a drowning man and seems to
be on the point of strangulation. It is hard for him to speak.

Colt has become very morose and sullen, and snarls at me when I
address him. I think that Gershom's plight has preyed sorely upon his
nerves -- as it has on mine. But my burden is heavier than Colt's: for I
know the inevitable doom of our insane and ill-starred expedition.
Sometimes I wish it were all over.... The hells of the human mind are
vaster than space, darker than the night between the worlds...and all three
of us have spent several eternities in hell. Our attempt to flee has only
plunged us into a black and shoreless limbo, through which we are fated to
carry still our own private perdition.

I, too, like Gershom, have been unable to sleep. But, unlike him, I am
tormented by the illusion of eternal immobility. In spite of the daily