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

tortured Gershom and drove him to his death. An awful dizziness assails me,
and I fear that I shall start to fall. But somehow I regain my equilibrium.

* * *

Sept. 16th. Colt used up all the morphine, and began to show signs of
intense depression and uncontrollable nervousness. His fear of the
satellite corpse appeared to grow upon him like an obsession; and I could
do nothing to reassure him. His terror was deepened by an eerie,
superstitious belief.

"I tell you, I hear Gershom calling us," he cried. "He wants company,
out there in the black, frozen emptiness; and he won't leave the vessel
till one of us goes out to join him. You've got to go, Beverly -- it's
either you or me -- otherwise he'll follow the Selenite forever."

I tried to reason with him, but in vain. He turned upon me in a sudden
shift of maniacal rage.

"Damn you, I'll throw you out, if you won't go any other way!" he
shrieked.

Clawing and mouthing like a mad beast, he leaped toward me where I sat
before the Selenite's control-board. I was almost overborne by his onset,
for he fought with a wild and frantic strength. I don't like to write down
all that happened, for the mere recollection makes me sick . Finally he got
me by the throat, with a sharp-nailed clutch that I could not loosen and
began to choke me to death. In self-defense, I had to shoot him with an
automatic which I carried in my pocket. Reeling dizzily, gasping for
breath, I found myself staring down at his prostrate body, from which a
crimson puddle was widening on the floor.

Somehow, I managed to put on a space suit. Dragging Colt by the
ankles, I got him to the inner door of the air-lock. When I opened the
door, the escaping air hurled me toward the open manhole together with the
corpse; and it was hard to regain my footing and avoid being carried
through into space. Colt's body, turning traversely in its movement, was
jammed across the manhole; and I had to thrust it out with my hands. Then I
closed the lid after it. When I returned to the ship's interior, I saw it
floating, pale and bloated, beside the corpse of Gershom.

* * *

Sept. 17th. I am alone -- and yet most horribly I am pursued and
companioned by the dead men. I have sought to concentrate my faculties on
the hopeless problem of survival, on the exigencies of space navigation;
but it is all useless. Ever I am aware of those stiff and swollen bodies,
swimming in the awful silence of the void, with the white, airless sun like
a leprosy of light on their upturned faces.