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

I try to keep my eyes on the control-board -- on the astronomic charts
-- on the log I am writing -- on the stars toward which I am travelling.
But a frightful and irresistible magnetism makes me turn at intervals, and
mechanically, helplessly, to the rearward ports. There are no words for
what I feel and think -- and words are as lost things along with the worlds
I have left so far behind. I sink in a chaos of vertiginous horror, beyond
all possibility of return.

* * *

Sept. 18th. I am entering the zone of the asteroids -- those desert
rocks, fragmentary and amorphous, that whirl in far-scattered array between
Mars and Jupiter. Today the Selenite passed very close to one of them -- a
small body like a broken-off mountain, which heaved suddenly from the gulf
with knife-sharp pinnacles and black gullies that seemed to cleave to its
very heart.

The Selenite would have crashed full upon it in a few instants, if I
had not reversed the power and steered in an abrupt diagonal to the right.
As it was, I passed near enough for the bodies of Colt and Gershom to be
caught by the gravitational pull of the planetoid; and when I looked back
at the receding rock, after the vessel was out of danger, they had
disappeared from sight. Finally I located them with the telescopic
reflector, and saw that they were revolving in space, like infinitesimal
moons, about that awful, naked asteroid. Perhaps they will float thus
forever, or will drift gradually down in lessening circles, to find a tomb
in one of those bleak, bottomless ravines.

* * *

Sept. 16th I have passed several more of the asteroids -- irregular
fragments, little larger than meteoric stones; and all my skill of
spacemanship has been taxed severely to avert collision. Because of the
need for unrelaxing vigilance, I have been compelled to keep awake at all
times. But sooner or later, sleep will overpower me, and the Selenite will
crash to destruction.

After all, it matters little: the end is inevitable, and must come
soon enough in any case. The store of concentrated food, the tanks of
compressed oxygen, might keep me alive for many months, since there is no
one but myself to consume them. But the fuel is almost gone, as I know from
my former calculations. At any moment, the propulsion may cease. Then the
vessel will drift idly and helplessly in this cosmic limbo, and be drawn to
its doom on some asteroidal reef.

* * *

Sep. 21st(?). Everything I have expected has happened, and yet by some
miracle of chance -- or mischance -- I am still alive.