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

The fuel gave out yesterday (at least I think it was yesterday). But I
was too close to the nadir of physical and mental exhaustion to realize
clearly that the rocket-explosions had ceased. I was dead for want of
sleep, and had gotten into a state beyond hope or despair. Dimly I remember
setting the vessel's controls through automatic force of habit; and then I
lashed myself in my hammock and fell asleep instantly.

I have no means of guessing how long I slept. Vaguely, in the gulf
beyond dreams, I heard a crash as of far-off thunder, and felt a violent
vibration that jarred me into dull wakefulness. A sensation of unnatural,
sweltering heat began to oppress me as I struggled toward consciousness;
but when I had opened my heavy eyes, I was unable to determine for some
little time what had really happened.

Twisting my head so that I could peer out through one of the ports, I
was startled to see, on a purple-black sky, an icy, glittering horizon of
saw-edged rocks.

For an instant, I thought that the vessel was about to strike on some
looming planetoid. Then, overwhelmingly, I realized that the crash had
already occurred -- that I had been awakened from my coma-like slumber by
the falling of the Selenite upon one of those cosmic islets.

I was wide-awake now, and I hastened to unlash myself from the
hammock. I found that the floor was pitched sharply, as if the vessel had
landed on a slope or had buried its nose in the alien terrain. Feeling a
queer, disconcerting lightness, and barely able to re-establish my feet on
the floor, I gradually made my way to the nearest port. It was plain that
the artificial gravity-system of the flier had been thrown out of
commission by the crash, and that I was now subject only to the feeble
gravitation of the asteroid. It seemed to me that I was light and
incorporeal as a cloud -- that I was no more than the airy specter of my
former self.

The floor and walls were strangely hot; and it came to me that the
heating must have been caused by the passage of the Selenite through some
sort of atmosphere. The asteroid, then, was not wholly airless, as such
bodies are commonly supposed to be; and probably it was one of the larger
fragments with a diameter of many miles -- perhaps hundreds. But even this
realization failed to prepare me for the weird and surprising scene upon
which I gazed through the port.

The horizon of serrate peaks, like a miniature mountain-range, lay at
a distance of several hundred yards. Above it, the small, intensely
brilliant sun, like a fiery moon in its magnitude, was sinking with visible
rapidity in the dark sky that revealed the major stars and planets.

The Selenite had plunged into a shallow valley, and had half-buried
its prow and bottom in a soil that was formed by decomposing rock, mainly
basaltic. All about were fretted ridges, guttering pillars and pinnacles;