"Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface, and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me;
but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the mid-dle distance than I found myself already leaving it
behind.
Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the passage of time was now very confused.
Minutes and hours, and perhaps even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable.
While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across
the
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thoroughfare of the asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they appeared as great stars
streaming across the constellations. One or two revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me.
Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted its position among the fixed stars. The great
globe now appeared as a disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major satellites were little pearls
floating beside it. The planet's surface now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds fogged
its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it. Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night
and day merged into one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its eastern and unilluminated
hemi-sphere vague areas of ruddy light, which were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense clouds by volcanic
up-heavals.
In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star, and then was lost in the splendor of the
diminished but still blazing sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon realized that I must be far
beyond the limits of even Pluto's orbit. The sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me.
At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the
Pleiades, mocked me with their familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the other bright
stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was
this my punishment for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate will to remain detached from
human affairs and passions and prejudices?
In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hilltop. I saw our home. The door opened. A figure came out into
the garden, lit by the hall light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went back into the house.
But all this was imagination only. In actuality, there was nothing but the stars.
After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of
the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still traveling, and
trav-eling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took long to
catch me.
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They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those
that met me on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as blue.
Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appear-ance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep
red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me. Surrounding the ruby
constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside
my course, on every side, the colors faded into the normal white of the sky's familiar diamonds. Since I was traveling
almost in the plane of the galaxy, the hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red behind.
Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven,
each hole surrounded by a zone of colored stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light from the forward and the
hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the range of my human vision.
As my speed increased, the two starless patches, before and behind, each with its colored fringe, continued to
encroach upon the intervening zone of normal stars which lay abreast of me on every side. Amongst these I now
detected move-ment. Through the effect of my own passage the nearer stars appeared to drift across the background
of the stars at great-er distance. This drifting accelerated, till, for an instant, the whole visible sky was streaked with
flying stars. Then every-thing vanished. Presumably my speed was so great in relation to the stars that light from none
of them could take normal effect on me.
Though I was now perhaps traveling faster than light itself, I seemed to be floating at the bottom of a deep and