"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

BE SECOND ONLY TO THE GODS.
 Contents
Part I
The Cave of Night

Part II
Hoax

Part III
The Big Wheel

Part IV
Powder Keg

Part V
Space Is a Lonely Place

Station in Space

The Cave of Night
THE PHRASE WAS FIRST USED by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It
appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:

"At eight o'clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There's a man up there
where no man has ever been.

"He is lost in the cave of night. . . "

The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it
stuck.

If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out.
Now he couldn't find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.

What goes up doesn't always come back down.

That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.

The cave of night.I wish the phrase had been mine.

That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It
was the way people talked about it: "What's the latest about the cave?" It summed it all up, the drama,
the anxiety, the hope.

Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing,
comparing, and they remembered the little girlтАФKathy Fiscus, wasn't it?тАФwho was trapped in that
abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others.

Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so accidentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their
terrors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.