"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

And he thought he answered, "But I am
dead."
How had he come to die?
EMORIES, groping, uncertain,
coming faster, clearer, clothed in
vivid color. A girl's face, a girl's red mouth
saying, "Don't go. Don't go if you love me.
You'll never come back."
Men and a ship--a little ship, a frail and
tiny craft, it seemed, for the long way it
was going and the high dreams it had.
Hard-faced iron-handed men, braver than
angels and more hungry than they were
brave, hungry for new worlds and the
unknown things that lay beyond the
mountains of the Moon, beyond the still
canals of Mars, beyond the glittering
deadly Belt.
He remembered now the men and the
ship, how they had gambled their lives
against glory and lost. "We shot the
Asteroids," he muttered, in the silence of
his mind. "Jupiter was there ahead of us, a
big golden apple almost in our hands. I
S
M
2
remember how the moons looked,
swarming like bees around it. I
remember..."
The meteor--the tearing agony of
metal, the last glimpse of horror in the ship
before the air-burst took him with it into
space, through the riven pilot-dome. The
brief, bitter knowledge that this was death.
"Dead," he said again. "I'm dead."
The strange voice answered, "If you
want to you can live again."
He thought about that. He thought about
it for a long time in the darkness. To live
again--the light and the warmth, the
hunger and pain and hope, the wanting, the
being able to want. He thought and he was
not sure and then at last he whispered,
"How? Tell me how!"
"Open your eyes and come back, back
where the light is. You were here before,
don't you remember? Open your eyes, John
Carey!"
He did or thought he did and there was