"Edmond Hamilton - Starwolf Omnibus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

STARWOLF
Edmond Hamilton
Book I тАФ The Weapon From Beyond (1967)
Book II тАФ The Closed Worlds (1968)
Book III тАФ World of the Starwolves (1968)
THE WEAPON FROM BEYOND

I
The stars watched him, and it seemed to him that they whispered to
him.
Die, Starwolf. Your course is run.
He lay across the pilot-chair, and the dark veils were close around his
brain, and the wound in his side throbbed and burned. He was not
unconscious, he knew that his little ship had come out of overdrive, and
that there were things that he should do. But it was no use, no use at all.
Let it go, Starwolf. Die.
In a corner of his mind, Morgan Chane knew that it was not the stars
that were talking to him. It was some part of himself that still wanted to
survive and that was haunting him, prodding him, trying to get him onto
his feet. But it was easier to ignore it, and lie here.
Easier, yes. And how happy his death would make his dear friends and
loving comrades. Chane's fogged mind held onto that thought. And finally
it brought a dull anger, and a resolve. He would not make them happy. He
would live, and some day he would make those who were now hunting him
very unhappy indeed.
The savage determination seemed to clear the blur of darkness a little
from his brain. He opened his eyes and then, slowly and painfully, he
hauled himself erect in the seat. The action pulled at his wound
sickeningly, and for a few minutes he fought against nausea. Then he
reached out a shaky hand toward a switch. He must first find out exactly
where he was, where the last desperately hasty course he had set as he fled
had brought him.
 Like little red eyes, figures glowed on the board as the computer silently
answered his question. He read the figures but his brain was not clear
enough to translate them. Shaking his head drunkenly, he peered at the
viewplate.
A mass of blazing stars walled the firmament in front of him.
High-piled suns, smoky-red, pure white, pale green and gold and peacock
blue, glared at him. Great canyons of darkness rifted the star-mass, rivers
of cosmic dust out of which gleamed the pale witch-fires of drowned suns.
He was just outside a cluster, and now Chane's blurred mind remembered
that in the last desperate moment of flight, when he threw his stolen ship
into overdrive before blacking out, he had jabbed the coordinates of
Corvus Cluster.
Blackness, nothingness, the eternal solemn silence of the void, and the
suns of the cluster pouring their mighty radiance upon the tiny needle
that was his ship. His memory quickened, and he knew now why he had
come here. There was a world that he knew about in this gigantic hive of
stars. He could lie up there and hide, and he sorely needed such a refuge,
for he had no healamp and his wound would take time to heal naturally.