"David Langford - The Space Eater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

The Space Eater
by David Langford
Copyright ┬йCopyright 1982 by David Langford




For Paul Barnett who was first maddened into suggesting I should write a book

and Peter Weston whose delusion it was that I should write this one

Chapter One originally appeared in slightly different form in THORтАЩS HAMMER, edited by Reginald
Bretnor, Ace Books, 1979.

Contents:

The Training Ground

Death and the Raven

The Devourer

There is therefore but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of the weakest arme to take away
life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death; God would not exempt himselfe from that; the misery
of immortality in the flesh he undertooke not, that was in it immortall. Certainly there is no happinesse
within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the Opticks of the eyes to behold felicity; the first day of our Jubilee is
death; the devill hath therefore failтАЩd of his desires; wee are happier with death than we should have been
without it; there is no miserie but in himselfe, where there is no end of miserie; and so indeed in his owne
sense, the Stoick is in the right: Hee forgets that hee can die who complains of miserie; wee are in the
power of no calamitie while death is in our owne.

Sir Thomas Browne,Religio Medici

Part One
The Training Ground

Wherefore I am a great king,

And waste the world in vain,

Because man hath not other power,

Save that in dealing death for dower,

He may forget it for an hour

To remember it again.

G.K. Chesterton,The Ballad of the White Horse