"Clark Ashton Smith - Marooned in Andromeda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

Marooned in Andromeda

Clark Ashton Smith





"I'm going to put you fellows off on the first world of the first
planetary system we come to."

The icy deliberation of Captain Volmar's tones was more terrible than
any show of anger would have been. His eyes were chill and sharp as the
sapphire lights in snow; and there was a fanatic rigor in the tightening of
his lips after the curtly spoken words.

The three mutineers looked sullenly at each other and at the captain,
but said nothing. The leveled automatics of Volmar and the three other
members of the space-flier's crew made all appeal or argument seem absurd.
They knew that there could be no relenting on the part of that thin,
austere mariner of the interstellar gulfs, who had dreamt of
circumnavigating space and thus becoming the Magellan of the
constellations.

For five years he had driven the great vessel further and further away
from the earth and the solar system, which had long ago dwindled into
points of telescopic light -- for five years he had hurled it onward at
more than the speed of cosmic rays, through the shoreless, bottomless
night, among the shifting stars and nebulae. The configuration of the skies
had changed beyond all recognition; the Signs were no longer those that are
known to terrestrial astronomers; far-off stars had leapt into blazing suns
and had faded back to stars; and there had been a flying glimpse of
stranger planets. And year by year the cold terror of the endless deeps,
the vertiginous horror of untold infinitude, had crept like a slow
paralysis upon the souls of the three men; and a nostalgia for the distant
earth had swept them with unutterable sickness; till they could bear it no
longer, and had made their hasty, ill-planned attempt to secure control of
the vessel and turn it homeward.

There had been a brief, desperate struggle. Forewarned by a subtle
instinct, Volmar had suspected them and had been in readiness; and he and
the men loyal to him had armed themselves furtively in preparation, while
the others had made their attack bare-handed, man to man. All of the
mutineers were wounded, though not seriously, before they could be subdued;
and blood dripped from their wounds on the floor of the flier, as they
stood before Volmar.

Albert Adams, Chester Deming and James Roverton were the names of the
mutineers. Adams and Deming were quite young, and Roverton was now verging
upon early middle-age. Their very presence in Volmar's crew was proof of