The resourcefulness of Hawk Carse! In these "few minor adventures" he
had but one weapon with which to joust against overwhelming odds on an
apparently hopeless quest. This weapon was a space-suit--nothing
more--yet so brilliantly and daringly did he wield its unique
advantages that he penetrated seemingly impregnable barriers and
achieved alone what another man would have required the ray-batteries
of a space-fleet to do.
But here is the story, heard first from Friday's lips and told and
re-told down through the years on the lonely ranches of the outlying
planets, of that one dark, savage night on Satellite III and of the
indomitable man who winged his lone way through it. Hawk Carse! Old
adventurer! Rise from your unknown star-girdled grave and live again!
* * * * *
Thirty thousand miles was the gap between Dr. Ku Sui's asteroid and
Satellite III, the nearest haven. Thirty thousand miles in a
space-ship is about the time of a peaceful cigarro. Thirty thousand
miles in a cramped awkward space-suit grow into a nightmare journey,
an eternity of suffering, and they will kill a good number of those
who traverse them so.
For, take away the metal bulkheads and walls, soft lights and warmth of
a space-liner, get out in a small cramped space-suit, and space loses
its mask of harmlessness and stands revealed as the bleak, unfeeling
torturer it is. There is the loneliness, the sense of timelessness, the
sensation of falling, and above all there is the "weightless" feeling
from pressure-changes in man's blood-stream--changes sickening in effect
and soon resulting in delirium. Nothing definite; no gravity; no
"bottom," no "top"; merely a vacuum, comprehended by the human mind
through an all-enveloping nausea, and seen in confused spectral
labyrinths as the whole cold panorama of icy stars staggers and swirls
and the universe goes mad. Such a trip was enough to churn the
resistance of the hardiest traveler, but for Hawk Carse, Friday and
Eliot Leithgow there was more. On Ku Sui's asteroid they had gone
through hours of mental and physical tension without break or
relaxation, and they were sleep-starved and food-starved and their
brains fagged and dull. What would have been a strong reaction on land
hit them, in space, with tripled force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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