（外文电子版资料）Marooned.in.Andromeda.doc

Marooned in Andromeda Clark Ashton Smith Im going to put you fellows off on the first world of the first planetary system we come to. The icy deliberation of Captain Volmars 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-fliers 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 preparatio