Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/14

vividly imagining those unplumbable depths of the abyss; in fact, I dare not look out of the port-hole long at a time, either downward or upward, because of the sickness that overwhelms me; it is all a part of the strangeness of the aspect of what should be a well-accustomed scene at sea; granting that I must be wrong in the first place about it being ten o'clock in the morning; granting that I must have lost a period of time. . . .

There it is! lam losing my grip on myself entirely. I did not sleep. It is morning. No, that way madness lies. One cannot look at the night sky, the night sea, and repeat that it is morning. Well, let that pass.

I tear my dizzy eyes away from the awful beauty outside the port. That sky, in the starless tunnels between the nebulæ—the awful, unparalleled blackness of it! The waters beneath our keel, those waters in which faint star-images shine impossibly upward: those misty, milkily violet waters that seem to hold an unknown phosphorescence—that resemble drifting vapor quite as much as water . . .

He is approaching, with Valerie. My God! I thought her face was white when we carried her on board this ship. Now it is whiter still, and in her eyes—those indescribable eyes of no color and many colors—there is some sure and dreadful knowledge. She sways as she walks, and his arm goes around her, and I start forward.

But the dizzy sickness I have been fighting overcomes me. The floor of the cabin swings upward, and for a little everything . . .

Was black. I see that I have carried the present tense a bit too far, in rendering legible the lines immediately before this. I fainted for a brief time, and then I was unable to write for a little. But I have found it possible to hold a pen again. He says the attacks of utter prostration will be intermittent, and each recovery more complete in the case of those of us who survive, and less complete in the case of those who will die.

Let me write as fast as possible while I can. It seems to me that all of us will die. Our sufferings in the last half-hour have been too intense. . . .

We are sailing—not the seas, but the skies! I have done with conjectures. I am recording things as they happen. This deadly sickness which overcomes us is space-sickness—the name Le Noir gives it. It is the result of shifting from one gravity zone to another. This shift is, I suppose, in the nature of a fairly smooth gradient—although there may be variants beyond my calculation. We are leaving earth and approaching the moon; of course there are small comets, groupings of dark matter, too, everywhere in space, and these set up minor shifts of magnetic attraction.

I think much of the wave-like procession of our attacks of nausea and utter prostration is due, however, to the efforts of our systems at adaptation. On board ship, you know, if one is seasick one can withstand it for a while; one is submerged in misery, and emerges—simply turns his head and is abjectly ill again.

All of us have read fanciful accounts of space-travel. Everything in the ship floats at a certain point; the nose of the ship directs itself forward toward the goal, but at a given place in the journey, up becomes down, and the drag of gravity which has had to be overcome, changes to an accelerating force.

It is all true, so far as it goes. But no writer of things imagined has ever even touched on the deadly shifting of the organs within the body, the very blood within the veins. The bottom of the spaceship is the bottom of the world, so far as you are concerned; yes, but there is that gradual—and sometimes lurching—sense of shifting, which is real; the reaction to