Read Out Of The Silent Planet for Free Online Page B

mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate
or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, - rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles,
no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but
likely on an alien world. The sores would be... would be... he dared not think what the sores
would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemed more horrible than being caught by
them. Given, handed over, offered. He saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities
- bulbous eyes, grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles. Loathing of insects, loathing of snakes,
loathing of things that squashed and squelched, all played their horrible symphonies over his nerves.
But the reality would be worse: it would be an extra-terrestrial otherness - something one had
never thought of never could have thought of. In that moment Ransom made a decision. He could
face death, but not the sores. He must escape when they got to Malacandra, if there were any
possibility. Starvation, or even to be chased by sores, would be better than being handed over.
If escape were impossible, then it must be suicide. Ransom was a pious man. He hoped he would
be forgiven. It was no more in his power, he thought, to decide otherwise than to grow a new
limb. Without hesitation he stole back into the galley and secured the sharpest knife: henceforward
he determined never to be parted from it.
    Such was the exhaustion produced by terror that when he regained his bed he fell instantly
into stupefied and dreamless sleep.
     

VI
----
    HE WOKE much refreshed, and even a little ashamed of his terror on the previous night. His situation
was, no doubt, very serious: indeed the possibility of returning alive to Earth must be almost
discounted. But death could be faced, and rational fear of death could be mastered. It was only
the irrational, the biological, horror of monsters that was the real difficulty: and this he faced
and came to terms with as well as he could while he lay in the sunlight after breakfast. He had
the feeling that one sailing in the heavens, as he was doing, should not suffer abject dismay before
any earthbound creature. He even reflected that the knife could pierce other flesh as well as his
own. The bellicose mood was a very rare one with Ransom. Like many men of his own age, he rather
under-estimated than over-estimated his own courage; the gap between boyhood's dreams and his
actual experience of the War had been startling, and his subsequent view of his own unheroic
qualities had perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction. He had some anxiety lest the firmness
of his present mood should prove a short-lived illusion; but he must make the best of it.
    As hour followed hour and waking followed sleep in their eternal day, he became aware of a gradual
change. The temperature was slowly falling. They resumed clothes. Later, they added warm underclothes.
Later still, an electric heater was turned on in the centre of the ship. And it became certain, too -
though the phenomenon was hard to seize - that the light was less overwhelming than it had been
at the beginning of the voyage. It became certain to the comparing intellect, but it was difficult
to feel what was happening as a diminution of light and impossible to think of it as darkening,
because while the radiance changed in degree, its unearthly quality had remained exactly the same
since the moment he first beheld it. It was not, like fading light upon the Earth, mixed with the
increasing moisture and phantom colours of the air. You might halve its intensity, Ransom perceived,
and the remaining half would still be what the whole had been - merely less, not other. Halve it
again, and the residue would still be the same. As long as it was at all, it would be itself - out
even to that unimagined distance where its last force was spent. He tried to explain what he meant
to Devine.
    'Like thingummy's