The Island of Hope Read Online Free PDF Page A

pass at a very close distance from the terrible spheroid.
    A chill ran down his spine. What could he do to counter the laws of celestial mechanics? Sooner or later his unguided drift would result in a collision with the cemetery of battered spaceships.
    He did not despair anymore. It seemed that little by little, Andrei had lost that kind of feeling. Each day of struggle changed his attitude to his trials and tribulations, but this wasn’t because he'd matured. He'd merely got used to the constant sense of danger which had gradually lost its intensity.
    Despite the anxious clicking of the radiation meter and an instinctive fear of the black infinity of space, he overcame the desire to step into the abyss. His own helplessness annoyed him, but also granted some strength. His loneliness was almost palpable.
    Having made a hesitant step forward, he secured the safety tether to the laser's bent mounting and cautiously made his way through the barricade of twisted armor plates.
    Having slowly advanced forty feet across the mauled hull, he was sweating and exhausted. The surface glazed by an infernal temperature offered nothing he could get hold of, so Andrei constantly faced the risk of slipping off. The thin rope trailing after him didn’t offer security. The cosmic abyss made him nauseous with fear. It felt as if the magnetic soles of his boots had lost contact with the hull, space would swallow him, tether or no tether.
    Finally, pulling himself up and trembling with fatigue, he crossed a mauled armor plate and saw two fire-polished hemispheres set to the left of the gun. These were tanks filled with liquid nitrogen, the sole hope of somehow correcting his drift.
    The liquid gas was capable of performing the function of primitive thrusters. All he had to do was to think of some way to vector it at the right moment and in the right direction.
    Andrei advanced some more and carefully examined the valves of the emergency nitrogen ejection system. They were molten too. Sparks glinted before his strained eyes. He hooked himself up to it with the tether and cast a gloomy glance at the spheroid, once again struck by the surreal sight.
    He didn’t yet know that his destiny was awaiting him there.
     
    * * *
     
    The wreckage.
    Thousands of tons of crumpled metal and molten plastic.
    God help us, someone had scribbled on the wall of a dark corridor filled with floating dead bodies.
    Wrecks of space cruisers, cargo ships, repair bases and light recon modules; billions of kilowatts of power, thousands of hours of work, someone’s hopes, ambitions and fears; love and hatred, wisdom and stupidity — all of it crammed into one tomb as if into a cemetery of mankind’s hopes.
    The wreckage of the Great Battle, an ominous monument to those whose bodies, which vacuum had conserved for eternity, were doomed to float endlessly in the darkness that reigned inside the spaceships they had built. What a bitter end for the creatures whose minds had been able to perceive the stars but unable to tame their own ambitions!
    Most of the wreckage, subjected to the nebula’s gravity, had stuck together. Their unification was as unpredictable and unstable as uncemented masonry: the spacecraft were incessantly and chaotically moving inside an invisible sphere they couldn't escape, gravitating to each other. The silent collisions were all the more sinister since their force couldn't be estimated. Their armored hulls were deformed, their hull structures crushed and broken; now and then, the energy of these collisions fused the battered spaceships together.
    It seemed that all life had left this place. Still, someone had written those words on the wall.
     
    * * *
     
    On three more occasions Andrei had ventured into outer space before he managed to unscrew one of the valves of the nitrogen emergency ejection system. The wreckage pile-up was approaching. At first he had the impression that his fragment would bypass them but, as his tiny planetoid was nearing