But a queer, deadly numbness had followed the prickling. I felt a terrible sudden pressure of sleep. All the accumulated fatigue of those sleepless nights and days poured over me resistlessly.
I knew it wouldn't do to sleep—not until the course of the Astronaut had been calculated and corrected. A delay of minutes, even, might be fatal. With dead hands I struggled to adjust the sextant, fighting for life itself.
But the instrument slipped from my fingers. The drug, I thought. Some reaction with the Cosmic Rays; an effect that Crosno had not anticipated. Missing ... Venus ...
I slept.
II
The Conquest of the Stars
Uranium is a strange element, slightly understood. Its atom is the heaviest known. It is the mother of a dozen others, even of magic radium. For its radioactive atom breaks down to form a chain of other elements, but so slowly that only half the mass is consumed in six billion years.
The uranium salts in that drug must have been responsible for my sleep.
At first there was only blank darkness.