Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

operation’ light in the control room, wouldn’t it? And they’d know there was something wrong here. And they’d come— and maybe you'd live.” The engineer gasped: “Don't—don't kill me!” “Suppose you tell me how much you know,” said Brent, eyes burning. The engineer moaned softly. “So you don’t know,” said Brent, “that the overdrive was to be turned off, the passengers driven mad; and when the right people had been killed, the ship was to turn around and head for port. The surviving passengers would be tried for murder, eh? How about the crew?” he asked with Sardonic softness. “Did you stop to think that the crew might be executed for not preventing the passengers from murdering each other?” The engineer babbled. He was a pitiable sight, but Brent was merciless. There were hundreds of thousands of colonized planets, now, with local histories up to two thousand years in length. Earth could not govern them— which was why the Profession was a necessity—and there were nearly as many forms of social organization as there were planets. Khem IV was a totalitarian government quite ruthless enough to do exactly what Brent had just named— and the engineer knew it. He whimpered. Brent looked at him with scornful pity. “But what can | do with you?” he demanded. “Apparently ¢ | Know more than you do about this mess.” The engineer whimpered again. Then, with the frantic speed of desperation, he sprang from his chair at an alarm button on the wall. Brent pulled trigger. There was no sound. The engineer’s body thumped into the rounded hollow wall of the overdrive room, and then slumped down on the floorplates in the boneless limpness of a man killed by a blaster. Brent put the blaster back in his pocket. CORniclooo SS CO