Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

He now regarded the overdrive with a grim and knowledgeable attention. But he couldn't afford to meddle with it just yet. He noted, though, the details of its installation. It was a good fifty years old. It had been installed by someone only half-qualified, by really modem Standards. They haven't read an engineering journal since this ship was built he thought grimly. They’d never heard of the Doom-Welt equation, for one thing, which shows with such beautiful clarity how and why turning part of the second-stage exciter into a closed circuit gives multiplied Space-modification effect. Brent —it was incidental to qualification -for the Profession—could work on this drive for a bare few minutes and— He nodded to himself. But the crew would be armed and desperate, and the passengers were already half-crazed with fear. Alarm the crew further and they might commit a massacre ... and to reassure the passengers would alarm the crew. Technically, it would be easy, but humanly it was impossible, he thought. Yet the impossible would have to be done. He moved about the absurdly simple apparatus that was the overdrive itself. It was merely a long bar of brightly polished metal with a peculiar greenish cast. At its ends it branched into slenderer rods—almost wires—that went through the skin of the overdrive room and spread out and branched again and again until they ended in pointed projections a few inches only beyond the plating of the hull. There were four separate coils of seemingly bare copper wire, placed in particular relationship to the bar. And that was all. Even the copper seemed uninsulated. But Brent knew better than that. He climbed away from the engine room with the body dangling and jerking as he climbed among the girders in the semidarkness. It was almost an hour later when he reached the passengers’ lounge again. He’d brushed himself carefully CORniclooo SS CO