Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 145: what you’re looking at

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

was blown up he departed to his observation point in space, quite certain that the Westerners would not’ reach Springfield, Ohio—not this time. He worked himself ahead exactly a century and looked down on a continent again peaceful. The war had been decided by a plague which had wiped out whole armies on both sides. Foreign powers had moved in to carve up the rich prize. Another century passed and Striker saw _ another American Revolution, not by a landed, rum-smuggling aristocracy, but by the slavelike labor who ran the foreign- owned factories and mines. This time it was keeps; there were scenes of slaughter that made the watcher sick to his imaginary stomach. And he found that he was jammed again, unable to move in space or time. It took discipline to wrench himself away from the bloody scenes going on beneath him. He did not observe very closely on his next jump. For the first thing he saw was a little arc of light spilling sparks from a port, shooting through space all the way to the Moon, where it crashed leaving no survivors. Striker’s feelings of pride and accomplishment were as dangerous as his disgust with needless slaughter. Striker moved ahead five hundred years and watched from a distance, finding the void thick with darting jewels made by man. Rockets were everywhere, ferrying human beings and priceless commodities. Cautiously, he peered at Mars to find there a human population of a billion, and growing steadily, from all indications. Surprisingly, there were few great public works and dwellings. Man was living a natural life. There was a score of years devoted to schooling, then the usual human activities of working, breeding and finally dying. But it looked very attractive to Striker, for there was no more disease and the life-soan had more than tripled. It was a superb exaggeration of a genus’ life history. And it was the same on nearly all the other planets. CORniclooo SS CO