Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 146: what you’re looking at

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

He was not sure how far ahead he moved on his next Jump into futurity, but it must have been unthinkable centuries. Mars had been depopulated by some unspecified catastrophe, and the race was determined that that would not happen again. Tinkering with genes had produced a strain of men with homy plates covering their bodies and great safes surrounding their brains so that nothing less than a stick of dynamite in the mouth could harm them. But it proved to be a blind alley, for with the reversion to brutally strong body-formation, came a_ corresponding psychological atavism; over the course of the next thousand years crime reappeared and hate lust-murders were common. Concerted action by the humans who had not the horn- plate genes wiped out the strain in quick order. Experiments began anew at an opposite pole, and man became slight in the next few generations. The end result of this Striker did not see. At the end of one of his flights he landed off Saturn and probed down to the surface to see what he could. And what he saw! Pavements that glowed with inner fire, buildings that were little more than arcs of electricity between four terminals! It was when he saw the men that he feared for his sanity, for they were slight creatures, right enough. And many had pulpy little horns on their brows. Some glowed with enormously stimulated mitogenic rays. The implication of this chilled Striker with horror; he tried to leave, to retreat into space for a while to think—and could not move. This was at last what he had dreaded, and the horror snowballed, gathering magnitude and intensity. IV STRIKER, fixed immovable, was jammed out there in Space until seven years had passed. For the first three he CORniclooo SS CO