Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 147: what you’re looking at

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

assiduously courted madness by brooding on his plight. By the fourth year he had come to his senses and worked out a grueling system of mental control that would ultimately divorce his mind from any vestige of emotion and impulse, leaving him, for the length of his time traveling, a cold and passionless being, secure from any repetition of this event. After four years of controlling, his project succeeded and he was free again to wander. He set his course for no less than fifteen thousand years, and back to Earth. He had seen enough of Saturn and its environments. When he had assumed his customary observation point he looked down briefly. The Earth was again a jungle, abandoned by man and given over to reptiles and carnivores. Striker brought his super-acute vision to bear on a little column of smoke. It was neither volcano nor forest fire. And another crushing fact insinuated itself into his mind. With only the staggering semblance of control he tore as far away from the planet as he could go, finding himself, seconds later, off Proxima Centauri’s planetary system. And there too were human beings—Ai/s people—now with bodies shriveled, blow-horns extended into luminous organs, some swinging clear of the ground as they moved. They lived wholly radiational lives, with customs and speech utterly beyond his conception. Had he not observed their evolution he would never have believed that they had Started as the genus homo. They too were able to pass through time and space at will. The watcher set his course for Earth again, ready to face facts that should not be denied. Over the mother-planet Striker minutely observed a colony of apes who had learned the use of fire. There were no more than a few hundred of them left, but in a century they were chattering at each other in the crude beginnings of a language. It was their salvation that they were fairly large but not so large that they had no practical enemies. CORniclooo SS CO