Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 164: what you’re looking at

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

“Why—l don’t know. | imagine he’s still alive somewhere, but-” “| thought so. No marriage. No family. No home. No tradition.” Kormt shook his massive head, slowly. “I pity you Galactics!” “Now please, good sir—” Damn it all, the old clodhopper could get as Irritating as a faulty computer. “We have records that go back to before man left this planet. Records of everything. It is you who Nave forgotten.” Kormt smiled and puffed blue clouds at him. “That‘s not what | meant.” “Do you mean you think it is good for men to five a life that is unchanging, that is just the same from century to century—no new dreams, no new triumphs, always the same grubbing rounds of days? | cannot agree.” Jorun’s mind flickered over history, trying to evaluate the basic motivations of his opponent. Partly cultural, partly biological, that must be it. Once Terra had been the center of the civilized universe. But the long migration starward, especially after the fall of the First Empire, drained off the most venturesome elements of the population. That drain went on for thousands of years. You couldn’t call them stagnant. Their life was too healthy, their civilization too rich in its own way—folk art, folk music, ceremony, religion, the intimacy of family life which the Galactics had lost—for that term. But to one who flew between the streaming suns, it was a small existence. Kormt’s voice broke in on his reverie. “Dreams, triumphs, work, deeds, love and life and finally death and the long Sleep in the earth,” he said. “Why should we want to change them? They never grow old; they are new for each child that iS born.” “Well,” said Jorun, and stopped. You couldn’t really answer that kind of logic. It wasn’t logic at all, but something deeper. CORniclooo SS CO