Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 211: what you’re looking at

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

HERE LIE WE Fox B. Holden KRUGER was quiet, sitting there, watching the screen, and for a long time neither of us spoke. You could hear the soft hum of the ion drive and it got to be sort of a muted thunder. You wondered if maybe, somehow, in the awful silence of the Big Dark there were any other ears that heard it, and the wondering framed the question for you again. The question was in Kruger’s mind, too. Maybe in a harder, cooler, more scientific sense than it was in mine, but | Knew it was there. And in the silence between us we watched the orange-green sphere grow bigger by the second. Kruger spoke, finally. “Wes,” he said, “I’ll even make eight to five. Eight to five she’s as dead as a doornail. So you lose, but think of being the first man in history to make a bet on life on Mars, Knowing that in less than an hour it’s bound to be paid off one way or another! How about that!” lf he’d been anything but a government-commissioned scientist at the threshold of an historic achievement, the quipping might have been bravado. But two years of training and study were paying off, and we had he-man danger reduced to a pretty unromantic minimum. No, it wasn't bravado because there was no genuine fear within us. Something else; | can’t name it. CORniclooo SS CO