Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 219: what you’re looking at

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

couches for size. It fit, and if Max snored louder than | did, | didn’t hear him for ten hours. ACTUALLY, the Teachers would have made a complete area of study in themselves. The civilization and culture they represented would have made a book of history for every page of Earth’s, and would have been a lifetime’s work without the kind of cooperation they gave Kruger and myself. Without their help, we’d have had to stick out our full five-year limit before leaving it to the others who would follow us in the successive voyages of the E-M-I. But as it was, the Teachers were more than ready for us. lt was almost as though they had been ready for a long time. The quorum summoned to help us numbered eleven, and each had a full research staff ready and waiting to go to work on any of our more involved questions that required more than a series of simple statements for accurate answer. It was the quietness about them—a sad kind of quietness— that got me; | wasn’t built for that, and it kept needling me in spite of Kruger’s objective speculations. | wanted to ask them to what they attributed that almost- haunting quality. It was information they had not offered, and | decided to leave my questions unasked. But it made me wonder if Max had noticed something else, and | asked him about that. We’d been there almost two months, and | had talked him into a day’s holiday in one of the resort Enclosures. We were both tired, and the cool, carefully nurtured beach of green grass felt good beneath our bared backs. There was a wide, artificial lake—shallow, of course, but in every respect representative of Martian adeptness at bringing beauty to places where before there had been no beauty—and it was one of a scant half-dozen which served the few who yet lived beneath the life- CORniclooo SS (SO)