Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 233: what you’re looking at

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

THE trip back to the Enclosures was with the coldness of the desert filling my insides, and | tried to think about how mad Kruger would be when he found out | hadn’t called home. But it didn’t help. | kept thinking of the girl beside me, and of her desperate little adventure to reach out and touch, if she could, if for just a moment, a breath of the seething ocean of life from which the E-M-I had come, and to which it would return. | tried to think about Kruger, but it didn’t help... . The next day | told Max all about it; | shouldn’t have, but | Knew that whatever reaction it brought, at least there would be no deception between us. And you take a different Slant on deception when there are only two of you, over forty million miles from home. A team can’t go haywire. When it does, you can count on death to be quick at taking advantage of the weaknesses that follow organizational breakdown. We were in our quarters, dressing and getting ready for the day’s work ahead. “You're a sucker for a line, Wes.” “| am? Tell me, Doc, what’ve we got on that ship that they haven’t, and ten times better? And these aren’t the kind of people who carve their initials on things for posterity. Their children don’t even do that.” He turned to face me, and | could see then that despite himself, he believed the story | had told him. “All right. They’re dying. It’s up to them what they do, not us. We aren’t dying. We’ve got a job to do—to complete, and we've got to step on it because without their help we'll be set back half a century. So let’s do it” CORniclooo SS CO