Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 234: what you’re looking at

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

He turned, pulled his khaki shirt on, cinched the broad belt at his waist. “Doc, it’s time to bow out.” | said it quietly, and | tried to make it hard and level. He didn’t even turn around. ‘It’s time to bow out when | say so. We’ve been working eight hours at a stretch, eight for sleep, and eight more for work again. Starting today It’s nine, six and nine. And it'll be ten, four and ten if | think it’s necessary.” He turned to me. “Got it?” He could have said, “That’s an order,” but he didn’t have to. His face was still friendly, but his eyes were hard, and it meant that Dr. Max Kruger was still running the show. “Yeah, all right,” | said. “Sure.” “I’m sorry about what’s happening to them, naturally. But in our own interests, we’ve got to get aS much as we can while we can. And if they want to stick with us up to their last ten minutes, that’s up to them, and we'll be happy for their services—period.” Yes, it was logic. The government hadn’t spent almost a billion bucks on us to throw away what few breaks we might get. We had to squeeze out every nickel’s worth of information we could. It wasn’t our dough. The money had bought us the equipment to do a grade-A job the first time out—money that the scientists back home had wrangled with Congress for God-knows-how-long to get. They had bought us a little over five years in Space; five years of food, of air to breathe, of fuel to bum. If we could complete the job in five months instead of five years, then we were expected to bring back the change. Men at their first time at bat In Space weren't in a position to waste as much as a flashlight battery. Whatever we saved, the next expedition in the E-M-I would have. And that included wear and tear on the ship itself. Jobs like the E-M-I took five years to build, and right now, CORniclooo SS CO