Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 252: what you’re looking at

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

There the rock and soil have been crumbled into dust under the lashing of heat and radiations. There the horizon is near, always looming just ahead, like an ever-present brink. But it is not these things that make the planet so alien. Rather, it is the strange distortion of lines, a distortion that one sometimes thinks he can see, but is never sure. Perhaps the very root of that alien sense is the fact that the Sun’s mass makes a straight line an impossibility, it is a stress that bends magnetic fields and stirs up the very structure of space itself. Curt Craig felt that strangeness of Mercury as he zoomed across the dusty plain. The puddle jumper splashed through a small molten pool, spraying it out in sizzling sheets—a pool of lead, or maybe tin. But Craig scarcely noticed. At the back of his brain pounded a thousand half-formed questions. His eyes, edged by crow’s-feet, squinted through the filter shield, following the trail left by Knut’s returning machine. The oxygen tank hissed softly and the atmosphere mixer chuckled. But all else was quiet. Looking back once Craig noticed a Candle—a big blue one. It seemed to be following him. But he soon forgot all about it Craig glanced at the notation of the space warp’s location. Only a few miles distant. He was almost there. There was nothing to indicate what the warp might be, although the instruments picked it up and charted it as he drew near. Perhaps if a man stood at just the right angle he might detect a certain shimmer, a certain strangeness, as If he were looking into a wavy mirror. But otherwise there probably would be nothing pointing to its presence. It was hard to know just where one stopped or started. Hard to keep from walking into one, even with instruments. CORniclooo SS CO