Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 256: what you’re looking at

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

The man stepped forward, and as he did,’ Craig stepped back, his hands dropping to the gun butts. But with die guns half out he stopped, for the man had disappeared. He had simply vanished. There had been no puff of smoke, no preliminary shimmering as of matter breaking down. The man just simply wasn’t there. But in his place was the big blue Candle, rocking to and fro. Cold sweat broke out upon Craig’s forehead and trickled down his face. For he knew he had trodden very close to death—perhaps to something even worse than death. Wildly he swung about, raced for the puddle jumper, wrenched the door open, hurled himself at the controls. Craig drove like a madman, the Cold claws of fear hovering over him. Twice he almost met disaster, once when the jumper bucked through a deep drift of dust, again when it rocketed through a pool of molten tin. Craig gripped the wheel hard and slammed the jumper up an incline slippery with dust. Damn it, the thing that had come back as Knut was Knut. It knew the things Knut knew, it acted like Knut. It had his mannerisms, it talked In his voice, it actually seemed to think the way Knut would think. What could a man—what could mankind do against a thing like that? How could it separate the original from the duplicate? How would it know its own? The thing that had come back to the Center had beaten Creepy at checkers. Creepy had led Knut to believe he was the old man’s equal at the game, although Creepy knew he could beat Knut at any time he chose. But Knut didn’t know that—and the thing masquerading as Knut didn’t know it, so it had sat down and beaten Creepy six games hand-running, to the old man’s horror and dismay. Did that mean anything or not? CORniclooo SS (SO)