Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 267: what you’re looking at

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

anyone else in his job, and had less to say about what he had found. A huge man, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark aquiline features and curiously brilliant greenish-gray eyes, he was middle-aged now though it didn’t show except at the temples. He was courteous enough to everyone, but Shortspoken and slow to laugh. Old friends, who had known him thirty years before when he was the gayest and most reckless officer in the Solar Navy, thought something during the Revolt had changed him more than any psychologist would admit was possible. But he had never said anything about it, merely resigning his commission after the war and going into Survey. We were sitting alone in a comer of the lounge. The Lunar branch of the Explorers’ Club maintains its building outside the main dome of Selene Center, and we were sitting beside one of the great windows, drinking Centaurian sidecars and swapping the inevitable shop-talk. “Come again?” | said. He laughed, without much humor. “Il might as well tell you,” he said. “You won’t believe it, and even if you did it’d make no difference. Sometimes | tell the story—alcohol makes me feel like it. | start remembering old times .. He settled farther back in his chair. “Maybe it wasn’t a real genie,” he went on. “More of a ghost, perhaps. That was a haunted planet. They were great a million years before man existed on Earth. They spanned the stars and they knew things the present civilization hasn’t even guessed at. And then they died. Their own weapons swept them away in one burst of fire, and only broken ruins were left—ruins and desert, and the ghost who lay waiting in that bottle. “It was—let me see—thirty-three years ago now, when | was a bright young lieutenant with bright young ideas. The Revolt was in full swing then, and the Janyards held all that CORniclooo SS CO