Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 277: what you’re looking at

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

John Laird stirred back toward consciousness, stunned neurones lapsing into familiar pathways of synapse, the pattern which was personality fighting to restore itself. Daryesh stumbled as the groping mind flashed a random command to his muscles, cursed, and willed the other self- back to blankness. Hold on, Daryesh, hold on, a few minutes only— He burst out of a small side entrance and stood in the tumbled desolation of the valley. The keen tenuous air raked his sobbing lungs as he looked wildly around at sand and stone and the alien stars. New constellations—Gods, it had been a long time! The moon was larger than he remembered, flooding the dead landscape with a frosty argence. It must have spiraled close in all those uncounted ages. The boat! Hellolaze, where was the boat? He saw the Janyard ship not far away, a long lean torpedo resting on the dunes. But it would be guarded—no use trying to steal it. Where was this Laird’s vessel, then? Tumbling through a confusion of alien memories, he recalled burying it on the west side ... No, it wasn’t he who had done that but Laird. Damnation, he had to work fast. He plunged around the monstrous eroded shape of the pyramid, found the long mound, saw the moon-gleam where the wind had blown sand off the metal. What a clumsy pup this Laird was. He shoveled the sand away from the airlock, scooping with his hands, the breath raw in throat and lungs. Any second now they’d be on him, any instant, and now that they really believed he understood the machines— The lock shone dully before him, cold under his hands. He spun the outer dog, swearing with a frantic emotion foreign to old Vwyrdda, but that was the habit of his host, untrained psychosomatically, unevolved— There they came! CORniclooo SS CO