Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 300: what you’re looking at

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

The spaceship was settling down to the charred landing field with its miserable cargo and Gedso lon Brown turned back to his pinched cabin, one of the only two which had no leg irons included, to pack his slender belongings. A little later he shuffled down a gangway and put his trunk on the ground and looked about for someone to tell him where his quarters were. But there was no one interested in him and so he stood with his baggy uniform blowing about his ungainly body, feeling unwelcome and forlorn. A mass gangway to his right, like a leg of a rusty beetle, was crowded with the sullen freight brought here each trip. Convicts, emaciated and ragged and chafed by irons, were being herded into trucks by surly and ruthless guards. He was not a prepossessing figure, Gedso lon Brown. He was a full two meters tall and he weighed two and one-half times as much as another the same size for he had been born on Centaur One of-Vega to pioneer Earth parents and Vega’s Centaur. One has a gravity two and one-half times that of Earth. A shuffling gait, a forward cant to his disproportioned head and thick, round shoulders minimized his appearance. Life to him had always been a travail. At his Earth engineering school he had been dubbed a “provincial lout” and he had earned it for he crushed whatever chair he sat upon and in an unthinking moment might pull a door off its hinges if the catch held a second too long—and then stand looking stupidly and embarrassedly at the thing he held by the knob. Awkward and ungainly and shy, Gedso lon Brown had never made much way in the Extra-Territorial Scienticorps, getting his promotion by number and so progressing alone and ignored in a service vast enough to Swallow even his unhandsome bulk. People generally thought him stupid, basing their conclusions upon his social disgraces, but this was not fair. In his line Gedso was alert enough and it is doubtful if more CORniclooo SS CO