Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 72: what you’re looking at

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

anywhere—go before the synthetics were just a memory and the ship turned into a total horror of starving maniacs? And how long could even the captain bind the men to his will—men who had never known anything but darkness and free flight, men who with each passing “day” became more and more adapted to their ship asylum in the black sea of Space and less and less suited for the lives of human beings? Was their fight only a hopeless race up a blind, fantastic alley? Perhaps the younger men were right. Perhaps they Should simply treat the other men, with their backsliding primitive culture and superstition, aS animals and try to exterminate them to make the synthetics last longer. Perhaps, from the initial revolution down to the present, it had all been their fault. Perhaps they should forget about being men, forget about saving the ship, and just make the best of the life with which they were confronted. Collins shook the thought from his mind. That way only seemed to be the easy way, he knew. That way meant death for all of them. The time would come, the timemust come, when they would need those savage people who now crouched around their strange fires in the black world below. Collins drifted around a comer and there was Malcolm. Malcolm, now growing old but still with a twinkle in his eyes, seemed dignified as always in the light of his small torch. He floated rigidly in the air, his spine unbending and his clothing faultlessly neat as usual. “| say, Collins,” he said briskly, “good to see you.” Collins smiled. Malcolm had discovered from the records that his parents had been British, and he had therefore read all the books he could find upon an incredibly distant England and her people. He had picked up what he fancied to be British phrases, and he used them doggedly. A pathetic thing, to be sure, and a trifle comic, but Collins respected the man’s effort to build a desperate individual personality in the midst of chaos. Once he had even tried to CORniclooo SS CO