Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

their way along the emergency guy rod even as he was doing. Were they good enough? The thought crept, unbidden, into his mind. They had worked hard, they were good, but they had learned under terrible handicaps. Their tools were inadequate. Could they fix the drive? If not- Getting out of the Viking in their old spacesuits had been something of a feat in itself, although the problem was not in getting through the small air lock but itn_ not getting blown through it into infinity. Getting back into the ship again through the engine room was, to say the least, going to be something else again. Owens had said that there was an operable air lock there that he had seen, one that could be opened from Outside, but—Was the man leading them all to their deaths? Was this all simply a last, tronic gesture of defiance? Collins inched his way along. He had no choice, he realized. It was act now or not at all. A chance, however desperate, was still a chance. Owens ... there was something strange about the man. Collins stared at the cold metal side of the Viking as he crept along it. In there, separated from him by scant feet, were the other men, the children of the revolutionaries. He was in their territory now, their part of the ship, where they gathered around their great synthetic fires and lived then- proud but futile lives, sliding back, back, back into a cold death in an empty ship. Could they be saved, turned to use, if the ship were recovered? Collins had always said that they could, and he believed it. For all their differences, for all their strangeness, these were yet people—people who had chosen to follow a different path from his, but people none the less. A common goal, a common hope, might yet unite the two. And all hands would be needed if the Viking were to come through at last. Collins smiled bitterly. What was that expression he had read in his youth?Don’t count your chickens before they're CORniclooo SS CO