Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 86: what you’re looking at

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

The captain. Mark Langston chewed on the stem of his pipe but didn’t light it. He could see the captain now, alone in that great control room, his old eyes alert as he listened to them explaining to him why he had to relinquish his command for the good of his ship. He could hear Owens’ guiet voice showing him-how his men put their trust in him as a symbol, and waited for him to save them—waited too long. He could hear the captain’s slow, careful questions. And he could seethe knife, the sudden Knife, the knife they had not been able to stop. The captain, sizing up the situation, had taken his own life to give his people the best possible chance. No man had ever given more. McConnell hung a cigarette at an impossible angle out of his mouth. “You feeling any better?” he asked Owens. “You took quite a beating in there.” Stan Owens fingered his battered face ruefully. “I didn’t see any other way to handle it,” he said. “Next time I'll just walk through a meat grinder.” Stan Owens. Mark Langston looked at his friend. /t had all been his plan, his responsibility—and he, more than any other man, had brought life again to the lostViking. The old captain, his son Collins, Webb, Renaldo, Echols, the strange and wonderful Englishman Malcolm—these would one day be household names, known to every schoolboy from the saga of the first of the interstellar shios. But who would ever hear the name of Stan Owens, save perhaps as a dimly remembered legend, a ghost-name? Would historians of the future ever figure out what really had happened on that dark ship—and would they correctly identify Owens as the “savage” who had led Collins to the engine room? Would they puzzle unduly over the extra air lock that had not been present when the ship left Earth? Would they ever understand that a switch had been made with Collins’ original prisoner, with Owens taking over with his story of a vanishing air supply to goad the desperate Collins into action? CORniclooo SS CO