Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

Four widely separated planets, in all, had been discovered with their entire populations killed. Two had been painstakingly looted of every valuable which men with unlimited transportation could wish to carry away. And it had been Brent’s errand—being of the Profession—to try to find out how all this had come about. Naturally, he had not thought of getting acquainted with girls, however pretty. Now, though, all bets were Off. If the Delilah's overdrive was blown, nobody had any profession or business or obligations of any sort that reached outside the ship. Nothing anybody did would have any effect, or any meaning, to anybody not on the ship at the Same time with him. The Delilah was, at the moment, very stodgy and respectable. But presently it would be a first- class imitation of hell. Brent’s Professional status was gone and all his obligations with it. It occurred to him that the most useful thing he could do would be to explain the situation to Kit Harlow and offer, politely, to kill her before things got too bad. He didn’t have to think the situation out. In overdrive, an antique ship like this—modern ships did vastly better— would cover a light-year of distance in a week of time. Light travels a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. In eight minutes it travels ninety-two millions of miles. In a day it travels so far that the distance has no meaning. In a year . It travels the distance the Deli/ah should cover in a week. lf a ship’s overdrive went off—any ship’s overdrive—and where it went off was Known, still it would take ten thousand other spaceships ten thousand years to hunt for it with one chance in ten thousand of finding it. Nobody ever hunted for a ship that vanished in overdrive. It was useless. If the crew couldn’t fix whatever was wrong, it wouldn’t get fixed. So far, in two thousand years of interstellar navigation, just two ships had been found after their overdrives blew. Each had drifted into a planetary system by pure chance. One had been lost a CORniclooo SS CO