Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 8 — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

THE GREAT AiR MONOPOLY up or gei shot or forget his regular youth treatments for a month and wind up in the quiet crypt where sat the nine hundred coffins of black ebony and gold containing all the mortal remains of Soldiers of Light who had departed the service in the only way possible and whose brothers had care- fully brought them home. He calculated from time to time and filled his pipe. After a while, when dinner was over, hed go to the lake, make an artificial dusk and try out his "battery of flies on the trout. Just now he was calculat- ing rf had came to him that morning that negative could be weighed and if this were so, then it could be canned and if that were true, he could undoubtedly surprise his colleagues at the Center some two hun- dred million light-years away by making painless amputations so that new limbs - could be grown. He had just come up to his ninety-sixth variable when Hippocrates heard the chain gang. The little slave was ashamed of him- self for being too busy or too provoked to heed sounds audible to him these past sixteen and two-tenths minutes. Hippocrates jumped to the panel, making the Morgue rock with his great weight and four-handedly threw on a combination of switches which utterly camouflaged the Morgue, screened Ole Doc without making him invisible, trained outward a brace of 600 mm, blasters rated at a thousand rounds a second and turned down the oven so that his cake wouldn’t burn. These four import- ances attended to, Hippocrates hung in- visible in the door and eyed the column with disfavor as it came in sight. Ole Doc saw it at last. It would have been very difficult to have avoided it, seeing that the vanguard—a huge Persephon rene- gade—would momentarily stumble against the screen, the limit of which he was paralleling. ‘It was a weird sight, that column. The lush grass bent under white human feet and became stained with red. Clothing tipped to nothing, eyes sunken and haunted, bent with iron fetters and despair, the hundred and sixteen people captive there appeared like shades just issued forth from hell for a bout with Judgment Day. The guards were brutish humanoids, eugenicized for slave tending. And this was odd because Ole Doc himself a hundred or was it fifty years before had thought the practice stopped by his own policing. These ape-armed, jaguar-toothed devils were like humans mad with a poisonous stimulant or like Persephons dragged from their pits and injected with satanic human intelligence. Their pointed heads were as thick as helmets, their necks were collared with an owner’s mark, their shoulders and shaggy loins girded about with blasters and brass 35 cases and their elephant-pad feet were shoed in something resembling spittoons. Whoever owned and controlled that crew who in turn controlled these human slaves must be a very rough lad himself. Doc raised a microglass to his eye and read the collar brand. It wasn’t a man’s name, it was a commercial company stamp, “Air, Limited.” Maybe they would have gone on by and nothing whatever would have been written - the Morgue’s log. But then Ole Doc saw er. She was slight, but strong enough to bear this iron. She was curved just so and thus And here eyes and nose and mouth made a triangle, just... well, and her hair flowed back and down her back. Ole Doc sat up and the pipe dropped unheeded to the ground. He looked harder. The lines before and behind her vanished. The guards vanished. The grass, the sun- light, all Arphon vanished. And there was this girl. Ole Doc stood up and his knees wobbled a little which was odd because Ole Doc was in a _ physical recondition far superior to most men of twenty-five. She saw him and for an instant, as she looked and he looked broke her stride. The slave behind her was old and stumbled. The slave ahead was jerked back by his collar. The Persephon humanoid whirled off the screen he had just bumped and came around ee es the tangle. And down came his brass rod. _ It never touched the young lady. Ole Doc had not practised drawing and hip shooting for about four hundred years but his hand had not forgotten. That Persephon human- oid sort of exploded into a mist. His arm flew up sixty yards, turned at the top and came down with a thump on the Morgue’s screen where it lay, dripping, suspended in air. The guard’s blaster belt went off after an instant like a chain of smiall cannons and blew tufts of grass in the air. The hole smoked and the other guards came up sharply, gaped and as one faced about with guns drawn looking for their quarry. It was not quite fair. Ole Doc was out of the screen where he could shoot without deflection and he was shocting. And even if he was a fine target it was still not sport- ing. He had five Persephons only to: shoot at him and then there were four, three, two, none. And patches of grass smoked and there was silence. A final belt cartridge ex- ploded in a hole and there was silence again. The Persephons never knew that they had had the honor of being shot by a Galactic Medalist in short arms. The slaves stood still and shivered. A wild one had pinked an old woman at the end of the column and she was sitting down staring at her own blood. The rest were gazing miserably at this new menace who ECOmMIGHoOoks (S@)