Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 57: what you’re looking at

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

LADY WITH A PAST By IRVING E. COX, Jr. OR a moment there was a shadow across the setting sun, a black shaft plunging toward the heart of the new forest. Peter Hallen sprang to the rail of his Watch House, waiting for the sound of the crash. Minutes passed and he heard nothing. It was his last day of annual Service Duty, and he wanted no flash fires to mar his record. He jerked on his plastic emergency jacket. Beneath it he wore jodhpurs of the same material; his boots, too, were plastic, as light and pliable as silk and as tough as Marsmetal. He ran down the stairway and sprang into his two-seated turbocar. In a spray of splattered gravel, he spun off the paved highway into the twisting, dirt road that led to the new forest. The redwoods on both sides of the road towered tall and straight from an uncluttered floor of soft, black loam, each tree an equal distance from its neighbors. The new forest was a rectangle of a thousand acres which had been recently cut. The roots of the giants had been ripped out of the earth and rows of year-old saplings planted in the rich soil. Most of the work had been done during Hallen’s period of Service Duty, and he was immefisely proud of it. He pulled his turbocar to a stop be- side the clearing and ran up the steps of the emergency watchpost. Half a mile from the road he saw a thin plume of ‘smoke rising toward the dusk-red sky, but whatever it was had nearly burned itself out. None the less, it was necessary: to extinguish any smoldering debris that might still lie on the earth. Slipping two of the chemical bombs into his pocket, Hallen moved off through the saplings toward the dying ribbon of smoke. He was a large man, chunkily built, with a suggestion of primitive savagery in his walk and in the flat, mas- sive bones of his face. His hair was black and thick, lying tightly curled against his skull; yet, in spite of the impression that. he gave of untamed brute strength, his slanting blue eyes were alert and intelli- 55 gent, his hands almost poetically delicate. Since he did not have sufficient data, he made no attempt to guess what had fallen in the forest. It could have been a Stratocargo robot, an Asia Transport, or one of the Venusian pioneer expedition rockets. If so, it was a unique disaster. Hallen was twenty-five years old and, in his lifetime, he had never heard of the crash of any aircraft. The last disaster had been a century before, when a robot carrier had fallen in Tibet; but it had been an old model not equipped with the safety automatics. It was dark when Hallen reached the site of the fire. The smoke was gone, the ground already cool. A score of sap- lings was crushed and burned in an ovoid pattern, which surrounded a long, shallow depression in the earth. It was coated with a gray-green film, like the waste dust that periodically choked the exhaust vents of the city power plants. The only ready explanation that occur- red to him was that a meteorite had fallen. As a precautionary measure, he broke two bombs over the waste and jumped back as the thick, white cloud spread over the ground. Behind him he heard a labored gasp, and a sharp crack as a young sapling was broken at the roots. Angry at such heedless desecration of young trees, he ran toward the sound. He caught a glimpse of a crude, robelike costume as a muffled figure fled from him. He followed easily. In a small turn- around clearing beside the road, Hallen came face to face with the stranger. For a split second he glared at Hallen, beady eyes blazing with terror in a small, white face. Then, ludicrously, he launched him- self in the air, springing upward as if he wore wings. Screaming, his body twisting violently, the stranger followed the proscribed laws of physics, His head hit the ground and he lay moaning painfully. It was only when Hallen bent over him and pulled back the hood of the robe that he dis- covered the stranger was a woman. She Gomichbooks.co G