Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

she was mad, a fugitive from the isolation sanitarium in the forest. When he saw her in the light, Hallen fully expected to find the tiny “I” tattooed on the lobe of her ear. It was the mark of the incurably insane, legally barring them from mar- riage. Hallen felt a slight twinge of regret, for he had found Diane Landers attrac- tive, in her fragile way. And he had already decided he liked her. He was, therefore, agreeably surprised to see that her lobe was clean. She was as sound of mind as he was himself. She leaned against the door jamb staring at him, while a wave of pity welled into her face. “Well—it’s almost over.” He backed away from her. “Now, wait a minute! Let’s start getting a few things straight. Nothing you’ve said makes sense. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing in the Plantation. I saw a meteorite fall in the new forest, and when I— “Only a meteorite?” Her eyes widened in terror. “But your surface-car is blue and you were on the road at the exact spot where—” She gasped. “Mr. Hallen, are you a Linkist?” He began to laugh. The Linkists were an exotic splinter sect, amusingly harm- less. In their badly printed tracts they were alternately threatening to overthrow world civilization and loudly lamenting their imagined persecution as an unpro- tected minority. Vaguely Hallen knew the Linkists pretended to believe the legend about the great ones who had fled during the Suicide War; the Linkists confidently expected, one day, to find their survivors. “So that’s what you’re afraid of,” he said. “No, Miss Landers, I’m just as normal as you are.” He took a trans- parent capsule out of a wall wound kit and broke it in his palm, applying the cool gelatine to the bruise on her fore- head. “We both seem to have gotten off to a side-rocket start. I took you for one kind of an idiot, and you took me for another. You’re from the lodge, aren’t you?” “Lodge?” “The hotel up on the lake. People are always wandering off to look at the trees, and getting lost. No point going back now. I'll drive you over in the morning, LADY WITH A PAST on my way back to the city. This is my last night of Service Duty.” “Mr. Hallen, I—” “Call me Pete.” “But I don’t know you!” “You will,” he grinned. 7 “IT must go, Mr. Hallen . . . Pete.” Her voice had the patient, patronizing tone of a mother addressing a little boy. “Thanks for all you’ve done, but you... you just wouldn’t understand.” “Understand what?” “Pete, I’ve made a mistake. When I saw the kind of a machine you drove, and the way the trees were planted, I began to wonder if the prognosis was wrong.” Tears gleamed in her eyes, “I said you wouldn’t understand, Pete.” Suddenly the folds of: her robe shifted and he saw a weapon gleaming in her hand. It was a primitive gun, a museum piece three or four centuries old. Hallen was shocked; to bear arms was on a social level with refusing to perform a Service Duty. Once again his eyes searched the lobe of her ear for the telltale brand. “Stay where you are, Pete.” She backed toward the door. “Diane! You can’t leave here carrying that thing. Give it to me and I'll get rid of it for you.” He moved toward her; she raised the gun. He did not believe she would pull the trigger until the ex- plosion echoed through the cabin and the sudden flaming pain stabbed into the flesh of his arm. In the nightmare of dizziness, he stag- gered and fell. He heard her feet on the steps, and the hum of his turbo car as she drove it toward the highway. As the. undulating blackness moved around him, he had the presence of mind to reach for one of the gelatine capsules and break it over the wound in his arm. The relief from pain was immediate and in less than a minute his head had cleared. He examined the wound criti- cally. The bullet had broken cleanly through the flesh, burying itself in the cabin wall. Hallen worked a synthacell strip into the wound, sealing it with another gelatine capsule. Then he went about the business of winding up his tour of Duty in the Forest Service. He set. the automatic fire cComicbooks.com