Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

~ tr. oT hoes) Y eee BOP OPN aie LAr eS Ay A iv ‘ pry yd TOR Ors ™ Leah ¢ ; a a ewiry Loy, C/ Fis bed) - re. ' Pa’ i vole control on his sector of the Plantation and completed the recapitulation of statistics on the cutting and planting which had been done under his super- vision. Only after he had pulled off his plastic jodhpurs and relaxed on the bed ee he begin to consider the problem of e Immediate pursuit did*not occur to him. It was his job to stay on duty in the Watch House until his replacement arrived. If a situation seemed to him to be an emergency, he could have sus- pended his allegiance to duty. But his brief encounter with Diane had given him no data for such a conclusion. For the same reason, he did not send in a general alarm. Now, he considered the facts that he had about her. Certainly her behavior was unusual; he could not apply a more specific adjective. : Yet she was sane, since the lobe of her ear was unmarked. For more than a century. the Medical Service had been able to identify the incurables -with- draw them from society before they reached the age of five. Generation by generation, the number had diminished to _ the vanishing point. Out of a world popu- lation of more than three billion, only a fraction of one per cent was still isolated in the institutions. After half a millen- nium, the effect of the radiation unleashed during the Suicide War had been very nearly wiped out. Then, since Diane had a rational mind, the nonsense she talked must have made sense. On the surface, that seemed absurd. She carried a gun: quite seriously she assumed that he was a Linkist; and she resorted to both emotion and violence to solve a problem. Hallen picked over the details of their conversation. It was not a difficult thing for him to do. His mind was uncluttered with warring emotion or insatiable frus- tration. Nurtured by the precision of a psycho-mathematical society, his memory functioned with the unbiased exactness of a mechanical calculator. When he first saw Diane, she had literally tried to leap off the surface of the earth; she had said she forgot about gravity. Such a comment suggested that 5g ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION she was physically acclimated to condi- tions of space flight and temporarily un- adjusted to planetary gravity. Her breath- lessness after climbing the Watch House steps argued the same hypothesis. It was possible, Hallen supposed. For two centuries ships from Earth had ex- plored both Mars and Venus. Millions of tons of rich, Venusian soil had been brought back to restore the deserts burned into the earth during the Suicide War. Ore from Mars built the city power plants, the continental networks of distro- tubes, the rocket jackets for the Strato- cargo robots. If Diane had been among the personnel of a Venusian expedition, the meteorite Hallen had seen had been a space rocket. But, if such a ship had destroyed itself, how could Diane have survived alone? At last Hallen’s hypothesis made sense. He sprang up, clenching his fists, angry because he had made no attempt to stop her. He had allowed her to plunge blindly into chaos! He remembered her reaction when she first saw his turbocar. She had mistaken him for someone else who had obviously intended to meet her in the new forest. Of course it would be a Linkist. She would have returned to the new forest road, now, to wait for the right man. If Hallen could find her first, he could still save her. He jerked on his jodhpurs and boots and ran down the Watch House steps. It was a moonless night, but Hallen knew the forest well enough to take a short cut through the redwoods. He was whistl- - ing tunelessly and, after a moment, he recognized it as the folk-melody of “The Ballad of Alamagordo,” with its vicious refrain, For man, we made atomic fire to break the mists of space. He scorned our words and used our strength to kill the human race. And so we leave your shattered cities, torn and stark with pain. Destroy yourselves! But save this hope: someday we come again. It was a Jong, rambling epic, preserved in several variants in the national gallery. Considered one of the more typical relics GComichbooksrco