Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

12 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION record. The crook had been of medium height, dark, scar-faced, broken-nosed —He sat for a while wondering how sane he was. How sane anybody was. Security Central asked for the com- plete file on the holdup, with any correlations the machine could make. It was sent to them. The description given could have been that of many men, but the scanners eliminated all but one possibility. Sam Hall. The hounds bayed forth again. That night Thornberg slept well. Dear Dad, Sorry I haven’t written before, but we’ve been kept pretty busy here. As you know, I’ve been with a patrol in Gorbuvashtar for the past several weeks—desolate country, like all this blasted planet. Sometimes I won- der if Pll ever see the sun again. And lakes and forests and—who wrote that line about the green hills of Earth? We can’t get much to read out here, and sometimes my mind feels rusty. Not that I’m complaining, of course. This is a necessary job, and somebody has to do it. We'd hardly gotten back from the patrol when we were called out on special duty, bundled into rockets and tossed halfway around the planet through the worst gale I’ve ever seen, even on Venus. If I hadn’t been an officer and therefore presumably a gentleman, I’d have upchucked. A lot of the boys did, and we were a pretty sorry crew when we landed. But we had to go into action right away. There was a strike in the thorium mines and the local men couldn’t break it. We had to use guns before we could bring them to reason. Dad, I felt sorry for the poor devils, I don’t mind admitting it. Rocks and hammers and sluice hoses against machine guns! And conditions in the mines are pretty rugged. They DELETED BY CENSOR someone has to do that job too, and if no one will volunteer for any kind of pay they have to assign civilian-service men arbitrarily. It’s for the state. Otherwise nothing new. Life is pretty monotonous. Don’t believe the adventure stories—adventure is weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of being scared gut- less. Sorry to be so brief, but I want to get this on the outbound rocket. Won’t be an- other for a couple of months. Everything well, really. I hope the same for you and live for the day we’ll meet again. Thanks a mil- lion for the cookies—you know you can’t afford to pay the freight, you old spendthrift! Martha baked them, didn’t she? I recognized the Obrenowicz touch. Say hello to her and Jim for me. And most of all, my kindest thoughts go to you. As ever, Jack The telecasts carried “Wanted” messages for Sam Hall. No photo- graphs of him were available, but an artist could draw an accurate likeness from Matilda’s precise description, and his truculent face began to adorn public places. Not long thereafter, the Security offices in Denver were blown up by a grenade tossed from a speeding car which vanished into traffic. A witness said he had glimpsed the thrower, and the fragmentary picture given under hypnosis was not unlike Sam Hall’s. Thornberg doc- tored the record a bit to make it still more similar. The tampering was risky, of course; if Security ever got suspicious, they could easily check back with their witnesses. But it was not too big a chance to take, for a scientifically quizzed man told every- thing germane to the subject which his memory, conscious, subconscious, and cellular, held. There was never any reason to repeat such an inter- rogation. Thornberg often tried to analyze his own motives. Plainly enough, he disliked the government. He must have contained that hate all his life, carefully suppressed from awareness, and only recently had it been forced into his conscious mind; not even his subconscious could have formulated it earlier, or he would have been caught by the loyalty probes. The hate derived from a lifetime of doubts (Had there been any real reason to fight Brazil, other than to obtain those bases and mining concessions? Had the Chinese attack perhaps been provoked—or even faked, for their government had denied it?) and the conniicloooks.c© im