Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

Ral Pe SAM HALL 17 what it meant to the government. Life in the garrison state was inevitably founded on fear and mistrust, every man’s eye on his neighbor; but at least psychotyping and hypnoquizzing had given a degree of surety. Now, with that staff knocked out from under them— His preliminary studies indicated that a discovery such as Sorensen had hypothesized, while not impossible, was too far beyond the scope of mod- ern science for the rebels to have per- fected. Such research carried on now- adays would, from the standpoint of practicality if not of knowledge, be a waste of time and trained men. He spent a good many sleepless hours, and used up a month’s cigarette ration, before he could decide what to do. All right, he’d aided insurrection in a small way, and he shouldn’t boggle at the next step. Still—Did he want to? Jack—the boy had a career lined out for himself. He loved the big deeps beyond the sky as he would love a woman. If things changed, what then of Jack’s career? Well, what was it now? Stuck on a dreary planet as guardsman and exe- cutioner of homesick starvelings poi- soned by radioactivity—never even seeing the sun. Come the day, Jack could surely wangle a berth on a real spacer; they’d need bold men to ex- plore beyond Saturn. Jack was too honest to make a good rebel, but Thornberg felt that after the initial shock he would welcome a new government. But treason! Oaths! When in the course of human events— It was a small thing which decided Thornberg. He passed a shop down- town and noticed a group of the Youth Guard smashing in its windows and spattering yellow paint over the goods. Once he had taken his path, a curious serenity possessed him. He stole a vial of prussic acid from a chemist friend and carried it in his pocket; and as for Jack, the boy would have to take his chances too. The work was demanding and dan- gerous. He had to alter recorded facts which were available elsewhere, in books and journals and the minds of men. Nothing could be done with basic theory, of course, but quantita- tive results could be juggled a little so that the overall picture was subtly askew. He would co-opt carefully chosen experts, men whose psycho- types indicated they would take the easy course of relying on Matilda in- stead of checking the original sources. And the correlation and integration of innumerable data, the empirical equations and extrapolations thereof, they could be tampered with. : He turned his regular job over to Rodney and devoted himself entirely to the new one. He grew thin and testy; when Sorensen called up trying to hurry him, he snapped back: “‘Do you want speed or quality?” and wasn’t too surprised at himself after- ward. He got little sleep, but his mind seemed unnaturally clear. Winter faded into spring while Thornberg and his experts labored and while the nation shook, psychi- cally and physically, with the growing violence of Sam Hall. The report Thornberg submitted in May was so voluminous and detailed that he didn’t think the government research- ers would bother referring to any other source. Its conclusion: Yes, given a brilliant man applying Belloni ma- trices to cybernetic formulas and using some unknown kind of colloidal probe, a psychological masking technique was plausible. The government yanked every man it could find into research. Thornberg knew it was only a matter of time be- comiiclooolks.corm