Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 9: what you’re looking at

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

SAM the cops to requisition Jimmy’s file, and there was nothing he could do. His hands were empty. No, he thought, I’/ give them Sam Hall! His fingers began to race, he lost his nausea in the intricate technical problem. Slipping a fake spool into Matilda—it wasn’t easy. You couldn’t duplicate numbers, and every citizen had a lot of them. You had to account for every day of his life. Well, some of that could be sim- plified. The machine had only existed for twenty-five years, before then the files had been kept on paper in a dozen different offices. Let’s make Sam Hall a resident of New York, his dossier there lost in the bombing thirty years ago—such of his papers as were on file in New Washington had also been lost in the Chinese attack. That meant he simply reported as much detail as he could remember, which needn’t be a lot. Let’s see. “Sam Hall” was an English song, so Sam Hall should be British himself. Came over with his parents, oh, thirty-eight years ago, when he was only three, and natural- ized with them; that was before the total ban on immigration. Grew up on New York’s lower East Side, a tough kid, a slum kid. School records lost in the bombing, but he claimed to have gone through the tenth grade. No living relatives. No family. No definite occupation, just a series of unskilled jobs. Loyalty rating BBA-O, which meant that purely routine ques- tions showed him to have no political opinions at all that mattered. Too colorless. Give him some violence in his background. Thornberg punched for information on New York police stations and _ civilian-police officers destroyed in the last raids. He used them as the source of records that Sam Hall had been continually HALL 7 in trouble—drunkenness, disorderly conduct, brawls, a suspicion of hold- ups and burglary but not strong enough to warrant calling in Security’s hypnotechnicians for quizzing him. Hm-m-m. Better make him 4-F, no military service. Reason? Well, a slight drug addiction; men weren’t so badly needed nowadays that hopheads had to be cured. Neocoke—that didn’t impair the faculties too much, indeed the addict was abnormally fast and strong under the influence, though there was a tough reaction afterwards. Then he would have had to put in a term in civilian service. Let’s see. He spent his three years as a common laborer on the Colorado Dam project ; sO many men had been involved there that no one would remember him, or at least it would be hard finding a supervisor who did. Now to fill in. Thornberg used a number of automatic machines to help him. Every day had to be ac- counted for, in twenty-five years; but of course the majority would show no travel or change of residence. Thorn- berg punched for cheap hotels hous- ing many at a time—no record would be kept there, everything being filed in Matilda, and no one would remem- ber a shabby individual patron. Sam Hall’s present address was given as the Triton, a glorified flophouse on the East Side, not far from the craters. At present unemployed, doubtless living off past savings. Oh, blast! It was necessary to file income tax returns. Thornberg did so. Hm-m-m—physical ID. Make him of average height, stocky, black- haired and black-eyed, a bent nose and a scar on his forehead—tough-looking, but not enough so to make him ‘es- pecially memorable. Thornberg filled in the precise measurements. It wasn’t hard to fake fingerprint and retinal patterns; he threw in a censor circuit Cconnicloooks.c© inn)