Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

WHAT THIN “Sit in this chair, Jennie,’ I said casually, and went on being busy with things on the top of my desk. My request wasn’t quite a command, but took obedience entirely for granted. It didn’t work with Jennie. She still stood at the door, the toe of one slippered foot on the arch of the other, her thin little legs twisted at an odd angle. Her look was neither defiant nor bashful. Nor was it courage covering fear. I was the nearest source of immediate danger. I should be watched. It was simply that, no more. I felt I should pity her, that I should warm to her desperate isola- tion. I was willing to feel sympathy because she did not ask for it, because ordinarily I admired and liked people who did not accentuate their pathos with calculated fraud. I found, to my surprise, that I did not like her. Oddly, I felt she knew it. And even worse, I felt that, knowing it, she was not hurt. But at least she did call for respect. Whatever she was, she was sincerely—whatever she was. I would not be a fraud either. I went to the point. “They tell me, Jennie,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could, and I’m experienced at it, “that you throw things and set things on fire.”’ If I expected either a burst of tears or defiance, I was mistaken. I didn’t have time to observe reactions at all. It was as if a sudden hurricane and earthquake had hit the room at the same time. A desk tray full of papers whizzed by my head; my pen stand crashed through the window back of me; I got a shower of paper clips in the chest; my intercom described an arc and crashed broken into a corner. By the time I had wiped the ashes and tobacco from my ashtray out of my eyes and got them to stay open again, Jennie was gone. Sara was PARTITIONS I] standing in the doorway with a look of consternation on her face. I was on my way home before I | remembered that when Sara and I had cleaned up the mess, I had not remem- bered picking up Auerbach’s little cylinder, his chemical impulse storer. I last saw it laying on the corner of my desk where Auerbach had left it. Probably Sara had picked it up and put it away. Anyway, the office was within security boundaries. The cyl- inder would be safe there. I put it out of my mind, and won- dered if the library had a card index classification under the heading of ‘*Poltergeist.”” I wasn’t much better prepared when I came into my office the following morning. Yes, of course, there was plenty of literature on the subject under such writers as Fort, books on oriental philosophy and the like. Orthodox psychologists had left the subject strictly alone, their attitude apparently being better to ignore the phenomenon than to risk precious and precarious reputation. Poltergeism, then, remained some- thing which one read about as an obscure, far away thing. I found no handy hints to help when one had it to deal with at first hand, no how-to- do-it books on the subject. Worse, I found myself with a hang- over of uncertainty, indecision. My deft incisiveness was gone. I felt a growing doubt that I had always been as smart as I thought I was. I shook off the mood as I walked through the outer personnel offices toward my own. No matter how un- sure, one must be positive and definite for the sake of the people who depend upon him for some certainties. Sara had not quite come to the same decision. There was a look of puzzle- ment on her face when I started through her office toward mine. Un- Conmiclooolks.c© i