Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

+4 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION She nodded. “I'll miss you. Hurry back.” Cody shut the grille of the lift be- hind him and leaned his head against the steel wall, slumping wearily as he shaped in his mind the code-signal to activate the mechanisms. A pre- occupied mind somewhere responded with another segment of the cipher, and a third—someone going by rap- idly, late to dinner—tossed in the necessary remaining symbols. Three mental images had to be projected simultaneously to operate the lift. It was a precaution. Escape exits could be operated by telepaths only. He pushed a slanting door open into a welter of dripping leaves and the sharp, sweet odor of wet pine and rain. A startled rabbit exploded out of the underbrush. Cody shut the camouflaged portal and looked up, squinting against the rain that drove in his face. From somewhere above a voiceless greeting came, a motor hummed and a dark coil rolled smoothly down out of the grayness. Cody set his foot in the stirrup and felt the soft instant upward lift of the basket seat snatching him aloft as he sank into it. The hovering copter received him through a single gaping jaw and carried him upward. Arn Friedmann did not glance back ‘from the controls. He did not need to. Short, squat, gravely expressionless in face and in manner, he leaned his dark-capped head forward to peer through the rain, his mind detaching enough of itself from attention to the business at hand to send a wordless greeting. For a moment Cody only leaned back and let the cool, untroubled silence of the open sky wash his mind clean. It was like allowing long-taut muscles to relax at last. The cavern was so filled with closed-down resent- ments, guilts and fears and tensions that after a while even the air became hard to breathe, for a telepath. Friedmann had something urgent he wanted to convey. Cody felt the touch of it on the outer edges of his awareness, waiting, letting the new- comer breathe clean air a while. Fried- mann’s mind hovered as the copter had hovered, patient, abiding the signal. Under them the pine woods swept backwards, tossing, rain-blurred. Water ran down the panes. The motor hummed pleasantly in the coolness. Lucy. Five years now without sight of rain or trees or sky. A lifetime ahead of her without them, or else a quick death, or—the Inductor. “We've got to have more time,” Friedmann’s thought came. “If a pogrom starts now, it'll spread. I think the paranoids are counting on that. They’ve been filtering into the key towns—the places where riots would be apt to start. Like American Gun. Jasper Horne’s there.” ‘Since when?” Cody asked. “Three weeks or so. And he’s been working hard. You know how the paranoids do it. Read a mind and drop a loaded word at the right time, to keep the tension building. Probably Horne could start a riot in American Gun any time he liked, by now.” “Not if he’s dead,’ Cody’s thought said, with grim anticipation. He leaned back watching the mists scud past, thinking of American Gun. It was a gambling town. That was _ the specialty, anyway, although there was a famous research laboratory in the town, and a master artisan in plastics lived. there. But basically men came to American Gun to gamble. That’s what VPll be doing, Cody thought. He watched sunlight dry the raindrops on the window beside him. Friedmann left Cody at the out- skirts of American Gun and sent the conniclooolks.conn