Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

HUMPTY carefully packed in foam-rubber? Un- conscious humans en route to a secret Baldy vivisection lab? Then an invisible breath seemed to sweep through the hot, still air. It was the paranoid aura. As, in petit mal, the epileptic attack is presaged by an indefinite feeling of impending disaster, so the physical approach of a paranoid carries before it the shadowy halo pushing outward from the distorted mind. Cody had felt this before, but each time he aa afresh the same faint shrinking, a though his contact with the bright, hot green world around him had thinned and snapped for an instant. He turned slowly and crossed the street, threading past the uneasy, murmuring groups of unshaved men, past their hostile stares. Ahead was a little restaurant—the Copter Vane Eatery. The aura thickened. Cody stopped outside the door of the restau- rant and reached out telepathically. The rumors flew past him. A man knew a man who had a Baldy neighbor who lost three fingers in a duel a month ago, and today had three fingers growing as good as new, grafted on in a private Baldy hospital. (But Baldies won’t duel—never mind that!) They could work miracles in medicine now, but you didn’t see them doing it for humans, did you? If they weren’t stopped soon, who could tell what might happen next? . Stiff with arrogance, wary with sus- picion, the mind of Jasper Horne, within the restaurant, sent out its own murky thoughts too—egotistical, prideful, sensitive, and inflexible. And there was a dim thought stirring in that cloudy mind, like an ember under gray ash, fading and brightening again into half-clarity, which made Cody, at the restaurant’s door, pause and stiffen into immobility for fear that the tele- pathic paranoid might sense his presence. DUMPTY 49 Horne had not come to American Gun to start a pogrom. His real motive was far more deadly. It was— What? That was what Cody could not see —yet. He had glimpsed the shadow of a thought, and that glimpse had been enough to flash a sharp warning to his mind, a signal of terrible urgency. Horne’s real motive lay deeply buried. But it had to be found out. Cody felt quite certain of that. He stepped aside, leaned against the wall of the building, and glanced idly around, while from under the Mute helmet his mind probed very delicately and_ sensitively toward Horne. Gently .. . gently. The paranoid was sitting alone in a booth near the back of the restaurant. His thoughts were clouded with re- pression. And he was concentrating on his lunch, not consciously thinking of the thing which had drifted across the surface of his mind for a triumph- ant instant. Unless this concept was summoned into consciousness, Cody could not read it without deep prob- ing, which Horne would immediately sense. Yet there was a way. The right cues would summon up the appropriate responses in any mind. But those cues would have to be implanted in Horne’s . thoughts very delicately, so that they would seem perfectly natural, and his own. Cody looked across the street, beyond the murmuring knots of men, at the Last Chance. Horne had been there half an hour ago. It was a fair cue. He sent the concept Last Chance softly into Horne’s mind. And that mind flinched warily, searched, found nothing—the Mute helmet guarded Cody—and then the cue summoned up its responses. Last Chance—gambling. But I'm the conmiclooolks.ec© im