Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 52: what you’re looking at

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

50 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION one who’s really gambling with them; all of them. Their lives. I can kill them. All, if in time—the thought-chain broke as videomusic swelled within the restaurant. Horne lifted his fork and began to eat again. : Cody fitted the beat of his thought to the music’s beat and sent the message to Horne. Kill them all. Kill them all. Kill them all. Loose the virus, Horne’s response came to the stimulus he thought was his own. Pomerance is getting closer. Every day control the resonance; mutate a virus. Kill them all. Kill them all. KILL THEM ALL! Cody braced himself against the red rage that poured out from the paranoid. Pomerance, he thought. Pomerance. Pomerance in the labs, Horne thought, and formed a sensory image. Not far away—only two blocks away —were the research laboratories of Amercan Gun, and in them was a man named Pomerance a biochemist, a nontelepath. He was working on a certain experiment which—if it suc- ceeded would enable the paranoids to develop a virus as deadly and as specialized as the virus of Operation Apocalypse. And this was the real reason for Horne’s presence in American Gun. The pogrom-plan was a cover up. It was camouflage to deceive the Baldies, while Horne went about his real purpose of telepathically following Pomerance’s experiments toward the goal of an Operation Apocalypse brought about by the paranoids them- selves. Pomerance was not aiming at such a goal, of course. He was a biochemist ; his aim was to develop a more efficient bacteriophage—but the method he would need to develop that could also be applied to far deadlier aims. Gently Cody manipulated the para- noid’s mind. He learned a little more. Pomerance might fail—Horne realized that. But in that case, then the pogrom could be set off. It would be better to find and use a human-killing virus, for in a pogrom paranoid lives would be lost too—but there would be a pogrom if no better way offered. Conditions were ripe. Horne had built the tension in American Gun; he had located the potential mob-leaders; he could start the pogrom at any time he desired— and that would be the signal for other paranoids across the nation to do the same. That universal pogrom would force the Baldies to release Operation Apocalypse—so the same end would be achieved. But it would be better to wait a little, just a little, following Pomerance’s experiments closely. He seemed to be very near his goal. Too near, Cody thought, his body swaying a little toward the restau- rant’s door. He was wasting time. Kill Horne, kill him now, he told himself— but hesitated still, because there was something else in the paranoid’s mind that puzzled him. Too much confi- dence was built on that twisted, shaky foundation of paranoid personality. There must be some reason for that surprising lack of anxiety. Cody probed again with careful cues that brushed the other mind lightly. Yes, there was a reason. There was a bomb hidden in Pomerance’s laboratory. Why? Horne had that information, and Cody gently extracted it. The bio- chemist must not be allowed to fall alive into the hands of Baldies. The bomb was triggered to explode when- ever Horne summoned to conscious- ness a certain complex of symbols— the paranoid’s mind shifted quickly away from that dangerous equation— and it would also explode if Horne’s mind stopped thinking. connicloooks.c© in