Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 80: what you’re looking at

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

78 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION of timber, an eroded hill or two. Presently he came to a winding road and since it afforded a more comfort- able base for ambulation he chose it in preference to the more direct route. He could have teleported of course, but on a mission of this sort it was better to be circumspect, at least until initial orientation had been completed. The group of buildings resolved into a dominant red structure, a much smaller white structure, and several odd nondescript structures. Ghan identified them tentatively with their word equivalents, drawing from one of the languages he had assimilated just before his departure: a barn, a house, a coop or sty of some sort, a— He had no word for the small Skeletal structure in the immediate foreground. It was an elaborate frame- work of some kind and it was overrun with tangled thorny vines. It stood in an area of small oval hummocks and geometric pathways. It appealed to him instantly as a practical base for his operations. The fact that it would afford him no protection from the weather was immaterial. He stepped inside and found a bench and a small table. He placed his portable transmitter on the table and he sat down on the bench. His headquarters was complete. Before intensifying his *pathic field he made a cursory probe of the ad- jacent buildings. All contained sentient life but the house contained the only type he was concerned with. He did not pause to examine it, however. It was more important, first, to ascertain whether he was centralized in an area that contained sufficient specimens to make a cross-section analysis valid. He began intensifying. The process was not enervating. A *path of Ghan’s ability could intensify or almost unlimited periods of time without harmful aftereffects. But in order to attain the degree of con- centration required, external physical awareness had to be sacrificed. His field expanded in concentric waves. At first he touched sentient life only in scattered sequence, then in progressively heavier sequence, finally en masse. He focused. A city. Complex, tiered, over- crowded. A plethoric jungle of thought patterns confronted him and_ he selected one at random for an ex- perimental trans-probe. In the Sosterich home system, and to a lesser degree in the scattered Sosterich satrapies, telepathy was a highly specialized art. It was thought- reading combined with analysis plus symbolical interpretation. The process was instantaneous. When Ghan probed a subject he participated in a dramatic representation of that subject’s char- acter. His first subject was a man. The dominant symbol was a forest. It was a melancholic forest, overgrown, tangled, gloomy. The man was walking along a vaguely defined trail, pausing often to glance back over his shoulder. All he ever saw was an impassive arabesque of vines and foliage, yet he knew without doubt that he was being followed. The trail led somewhere, but the man did not know where. The man hated the forest. He hated the scab- rous trees with their hungry leaves that devoured the sunlight, leaving him only a pale pittance to illumine his way along the trail. He wanted to turn and retrace his steps, but he was afraid. He was sure that way back on the trail there had been a clearing, a clearing filled with warm sunlight. All he wanted was to find it again, but he knew he could never find it unless he went back. All he could do was to keep stumbling ahead, hoping that the trail did not follow a relentless straight line, hoping that it curved in a wide connicloooks.c© iim