Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 85: what you’re looking at

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

THE GARDEN IN THE FOREST 83 The man and the woman stared into the interior. They looked at the bench, the table, the transmitter (the transmitter was a tesseract, as in- visible to three-dimensional beings as a cube would be to two-dimensional creatures). They looked at Ghan. “Why, Alicia,” the woman. said, “‘there’s no one here at all.”’ “But there is, Mother! Can’t you see him? You're looking right at him! He’s come all the way from a star and he doesn’t have a heart and sometimes you can hardly hear him he talks so soft, and—’’ “Alicia! That’s imagining all this.” “But I’m not!” The little girl was crying. There was a ‘puzzled expression on the woman’s pinched face. Ghan slipped briefly into her mind—There was a forest, dark and tangled, and he was stumbling along an overgrown path. He did not know where the path led, but it had to take him out of the forest if he followed it long enough. The forest could not be forever. Some- where in the forest there had been a clearing a long time ago—or was it a garden?—he could not remember. Once he had found it, he was sure, and now, more than anything in the world, he wanted to find it again. For he hated the forest, with its pale sickly foliage and its loathsome ophidian vines; he hated the forest by day, but he hated it more by night when you could not see, when you could not find paths, not even overgrown travesties of paths that led nowhere, and you had to crouch there in the misshapen shadows, in the abysmal darkness, in the lonely night— The little girl was still crying, and the woman took her hand and led her away. The man stood by impassively, the gun slung under his arm. He had a thin, windburned face and watery enough. You're gray eyes. Ghan probed him as he stood there, not expecting to find, and not finding, any appreciable deviation from the general pattern his previous probes had established. The symbol itself was a little more bleak, perhaps, than the others. Es- sentialy, it was a featureless dreary plain. There were no mountains, there weren’t even any hills. He was stand- ing immobile in the midst of endless empty acres beneath an endless empty sky. There was a slight wind blowing; a cold wind. He had nebulous mem- ories of another wind, a much warmer one; but that one had blown so long ago that he had forgotten how it had felt, and the cold wind wasn’t so bad anyway, once you were used to it— After a while the man turned and followed the woman and the little girl. The corner of the barn hid him from view and Ghan_ returned his attention to the sky. It was such a magnificent sky that it was difficult to understand how anything ignoble could occur beneath it. The object of living—Ghan remem- bered the simple Sosterich credo—is to die gracefully. Under such a sky even the most uncultured savage should have been able to attain that ideal. But not a semicultured savage. Not a Phase Nine barbarian. Never a civilization honeycombed with fear. Never a race of people dominated by fear: fear-of-each-other, fear - of - themselves, fear - of - the - unfamiliar. For fear destroys com- passion and nurtures hatred and misery. Fear is the accomplice of violence, the assassin of peace. In a planetary sense, the danger of such -a civilization was frightening; in a galactic sense, it was appalling. There was little object in continuing the investigation. Ghan reached for Cconniclooolkks.e@