Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

GIMMICK up curiosity on the subject and called base. A husky blonde woman appeared on the screen, with a calibrator in one hand. “Calland!”’ she spread her arms in a gesture of embracement. _ “Hello, Della,’ he smiled a little. “They told us there wasn’t any- thing left of the ship but small-sized pieces, and it looked as though the Furries had towed away the control cabin to examine the gizmo. We thought the Furries had you.” She looked worried to illustrate. “They said there weren’t any pieces big enough for survivors. Where did you go, boy?” : “T was in a small piece.’’ He found himself smiling again, without \t touching the frozen feeling somewhere inside. She inspected his face. “As long as it’s one piece at a time, we don’t mind. How about transferring back to base and designing where it’s safe? You’re too productive a man to be floating around in pieces.”’ She added, “Especially in small Pieces.” In peace time he had been working on better self-accommodating elec- tronic readers to make punched tapes for controlling machine tools to pro- duce machinery accurate in the fitting of its parts from inaccurate and approximate blueprints. And as his special love he had been applying self- accommodating and proportioning to a console color player which made unified color compositions from the sound of symphonies. He stated his feeling more precisely than he had understood it before. “I don’t like weapons.” “Then why test them?” She was startled, but saw the answer in what she knew of managing idea men. “OK. 574: see: itso No like: ..-eant think . . . not top thinking anyhow. Go ahead and test, you know what 89 you're doing. But don’t let the Furries get you.” She was about to switch off, but thought of something. “Did you hear the radio flash? We bombed the Furry settlement on lar four hours ago. Retaliation for those beam swaths their cruiser cut across New Boston. The bombs left that settlement flat- tened out. It didn’t have any defenses that worked.” He felt cold suddenly, his skin numbing again, understanding what would happen next, where he would not have understood before. Most of humanity was unused to the simple logic of catastrophe. He had two cousins and a girl friend in New Bos- ton, the city nearest to the Furry planetary group. ‘““What did we do that for? What is that supposed to do for us?” She was indignant. “It will show the Furries that they'll find life easier if they stick to the rules of civilized warfare and leave cities and civilians alone.” Knowing that he was being ab- solutely accurate, with the certainty of pointing out that the sun will rise, he said, ‘They are going to send a cruiser back to New Boston and burn it as flat as a piece of burnt toast.’’' He added, ‘‘As a lesson to us not to attack cities and civilians. Someone I know lives there.” The handsome blonde woman looked whiter than usual, as if the tone of his voice had made it seem real. He began to follow a glimmer of thought, some kind of a pattern that was thinking he had done and forgot- ten in the long wait in the corridor. “What would happen if we tried to bomb a human city?” She was used to having research thinkers asking rhetorical questions to bounce their ideas from her. ““They’d turn on their EG screen. Our bombs: couldn’t touch it.” connicloooks.c© im