Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 72: what you’re looking at

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

710 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION juestion. He registered at a down- town hotel, locked the door, closed and locked all the windows, shoved his bed hard against the wall and the bureau against the open side of the bed; then slept. He remembered no dreams, and when he awoke in the morning he was still lying within the manufactured enclosure. He felt relieved. When he arrived in good time at Physics Hall on the Institute’s campus he found, as he expected, a large room and a small gathering. The seminar sessions were held, traditionally, over the Easter vacation and _ students were not in attendance. Some fifty physicists sat in an auditorium de- signed to hold four hundred, clustering on either side of the central aisle up near the podium. Roger took his seat in the last row, where he would not be seen by casual passers-by looking through the high, small windows of the auditorium door, and where the others in the audience would have had to twist through nearly a hundred eighty degrees to see him. Except, of course, for the speaker on the platform—and for Professor Deering. Roger did not hear much of the actual proceedings. He concentrated entirely on waiting for those moments when Deering was alone on the plat- form; when only Deering could see him. As Deering grew obviously more disturbed, Roger grew bolder. During the final summing up of the after- noon, he did his best. Professor Deering stopped al- together in the middle of a poorly constructed and entirely meaningless sentence. His audience, which had been shifting in their seats for some time stopped also and looked wonder- ingly at him. | Deering raised his hand and said, gaspingly, “You! You there!” Roger Toomey had been sitting with an air of complete relaxation— in the very center of the aisle. The only chair beneath him was composed of two and a half feet of empty air. His legs were stretched out before him on the armrest of an equally airy chair. When Deering pointed, Roger slid rapidly sidewise. By the time fifty heads turned, he was sitting quietly in a very prosaic wooden seat. Roger looked this way and that, then stared at Deering’s pointing finger and rose. “Are you speaking to me, Professor Deering?” he asked, with only the slightest tremble in his voice to indi- cate the savage battle he was fighting within himself to keep that voice cool and wondering. “What are you doing?’”’ demanded Deering, his morning’s tension ex- ploding. Some of the audience were standing in order to see better. An unexpected commotion is as dearly loved by a gathering of research physicists as by a crowd at a baseball game. “T'm not doing anything,” said Roger. “I don’t understand you.” “Get out! Leave this hall?” Deering was beside himself with a mixture of emotions, or perhaps he would not have said that. At any rate, Roger sighed and took his opportunity prayerfully. He said, loudly and distinctly, forcc- ing himself to be heard over the gathering clamor, “I am Professor Roger Toomey of Carson College. I am a member of the American Physical Association. I have applied for permission to attend these sessions, have been accepted, and have paid my registration fee. I am sitting here, as is my right, and will continue to do so.” EComichooksnco im