Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition), April 1944 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

THE BEAST His voice was lost in a chorus of blood- thirsty yells. He was. shoved, flung; and he hadn’t the strength even to lift his arm. At the very moment that the club struck him slantingly on the head, his amazement reached its peak; amazement because— His assailants were not German! IV. A MISSING ex-airman, his kidnaped wife, a curious two-year-old story about an atomic engine—those were the threads. In all those vital days there seemed nothing else. But there was another thread. August ended. The Earth sighed as it turned on its axis; and a thousand winds blew in their thousand directions. Septem- ber 1st flashed across the international date line; by the time it reached the eastern American seaboard, a northeaster was blow- ing; and a score of meteorologists drawing their isobars noted laconically that winter would be early this year of Grace, nineteen hundred and fifty. By midafternoon of September 1st the hidden thread was coming up into the open. Air Commissioner Blakeley recovered from a bad case of influenza, and returned to his office. In catching up events, he came across the interview of Major Ned Hoskins, patent attorney, by one of his staff officers. ‘“Pendrake,” he mused, then flushed with remembered humiliation. “That was the one-armed chap who threw me out of his house, then sometime afterward sent me a list of names and addresses of atomic scientists and—”’ His thought stopped. A storm of blood hammered at his temples. “This could ruin me!” he thought. After a little, very white, he sent for Pendrake’s file and reread the letter with its list of names: Dr. McClintock Grayson, Cyrus Lambton—come to think of it he’d read about the death of those men in an accident and— This thing looked bigger every instant. Sweating, he read his own reply to Pen- drake’s letter, “—-Further correspondence would be useless—” For a long minute he stared down at the damning document. Finally, his jaw stiffened. He reached for the telephone. “Get me Cree Lipton of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The phone lights in the stocky man’s private office misted, then came bright and clear. He said thickly: 25 “Herr Birdman excellency. What do you—” He was cut off: “I have just received word from our Washington agents that the F.B.I. has been called into the case. Carry out Plan D at once. “Kill Hoskins,” the steely voice went on. “IT place you in full responsibility. Hoskins had been in Crescentville for nearly a week tracing Pendrake’s movements; he has al- ready discovered the hole in the hillside where the engine fell that originally brought Pendrake into the affair. And he has photo- graphed the images in the electrons in the surrounding earth with excellent confirma- tory results even after all this time. “Now that action is being taken by the government, the reason for denying him speaking, death no longer exists. That is all.” There was a click. | It was the afternoon of September 2. Ned Hoskins glanced at the placard on the announcement board of the Crescent- ville All-Denominational Church — and stopped short, settled his heels hard on the dusty cement of the sidewalk. He stood there under the glare of the mid-afternoon sun, a lean, fastidiously dressed young man. With bleak-eyed hostility, he reread the words on the placard: LETSTOP (Let’s End the Shaposhenko Type of Punishment, Inc.) PRESENTS A VIGOROUS SPEAKER WHO WILL ASSAIL THIS INCREDIBLE BLOT ON THE CHRISTIAN WORLD SIGN PETITION END HATRED OF EX-ENEMY NATIONS THIS AFTERNOON AT 2:30 ADMISSION FREE Hoskins’ watch showed twenty minutes after two. He scowled viciously. Damn these LETSTOP people. The second meet- ing within ten days. Well, this time he did have his masks. But— It had turned hot after a cool morning, a close, dry heat that made his face tingle with tiny tremors of the old pain. There was still the extra edge of needling in his right cheek where the plastic surgeons had to cut deep, long ago now. Hoskins fingered the pain spot; and, narrow-eyed, watched the people trickling into the church. By ones and twos they came, mostly women, but there were some comiclooks ©)