Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

KINDNESS Miss Larsen smiled again, half winking at him. “O.K., Danny, I'll tell him. Night!” Outside, with the cool of evening begin- ning to fall, Danny found his way into the untraveled sections and let his feet guide him. Once, as a group came toward him. he crossed the street without thinking, and went on. The package under his arm grew heavy, and he shifted it, torn between a desire to find what had happened to the hero and a disgust at his own sapient mind for not knowing. Probably, in the long run, he’d end up by going home and reading it, but for the moment he was nearest content to let his feet carry him along idly, holding most of his thoughts in abeyance. Another small park was in his path, and he crossed it slowly, the babble of small children’s voices only partly heard until he came to them, two boys and a girl. The supervisor, who should have had them back at the Center, was a dim shape in the far shadows, with another, dimmer shape beside her, leaving the three five-year-olds happily engaged in the ancient pastime of getting dirty and impressing each other. Danny stopped, a slow smile creeping onto his lips. At that age, their intuitive faculty was just beginning, and their little games and pretenses made sense that was like a tonic to him. Vaguely, he remem- bered his own friends of that age beginning uncertainly to acquire the trick of seeming omniscience, and his worries at being left behind. For a time, the occasional flashes of intuition that had always blessed even homo sapiens gave him hope, but eventually the supervisor had been forced to tell him that he was different, and why. Now he thrust those painful memories aside and slipped quietly forward into the game. They accepted him with the easy non- chalance of children. who have no repres- sions, feverishly trying to build their sand-castles higher than his; but in that, his experience was greater than theirs, and his judgment of the damp medium surer. A perverse glow of accomplishment grew in- side him as he added still another story to the towering structure and built a bridge, propped up with sticks and leaves, leading to it. Then the lights came on, illuminating the sandbox and those inside and dispelling the shadows of dusk. The little boy glanced up, really seeing him for the first time. “Oh, you’re Danny Black, ain’t you? I seen your pi ture. Judy, Maysie, look! It’s that man—” But their voices faded out as he ran off 47 through the park and into the deserted by- Ways again, ciutching the package to bim. Foot! 10 delight in beating chiluren at a useless game, of to be surprised that they should know him! He slowed to a walk, twiicning his lips at the thought that by now the supervisor would be reprimanding them for their thoughtlessness. And still his teet went on, unguided, It was inevitable, of course, that they should lead him to the Museum, where ail his secret hopes centered, but he was sur- prised to look up and see it before him. And then he was glad. Surely they could read nothing in this visit, unpremeditated, just before the place closed. He caught his breath, forced his face into lines of mere casual interest, and went inside, down the long corridors, and to the hali of the ship. She rested there, pointed slightly skyward, sleek and immense even in a room designed to appear like the distant reaches of space. For six hundred feet, gleaming metal formed a smooth frictionless surface that slid grace- fully from the blunt bow back toward the narrow stern with its blackened ion jets. This, Danny knew, was the last and greatest of the space liners his people had built at the height of their glory. And even before her, the mutation had been caused by the radiation of deep space, the results were spreading. For a time, as the log books indicated, she had sailed out to Mars, to Venus, and to the other points of man’s em- pire, while the tension slowly mounted at home. There had never been another wholly sapient-designed ship, for the new race was making its greater power felt, with the in- vert-matter rocket replacing the older, less efficient, ion. rocket the ship still carried. Eventually, unable to compete with the new models, she had been retired from the ser- vice and junked, while the War passed by her and buried her under tons of rubble, leaving no memory of her existence. And now, carefully excavated from the old ruins of the drydock where she had lain so long, she had been enthroned in state for the last year, here in the Museum of Sapient History, while all Danny’s hopes and prayers had centered around her. There was still a feeling of awe in him as he started slowly across the carpeted floor toward the open Jock and the lighted interior. “Danny!” The sudden word interrupted him, bringing him about with a guilty start, but it was only Professor Kirk, and he re- laxed again. The old archeologist came toward him, his smile barely visible in the comiclooks CO