Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 30: what you’re looking at

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

SAVIOUR sciousness throughout all his rememberings, had ceased. The three men stood up. ‘All right, Vane,’ said the Captain. The door of the lift slid open and slammed itself into its niche with a grinding of lattice-work. They had arrived at the Administration Level and—Patrick thought as he walked out into the light from the artificial sun above—it would take them but a matter of minutes to reach the Psychocentre. Administration was similar to all the other levels of Deep London, insofar as the way in which it had been constructed was concerned. But there the resemblance ended, for there were no rows of tiny chalets here; there were no dwelling places at all, in fact, but only bleak concrete structures of great size in which were carried on all matters of. government. Here was the Military Headquarters, there the Communications Centre, in another place the enor- mous building that housed the many electronic brains that, over recent years, had come to be the real rulers of the city. A Security railcar was wait- ing for them when they came out of the lift. The Captain waved Patrick inside and 29 within seconds they were speeding off along the single rail that led, with very few windings indeed, to the Psychocentre. It was then, in the speeding railcar, that Patrick Vane felt the first real fear. Before, when he had been taken to the lift and while he had been inside it, travelling upwards, there had been won- der and bewilderment and anger, and the flood upon flood of memories through which he had been searching, in desperate haste, for reasons thathedidnotfullyunderstand. But now there was fear. Soon they would be outside the Psychocentre itself. Then they would hustle him out of the railcar and into the build- ing. He would go through rooms and up stairs and along corridors and he would be confronted, finally, by an analyst, who would sit him down and ask him questions, and probably, with many remarks intended to set his mind at ease, put him under one of the mechanical Ana- lysers, those monstrously in- different machines that delved and probed and sought and recorded, and from which one had no hope, no hope at all, of ever hiding anything. The vehicle purred im- comiclbooks.conn