Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION passively along upon its single rail. Within it, sitting very still, Patrick Vane, that very different young man, felt tiny terror tremblings and fear quiverings tingle over his body and down into his limbs. He pressed his hands hard against his knees so that the security men should not see the way they were shaking. But why should he be frightened? He might come out of the analysis with flying colours. Or it might be as his father had been saying: some- thing that had happened when he was a child that he’d con- sciously forgotten, yet which had imbedded itself in the unconscious part of his mind and set up a chain reaction of trouble. If that was so then analysis would reveal what was wrong and they would give him psychosur- gery to cure it. He’d come out a bit altered, true, but then he wouldn’t be aware of it, and he wouldn’t experience any pain while the surgery was going on. But somehow he knew that it wasn’t just something that had happened when he was a child. Somehow he knew that it was more than that, and that the analysts wouldn’t like it when they found it. 30 And there was no chance of keeping anything back from a mechanical Analyser. He'd seen visor pictures of how they worked. He saw himself, then, as he would be once they got busy : on him. He’d be sitting in a chair, shot full of drugs, the squat bulk of the Analyser in _ front of him and instruments fixed all over him to record the slightest physiological changes that might result, during the analysis, from the mental conditions brought about by the Analyser’s ques- tions. He’d be asked, in mechanical and dully indif- ferent tones, all manner of things and he’d have to answer because of the drugs. they’d have given him. He’d be given tests of all kinds and the Analyser would go back and back into his past life, the way a Mole Heavy would plough on and on through strata upon strata of rock, blades churning, on andon... He sat sweating in the car and tried to force the picture he had conjured up to vanish, to become no more. There was no sense in wasting time and - emotion in thinking about what might happen in the future. Better to think back, as he had done before. Far better. Why was it better? He connicloooks.Ccomn)