Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

ILL WIND 7 35 hooking the leg of a chair with his foot and dragging it over. He sat down promptly, feeling terrible. His head- ache wasn’t getting any better, and he wondered for a moment what had happened. It came back to him slowly. He re- membered Dave calling him last night. “I’m just about to lift ship,” his twin brother had told him. There had been a strange elation in his voice. ‘But I wanted to tell you before any- one else. Jeanie said O.K., and we set the date this afternoon. Will you be my best man, chum?” Dan hadn’t answered but slammed the receiver down. He didn’t remem- ber how long he’d sat there, stunned, baffled, and cut to the ccre. Jeanie was his! Had been his! What right had that stupid twin brother of his—? He’d acted on impulse. The drive south he remembered but vaguely. He knew he’d started the night off in the first place he could find after driv- ing through the Rio Grande Tunnel to Juarez, and he recalled that he’d ended up drinking tequila con sal y limoén at five cents a shot in some dingy little dive on the Sixteenth of September Street. After that, it was blotto; he didn’t even remember how he’d got home to Las Cruces. Some- how, he was back, but he felt like he’d been through a fuel pump. “Go ahead, please,’ the voice of the operator brought him abruptly back to reality. **Hello, Dan, this is Pete Schneckle at Operations. Can you get out here and get ready to lift ship at once?” ° “Huh?” Dan said, groping his way up out of the fog that threatened to close over him again. “‘Pete, you must be mistaken. I wasn’t due to test hop the Ares for two days. The ship won’t even be out of the shop until tomorrow ...or did I lose a couple days some- where?”’ “The Ares is ready now,” the Oper- ations man cut in. ““We worked all night on her.”’ Dan’s head cleared a bit; he sat up quickly. ““What happened?”’ “The Zeus blew up as she was warping in to the space station.” His stomach did cartwheels the way it always did when he hit free-fall. Dave had been the pilot of the Zeus, one of the four spaceships serving man’s first artificial satellite. ““Dave ...how is my brother?” “We don’t know. Communications on the satellite went out five hours ago. Their solar power plant went out of commission, and their batteries ran down. When the Zeus blew, she tock a whole section of the satellite with her and damaged the Apollo. The boys are stuck up there without any power or air. They’re living in spacesuits until we can get a ship up to them ...and they’re only good for another twelve hours. We’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours, but we couidn’t find you—” ““T wasn’t where I could be found.” “And the phones are all fouled up. Some of the lines are down.” “Huh? Why?” There was a momentary pause. “I can see you haven’t stuck your head outside this morning,” Schneckle re- marked. ““The New Mexico ‘monsoon season’ is in full swing. We’ve got winds of steady sixty miles-per-hour out here with gusts up to seventy-five, and the visibility is down to a hundred feet with all the sand and dust blow- ing.” Finn: was suddenly conscious of the wind howling around the apartment windows. He didn’t say anything. “Hello, Dan? Are you still on?” “Yeah.” “Wiil you come out right away?” connichooks.co Al