Authentic Science Fiction, December 1951 — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

38 THE MOON IS HEAVEN this is your first view of space without air. It’s black. Blacker than anything you’ve ever seen. Blacker, it seems, than the absence of light has a right to be. And it’s speckled with burning points, red, white, green and amber. Millions of them! Then you turn your head and see the Earth! It looks pathetic, somehow, up there, hanging in the sky. A multicoloured circle with continents that look vaguely like the face of an unhappy baby, about to cry, not sure whether it should, or whether it even wants to. And you’ve come from there, all that way away. Everyone must be feeling the same way, because there’s silence for a good few minutes while you all cluster on the white rock just outside the air-lock and stare at the bleak, cold, dead world. Then Atah doubles back into the rocket and comes out again a few seconds later with the tiny radar transmitter. He places it on the ground, swings the aerial round to face Earth and taps out a few pulses, It is the prearranged signal. The first message ever to be received on Earth from outside sources. You can imagine them waiting for it on Earth. See it make the front pages. The signal they’ve been wait-. ing for. “ ARRIVED AND ALIVE.”’ “Well,” says Atah. ‘‘ That’s the drama over. Now to get cracking. We must get that dome up before we thought. There’s no air left in the rocket and these suits will only keep us going a short time.” Schnabel looks around and grunts. ‘‘ This is hardly the place for the dome, is it? Hadn’t we better find a place first?’? You yourself are already getting just a little tired of this surliness from Schnabel. God knows what it’ll be like before the end of the trip. But Atah nods and agrees. You reckon he must have a pretty good respect for Schnabel’s technical ability. * comicbooks.com