Authentic Science Fiction, December 1951 — page 92: what you’re looking at

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

90 ' THE MOON IS HEAVEN Then you make contact. Both of you go down onto the rocky ledge. Schnabel is cursing and flailing with his arms. He’s still got a good grip. In it, you both roll around on the rock, getting near the edge, where a fissure yawns blackly down and down. You know very well what he’s trying to do. That’s because his{magination is not working too well, His idea is to get you off the ledge. You could do that to him, of course, but then there’d be no proof that he’s dead and out of the way. You reckon there’s a much better method of dealing with the redoubtable Schnabel. You wait your opportunity, just making sure that he doesn’t send you down into the abyss. And then it comes. You find your hands free at the same time as you both roll near a jagged rock. You bring your hands up with fingers spread wide. You grasp his helmet tightly. You bring it down with as much force as you can muster onto the jagged rock, It cracks and flies apart. That’s all there is to it. He doesn’t take even a minute in dying. The vacuum of space does things to his lungs and eyeballs that don’t make for beauty. Compared to this, his previous appearance was one of cupidian charm. You turn away, not because it makes you sick, But because you are tired of it all, Now that it’s over, the reaction sets in. But there’s no time to sit and stare at the sky while you get your mind orientated again. There’s only a few minutes’ oxygen left in your bottle and you’ve already noticed that Schnabel isn’t carrying the spares. Even if he were, they wouldn’t be much good, because you can’t change them out in space. For the same reason you can’t use the bottle on his spacesuit. You reckon he must have hidden the spares up in the rocks somewhere. However, there’ll be time to look for those later if neces- sary. The great thing now is to get Schnabel’s.body down to the dome in as short a time as possible. You turn back to-him and lift him up, He is quite light comicbooks.com