Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 116: what you’re looking at

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

MARY HELL’S waited in the cold, in her thin evening dress, for an hour. Mary didn’t get it. She tried to fit it all together, in relation to JoAnn. Was Cole trying to hurt the Earth girl, after all these years—punish her anew for having followed him to Mars? She had seen him look covertly at JoAnn while he was talking to Lania, making the date. And she had seen JoAnn’s white face. Mary shook her head. She didn’t know much about triangles. The next night the lieu- tenant was in again. Mary switched Lania to another table and went over to talk to him. Cole laughed at her. It was a gag, he said. He had no intention of keeping the date and she should have known it. He was an Earth- man and the son of the C.O., and he didn’t go chippy- chasing around with any of these Martian women. Later she said to the girl: ““He’s trash, Lania, honey. Don’t you bother with him. If you’ve got to have a boy friend, get yourself a real 115 man. There are plenty of them here, worth ten of him.” So Lania got herself a corporal, a nice boy who worried about the dirt he got under his fingernails from repairing rocket engines, and carried around in his wallet a picture of his mother. The boy, Joe Brewster, saw Lania half a dozen times in Mary Hell’s before he got up courage enough to ask her to have a date with him outside. Lania was radiant when she reported for work the follow- ing evening. Mary had heard her in the room she rented on the second floor, singing a wild Martian love song as she dressed. ‘‘He’s a sweetheart, that Joe,” she told Mary when she came down. Mary smiled. “Think you'll be able to wait on table tonight from up there in the clouds ?” Lanja’s natural beauty was heightened by her happiness, and Lieutenant Cole was well aware of it. She had ignored the officer since her woman-to- comiclbooks.com