Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 118: what you’re looking at

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

MARY HELL’S He brooded about the pos- sibility that he was only infatuated with Lania. That would be understandable; she was a beautiful creature... Yes, that’s what she was, he told himself, a creature, a Martian, a cheap colonial. And he was a Cole—a Jeffrey Cole, moreover, named for an aristocratic ancestor who had been a general in the confederacy under Robert E. Lee. The old Jeffrey might have been similarly attracted to a lovely Negro girl on his plantation. He might even have succumbed to her body. But he couldn’t have let himself Jove her. There was the word in his thoughts and the féeling in his heart. And if it were love—there was that word again, in- sisting on being chosen— could he stand it? Could he live with his passion and his prejudice too? It might be enough to kill him. Or he might have to kill her to be able to live again, himself. He couldn’t live with that 117 kind of love. His notebook was out and he wrote some- thing in it, in big, drunken letters: “There is love with which you cannot live. There comes a life in which you cannot love.” Thus, on New Year’s Eve in Mary Hell’s, Lieutenant Jeffrey Cole sat and brooded, and drank, and wrote in his notebook. Lania looked gorgeous as she carried drinks to the tables. Joe Brewster hadn’t arrived. He’d been stuck with a tough engine overhaul, but he’d sent word that he’d be there by ten sure. Lania joked with his buddies and pirouetted for them in the evening gown she’d made especially for tonight and Joe. By the standards of any planet, she was ravishing. JoAnn Deveraux, by con- trast, was at her worst. Slender and pallid, her viva- city once had been her great- est appeal. That and doll-like features, cast in an all-em- comicloooks.conn