Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 143: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION scour this area completely.” Propped up on the crude cot, George Three stared in bewilderment at the intense faces of the group. They seemed vaguely familiar, but he could not identify any of them. Lilian Four was seated beside him on the edge of his cot. “Who are you?” George Three. The other smiled. ““Perhaps that is as good a starting point as any. Our names are unimportant. We are the people you’ve met many times before without recognising. You worked in the factory with some of us—Lilian Four here. You lived on the same block with one or perhaps two. Others you saw ‘exposed’ on your viewer—here is Dr. Samuel Eight, one of the fore- most rocket engineers alive. Some, like Beth Two here, ‘taught’ in the City schools— taught, that is, in the State- accepted fashion. “We are the Addicts—ad- dicts in the strangely inverted sense that this society know defines the word. We abstain.” Abstain. It was still not pos- asked 142 sible for George Three to shake the horror of the word. “We are the arch criminals of the modern Power-State, George. We cannot escape ad- mitting that fact. Other men and women rob and kill, sell contraband and _ narcotics. They are cast into prisons or ‘rehabilitated’. “But the real criminals of thisage arethe men and women right: here in this room and their counterparts in the world at large. We threaten the very State. More than that, we further a movement that would inevitably cause others to threaten it. “And yet, we form no plots. We attack no basic premise of the existing state. We plan no revolution, cer- tainly no subversion. We propose no violence, sabotage, or threat of these. We do not plan assassinations, or capture of the State. We urge no ideology that is foreign to the moral spirit of man. “We simply will not take Tab. Simple, isn’t it?” said the man. | George Three gazed in wonder at the small group. They were Addicts, he told conmicloooks.conn