Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION one sometimes sees from glass roofs or water, both of which are rather scarce here. Gor- don was piloting and he reckoned it was just a quartz outcrop catching the sunlight. Now aircraft engineering is a job that teaches you to re- gard with distrust any tech- nical triviality that cannot be explained with hard technical facts. There’s no quartz around here; at least there’s none anywhere near the sur- face. The map didn’t even show a contour line, so I set the camera going and took a group of overlapping verticals all the way back to the field. I knew the compass heading, and as soon as the pictures were printed I set off on a bit of private exploration. _ That is how I came to meet Peter. The cause of the re- flections very nearly describes the man. He had covered the roof of his house with some transparent plastic structures about ten feet long and three feet from edge to edge. They were filled with water and acted as lenses focusing on some small water pipes, producing steam for a little turbine which ran the genera- tor. A photo-electric relay followed the sun around and tilted the lens assemblies. 74 Peter had electricity laid gn, with reserve capacity stored in enough batteries almost to drive a submarine. A technical introduction like this put us on a good footing of mutual friendship from the beginning. An additional factor was our equal interest in music; I shouldn’t be sur- prised if Peter’s collection of records is the largest one to be found anywhere outside the cities. On evenings when I wasn’t tied up with routine maintenance or, like today, when it was too bumpy to do precise survey flying, I would drive over here to give Peter.a hand with some mechanical job, or maybe we would just chat or listen to music, I don’t know Peter’s nation- ality. Certainly European, but he could have been anything from Dutch to Bulgarian; he never told me and [’m no judge of these things. His English was very slightly ac- cented and sometimes the order of his words was twisted in a typically foreign manner. Probably no one here in Australia knows anything about his background. All I ever found out was that his fiancée was a medical student who committed suicide, but connicloooks.com