Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION time the signs of age and wear that had worn the stain thin, so that the plastic showed through at back and seat edge. He gulped, bent down and seized the chair in his fists, straightened and lifted it off the floor. Held like this, with the back just under his nose, he was aware of something missing. Walking back to his desk, his legs quivering and threatening to let him down at every step, his mind sought for that mis- sing something like a puppy at a rabbit hole. Behind the desk, he put the chair down firmly and stepped back, looking at it calculatingly. Like any well-worn piece of furniture, his chair had a rich aroma of polish. But, sniff as hard as he would, the aroma had vanished. There was just no special sort of smell at- tached to the chair. Deciding that another drink was called for, Carpenter pulled out the whisky bottle and then stopped, muttered angrily under his breath, and thrust the bottle back. Damn 14 these committee men. If they thought he was drinking too heavily, all hell would pop. He looked again at the chair. When he came into the office he could have sworn that the chair was behind the desk; but he hadn’t really looked. It was one of those things that you take for granted. He couldn’t be absolutely, one hundred per cent. sure that the chair had not been standing against the side wall all the time. He could have come in, thinking the chair was where it should be, behind the desk— after all, he had been day- dreaming at the time, thinking about Katrin and the first experiments on Mars and the committee men, and then, when he went to sit down, he would have simply tumbled onto the floor. Then his mind would have to think out some rational cause for the chair to be over by the wall and had fabricated the story that it had run there on its own legs. Like Katrin’s doll? coniicloooks.com