Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 89: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION faint sound rolled around him like the whispers of ten million dead. He stared around him, straining his ears to make sure that his wife was still living, grateful for the sound of her — ragged breathing, and stared for a long time at the slow rise and fall of her chest to make sure that she was still alive. He slept badly, starting awake at imagined screams, at sounds coming from the thick door, at the imagined falter of a pump or the tread of feet signalling the arrival of the rescue squads. He awoke to the sound of Lorna’s weak call. “George!” “George isn’t here,’ he said, his voice brittle with strain. “I told you, he went outside to get help.” ““George!”’ “Damn it, Lorna! I told you he’s not here!” “George!” He sighed, giving up the un- equal struggle, and took her thin hand in his. “‘How do you feel, Lorna?” ‘I’m dying,’’ she whispered. “I know I am. I can feel it in- side of me.” 88 “That’s nonsense. You're going to be all right.” ‘““No, George.” She strug- gled to sit up and stared around the shelter with her horrible eyes. “‘I feel as if I’m already buried. This place is a grave. I can smell it. I know it." “Stop it, Lorna! You’re going to be allright I tell you.” Desperation knotted his stomach as he looked at her. “You can’t die, Lorna. You can’t! I spent ten thousand pounds on making sure that we would live. You can’t leave me now.” “Poor Jeff,’ she whispered, as though he had _ never spoken. “‘He wants so much to live, so much. He thought that his money could save his life, but it can’t, George. Money never can. All he did was to build himself a grave. And it’s a horrible grave, George, a horrible grave.” “Lorna!” “So much better to have died with the others, out in the clear air and in the com- pany of our own kind. It would have been all over now. No suffering, no sickness, no comicloooks.com