Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION of his blows dim against her cheek. Finally, he accepted the fact that she was dead. He drank himself into a stupor then, breaking open a stored case of whisky and drinking like a fool or a man desperate with the need of forgetting. He awoke and drank again, fumbling the bottle and giggling as he jested with silent clay. He slept again and woke to harsh reality, turning to the bottle as the only thing left for him in a world bounded by damp walls of cadmium concrete and surrounded by invisible death. Drinking was the only thing left for him to do, but when the whisky was exhausted, terror waited at the bottom of the last bottle. It came as a thin, sickly, sweet odour welling from the bunk and filling the heavy air. It came with loneliness and shadows, the sense of being trapped and the know- ledge that there could be no escape. It came with the failing of the accumulators and the dimming of the single weak bulb. 90 It came with droning wings and pulpy red bodies. Flies, hatched perhaps from air-borne eggs, obscenely mu- tated and with disgusting appetites. They clustered over the dead woman, breeding, droning about the shelter and trailing their long, hairy legs over his bare face and hands. Once he tried to carry the rotting remains of what had once been an attractive woman out into one of the corridors, but he had left it too late, and the flies droned around him, flecking his naked flesh with blood from a thousand bites, so that he ran, scream- ing, and flailing his arms as he ran from their food. Madness came when the lights went out. He crouched in the dark, listening to the flies, choking in the odour, imagining a thousand things and dying a thousand deaths. He sat and gibbered, screaming insults at those who had died, for deny- ing him their company, and always he had to fight the hungry mandibles of impatient insects. Sanity returned after the third day. comicloooks.com