Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

The Adaptants were so useful that you couldn’t fust go ahead and kill one. You had to be clever... THIRD HAND by GEORGE PAUL MANN Someone had called them Adaptants and the name had stuck. It described them perfectly. They were capable of adapting themselves to anything. The planet that was their home provided the real reason for this ability of course. The pressure over its surface was inconstant. Put a human being down there stripped of his space suit, and push him into travelling, and he’d explode in three paces. He just wasn’t built for a world of inconstant atmospheric pressures. The Adaptants were. At home, on their own planet, they changed their shapes and their sizes with almost every step. They ex- truded handsto pullthemselves over volcanic rock formations; they grew legs at will to scam- per over the eternal ice of the lakes—like obscene spiders. 96 They extruded and withdrew arms, and legs, and hands, just when they needed them. They grew and billowed and shrank like smoke. And yet there was flesh there. That was the uncanny thing. They were fleshed like humans. But, unlike humans, they could fit themselves into the pattern of nature as it was. They didn’t have to alter things, to build bridges or make diving suits. They got along very nicely as they were. They were Adaptants. Lessinger hadn’t been with the party that opened up the planet to space flight. So he was used to the idea of their > existence before he saw them. At first, like everyone else, he’d scoffed at the very notion of a form of life which was so versatile. He’d put down to space fever the newspaper stories of what that first crew comicloooks.com