Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

THIRD had seen. He’d said he was open-minded; that he could believe almost anything. But really! And his wife, Molly, had acted that way too, and they’d kicked the idea around for a while, working on its most fantastic and ludicrous pos- sibilities. They’d even laughed about it, Lessinger remem- bered. Hell! They'd even laughed about it! It was far from being a laughing matter now! He looked at the instrument panel ahead with unseeing eyes. He turned and looked at Mike. And Mike just sat there and grinned at him. Nice fel- low, Mike. Clean. Straight. Good-looking even, in his way. Easy to get along with. Too bad about him! Too bad that he was just that little bit too clean, too straight, too easy to get along with. Too bad that Lessinger hated his guts. Sure! Mike was an Adapt- ant. His Adaptant! Lessinger thought about it bitterly. Of course, once the creatures had been shipped to Earth there was no stopping them. HAND They were so damned useful. They took to Earth’s atmos- phere like they’d been born there. Put one of them in a crowd and you’d lose him. You couldn’t pick him out. Or could you? Not by looks, maybe. But certainly by some- thing else. Two weeks after the first shipload arrived, some charac- ter in an office chair dis- covered that an Adaptant could get through five times as much work as a human. Three weeks, and the space ships couldn’t cover the dis- tance to Limnos fast enough! Thank God, thought Les- singer, thank God that the Earth’s atmosphere did do something to them. Thank God it made them sterile. They’d have wiped out hu- manity if it hadn’t been that way. They'd have overgrown the human population and choked it, like fungus over- grows and chokes out the life of a tree. It was something to be thankful for, even if it did leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Even if it did get you thinking really nasty ideas... -Six months after the first Adaptant had reached Earth comicloooks.com