Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

SAVIOUR looked after. Fattened up. Pig for the slaughter. Funny thing, remembering that phrase. Out of an old book. Wonder what a real pig tasted like? Before my time, all that, though. Hydroponics only nowadays. Remember Dad saying how good real beef was in the surface days... Dad. The strong, forceful features of the grey-haired man spun briefly in his mind and settled. Strength was in the face, yet there was kindness there also, but the kindness had almost lost the battle against the strength. Had he been right to run? Right or wrong, what did it matter? They’d get him now, for certain. With a twisted ankle he couldn’t hope to reach the old man’s place before the psychosecs caught up with him. And what could the old man do for him, really, anyway? What could anyone do for him? Better to lie and wait until the security men caught up with him and then let them do whatever they wanted. After all, psycho- surgery wasn’t painful, and nobody who’d ever had it had ever been known to com- plain about it afterwards. Besides, they wouldn’t do much to the son of General Vane himself. Or would they? The darkness was a cool and restful balm all about him. He lay very still. But his mind was not still. He couldn’t stop himself thinking and remembering. It wasn’t as if he’d ever wanted to be different. Because ‘he’d been alone and odd and strange for as long as he could remember they'd looked at him and treated him as though he’d planned it that way. And that wasn’t true at all. Any- thing but. Nobody wants to be cut off from other people. Nobody’sever given thechance to say what they want to be when they’re born, and now- adays only a few get the chance to say what they want to do with their lives. It’s all wrong. All wrong. And Mother was the worst of them all. If he hadn’t thought exactly the way she wanted him to think then he was wrong, bad, a no-good, an idler, a dreamer, one of the come-to-bad-ends. And that catch in her voice she’d always managed to get when she talked to him about it. Faked. He was certain of it. She never had it when she talked to his father about him, and he’d heard them talking often enough. Oh, he’d had conmmicloookks.conn