Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION else been there when it had happened or had he been on his own? How old? Where? What ? How? When? Pictures flashed in his mind like a speeded-up visor film. He was seven years old, sitting in class with the instructor’s voice droning on and on inhisears, but he wasn’t listening because he was seeing something in his mind. He was seeing his father getting out of a Mole Heavy and walking into a boundary outpost mess and packing his kit, and Patrick knew, quite definitely, that his father was coming home. The next day General Vane had come home on four days’ unexpected leave. But that didn’t help. That wasn’t what he was searching for. Nor was the memory of the time when he’d had a little plastic model of a robotplane given him on his birthday, and he wanted so much for it to be a real robotplane that would really fly like the ones that filled the skies miles above his head. And one night, the night after he’d been given it, alone in his room, secretly, he’d willed and willed that the *plane might fly for him just once, just this once. And lo! Like a plastic, soaring butter- fly, as in some magic child- hood dream, the toy had moved like a live thing, had 32 risen on its tiny plastic wings, risen and risen to soar and bank and glide and dive about in the tiny enclosed sky of Patrick Vane’s bed- room. Hunched up on the bed, clasping himself in ec- stasy, wide-eyed, Patrick had watched its enchanted flight until footsteps had sounded on the stairs and the robot- plane had settled to rest, and Mrs. Vane had stood in the doorway demanding to know why Patrick was sitting up in bed with the light on when he should have been sound asleep. When he’d told her about the toy *plane she’d laughed and said that such a thing could never happen because a toy was a toy and couldn’t be made to fly about the room and, therefore, Patrick must have dreamed it. He hadn’t been able to make the toy fly about after that, and as he had got older, he’d come to accept the fact that his mother had been right and that it all had been a dream. And that memory didn’t help him. It wasn’t what he was searching for, of that he was certain. There was some- thing else, Something else. They went up in a lift to the top floor. When the lift door opened Captain Mathews comicloooks.com