Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 39: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION some strange way, into their companion’s mind and thus understand the reason for the thought or deed or longing. And they knew, these two at the canteen table, talking away the afternoon, that only through understanding and never through condemnation, could a bad thing be made good, or a strange thing made acceptable. ‘Another coffee?’ Patrick asked. She shook her head. “I haven’t finished this one yet,” she told him, sipping from her cup. He leaned back in the chair and watched her. ““We’re very much alike, you know,” he told her. ‘““That business you were telling me about, making the ball bounce up and down in the playground, when you were five years old or so, without touching it, just to make the little boy frightened.” *“Well?’’ She eyed him over the rim of the cup. “Like me and the toy robot- plane. Moving something about with—well, with your mind, I suppose.” She set the cup down. “‘Yes, it’s the same sort of thing. And, like you, when I told someone about it they told me I shouldn’t tell fibs and that I 38 must have been making the whole thing up.” He nodded, remembering the plane and the way his mother came into his bedroom. It was very vague in his mind, but he could recall enough of the incident to see that the two things were very similar. The girl and a bouncing ball that she wanted to bounce up and down to frighten a little boy who was trying to pull her hair. The boy with a toy robotplane that he wanted so very, very much to behave like a real one. Both of them told, afterwards, that the incidents could never have occurred. Both winding up by accepting the incidents more or less as being dreams of some sort. “I’ve never been able to do it again,”’ she told him, putting the cup down on the table. ““Never.”’ *“Because, perhaps, like me, you’d grown up with the idea that it must have been imagina- tion or a dream, because a grown-up said so.”’ He pointed a lean finger at a spoon that lay between them on the table. ‘“‘Try on that,”’ he said, ‘‘and Ill try and help you do it. Just an inch off the table. We don’t want it sailing all over the place. Just an inch.”’ If he could get inside her mind, he thought swiftly, he comiclooks.conn