Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

SAVIOUR into a sponge. He felt the hardness of the chair beneath him, felt the cold, smooth surface of the canteen table on which both his hands were pressing with a force that surprised him. He heard, now that the stranger had left, all the myriad sounds that filled the canteen: the noises from the counter, the scraping of chairs, the faint rattle of spoon on plate, the odd words that floated out to him from various distant conversations like pieces from numerous verbal jig-saws. And he grew aware of Margaret, too, sitting opposite him, not speak- ing, looking now at his face with odd, bewildered gaze, and now down at the table— at the spoon. “What did he mean, ‘we might need help’? Margaret asked. Her tone matched the look in her eyes. Patrick shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied, slowly. “I don’t know and I don’t think, somehow, that I want to know.”’ He stood up abruptly. “‘V’ll get some more coffee,’’ he announced. When he returned from the counter with the two brim- ming cups and looked into her eyes he knew that she didn’t want to talk any more about what had happened. And he 41 knew, also, that she could read the same thing in his own face, his own eyes. They did not have to speak to each other to learn these things. The old man, with his strange arrival and his casual offer of help, had put a fear into their minds and into their hearts, and it was the same fear within both of them, and because they were these two special people, Patrick and Margaret, they did not need to speak of the fear in order to share it the more fully. All through the holiday he came up to see Margaret several times a week, but when the holiday was over he could only get away from his own Level on Saturdays. Then he went down with “flu and couldn’t visit the canteen at all. And when he recovered and went up to the General Labour Level on a Saturday evening to find her again, he was told that she had left. No, the manager didn’t know where she was working now. She’d left suddenly because her father had died and she’d had to look after her mother. No, he couldn’t give her address unless Patrick was a relative, which, of course, he wasn’t. He looked for her but he never saw her again. He comiclbookks.com