Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 56: what you’re looking at

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

SAVIOUR fighting down fear of the thousand nightmare whisper- ings that called his name in the echoing dark and told him with tittering cruelty that the tunnel would never end, and that he was in a dream from which he would never awake and would—as natur- ally followed—continue to hobble and creep, and sweat and be frightened until the final: day when the dream would end and he would fall down and, very quietly and just as naturally, under the circumstances, die. Time was a thing that had meaning only when you were not alone. You knew how many minutes or seconds had passed when you were with someone else, because you had terms of reference, then. You could gauge time by watching your companion, knowing that it must have taken so many seconds for him to have said such-and- such a thing, or for him to have gone across the room and closed the window or pulled a chair towards the glowing wires of the fire. But in the deep tunnel gloom there are no companions and you cannot think of time at all in terms of anything except eternity. And _ eternity is ultimate and, therefore, mean- 55 ingless to something that is not itself ultimate. The pain in his ankle no longer troubled him, because it had grown and become a part of himself, and of the place in which he was. The pain. The torch. The walls. The movement. He saw it after perhaps twenty minutes from the time he got to his feet, or perhaps after ten thousand years from that same instant. It was very near when he- saw it, for his torch was not sufficiently powerful to il- luminate very much of the tunnel. He moved nearer to it. He reached out a trembling hand and touched it, and knew instantly what it was. The Public Safety men had been very thorough with this par- ticular tunnel. It would have taken a Mole Heavy to break a way through the stone and cement and girders that had been used to wall off this disused, and probably dan- gerous, freight transport tunnel. The whisperings and the titterings and the sly, secret gargoyle voices crowded in about him. The end of the dream has arrived, they said. The eternity of movement was over, they informed him. comicloooks.con