Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 9: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION had been in the right and the enemy in the wrong. In the skies of Earth the robot weapons flamed out their firework messages. And in a deep cavern city of Earth, below sterile soil, past rock and coal seam, past strata upon strata, deep down, be- neath steel and durasteel and concrete roofings, in a certain dark tunnel... He lay there in the blackness, not moving, his eyes still closed and with the last trace of the dream yet lingering in his mind as the last notes of a song might linger in the ear. The surface, he thought, as the images drifted offand away to nothing. J was dreaming of the surface. But what a dream! What clarity! It was as though he had actually been up there, miles above. He had almost been able to feel the bite of the dust clouds as they swirled past. And yet he’d never, of course, been up to the surface; never even seen visors of the surface war, since such things weren’t permitted to any but high-ranking military officials like his father. His father. The thought jerked his dream from him and scattered it, piecemeal, into the surrounding dark. And with the disruption of the terrifying, yet amazingly clear dream memory came the swift and far more terrifying return of reality, awareness, realisation. He was lying on his back in the utter darkness of a disused freight transport tunnel on one of the Levels of the vast cavern city that was known as Deep London. He was tall and lean and dark, and he was eighteen years of age. More important by far—he was cold and very hungry, and had a twisted ankle. And the psychosecurity men were after him. He tried to move his injured leg, winced at the pain and lay still once more. His eyes were open but the blackness above and about him was a complete. blackness. He might have been lying, he thought vaguely, in a black fur cocoon. Or with- in his mother’s womb, bliss- fully still and un-needful of movement, waiting in a huge dark eternity of peaceful, half-formed dreamings. His stomach rumbled briefly, the sound seeming strangely loud in the silence. Hungry, he thought. I miss one meal and I get hungry like this. That’s what comes of having the best of everything all my life. I’ve been well connicloooks.Ccomnn