Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 47 — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

THE MUTILANTS was constantly depressed by the sight and stench of bomb- batchy and deformed civilians foraging for scraps of putrid and decomposing food among the rubble. They stumbled in their thousands, with ever- weakening steps, until insanity again fired their despair- dulled eyes and radio-activity burnt them out from the inside. Ferro-concrete columns sprawled across powdered brick and splintered glass, and gobs of human meat littered Oxford Circus and Sauchiehall Street, and the now barren site of the Tower Ballroom. Jet engines, designed to run on refined paraffin, were boosted to 30,000 revolutions a minute on liquid oxygen, water injection and hydrogen- peroxide mixtures. If a pilot completed three operational sorties before his engine dis- integrated—to smear him across the instrument panel like so much jelly—he was one of the chosen few. Of the sixteen pilots who greeted me when I joined the squadron, only three were alive two weeks later. I was 49 one of them and wished to stay that way. Scared? I should say I was scared. But I loved flying. Have you ever sat up there, above a stretch of white and rose-tinted cloud, beneath a blue dome as limitless as time and vast as infinity itself? Right above the dirt and squallor, the rain and stench and avarice; above the East and the West and money— right way up above Wall Street, Purchase Tax and Parkhurst ? Have you ever sat up there, proudly controlling your movement in three di- mensions at twelve hundred miles an hour, and then reached the end of the cloud - ‘bank—to see a whole con- tinent spread before you like a contour-topograph of itself? Have you sat high in the troposphere, listening to the thousand-mile-an-hour whistle of air streaming thinly over. the plastiglass canopy, and seen a silver-grey speck grow out of the distance until, within the space of seconds, . it has become a magical, slender and beautifully stream- lined ship glinting in the clear sunshine of outer atmosphere, comicbhooks.com