Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 47 — page 52: what you’re looking at

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

THE MUTILANTS times, but how can you ever forget flying? More pilots came, more were killed, and we knew the fear that dries up your mouth like blotting paper, that makes your hands run ahead of your brain, and that opens every sweat-producing pore of your body. They issued narcotics, spirits, rubber bottles. Still we climbed up and _ vanished, sometimes for ever, behind tumbling cumulous cloud. Finally, I bought it too. I ejected myself from a blazing Vituper with disintegrated im- pellors and bursting hydrogen all about me. The separator- gear failed to operate, and instead of leaving the ejector seat I went hurtling down with it. Our arrival made a noticeable impression on the surface of the earth—and I never flew again. Later I left the Service. I sold cans of oil, worked in a factory, drove a lorry. People were starving and I was “people.” I was not in very good shape, and when I bumped into Doc Lestrange, and told him how bad things were and how much I missed flying, he glanced me over. 51 To my great surprise the Doc pronounced me fit and sent me along to E.R.H.L.F. “Tell Doctor Kersch that I sent you,” he reminded me, “‘and that I regard you as fit and eminently suitable for ad- vanced flying.” So there I was, walking down Superior Hill with hope in my heart, my heart in my mouth, and nothing in my stomach, feeling again the trembly thrill of bringing a high-speed fighting machine in to land. I stopped, hearing suddenly the high-pitched whine of a Superjet winding up. Then I saw the glint of light on its cowling as it topped the ramp from its underground hangar. It slid smoothly out of the flat mouth and gained strip level, ac- celerated rapidly towards take- off point. Belly hugging the ground, light glinting on plastiglass, and undergear tele- scoping as its nose dipped with the brakes, it looked a typical Superjet. Shrilly the boosters fired. It shot forward at twenty, fifty, two hundred, seven hundred miles per hour; shrieking, hurtling, boring comicloooks.conn