Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 48 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

TABARNI DOCUMENT no. I’m all for the pleasures of civilisation and room enough to indulge in them. Why? Are you going to bring more life to the Belt?” “Yes and no. Id like to pave the way for more life, though. You know about the radio-active atmosphere ~which surrounds the barren planets in the belt, of course.” The giant nodded, and his small companion began to dilate on his theory. “They have to bore a channel in the atmosphere round the surface of every planet,” he said. “It’s rather like the hole that a worm might drill round the surface of a sphere buried under a metre or so of soil. Only in this channel, which has been carved out of the atmosphere by neutralising gear, is any life possible. Consequently they have to save every avail- able bit of space. And that is why they use the Alpha-Beta frequency translation.” “| hear they have to do all their building and carry on 27 all their activities in that cramped tunnel,” - said Tabarni. “And the Alpha- Beta dodge is to enable them to build two things in the space of one. Right?” > “'That’s it. It costs so much to bore the channel that they can’t afford to build more than one storey high. And the upkeep of the channel is enormous. The radio-activity is always leaking through the ceiling. The Alpha-Beta fre- quency translation is quite simple in principle. * You con- struct buildings in two fre- quencies. T'wo superimposed storeys take up the same space. You build one in Alpha and one in Beta. They are co-existent in absolute space and time, but they’re rela- tively distinct from each other because of the different mole- cular frequencies of their structures. Take the workers, for example. They sleep in Beta hostels and arrive at their work in co-existent Alpha factories by concen- trating on Alpha thoughts.” Cha Tabarni tugged his comicloooks.conm