Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 48 — page 45: what you’re looking at

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

° AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION kilometre base-line of the fleet. Pencil-slim scout craft circled the boundaries of the vast Fighting formation or bobbed at the rear of their mother ships. The ovoid battleships, with their deflectors and atomisers smoothly shrouded, poised motionless, deadly and beau- tiful. Each had its mass inertia axis aligned with a Venusian radius. “It can’t be long now,” said Luronne. She gave a little shiver. Both rebels glanced at their minichrono- meters. “ Any luck with those Martian inter-ship signals?” she asked. “No,” said Tabarni. “They're coded and scram- bled. No chance of knowing what they plan. Still, there’s only one thing they can do. If we won’t go up to meet them, they'll have to come down to us.” “THERES ONLY ONE thing we can do,” said Marshal Takato. “ If they won’t come up to meet us, we'll have te 44 go down to them.” He looked at the faces about him in the control room of the binary flag-ship. “Can’t we use long-range action, sir?” asked a captain. “Little point in_ it,” answered the marshal, tap- ping his fingers on a pilot’s chart of the Venusian ap-. proaches. “Doing some damage at a_ distance wouldn’t get us any nearer the food, and that’s what we want. We’re already on short rations. Remember, the Venusians can afford to wait; we can’t. No, we must go down. there and land. The scouts can let off their offen- sive weapons as they ap- proach. That should make the rebels keep their heads down. If they send up any craft at the last moment, we can knock them out of the sky.” Major Vataron said : “ The thing that worries me, sir, is the silence. They must know they are helpless against us, yet they don’t even bother to comiclooks.com