Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 51 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION At first people were rather shy of admitting to the exist- ence of the robots. Origin- ally they were dubbed “the after-men,” but this clumsy phrase could not stick for long; in due course the grey plastic covering of the arti- ficial bodies resulted in their being called Greys. There was at that time no emotional undertone to the word. It was only as generations went by that the Greys became associated with tyranny and greed and exclusiveness. Only the Greys could travel to the planets. The un- leashed, unshielded power of cosmic rays out in space made interplanetary travel impos- sible for normal human beings. The living conditions on the other planets were, in any case, quite unbearable. What a blessing, it was said at first, was the introduction of the new race. But resentment grew. The Greys were too clever. Not only did they travel through space, bringing back valuable minerals on whose disposal 14 they made _ their own decisions: they began to dis- place ordinary human beings on the councils of the world, claiming that this was for the benefit of everyone. They were more intelligent and more dispassionate than their flesh and blood predecessors. But, they gently argued, they understood human problems : had they not, themselves, once been ordinary creatures? The minds that now made decrees, that carried on abstruse re- searches and dealt with the new problems of the planets, were human minds _ that simply went on living and growing in wisdom. “The development of the After-men,” said one of the early Greys in a speech made to the Council of the World Federation, “is the develop- ment of the whole human race. What we do is for the mutual benefit of the primi- tives and for ourselves: in- deed, it could be said that the primitives benefit more than we do, since our pleasure is mainly in study and abstract comichooks.com