Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 51 — page 34: what you’re looking at

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

THE ENVIED shore. It looked cold, yet in- viting. And down there it would be quiet. You could listen to music if you wanted to, by switching on the helmet receiver. But he wasn’t going to do that. He felt suddenly glad that he had come, and that he had suggested this particular trip. Under the sea, you could shut out the babble of the world and the jarring exuberance of the per- sistent background noise. Deborah joined him. Her body was magnificent under the smooth-fitting cos- tume. She stood proudly beside him, and suddenly he laughed—his first carefree laugh in a long while. There was a faint splutter- ing inside his helmet as the speaker came _ to _ life. Deborah’s voice said in his ear: “ Ready?” “ Let’s go,” he said. They went down into the water with a cool, invigorat- ing shock. The small heater unit glowed into life, but on impulse Warren switched it off. The tingling vitality he 33 experienced was something he didn’t want spoilt by an arti- ficial heat stabilisation. Deborah swam down beside him, twisting gracefully like a sleek and beautiful fish. They smiled at. one another, their expressions comically blurred through the helmets and the distorting water. Two hundred yards out, as they went down deeper and swam along above the bottom, watching the strange brown and golden fish leaping up from the rocks in a fantastic ballet, he switched on the heater. The world down here was becoming dark and chill. But he sank into it gratefully. His aches and confusions were drawn out of him, and the rhythm of his movements seemed to set up a corre- sponding, gentle rhythm in his mind. ‘What's that over there?” he asked. “The Quentin grottoes,” she said. “‘ My father found them and related them to one of his theories about . . . oh, about something.” comiclbooks.com °