Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 53 — page 7: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION gers held it. I threw it back on the counter. The manager smiled sweetly, ever so sweetly, pressed the disc against a flat surface and rubbed it with his palm. The warp vanished. ““Would you like to take your doubts to court?” “No!” A litigious people these New Men. If there’s any doubt about anything, any- where, go to court with it. If no law or precedent can be found, there will be one. Soon. I didn’t want to go to court and be made to look foolish, but . . . The memory of Mattis, who might have been my son, still irked me and [| wanted desperately to prove myself the equal, if not the better, of a New Man, to humiliate, to out-bluff one. Also it did not look like a twenty-five penko record, and I ought to know. It was some thirty years ago, I think, when they were trying to standardize world currency. Our Team had been assigned to the project and I was sitting in conference with a batch of financial experts. For one whole day they had been trying to smooth out the difference between the French and the Belgian franc. I was sick of their bumbling attempts at compromise. I left the room and asked Exchange to locate Harty, a friend of mine, a mathema- tician on one of the Statistics Teams. They found him and his gang in the bar of the Colonial and I vised him to stay put, that I was coming over. “What's today’s head- ache?’ he asked, after he had introduced me around. ‘Those blockheads of mine are compromising again and we're getting nowhere. Ill have to cut straight through. Give me a good world-wide standard for currency.” “Man hours,” suggested someone. “No good,” I said. “No two men work alike and you can’t export time.” connicloooks.conn