Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 53 — page 85: what you’re looking at

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

It happened in Australia and it could happen all over the world if the spacemen bring back— A PRESENT FROM MARS by MARTIN JORDAN HE cleft was three- sixteenths of an inch high and three inches deep, formed of an angle between two pieces of timber resting against the bulkhead of the grounded spaceship. They were bits of Martian timber— specimens—the only bits of timber aboard. Inside the cleft it was warm, dark and pungent. Twenty- three cylindrical eggs were cemented to a brown shake in the timber. An adult female—a being yet to be observed and- classified by man—a female with distended abdomen and proboscis with- drawn beneath the thorax, lay motionless beyond the eggs. Apart from a vague movement of her feelers in answer to the vibrations of footfalls about the ship, she had not stirred since her last meal, five days since. Nearby, the moulted skin of a nymph reared like a live thing—a brown husk, dead and perfect. 84 One of the eggs shuddered. Gradually the first spasms of undirected movement became the tactics of an embryo; a violent purposiveness con- vulsed it. Blue with indigested blood, the female watched the perils of the birth—saw the egg undulate as a more than regal temperament clawed at it from within—until the silent egg seemed to be full of wild cries, and, with something of the triumph of discovery, a pair of mandibles shot out, the hinged lid opened... Thursday. 10.00 hours, G.M.T. (Hope that’s O.K. Our three chronometers syn- chronise to a microsecond, but what if the FIELD has jixed all three? That would be as impossible to detect as Ein- stein’s shortening footrule ... the theoretical one that gets SHORTER as your speed ap- proaches that of light.) Only three more Earth-days, Maggurt says, and we'll be connicloooks.comn