Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 53 — page 92: what you’re looking at

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

A PRESENT FROM MARS have been brought. But in the result, the biotic balance of our planet has been destroyed. A law of nature has been violated —a law which few realised ex- isted—alaw which says that the balanee of nature is only valid for a given planet. Worlds cannot mix! The bugs landed on Earth, and the conditions they found were so -intensely favourable that an uncontrollable gush of creativity followed. On their home planet their evolution had been based mainly on chromo- somal aberrations and gene fluctuations in relation to en- vironment. We substituted a new environment. Not a con- trolled laboratory environment —an uncontrolled one of planet-size! There is no know- ing when the spread of bugs will Stop. Perhaps, never. *“Now I haven’t any public,” he said. The months had shrivelled him. Once he had been assured of eternal youth—if a little thin on top. Now old age had taken one stride and claimed him. She said: “Everyone has a job getting rid of them.” The bitumastic had not kept out the invaders, and now the theatre had been 91 abandoned to the oily, maho- gany coloured discs. He looked at her as she washed the baby, saw the bugs drowning in the bath, his wife’s chapped cheeks and starting cheekbones, and re- membered their embraces. They didn’t embrace any more—few did. The bugs were barriers against love. And under the windows, along the sidewalks, went people—thousands of people —pushing perambulators and lugging tarpdulins. The nomads. They wandered mysteriously from nowhere to nowhere— gangers, city men, clerks, shabby people from tenements and smart people from park- side apartments. They kept moving. At night they slept on black, e soil outside the city limits under the stars or in the rain. And often at night they got up and kept moving. My name is Kenn Sigsbee. I am a professor of Entomology, and I live in a hole in the Rocky Mountains. I am sixty- one and I guess this way of life will kill me in not less than three years. There was a man with me— comicloooks.con