Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 54 — page 103: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION smiled as he watched her die. Afterwards, when he re-' alised what he had done, and more important, whom he had done it before, he felt shame and guilt and a terrible re- vulsion of feeling. : “Tm sorry, Tommy,” he said, quietly. “But she was a bad woman, you know that, and she had to die.” The boy didn’t answer. He sat as he had sat since the beginning, wide-eyed and silent, watchful and poised like an overscared young animal, ready to run, but not knowing from where danger would come. Henley sighed as he looked at the boy, so young to have suffered so much, and, turning off the light, settled down to wait for rescue. Somehow, it was better in the dark. It was better stil when he finally drove himself to lash the drifting bodies to a stanchion, and even though the blood was a nuisance, yet it could be borne. He was safe. He was alive and the others were dead. He alone of them all would return to Earth and the warm comfort of civilisation. And he had a witness to prove his innocence. He smiled as he thought about it; then, still thinking, he lost his smile. The officer 102 had died a natural death, there was no mistake about that. The old man? Jeff. But Jeff had protested his in- nocence and held onto the knife. Mrs. Caulder had been touching him when the lights went out. Jeff had been talk- ing to Lorna, so... who had cut the wires? And who had killed Jeff, big and armed and ready for trouble? And who had killed the woman, and why? She had died from a cunning blow to the neck, a skilled and” highly technical blow unlikely to be known by the average person. Jeff could have done it, but,Jeff was dying with a knife in his throat. Who? “Tommy.” Henley tried to keep his voice calm and even. ““Where are you, son.” “Worked it out yet, Hen- ley ?”’ The voice was the same, high and weak, and sur- prisingly boyish, but the tone was that of a man. “Sur- prised? You shouldn’t be. It was pretty obvious from the start.” “You! You did it!’ “Of course.’ The boy—it was hard to think of him as other than a boy—chuckled. “I’m the saboteur you were all talking about. The scum you wanted to find and hurt. The fiith you hate and despise comicloooks.comn