Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 54 — page 115: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION knowledge and plain instinct to avoid the probing death of the enemy missiles. Andthat was interstellar war. There were no ships sil- houetted in gun sights. No thrill and pulse of combat, ex- ploding ruin caused by the pressure of a trigger, the ex- citement and adventure of pitting life against death. There was waiting and silence and the slow movement of specks on a screen. There were clicking relays and glowing tubes and mechanical predic- tion. It was a game in which one man controlled the moves and the rest sat and looked on, knowing that if he guessed wrong, they would spill their lives into the void. No thrill. No glamour. No personal par- ticipation. Just waiting. And so they waited while Longstrom sweated as he tried to guess where the atomic missiles would be. They waited as Carter fired their own mes- sengers of death towards a segment of nothingness and hoped that they would arrive at the same time as the enemy ship. They waited, nerves tense, breath rasping in their throats as they lived in imaginationathousanddeaths, from the ripped hull and escaping air to the remote, but always possible, triggering 114 of their own pile by the streaming neutrons of a too- near explosion. They waited—and the Head waited with them. Longstrom tried to ignore it, tried to forget the insane rush of uncoupling the feed-in connections, the sealing and transportation of the mon- strosity from one ship to the other. It rested behind him in the control room, Harding-to one side, tense as he watched the screens, Carter on the other, his delicate fingers poised over his firing buttons. And of them all, only the Head didn’t seem afraid. It giggled, rolling its eyes as it tried to focus on the winking lights and flickering dials, dribbling and mouthing like the new-born or the insane, and, somehow, Longstrom had the impression that it would welcome death. He sighed as the last crawl- ing fleck vanished from the screens, leaning back and rubbing the ache from his fingers. Harding grunted, emotionlessly, and yet with his usual hint of disappoint- ment, then thumbed a button and spoke into the intercom. “Red alert ended. Normal stations.”” He stared at his computor man. “‘Why didn’t we destroy the enemy ?” comiclooks.corn