Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 54 — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION is going to be all right.”’ He looked at the toil-worn fea- tures of the woman. “Perhaps you could take care of him, madam ?”’ “Til look after him,” promised Mrs. Caulder. She pulled the boy towards her. “Come on now, Tommy, time for you to get some sleep.” Henley watched her as she mothered the boy, recognising a long thwarted maternal instinct in the way she touched him, smoothing his hair and resting his head on her shoul- der. He turned as Jeff swore with quiet, bitter anger. “The swine! The dirty stinking swine!” “The Numen ?”’ “Who else? To do a thing like that. Wreck a ship in deep space and kill off women and children as if they were vermin.” He knotted his big hands. “If I could just get hold of the swine who did Miscou ‘““He’s dead,” said Henley, tiredly. He didn’t want to get dragged into an argument on the merits of the war, and yet, deep within himself, he had a sneaking sympathy for the Numen. Whatever else they were, they were brave. They carried on a hopeless struggle with nothing to help them but their own courage 90 and a fanatical determination to be left alone at all costs. Sometimes it was hard to remember that they were human, of the same stock as the Terrestrials, settlers who had carved a living from the hostile satellites of Jupiter, a living threatened by the oc- cupation of those worlds by the advancing frontiers of civilisation. Perhaps he would have felt different had he lost a wife or son in the wreck, but he “hadn’t and he was alive, and that was all that mattered. Night came with the switch- ing off of the light—to save power, though no one men- tioned that—and in the heavy darkness seven people tried to forget worry and fear in sleep. It wasn’t easy. Free fall didn’t induce physical weariness, and the novelty and danger of their position tended to keep them all awake. Henley hooked one leg beneath the strut retaining the air tanks and stared into the darkness, listening to the © various sounds sighing and ebbing through the heavy air. A slobbering, half-baby, half-animal whimper, moist and drooling, sucking and horrible—the old man still living with his terror. A whispered croon—the woman comicloooks.conn