Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION by three photo-electric cells, one keeping a needle auto- matically pointed towards the sun, another towards Mars and the third towards Venus. MATHEMATICS THE PROPHET Now for quite a long while mathematicians have been using a system of studying curved lines and curved sur- faces known as polar co- ordinate geometry. It locates all things with reference to their direction and distance from a fixed point. Space navigation could well be the justification for many student hours of labour which have so far had comparatively little usefulness. I will finish by throwing all such probabilities as I have tried to describe onto the ashpit, and leap an unknown number of centuries ahead to a vision rather than to a reasoned scheme of things. Maybe the great vessels that will conquer space will be as unpiloted as a boy’s electric 100 train set. A crew may be packed aboard like so many cocoons. Men in the pupa condition, oblivious of all things, immune to most of man’s common _ ills—cold, hunger or too many G’s! Also aboard will be a signal emitter, so that men of many generations may live and die receiving those signals and knowing all their lives exactly where the vessel is in space during its journey through the centuries to some distant galaxy. Instruments on the vessel will respond to signals sent from Earth to reach the destination. Other impulses from earth will cause the chrysalids to crack and men will emerge, fulfil their task of exploration and then again pupate for the long journey home. But the generations of men at the Earth base control panels will be using their own particular modification of the space chart reference grid that every baby plots with refer- ence to its mouth. comiclooks.cormn