Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 125: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION am sure we are, we can offer this to the world as the answer to starvation and food shortage.” “Do you mean we grow a few million of these and spread them round the world?” asked Rayson, shaken out of his usual taciturnity by the significance of the work with which he had been helping for so long. “I didn’t know we were doing anything like that. Is everybody to have one?” “Why, yes, Rayson. We only have two seeds this time and you can have one of those. You deserve the first. You’ve worked hard to bring them into existence and I think it is right that you should have the’ first. Don’t you agree, George?” George looked at the won- dering Rayson with a smile. “I do agree. He deserves the very first.” Rayson grew red in the face with these compliments, but after some hesitation he answered: “I know you mean 124 to be generous, gentlemen, but I don’t like the idea of a plant being so chummy with me that we can’t get on without each other...” Rayson looked at them with an unexpressed distaste in*® his eyes. “It doesn’t seem natural.” “I wonder,’ John com- mented when Rayson had scuttled off full of embarrass- ment, “if we have heard an echo of the voice of the man in the street ?”’ The subject was not men- tioned again, but the seeds which had lain on the bench were treated to increase their chromosome number and so produce trees or at least large bushes. The central area of the Crystal Palace had long been kept fo. the final product and it became the interest point for the household. Each morning, before they were dressed, it became the custom to visit the “Palace.’’ They would stand around this one patch of innocent earth and speculate upon how long it comicloooks.com