Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION and let the null-grav cushions caress his head, his body, his limbs. It was like a super Buoyobath, he though’, re- membering vaguely the ex- perience of a Buoyobath wiith- out recalling where he had had one, or when. The foam settled itself about him, holding him with softly luxurious fingers that moulded themselves to the contours of his flesh in the way that water might welcome the outlines of a human foot placed tentatively in a tide-line pool. Somewhere behind him Dr. MIkL AndrUz was busy with some strange apparatus. He had seen the apparatus when he had entered the surgery, but it had meant nothing to him. Just a box-shaped thing with a tube stretching from it—a tube that ended in a cup-like metal shape. And there were cables and wires that led from the box to a bank of points and switches on the wall. He lifted his left arm and his right arm and gazed at the small discs of glittering plastic with which the doctor had covered the tiny punc- tures made by the hypo. 26 ““How long wiil it all take?” he asked, his voice seeming to come from outside his head, instead of inside. It was, he thought, like hearing an echo sounding down a long tunnel; an echo of words spoken hours before, yet which siill reverberated on and on. ““Scarcely any time at all,” came the reply, faintly, faintly. “Will—will I feel anything ?” A fainter echo. “You'll feel a lot. Not physicalfeeling. Mental. You'll go through the things that led up to this visit, in your mind, but you'll go through them very, very quickly.” The voice was not a voice— though the meaning of the words was quite plain; it was not a voice but the booming of a gong ten million miles away. It was the whisper of leaves in a night wind; the kiss of small waves on a, world of moonlit sand. He closed his eyes, feeling as he did so the cold touch of metal about his head. That machine, he thought. That metal cap thing. That’s what it is. The tiredness seeped conmicloooks.com