Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 65 — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

The Reluctant Death y BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY HERE WAS SUFFERING IN ik: night. There were the screams of cities dying, the screams of stone and metal and machine de- serted, condemned by their gods, by those without which they could not exist. The helpless beings tortured themselves, tore out their own megapolitan intestines as ‘they obeyed the wishes of their indispensable god-para- sites, and put into action the Exodus. At the first order, the brains cringed. Reluctantly, the technological mightinesses - . re-directed their efforts, un- able to assimilate the new demands. Then, inevitably, the machinery accelerated, moved with furious rushing, the vast creatures spewed and rumbled in busy, helpless weeping. The cities were cleared. 39 Alone, their life-motes ex- pelled from them, the cities groaned into the dawn. They were incapable of sustaining their own _ processes, and thirty-four dawns later all awareness was gone, and the towns were dead, | In the terrible months that followed for the humans, only one man survived. He did not know why. Neither did he know for certain what befell his race, nor where he him- self was. He remembered the flash as he fell fiom the exodus car onto the electri- fied cable, and the b: bble of the city mechanisms trying to save him in that instant. But that was all. | Now he sprawled miserably in the desert, messing with a typewriter. The typewriter was sand-infested, stiff, useless He had wandered for two comiclooks.conrn