Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 65 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

> fe ye - j ie = . mr ‘mame Sy 4 s 3 ,” They will steer in their ship by side-jets, and it may be necessary that the ship itself will slowly rotate in order to provide some form of imita- tion gravity. All instruments will be carried in carefully padded boxes. Men will be insulated from heat and cold as if living in a vacuum flask, for, although the sunlit side of the Moon might be bear- able, the shadows would be appallingly cold where heat was never carried by con- vection in an airless space. Men could probably leap twenty or thirty feet at a time, and I believe that the only fear which now seems to give cause for alarm, that of flying meteorites, wil! in fact prove unnecessary. When the astronauts first step from their hemispherical cabin in the nose of the vessel from which some of their million horsepower jets may have been jettisoned, they will find a mass of shimmering sunlit rocks beside which the richest flower garden on Earth might seem as waste land. Above this brilliant landscape will be a dead biack sky shining on an unbelievable 76 AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION mass of vividly coloured, un- winking stars. The Moon itself may be a place of glitter, receiving light many times brighter than our full Moon on Earth, radiating as it will seem to the travellers, from a shining white Earth, blue- white, misted, solid and Fiages with red. On other planets, distant many months of travelling at lightning speed, there may be human thought in a different form or perhaps a low form of life of which we could make © some use. Martians might be a collection of virus-like crea- tures which individually have no intellect or imaginative ability. Collectively, they might be better organised than a hive of bees or even than the cells of our own brains. Such a conglomeration energised by radiant matter might be capable of advanced life, a mass of units with one thought, like countless mil- lions of creatures with only one definite object. Life on Mars itself might be underground. The idea of cities and farms artificially heated and oxygenated is no longer fantastic in the life of comicloooks.conm