Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 113: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION is why the earlier observers failed to detect them. Both Wilkins and Moore believe that the answer may be that these features are of recent origin. The domes are low, rounded hills, ranging in size from two to three miles across and a few hundred feet in height. Dr. Wilkins has described them as resembling unburst bubbles, but the strangest thing about them is .that nearly all have a deep pit right at the top. This pit is always on top and never at the side. It is possible, sug- gests Dr. Wilkins, that local swellings of the lunar surface take place here and there and that the resulting domes may not be entirely solid, but cavernous in their interiors and, with a little tunnelling, would make excellent natural shelters for future spacemen. The dusky streaks bring us to consider the possibility of life on the Moon. Life in its more familiar aspects is ob- viously impossible with lunar conditions as we know them, but we also know (see Authen- tic, September, 1955) that life, even on Earth, can exist 112 in fantastic forms, adapting themselves to the most rugged and unfavourable environ- ments. On some of the crater floors and on some of the inner slopes of many crater walls, systems of streaks or radial bands are to be seen. The system in Aristarchus was the first to be studied. There, dusky streaks radiate from the brilliant central mountain over the floor and up the sides. In this case, we have drawings of them made by Lord Rosse in 1863. Phillips may have seen them in 1866. The other famous lunar observers made no records of them. But since 1895 the bands seem to have not only steadily increased in visibility, but grown in numbers. Matthew, Smith and Favar- ger have shown that the bands have a periodical devel- opment, becoming longer and broader as the lunar day passes, reaching their peak about lunar noon, and then fading away. At the present date more than a dozen of these systems of streaks are known, and Moore has stated that the single band in the comiclooks.cormn