Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 148: what you’re looking at

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

THE CREEP “Give up?” asked Sam. “N-no. Not yet. But I never realised before how inadequate our language is. You can’t get across more than about one word at a time; a simple three-word sentence at the most.” “Lena.” Her name was spoken in a deep, resonant singing voice— the voice of the alien. ““Lena,” he said again, and she went to his side like a sleep-walker. In ten minutes, the alien had learned directly no more than twenty or thirty nouns, adjectives and expletives. He had picked up the meaning of about twice as many words by watching and listening to the general conversation. With this vocabulary of roughly a hundred words, he completely turned the tables on Lena. He taught her his own tongue. Less tortuous than English, it was also less colourful. In place of complexity it had straightforwardness. What it lacked in colour was more than made up for by its clarity. And in just ~ over 147 thirty minutes there was noth- ing the alien could say which Sam and Lena could not understand. Even his ex- planation of the sphere’s mechanics was lucid up to the point where their ignorance of things technical failed them. They gathered that cosmic rays linked every star in the heavens. The rays, said the alien, were everywhere in space; but because of stellar magnetism there were con- centrated channels of the rays between each and every sun, and weaker but detect- able links between suns and planets. When these broad highways were there to be travelled, who would not wish to explore? Especially when it was relatively easy to build a sphere with a drive operating from the cosmic rays. “Why come to Earth?” asked Sam. “There was a_ highway,” said the alien, as if that was sufficient explanation. “Do you always drop in so clumsily ?”” aa comiclooks.conrn