Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 32: what you’re looking at

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

WHEN HE DIED Sixty years is a long time, and memories tend to fade and become overlaid with nostalgia. The city | saw now was not the city as I remem- bered it, but then I had looked at it. through the eyes of youth, while now I stared at it with the eyes of critical age. I smiled as I drank the coffee, wondering what my fellow workers would be say- ing at my absence. To trans- port my mass had drained the potential of the pile, and the cost of replacement would be enormous. In effect, I was a criminal, a saboteur, a self- centred fool without regard for others. But I didn’t care. My motive, to me, was all important. Have you ever known regret? Have you ever known what it is to sit and smile and make conversation, while all the time your eyes are burning with unshedable tears, and your heart is torn and aching inside of you? Do you know what it is to realise that all 31 your hopes and plans and aspirations have dissolved like dead-sea fruit in your hands, and that all the care and caution you were once so proud of has reared up before you and is making your life a hell? Have you ever felt the sickening knowledge that nothing you can do now can possibly matter, because it is too late? I felt like that the night my father died. | I loved my father. Strange to hear a man say that? Not so strange when you realise that he was the only parent I had ever known, He was more than just my father. He was the man who stayed up all night to mend my bicycle so that I could ride out with my friends on our Sunday ex- cursions. He was the man who collapsed at work while earn- ing the money to keep me at school instead of -letting me take a blind-alley job so that he could reap the benefit of my wages. He was the man who, with ruined heart and rasping lungs, crept painfully comiclbooks.corn