Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 36: what you’re looking at

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

WHEN HE DIED of my father, and yet time still had not healed the hurt of his passing. It was inevitable that I should use the shuttle to return back in time so as to see him once more. And I had arrived just two months before he was due to die. I finished my coffee and left the cafe. I walked down the familiar streets and came to the old house. My heart beat with a peculiar excitement as I reached it, and for a long time I stood outside. Within the house I knew that my father would be sitting in his old armchair. Perhaps he would be reading, or listening to the radio, or perhaps he was busy making himself a cup of tea or cooking one of his little meals. My eyes stung as I thought of him in his loneliness. Old, ul, seemingly unwanted by his only son. Old myself, I could now appreciate the terrors of age. The sleepless nights, the failing memory, the discomfort and pain of a 35 body which was breaking down faster than the mind it contained. For a moment I felt the impulse to go. To walk away and not to resurrect the ghosts of the past. I fought the impulse. This was not the past, not now. This was the present, and my father was alive and I was here to comfort him if I could. But it took more courage than I expected to knock upon “the door. He was the same. It was incredible, but he was just the same. The same poor, bluish hands, the same wheez- ing in his throat, the same deep-set eyes creased with wrinkles and yellowed with illness. He stood and looked at me and JI, after my first involuntary step forward, re- membered who and what I was. I was his son—but he could never know it. He was my father—but he was young enough to be my son. To him I was an elderly stranger. It was easy to make friends. I knew him—who could know him better? I introduced my- comicloooks.conm