Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 85: what you’re looking at

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

Nuisance Value BY JOHN BRUNNER HE PERIOD OF SILENCE which followed the blast- off was unbearable. Foley, managing to keep his face expressionless, flexed and clasped his thin, unusually white fingers, on which a yellow smear of nicotine stood out like a scar, a relic of the cigarettes with which he had sought to ease the tension of the past month. Normally, he stuck to his pipe, but he had scarcely been able to find time to fill it these last few weeks. He had to do something. And that, in a way, was the key to the whole problem. Four others of the half dozen in the concrete block- house were more fortunate. There was the prematurely grey man in khaki, sitting before a luminous screen, the jacket with the insignia of his major’s rank thrown care- lessly over the back of his chair. There were the youthful- seeming men in Air Force blue tunics—a wing com- mander and a flight lieutenant —whose collars bore the crescent moon symbol of the embryo Spatial Branch, and whose eyes flickered from 84 point to point over the in- strument boards before them with something of the irregu- lar fidgetiness of the needles on the telemetering dials they watched. And there was the only non-commissioned mem- ber of the group—aside from Foley, of course—the staff sergeant of signals, delicately filtering indefinable static out of the verbal communication circuit. He had to be there. No machine could be con- structed subtler than the human ear for distinguishing the minimal information con- tent which was all the storm of solar radiation in free space left of speech. Of course, there was no speech for him to catch yet, but he kept minutely shifting the resistances under his hands, as if by reflex. Even Taunton was less badly off, thought Foley greyly. Taunton was merely aware > that this had happened three times before, and ended in failure. His function was to tell people what to do—not how to do it. When they failed, he fumed and gave more orders. Of course, he was comiclooks.corn