Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 87: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION The staff sergeant nodded, his busy hands moving over the mixing controls, striving to impart greater comprehen- sibility to the incoming noise. Even though it had all hap- pened before, Foley noticed, the others seemed to feel a shadow of the same tremor of sheer excitement he himself felt when he remembered that the voice would first speak to them from a thous- and miles above the Earth. Then—— Yes. Then. That was the point. Foley’s mind went into high gear all of a sudden, and in the few seconds before the wall speaker boomed, he seemed to review mentally the whole history behind the undertaking. In the beginning, the task was simple; send a man round the Earth. It -grew less simple when they had to add the corollary: bring him back sane. The mechanical part of it was easily enough accom- plished. Small collections of instruments had made the trip first, burning up in the atmosphere as they fell back, their momentum gone. Then permanent satellites had been hung up on nothing against that spangled black curtain— 86 rockets with just enough fuel to set them spinning for ever in chance orbits. What orbit did not particularly matter; three hours or nine hours, or six and a half. After that, there were ships which made the round trip—literally—and returned. The machines were virtually perfect by then. — But only with the perfection of machinery. At the start it was enough to send up some- thing to perform the passive function of relaying data. But it was not long before all the necessary information was in and gathered. After that, people wanted to do some- thing in space—and that meant sending out a man. So the two rival giants who had climbed neck and neck up the ladder to the stars so far, set their feet on the next rung, and it broke. By devious routes the information leaked out—there were few absolute secrets on the planet now. Even before security slipped enough for that to happen, the powers that be on both sides of the world had prac- tically agreed to give it up as a bad job, for the time being at least. When they heard that their opponents had reached the same conclusion, they probed the source of the news cautiously, found it comiclooks.com