Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 67 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

THE MAN IN BETWEEN tradition. When he spoke it was in English better than mine. “Pipes ?” “Two. Put us in adjoining bunks.” Harry paid out a sheaf of creased bills and nudged me as the doorman handed us over to an at- tendant. “You smoked before ?”’ “No.” “Don’t inhale. Just relax and pretend that you’re en- joying it.” I nodded and sat on the edge of a low bunk while the attendant prepared the pipes. All around, in a long low room filled with bunks, men sat or reclined, smoking and staring before them with glazed eyes. Others had sunk into a drug-induced stupor, and one or two muttered in their sleep. The air was heavy, sickly, filled with a vaguely disturbing fragrance, and I was reminded of the community barracks where I had stayed while working on Mars. . I wasn’t disgusted, or em- barrassed, or guilty. Ke Fei ran a legitimate business, for in the Belt, drugs, like alcohol, were legal. In fact, anything was legal if you could get away with it. The only law enforcement station in the entire decant consisted of not more than a dozen men, and they couldn’t be bothered with any crime short of murder. That was in practice. In theory, they were supposed to uphold the entire legislature. They did, too, but to get justice you had to collect the evidence, grab the crimi- nal, find your witnesses and take the entire shooting match to the station for a hearing and sentence. Naturally, as that was a lot of bother, law in the Belt tended to be settled without the sanction of the authorities. The attendant passed me the pipe, a slender-stemmed thing of plastic with a tiny bowl, and I settled back on the mattress and pretended to be enjoying it. Beside me, his mouth a few inches from my Comicbooks.com