Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 67 — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION “I suppose so,” he said slowly, and bit at his lower das: “Goodnight, John.” © “But, Margaret! I...” “Goodnight, John.” She closed the door in his face. It was hard to shut him out like that, harder still to ignore the pleading in his eyes, his obvious need for her, but it had to be done. For three years now she had known that it had to be done, but now that the moment had arrived and passed, she had to remind herself of many things before despair yielded to jubilation. But when elation came, it was all the more overpowering because of her previous depression. She smiled and glanced around her room. Books lined two of the walls and the framed astronomical portraits matched their titles in subject. Gently she touched them, letting her fingers run over the battered spines of the volumes, the slick glass covering the portraits. 50 This was her life. The other, the routine of. day to day existence, was nothing; this was all. This was the dream which filled her, the greater love, beside which that she had for John as a man was negligible. She loved him, yes, in her fashion, but her real emotion for him, the deep-down, well-hidden emo- tion which she felt every time she looked at him or thought about him and others like him, was not love at all. That emotion was pure envy. She had been ten when she realised that she had been born the wrong sex. She had been twenty before she had been able to accept the fact that there was nothing she could do about it. She had been thirty before she had been able to make a com- promise with herself and accept reality and the need for substitution when every atom of her whole being cried out for what she could never have. It had been five years later that she had found the substitute, and for the past comiclooks.com