Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 67 — page 70: what you’re looking at

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

POST MORTEM my allocation I’m drunk and they don’t like it. Anybody else can be drunk, but not Captain Forde’s wife. That’s letting him down. I know what they’re thinking, all right. And whose fault is it I drink? His!” The.captain’s widow shuffled off. She seemed to realise suddenly that she had said too much. Duffy wasn’t sorry to see her go. He sighed relief. The tail of the queue was all that remained, and Gillick would relieve him in fifteen minutes. He didn’t envy the radar man the night watch. Gillick would have to stand guard alone. There would be no crowd to speed the hours. There would only be Gillick and thecaptain—and he wasn’t pleasant company, never had been. Forde had been strong on solitude. Always a strict dis- ciplinarian, with himself as much as with anyone, he had never unbent to speak with any of the men on level terms. Throughout each transit he confined himself in the flight room, and his voice issuing over the Tannoys was the only indication that he was aboard and alive. Heaven help any- one who entered the flight room without permission. 69 Duffy could remember the time he had committed the unforgivable sin. In that in- stance he had roused the captain’s ire doubly by leaving the door open behind him. But the lambasting he got then was nothing to the humiliating flaying which Mahon, the biologist, suf- fered when he marched into Forde’s den uninvited, with both the flight room door and the door of the hydroponics room gaping behind him. It ‘was made very clear that the captain didn’t care much for the wet smell of greenery. There wasn’t a man aboard who hadn’t suffered the lash of the captain’s tongue at one time or another. Which may have accounted for the pleas- ure which the crew took in - « standing their ground over the issue of young Kenwood. Either the kid was taken ‘straight to Earth, they said, or they went on strike. Gil- lick refused to take bearings on the Wheel. Mahon refused to renew the nutrient in the hydroponics tanks. The charts were locked up by the deputy navigator. Duffy and the other reactor men threatened to pull the rods. “*Fools,” said Forde. ““‘Why- don’t they send me men for my crew instead of callow connicloooks.conm