Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 67 — page 84: what you’re looking at

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

THE LONG JOURNEY daren’t land until we know how Hemridge died. Need any help?” ““Only to get him to the sick bay.”’ “Tl help you.” Stanley gripped one end of the thin, rubberoid sheet and, with Thorne at the other, helped carry the dead man into the compact sick bay. They dumped the body on the operating table and, while Thorne scrubbed and pro- tected himself, Stanley broke the. news to the others. “‘Hemridge is dead,” he announced bluntly. ‘‘As yet we don’t know what killed him. I don’t have to tell you what that means.”’ Hedidn’t. They hadaccepted the risk and now they had to accept the possibility of paying the price. But somehow, maybe because no one yet had ever had to pay that price, it was still something to be talked about, the sort of thing which could happen to others but never to them. And so they reacted in a typically human way. “You touched him!”’ Klien stepped away from Leman. “You shared the same cabin with him. Stay away from me.”’ “How about that, Cap?’’ Leman had turned very white. “‘What can we do to protect ourselves ?” *“Nothing.”’ : *““Nothing ?’’ Leman looked hurt. “That doesn’t make sense. If Hemridge died from some disease we don’t want to catch it, too.” “And what makes you think that you haven’t already?” asked Stanley im- patiently. “‘We’ve all shared the same food, the same water, breathed the same air. We’ve all been outside and we’ve all been in close contact. We don’t know that Hemridge died from some alien virus, but if he did there is nothing we can do about it. If it’s here then we’ve got it. If it isn’t then it can’t hurt us. In any case, there is only one way to find out—wait and see.”’ And that was the hardest part. Waiting, any kind of wait- ing, is bad. Waiting to dis- cover whether or not death is inevitable is worse than just bad; that kind of waiting is the father of insanity. They fought against it, of course. comicloooks.com