Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

_*T hope we'll all find some- thing better than that.” _ Heleft them to complete his _ tour. They might have taken SDP PS BA Meee SP rma Cee OM Oa ae t ee Las ‘ £ ‘ Wu § : ahod i ; ia! r alike y it much worse. Esther re- minded him faintly of Pam, his wife. It was a memory he didn’t want or need. The Crispins met him philo- sophically. ““You needn’t give us the spiel, Jim,” said Mary. They both laughed, the Cris- pins who could laugh at anything. Of the three women on the ship, with two glamour girls above, Mary was the most beautiful, at thirty-eight. She had plenty of faults that they hadn’t—a sharp chin, creases about her eyes, ruddy colour, a strong nose, a big mouth— but it all made a glorious, lovely whole. She had always been beautiful, and she would never have quite lost her beauty. She and Bob were ~ the best, the happiest people on the ship, Winter thought— and their death would be the smallest tragedy. “Do the beauty queens want to be left alone, or do ~ you think I could help?” she asked. “Pd be glad if you’d see 10 AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION | them, Mary. And, Bob, you might look in on the miners. You might be able to say the right thing, if there is any.” ‘“Sure,”’ said Bob, who was bore 4 gle Wie: older than Mary but not as. much as he looked. ““What are you doing about the ship?” “Leaving it right between the black moss and Earth. We can’t do anything about ships coming the other way, but if by any chance a ship tries to make Ceres straight from Earth in the next week we may be of some use yet. When they saw us drifting they’d know what had hap- pened.” 7 “Chances are only fifty million to one against,” Bob remarked. “Anyway, they'll know about that patch now.” The course they would follow had been filed on Ceres to provide for just such an event. In a month that spot of black moss would be charted and might never claim another victim. Black moss, whatever it was, kept pretty much the same position in the system. Ships could pass safely within a million miles of a known patch with no fear of its ComichookSacon — a