Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 145: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION -jt was a rocket, and if it went up to free fall, they wanted to travel in it. It was a much worse bug than had bitten the Earth colonisers of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries.” “No accounting for tastes,” agreed George politely. Graves smiled vaguely. “So _ that was the set-up. Three men took off from the Moon for the great Martian adven- ture, and three men came back—only one was in cold storage.” “They didn’t bother about psychology that far back,” Graves said. “‘All the rocket companies wanted to know was whether a spaceman could take the acceleration. and whether he knew what to do if half a dozen things went wrong at once. So that meant some odd types travelling together, and, according to Tom, the pilot, who gave evidence at the subsequent enquiry, there was bad feeling from the start between the engineer and the navigator. And he never was able to pin it down. Being in command, he talked to the two about it when they were only three weeks out from Luna, and threatened to stick their heads in the reactor if they didn’t snap out of it. But the pig- headedness of the male, which is something quite easily ab- sorbed in the hurrying activi- ties of Earth, is distilled into solid concrete in the astro- . nomical vastnesses of space. They were civil enough to him, and they worked all right, but the atmosphere, and the veiled threats, the ugly looks from Harry to Dick, and Dick’s ill-concealed watchfulness of Harry, con- tinued for the best part of the month’s long trip until death knocked one of the protagon- ists out of the battle. A pretty unpleasant battle it must have been for the pilot to watch, too. With his own life depend- | ing on the amity and skill of two men who were always at unspoken loggerheads, he must have been nearly as nervous and irritable as the unfortunate Harry. According to Tom, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, and only a spaceman knows the strained quality of a close-quarters hate being built 144 connicloooksseconmn