Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 147: what you’re looking at

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

the airlock with the rubbish. Tom and Dick hadn’t emptied any rubbish. Harry had. Noth- ing said, but plenty thought. Tom swore more violently than he had ever done on Earth, doled out some stuff from the medicine kit that wasn’t much good, and or- dered a few hours rest before they started back. “They all took the rest. Even the feud seemed to have died down temporarily in the nervous excitement that followed the last two days. They dozed fitfully, or sucked nourishment, taking turns of duty at the board. But the time was barely half gone when the meteor bell went off with a cacophony that filled the tiny ship with the space- man’s peculiar dread—pene- tration by meteors. “They took about one sec- ond to start up and grab their individual supply of ‘plasters.’ —They were lucky. They had nearly half an hour to watch the approaching cloud of particles on the screen, and eyen then, by some miracle, they weren’t AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION feed the reactor, and the _ only other place is out through really in it; all they caught was the tail end of the tail, if you follow me, something like passing through the tail nas rare) end, the faintest tip, of a comet.”’ “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said they were lucky, because that cloud of meteors was the cause of the next piece of unpleasantness; in fact, of an incident that can only be described as murderous. While | they waited, tensed and sweat- ing, they were penetrated four times within a minute, They had the preliminary plasters on in something like tweive seconds. It’s amazing how fast you can move, and — how accurately, when a few seconds delay might mean a singularly unlovely corpse in a disintegrating ship. But when at last they had the blazing sun, the bright stars, and the endless black vacuum of space all to themselves once more, there was a tidy amount of repair work to do, and a good deal of it was outside, with nothing but ropes, spacesuits, magnetic boots and goodwill, especially the latter, between them and eternity. 140 conmiclxoaolks.conn)