Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 150: what you’re looking at

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

YOU DO TAKE They shut up like clams. Harry was white, rigid, polite and efficient—Dick was sulky, quiet, tired and ill, due to nervous prostration plus the need for his missing pills. So Tom let it lie, hoping they’d learned their lesson. They all wanted another few hours rest, and hoped they’d get it this time before the long, fretful acceleration back to the Lunar path. “Nothing else happened, of either human or spatial origin. But as time approached for the attempted return, it was found that Dick was ‘really ill and likely to be a lot worse if they ever reached the top of their planned jump. He lay on his bunk, watching Harry fitfully with red-rimmed eyes as still as a snake’s in a pallid, sweating face. Tom took one look at him and wrote him off philosophically as an active crew member for the next few days. He fixed the straps of the engineer’s bunk with his own hands, warned him of acceleration zero, and told Harry to follow him overhead to con- trols. He says he prayed as they fixed their own straps, 149 IT WITH YOU ~ ™ and very likely he did; that gimcrack rocket on that kind of climb needed something a little more than natural law to get it there. “The red light flashed in both cabins as the automatic took over. Ten seconds later the jets fired with a shuddering crash and the ship creaked in torment. Tom and Harry | blacked out several times before the pre-set dropped them back to three and a quarter G’s and they could almost breathe without gasp- ing. Even so, they lay pressed on their backs for the next five hours, watching in dumb relief as the flight screen marked up steadily the foulest synergy they’d ever been on. “They made it, obviously, otherwise I shouldn’t be tell- ing you this tale. But Tom said it was nothing’ short of a miracle. When at last the deafening, nerve-shatter- ing whine had ceased and they were coasting quiet and weightless back on the long Lunar drop, they were both very sick men indeed. It was a long while before they got — up to make some manual comiclsooks.com