Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCiENCE FICTION © Winter saw it. At the time he thought, sententiously but sincerely, that the ways of gods should not be shown to men. He was yet to learn that Barker was no god, no knight in shining armour. Esther asked Winter an- xiously, the next day: “Is he reallyasblackashe’s painted ?” Winter was weary with the effort of telling half a story and making it sound like the whole story. “I know him better than any man alive,” he said, “‘and I can’t tell you. I’ve learned one thing from being with him that I ought to have known if he’d never lived. There’s no such thing as black and white. A creature who was wholly good or wholly evil wouldn’t be human, and if he was ever born we'd shut him up. ““Barker’s no saint and no devil, though often he’d seem like one or the other. I’ve seen him as brave as any man and as frightened as a school- girl. He...” “But was he as .. . cruel as the newspapers said?” “Oh, yes. A man like him had to be cruel.’’ Winter lit 26 another cigarette and went on telling what was true, but only some of the truth. “It’s net much use telling you about isolated acts of cruelty, for you wouldn’t see them. It would be like the things we read in any news- paper. Woman shuts child in dark room for twelve years. Schoolboys throw dog down quarry three times, pour kero- sene on it and set match to it. Man kicks sixteen-year-old > girl in stomach, sets fire to her dress and piles firewood on her. It would make us sick to see anything like that happen, but when we hear about it we just shake our heads and think about something else. “Barker was cruel, but there’s no point in telling you about it. You wouldn’t see him grinning because a man wasn’t dead after all, and could take another hour of torture. Even if he were naturally gentle and hated causing pain, he’d have had to make himself cruel. But he isn’t. The papers called him a sadist and they were right. On Mars he did all the things — that terrorists have always done—but terrorists haven’t COMICHOOXS.cOm