Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 72 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION Is this to be my reward, grandfather? To be able to recognise valour when I see it, without being told by a pub- licity man that it was there? I was the only passenger scheduled. MacNab punched the button to close the doors of the shuttle after I had thrown my luggage aboard. He had the barest words for me, and those given grudg- ingly. He was tall and slender, with grey hair still thatched thick upon his head, and coming out of his ears and nostrils. Scotsmen do seem to run to hair growth as they get older. His uniform was surprisingly neat and meticu- lously patched. There was no sign of the Venus weed twitch, the Moon dust squint, the Martian chemo vein burst, the Earth alcohol eye glaze. But my job was not to wonder about people. My job was to interpret and enforce government regulations. I sat down in the nearest seat and took out a sheaf of new regulations. I tried to make sense out of the gobbledegook in which the regulations were written. I pulied an analysis sheet out of my brief case to parse thesentences oftheregulations. Maybe if I could separate the clauses from the phrases, I could begin to grasp the idea. Hell—I couldn’t even find a subject or a predicate. The boys who wrote these regulations should go far. I found myself wondering if the mine [ had just in- spected really would destroy the explosives I had con- demned. I wondered if the company would consider the cost of the condemned ex- plosives to be of greater value than the lives of the men it employed and use them anyway. I found myself wondering why MacNab didn’t start the ship. He seemed to be pawing at levers and jabbing at buttons. Why didn’t he take off? . I went back to the regula- tions. The first sentence had thirty-two phrases in it. I got as far as determining that phrase seventeen modified the meaning of phrase three, and 100 commiclooolkks.com