Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 72 — page 80: what you’re looking at

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

THE WAY | AM acceleration on the small of my back. We were on our way. The engines were soon off again and we floated, un- powered, in the direction where we would pick up the orbit of Mars in nine months’ time. There was nothing to do; the ship needed no control- ling until then. We just sat and talked, or rather Grant talked most of the time. He wanted so much to help me. It became an ob- session with him to tear down the barrier and break my conviction that I was finished as a pilot. “Before this journey is through you'll be as good a pilot as you ever were, and you'll have me to thank for it,” he would say, as if he expected the very repetition of words to have a hetero suggestive effect on me. But I knew he was wrong. All the stuff he kept on pouring out, all the rationalisa- _ tion, was just so much noise. It didn’t touch the root of the thing. I knew the reason why I was this way, but that didn’t make it any easier to convince myself. 79 After the first few weeks I began to try to avoid him. Under the circumstances that took some doing. I found a crate in the cargo, which made life a bit more bearable. I would lie there for hours, dulling the pain in my mind with the fiery stuff. But Grant would always turn up sooner or later and start talking in his friendly, per- suasive manner. } He did not mention the liquor, but I knew from the way he looked at me that he did not approve. He just went on talking, trying to be helpful and to save my soul— when all the time I knew that I was eternally damned. We were almost three months out when he said: “I don’t suppose you feel like a bit of exercise, Molson? The rear view camera is acting up. Somebody will have to go outside and take a look at it.” He wasn’t ordering me to do anything, just talking in his usual, amiable way, but suddenly I felt that I couldn’t do anything else but offer to tackle it. It was just a routine job, replacing the lens of the comiclooks.corn