Argosy, September 1955 — page 133: what you’re looking at

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

THE CHRYSALIDS 131 ‘ voyages ships turned back for fear they would never reach any place where they could water and provision. They came home, saying that they thought the alternation of Badlands and Black- Binds must continue to the end of the earth. = But they don’t. The Badlands do come to an end, but the world 4 beyond them isn’t civilized, it isn’t civilizable, it’s more like the Fringes. They don’t have any sense of sin to stop deviation. The _ people are Mutants, and unashamed of it; it doesn’t seem to worry kde when children turn out wrong. In other parts you’ll find a deviational form that thinks that et is normal, and has suppressed all other deviations. There’s one _ tribe where all the men and women are hairless, and think that _ hair i is the devil’s mark. Another where they all have white hair and pink eyes. Some of them think it is right to have webbed ye ingers and toes. Some places, no woman who is not multi- _ breasted is allowed to have children. je __ Wherever the people were friendly, we tried to talk to them. - Sometimes you couldn’t understand anything of it, but more often, after you’d listened a bit, you’d begin to find that a lot of the _ words were really like our own, but spoken differently. And we’d _ find out some strange, disturbing things. One was that they all have much the same legends of the Old People as we have—how nt A Re they had machines that could fly, how they used to build cities ae: that floated on the sea, how a person could speak to any other * a Nihon _ person, even hundreds of miles away, and so-on. | But there was another thing, too. Most of them, whatever they were like—whether they had seven toes, or four arms, or hair all over, or six breasts, they all thought they were the true image of _ Of course, that seemed very foolish at first, but when we found ee x. more and more kinds just as convinced of it as we were ourselves, it began to worry some of us a bit. : _ We’d never thought about it before. When you are at home, oe don’t, because everyone is quite convinced ; but after you’ve | Re to say to yourself: what real Leen Gk have we got about the true _ image? And you find it all comes from Nicholson’s Repentances— Fe and ‘he admits that he was writing some generations after Tribula- _ tion started, so rae a Nicholson himself wasn *t a true image, a _ but only thought he was . Uncle Axel paused for a minute or more before he added, ‘‘ Do _ you see why I’ve been telling you all this, Davie? ” ____I saw well enough, but I resisted admitting it. I was reluctant _ to allow the flaw in the foundation of all that I had been taught. io «(I'm telling you that a lot of people saying that a thing is so doesn’t prove it,” went on Uncle Axel. “I’m telling you that nobody, nobody can know what the true image is—they can only _ think they know.” He turned, and looked steadily at me again. ~ comicbooks.comn