Astounding British Edition, May 1953 — page 9: what you’re looking at

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

and across the night lights of the city. There were certain things you had to accept as impossible. The foundation of science was built upon the concept of the impossible as well as the possible. Perpetual motion. The alchemist’s dream—as the alchemist dreamed it, anyway. Antigravity— All man’s experience in attempting to master nature showed these things could not be done. You had to set yourself some limitations. You had to let your work be bounded by certain Great Impossibles or you could spend a lifetime trying to solve the secret of invisibility or of walking through a brick wall. Or trying to build a magic carpet. He stood up and walked to the window. There had been growing all afternoon a sense of faint panic. And now he identified it, Where could you draw the line? It had to be drawn. He was sure of that. It had been drawn once before, quite definitely. In the 1890s they had closed the books. Great minds believed then that science had encompassed the universe. All that was not known belonged to the Great Impossibles. Then had come radium, the Roentgen tube, relativity, cosmic rays. The line vanished. Where was it now? A few hours ago he would have said he could define it with fair accuracy. Tonight he did not know. He went to bed. After an hour he got up and called Kenneth Berkeley. The clock said almost midnight. It didn’t matter. “Berk,” he said into the phone. “Mart. I’ve just been thinking. The whole crowd will be going through Dunning’s lab and his library, What’s the chance of you getting me out there first thing in the morning? Just the two of us. Id like to beat the crowd.” “I think I can arrange it,” said Berk. “Keyes wants each of you to work as you wish. Til tell you more about that to- morrow. I'll call you as early as I can.” It rained during the night, and when Berk called for Mart in his car, the city was dismal with fog, lessening even further the reality surrounding them. “Keyes wasn’t much in favor of this,” said Berk as they drove away from. the hotel. “It’s liable to make some of the others mad but frankly, I’m sure convinced that NOISE LEVEL A « < Pb aa ye - ie: a PA Mi Ae : EAD shades ¥ + WRG aha se tk Ree bag pk SA oy pS cane eM aN vu “je J th JB) ie Sadr &