Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 38: what you’re looking at

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

36 There is a place inside the collarbone, near the neck, and consciousness goes out like a blown candle in a matter of seconds if you drive the knife in there. If your burden is too much to bear, as Merriam’s was, and Brewster’s. And Jeff Cody’s. All around him in the air, like an eyeless, invisible staring, uneasy tele- pathic minds were swinging around toward him. A ripple of panic was running through the cavern. Some- thing, somewhere, was wrong. But Cody had controlled his surface thoughts skilfully. He had not let himself really see the knife, really think clearly of that spot inside the collarbone, until now. Now he drew a deep breath and let the wonderful release of the thought flash bright and clear through the cavern. They couldn’t stop him. No- body was near enough. He was free. “So the Inductor won’t work,”’ he said aloud. “So you can’t induce tele- pathy in a human mind. But there’s one way to stop telepathy!” He took one long sidewise step and the knife was in his hand. With two fingers he felt for the ridge of his col- larbone, to guide the blade. ‘Let the Inductor fail,” he thought. “Let the pogrom come. Let the race die. Turn loose Apocalypse. It’s not my problem now!” Generations ago, the Blowup had posed the problem by mutating sub- species of telepaths. And there had been a time when the Baldies hoped that eugenics could solve that prob- lem. But not any more. Time was too short. Even though the telepathic function was carried by a dominant gene, there were too few Baldies. Given enough time and enough intermarriage, the world might become peopled entirely by telepaths, but there was not enough time. The only answer was the one ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION which Baldies had been seeking for years now—a mechanical device, an Inductor, which would induce the telepathic power in a nontelepath. It was theoretically possible. The minds of the greatest scientists on earth lay open to the Baldies. And here in the caves the electronic cal- culator could solve the problem, given enough data. But this problem it had not completely solved, for there was not enough data, in spite of the treasure of knowledge stolen from hundreds of brilliant, seeking, non- Baldy minds. Still, it was the answer. If every man and woman in the world could become a telepath, simply by wearing a compact mechanical device, the miracle could be worked. The last barriers would go down. The fear and hatred nontelepaths had for Baldies would vanish—not instantly, but it would dissolve little by little in the great sea of interacting minds. The walls, the difference, would vanish, and with it the fear that relentlessly forced the coming of the pogrom. But the Inductor was still a theory. The calculator had not yet solved that problem, if it ever would. Instead, it had given the answer to the basic problem in an unexpected way, coldly mechanical and terribly logical. The problem could be solved, the calcula- tor said. Destroy all nontelepathic humans. The method? It searched its vast memory-library and found— Operation Apocalypse. There was a virus which, by means of certain stimuli, could be mutated into a variant which was air-borne and propagated quickly. It destroyed human neural tissue. There was only one kind of human neural tissue it could not harm. Telepaths were naturally immune to the mutated virus. No Baldy knew what the virus was, or the method of mutation. Only the connicloooks.c© nn