Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

38 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION moved uneasily—something he had not thought of since he woke. If the Inductor failed, then—it would be his roblem again, the same old problem, which he had failed to solve. The dilemma which had sent him out to try to kill Jasper Horne. The respon- sibility that was too great for any man to carry after a while. Operation Apocalypse. The end of ail flesh— Very quickly he turned his mind from that thought. He reached out mentally with a sense of panic, while his arm tightened about Lucy. .(Would he have to kill her—her and their child? It may not come to that. Don’t think about it!) He searched for a concept intricate enough to drive the obsessive terror from his mind. The Inductor, he asked at random. What’s the theory? How does it work? Another mind leaped gratefully toward the question. It was Kunashi, the physicist. From beneath Kunashi’s Mute helmet came quick clear thoughts that could not quite conceal the anxiety in the man’s mind. For Kunashi, too, was married to a nontelepath. “You remember when we asked the calculator for a solution to our problem?” (The electrodes were being unclamped from June Barton’s head now.) ““‘We gathered all the data we could to feed into the calculator. We read the minds of human scientists everywhere, and coded all the data that could possibly be relevant. Well, some of that data came from Pomer- ance’s mind, more than a year ago. He wasn’t very far along with his theory then, but the key concepts had been formulated—the hypothesis in- volving mutation of nucleoproteins by resonance. The calculator inte- grated that with other data and came up with the simplest answer—the virus. It didn’t have the necessary data to follow the theory along the lines of the Inductor, even though both concepts depend on the same basic— resonance.” (Someone else was sitting down in the chair. The electrodes were being attached. Cody felt the growing distress and anxiety in every mind.) Kunashi went on doggedly, ““Pomer- ance is a biochemist. He was working on a virus—Japanese encephalitis type A—and trying to mutate it into a specialized bacteriophage.” The thought faltered for an instant and picked up again. “The reproduction of a virus—or a gene—depends on high internal resonance; it’s a nucleo- protein. Theoretically, anything can change into anything else, eventually. But the physical probability of such a change depends on the relative resonance measures of the two states— high for the aminoacid-protein chain, for example, and the two states of the benzene ring.” (Kunashi’s wife was sitting down in the chair.) “The change, the reproduction, also involves high specificity of the chemical substances involved. That’s the reason telepaths would be immune to the Operation Apocalypse virus, whatever it is. Now... now specificity can vary not only from species to species, but within the species, too. Our immunity is innate. The (will it work? will it work?) nucleo-protein of the Operation Apocalypse virus must have a high affinity for certain high- resonance particles in the central nervous system of nontelepaths. Such particles have a great capacity for storing information. So our virus would attack the information centers of the nontelepathic brain. ‘That affinity depends on resonance differential—and Pomerance’s experi- ments were aimed at finding a way to alter that differential. Such a method would make it possible to mutate virus- strains with great predictability and control. And it can also ‘be used to conmilclooolkks.c© nn