Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 41 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

THE PHOENIX NEST vacantly at the University grounds, he drew the soundest analogy of which his highly trained mind was capable. What was amnesia? It was loss of memory, loss of iden- tity. What caused it? It was caused by an emotional or physical shock. What emo- tional or physical shock more severe than those of death and subsequent rebirth! As a theory, it made sense! Stroth- meyer’s knuckles whitened, gripping the window frame. His eyes were shining. If the ignorance of an infant was no more than amnesia, then immortality was true! And it had always been true! A new-born human was an amnesia victim, transplanted to a strange environment, and so, unlikely to remember his former identity. But if the mind should return to a familiar body, like a battle- neurotic coming back to his home town, might not mem- ory return and immortality become conscious ? If Church- ill One should attract the mind of the true Winston Churchill, might not that mind be wakened to full 23 memory by its familiar physio- logical surroundings? Strothmeyer began to realise that the awakening of the two Churchills might demonstrate immortality in a way that Professor Knaut could not even envisage. Then he, Stroth- meyer, would be the true dis- coverer Of immortality. He stared out over the campus, not seeing the metal and stone figures of presidents, educa- tors, soldiers and scientists, but seeing himself walking on the checkered walks, a hun- dred years in the future. He saw Strothmeyer Two, or Strothmeyer Three, the dis- coverer of true immortality, the man who had combined the body and the mind, the man who saw great promise in the experiments of Knaut and his predecessors, but saw also that they were missing a most important point—the fact that the new body does not recreate the mind but is a magnet for the mind; that it draws the mind out of some other body, or out of space, and wakes it again to memory of its former identity, just as an amnesia victim may be connicloooks.comnn