Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 41 — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

FLY BY NIGHT what you want. Only... it did not work. Or did it? Lately there seemed to be a sort of memory of a “holding his breath” effect. Not actually non- breathing so much as that ‘lifting’ feeling you get when you take a deep breath and hold it. Yet he knew he couldn’t hold his breath as long as he sometimes flew— half an hour or so. No, some- how he was controlling, with his mind, some sort of lines or beams of force that lifted and carried him. ““*What man can imagine, man can do’,” he quoted. “I sure have imagined it—by God Ill do it!” And then he’d realised how serious he was getting about this impossible thing, and go off into gales of laughter at such silliness. Then would sober down and start thinking about it again. *‘Damn it, I know it’s more than a dream!” he rebelled. “But you could never use it,” his other self jeered. “Think how people would gawp at you and the awful publicity and the notoriety if you were ever seen flying!” 49 For this was his fear, born and nurtured in childhood when he was a too-tall, too- skinny kid who couldn’t keep up with the other boys in their strenuous boyhood games. They taunted and ridiculed his weakness. The white-hot irons of their unthinking child- ish jeers and sneers and mock- ings had seared deeply into his sensitive soul. A horror he’d never been able to erase. This morning his mind in- sisted on trying to solidify the knowledge of the technique he knew in his dreams. Just how had he controlled those forces with his mind? Just what was the pattern of thought neces- sary? They were just on the fringe of his consciousness. It made him mad that he couldn’t answer. It made him even madder that he tried to answer them. He pounded his fists on the chair arms. “I’m a stupid, dumb fool!” he called himself . . . but it didn’t do any good. For he saw himself again, lying on the ceiling, and felt the jar when he landed, and the breaking of the bed. Then he heard again the laughter of comiclooks.conrn