Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 43: what you’re looking at

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

7 AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION are the immortals and those _who are merely sensitive. The mutation is a curious one, and Savigny—the French biologist—is still trying to classify it. It’s super-recessive and yet becomes unexpectedly dominant under certain cir- cumstances. It won’t repeat in the next generation, even if both the parents are im- mortals, but it sometimes appears in the children of people who have as little as one sixty-fourth sensitive an- cestry. If both parents have the tinge and it shows up, it will cause an immortal. If only one—then an ordinary sensitive. Or, more often, neither. Those whose muta- tion is carried single, die like anyone else, but we who are immortal have our minds so stepped up by it that we can control what is normally subconscious activity—the heart’s beating, the accumu- lation of aging products in the body tissues. Montague, the fortune teller and con- jurer, is an example of an ordinary sensitive. 42 ““The two parties among the sensitives are quite different. You can only understand them and their existence if you realise that the human race is slowly developing superconsciousness—self- awareness as-a racial entity. Thus you can compare the vast mass of the people to the individual cells of the brain, each a repository of sensation, information, et al.— useless without some form of linkage and co-ordination. Ordinary sensitives might be said to represent the cells which will eventually enable superconsciousness to pro- vide that linkage. We, the immortals, represent the main drives of :the race. We brought men out of the caves. Yes! We weren't true immortals then, of course, only very long-lived. Such people still occur in primitive tribes in Africa and else- where—witch doctors, usually, who live to be about three hundred years old. The first immortal, properly speaking, was born less than a thousand connicloooks.comn