Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

ERRAND OF MERCY “Kill me. Please kill me. Bring your kind and kill us. Hunt us, destroy us, save us from this unending torment. You can kill us; you have the power. We cry for quick death. We are weak—we cannot bear our fate.” When he had absorbed this shock, Lewes thought, halt- ingly: ““Explain—tell me.” Again the torrent of emotion. “In the deeps there are yet thousands of us left, and all diseased. There is no exception. The circle of con- tagion was completed long ago. The virus swarms in our blood and causes agony be- yond endurance. There is no respite. We can cause matter to move, by mental power, if we can observe it. We cannot see the virus. If we could, we should cast it from us by wrenching out our own hearts. We are steeled to that. Every year we are forced to wrench out our hearts. I have just done so. I have just killed my own young.” 89 The anguish which pulsed from the monster’s mind was almost insupportable. “That we should be so at the mercy of instinct! But ingrained racial habits run far deeper than reason, and reason is helpless against them. Each year the mad season comes. We are possessed. We climb the rivers to spawn in the shallows. Then we return to the sea. When the madness has passed, we have to undo what we have done, annihilate what we have created. It is a duty, an errand of mercy. *“We must spare our young what we suffer. For they are born with the disease in their blood. Yet not until they begin to mature does it mature also and start to grip pnd pain them. They are small and physically weak. We can kill them with a blow. But we cannot kill ourselves so quickly and easily. That we, too, could have died in infancy! Some of us are driven to crawl ashore to starve. But that brings death comiclooks.corn