Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION activities due to ‘the influence of outside sources.’ “Out there, far away in the heavens, there are so-called heavy stars. By using spectro- scopes astronomers have found out how they come to be so heavy, but we don’t know why. From some un- known and remote part of space come the cosmic rays, powerful enough to mark a photographic plate even when it is exposed in darkness deep underground. We do hot know where they come from; we can only conjecture on their purpose and what they do. All that a scientist can confirm, with any degree of certainty, is that they do exist. “T have worked on virus: research for many years. I am not a doctor of medicine; I was a physicist before I started my serious research and, I teil you, there are too many things happening in the world today which cannot be explained by scientific for- mule, equations or practical experiment. And far and away the most important is the secret of the virus. A life-force hidden in a trans- parent chemical crystal and yet invisible. The riddle of the universe, with no clue or code leading to the answer.” 78 Peter had reached the un- escapable conclusion that the deadly properties of viruses were due to malignant in- fluences from outside the world we live in! Can present day science otherwise explain the ability of inanimate chem- icals to live and multiply? An infinitesimally small virus crystal, proved beyond doubt to be nothing but a combina- tion of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, even when diluted in a hundred million times its weight of water, will attack a living cell and multiply at a fantastic speed. Cattle plague, foot and mouth disease, polio, hundreds of plant diseases and some of the apparently incurable growths in human beings— all these are virus infections. Since the beginning of time how much have we lost to the virus attack? What incal- culable quantities of food- stuffs, livestock, how many men of genius or self-sacrific- ing doctors, how many priests and nurses have been doomed, how much mourning for dead friends, loved ones and blame- less children? By Peter’s cautious estimates mankind has lost a thousand times more to the virus disease than has been destroyed by all the wars in history. conmicloooks.corn