Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 81: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION able to deflect them from their normal courses by a propor- tional angle. A random refer- ence in a scientific paper, drawing attention to the mass and electrical pecularities of virus crystals, had influenced all Peter’s subsequent work. He elaborated the pigeon ex- periments by using one of the mildly paralysing viruses. Using injection and electrical exposure, screening one side of the birds with opposing currents, he had made them fiy in circles so that they homed back to the laboratory, where he carried out further bloodstream and intra- muscular tests. After some months of patient work he discovered that uninfected and unexposed birds began flying in circles and, later, completely erratic- ally. The loss of a number of birds left some serious gaps in his experiments and blank spaces on his charts which pained his methodical mind. So he began injecting the pigeons with a delayed action drug, tracked them with a telescope for the two or three miles that they flew, then brought them back for exam- ination and correlation with the courses they had flown. Even under an electron micro- 80 scope there were no traces of disease in the muscle tissue Or nervous system of the wings—but some of the brain cells had been attacked. Peter, unlike the pigeons, was on the right track. He painstakingly extracted and analysed the virus crystals. Thechemical constituents were the same. The crystal was a different shape. It was a new and unknown type of virus with only slight resemblance to the one he was using in his experiments. The virus was mutating, following prece- dents completely unknown among chemicals but well established among living organisms. Peter faced up to the pos- sibility that he was confronted with an unknown evil. His work went on with a new objective in view. The viruses were the enemies of man, the guerillas waiting in ambush to pick off stragglers, the com- mandos making a lightning attack on some village or town, the organised battalions of the most powerful army in the world, immense, invisible, unsuspected and apparently invulnerable. “They are waiting,” said Peter. “They know. They have brains but no real comicloooks.conrn