Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 86: what you’re looking at

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

THE STAR VIRUS just overwhelmingly right! He cannot possibly be wrong, and here lies the deadliest peril of all. He has spent years trying to track down, isolate and study the star virus, to experiment with possible deter- rents, antidotes and counter measures. But the diabolical cleverness of the star virus is unbelievable. It watches, it knows, it changes character- istics by mutating from one possible form to a different one, using other viruses as camouflage or controlling them like pawns in a game of chess. It looking for a needle in a haystack—it’s a matter of turning over haystacks at random and occasionally find- ing some easily explained object, a nail, a piece of barbed wire or the broken tang of a hayfork. I have never heard Peter speak in tones of exultation or dejection as his research ap- peared to progress or came to the end of another frus- trating blind alley after weeks of labour. Peter went steadily on, every step, the minutest detail of each experiment, all results, whether promising or abortive, carefully tabulated and filed. The star virus countered every move. Peter 85 isn’t even like. tried to outwit it in a number of ways. He would concen- trate on elaborate experiments using nearly all his apparatus, pretending to overlook a small project on the spinal cord of a kangaroo. He would run up to fifty different activities simultaneously, paying the greatest attention to efforts which he inwardly considered of little value. A few weeks ago he went so far as to repeat experiments which had proved sterile months or even years before—with results that were different although equally fruitless. The star virus could not be bluffed by tricks of this sort. Since then Peter has worked on the idea of a shield to filter out emanations from the red dwarf stars, but very little progress has been made. He could not assess the wave- length of the rays, and had suggested that they might operate on a frequency modu- lation basis. To try to jam the rays he has built a mixed ray projector, but it uses up a colossal amount of power and can be used only for com- paratively short periods. Whenever the astronomical tables indicated high inten- sities of radiation from the red dwarf stars we would conicbooks.conn |