Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 63: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION b “Go on.” The old man watched him closely, eagerly. **... were really normal, but didn’t know it,” Patrick fin- ished, the idea seeming to him now to be less insane than when it first had come to him. Mr. Whittam relaxed the stern and eager tension of his face. His body, too, seemed somehow to flow from rigidity to soft comfort and ease. “You've got it, boy,”’ he said, quietly. “Just try and imagine a society where everyone com- municated with each other just by using their minds. - Then imagine the odd, dif- ferent person who started to draw pictures, say, with a bit of charcoal, and showed them to one of his companions. Think what would be said of a person like that, in a society like that where drawing was completely unknown. He’d be a freak, wouldn’t he? And anyone that did the same would be a freak, too. The fact that everyone in that society who had the use of their eyes and their fingers could do exactly the same sort of thing as the freak had done wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. The majority would still—in their own eyes, anyway—be the normal people, while the minority would be the different ones, ep) fo the freaks, or, if you like, the mytants.”’ The idea that had been so vast, so insane, so illogical, was made almost acceptable to Patrick by the old man’s theoretical parallel. Almost —but not entirely. “But in that sort of society you'd expect people to discard draw- ing; they’d got complete men- tal communication, hadn’t they? What would they want with drawings and stuff like that when they could get their ideas across much quicker and much more successfully just by thinking? They would- n’t need to be able to draw. But with humans it’s not like that. Plenty of people would be only too pleased to be able to use these—well, these normal powers if they’d got ’em. Who’d want to mess around with visors and stuff like that if they could get in touch with whoever they wanted just by using their minds ?” ““Ah,”’ said Mr. Whittam, leaning forward over the back of the chair. “Ah, but then supposing they didn’t know how to get in touch just by using their minds? Supposing, too, that they’d been brought up to think that stories about people who could do such things were a!! nonsense? comicloooks.comn