Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION web of awareness reached upwards to the skies that he had never seen—the skies in which the robotplanes still soared with their fiery scream- ings and in which the great rolling clouds of war dust still billowed over ruins that once, long ago, had been Man’s strongholds. The creeping approach of conscious determination vi- brated along the strands of awareness. He turned slightly and saw that he was not alone in the Processing room. The little psychologist, Dr. Allard, stood beside him, looking up at him with great excitement in his eyes and something else, too, mirrored there. Was it— could it be awe? Conscious determination. It grew up within him slowly, advancing upwards with cau- tion, yet with strength also. It grew out of a lifetime of living in a society conditioned to accept war as a natural phenomenon, and it came, too, from a million memories that reminded him insistently of how continually tortured he had been because of his— difference. And now he knew what his differences were; knew that he was different not because he was ab-normal, but because the others were sub-normal. They—the others 74 —had chosen to follow paths that led them directly away from full realisation, away from ability to control and use the psi faculties that lay in embryo within them, and _which could have given the race its true manhood—or its true godhead. The determination shivered away the fragments of its un- certainty and became— purpose. The strands of awareness quivered and told him Of the shape of the world in much the same fashion as a spider, sitting at the centre of its web, might tell when a passing fly should chance to get itself entangled. He saw the multi- tude of things that his con- science had always told him must be wrong; he saw the injustices and the brutalities, and the vast blanket of in- tolerance that seemed to him the greatest of all these evils. For others that begat wars and quarrels, and international strife. And that same intoler- ance stemmed from the fact that Man had taken a path that led away from his full realisation, for with universal conscious control of the psi abilities such intolerance could never exist. And was it possible that conmicbooks,. conn * it was intolerance of — ‘