Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION he had abandoned by concen- trating on the things he could do with his hands rather than those that he might do with his mind alone. No, for those tasks live and active men were needed. The force wave pulsed out and threaded its infinity of fingers through the miasma of the collective conscious and unconscious of humanity to find that most secret and deeply hidden part of it—the group conscience: that small voice that whispered on, al- most unheard, pointing out the basic wrongness of one certain thing and the basic rightness of another. Once, perhaps, such a con- science might have been a strong thing possessing strength and power in its tones, but now it was very far from being strong, and its tones were like the last echoes, barely audible, of things spoken ages before. For what was right and what was wrong had been supplanted, over the long years of propaganda and conditioning, by what was necessary and best for indi- vidual constituents of the group, but not for the group as a whole. And with this dis-unity had come the great trembling apart, the great weakening and the great, slow dying. The power of Patrick Vane acted as a titan amplifier. It took this small whisper that was so near, it seemed, to extinction, and it blossomed it upwards with Jack-and-the- beanstalk speed, making it rise from a whisper to a mutter, from a mutter to a chant, from a chant to a song, from a song to a thunderous roar that per- meated collective conscious- ness and unconsciousness alike with its great injunction: “‘The war will stop — Now!” There was no fear in any man’s mind, then, that an alien force had stopped the war. Nor was there fear that it was some trick of the enemy’s, for one knew, somehow, that one’s opponents were also aware that the war had—in that instant—stopped. In -Deep City factories, everywhere, switches were pulled and buttons pressed, and production belts stopped. And these things were done automatically by whoever happened to be there at the time, without waiting for the authorative word of the over- seer. The war did not come to a halt or slow down. One moment there was a state of comiclbooks.corn