Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 50 — page 54: what you’re looking at

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

IT TAKES TWO mal sensitivity under which he was functioning. How- ever, the Sokkath battle fleet is another matter. They will certainly spot us.” Jarril said: “What about my mentalarm?” And with that question he knew that the last barriers were down. He actually accepted what these people had to say about their cul- ture. As to the commind— well, he could see quite clearly now just what that was. Hadn’t he felt the sing- ing hum in his mind, growing until shards of thought burst inside his brain, knocking him unconscious? Hadn’t he been completely deceived by an illusion so real that he’d actually felt the bite of his gun-butt and the sun on his neck? When a group cast off all their former primeval inhibitions, when they at- tained to some exalted per- sonal state wherein there could be no petty jealousy, no bickering, no _ festering animosity, then it was the next logical step to assume that from that group unity of consciousness a truly group mind arose. 93 With all the Academy training serving as a back- ground of integration, of pre- paring to work one with another smoothly and with no friction, Jarril could quite clearly see the implications of a freed mind. It was a sort of super- entity. And he had experienced it two ways. From the outside, subjected to its dominance, when he had been under the illusion. And from the inside, if only for a tiny span of time, just before he had blacked out. And, because he had come unheralded and unwanted into this tightly-organised community, he was about to betray it to the enemy. And the Sokkaths, he knew with sombre foreboding, would attack savagely and without mercy, destroying the settle- ment with one obliterating sweep of their weapons as soon as they picked up his brain impulses. He looked around for his mentalarm, which he remem- bered he had tried to. draw from its pouch during that hallucinatory period. Pulling comicloooks.comn