Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 54 — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION thermometer? Forget it. It’s fixed—can’t show any- thing else but sixty-five de- grees. You really amused me with the telephone. It’s a perfectly ordinary ’phone, but it can be connecied to a wire recorder which auto- matically plays back anything you say to it. I’m afraid my agent often lied when he said I was out of town. I was just as often behind the walls watching you. Not all the time: I have to eat and sleep. I have my own ways in and out of this place—re- member, I built it.” “Just for me?” “Just for you, little man, my pet, my life-long enemy.” “What have I ever . “Tl tell you. It goes back a quarter of a century, to Pavlov’s happy days, and when Dr. J. B. Watson was founding the Behaviourist school. Remember his fear conditioning experiments with a baby—Albert ? Watson kept striking a heavy steel bar just behind the baby’s head until Albert was scared and crying—he was only eleven months old. Having estab- lished his terror of the noise, 60 Watson kept striking the bar every time Albert tried to play with his pet, a white rat he loved. The fear reflex was transferred to the rat. And so Albert lost his little friend— he became terrified, not only of white rats, but also of rabbits, cats, dogs and any- thing of a furry nature, in- cluding sealskin coats, cotton wool, and even the hair on Watson’s head. You copied those experiments, didn’t you, little man?” “‘I—er—did some work of the sort.” “You copied them on me. Charles Weir my name was then, and I was not a year old. You charged my whole nervous system with fear of this and of that. You made me the nervous wreck I’ve since always been. I don’t know what happened to AI- bert, nor what he felt about it, but I know what happened to me and how I feel about it. What have you ever done to me, you ask. I ask—what had an innocent baby ever done to you?” | Sweet was white and shaking with anger. There was a rim of saliva on his twisted lips. commcloooks.com