Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

The general sees the wreck of his armies and battle plans. He will lose the conflict, he knows it. So what can he do? Logically, there is only one thing he can do—surrender and avoid the debacle. But if he does that, then his glimpse of the future is false, for in that future he has fought and lost. So, apparently, he must fight just the same, but this time without the slightest hope of winning. Being human, he refuses to send his men to certain destruction. Being logical and intelligent, he wonders why, if he can change the future by refusing to fight, he shouldn’t win the war anyway. But if he engages in battle he will lose. He would have been happier operating strictly on his own. Human nature being what it is, it is impossible for a man to learn that something unpleasant is going to happen to him without trying to avoid it. A man consults a one hundred-percent.-correct clairvoyant. He learns that, in two days’ time, he will be killed in a road accident. So he goes home, locks the doors and refuses to venture near a road. He doesn’t get killed, and so proves what? That the clairvoyant wasn’t a hundred per cent. correct? AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION That each individual has the _ 3 power to alter the future, once M FAR OM SA ye ER ee) Phe eel G aa | ney he knows it,'and so make clairvoyancy a self-invalidat- ing science? Or that the very act of peering into the future introduces an unknown ~— element? Clairvoyancy, in that light, would be like picking a card, each card being a probable future, with the added com- plication that the very act of picking a card makes certain that the one picked isn’t the right one. But, even granting the ability to see into the future, clairvoyancy is one of the psionic talents that we are better without. Correction; that we simply cannot afford to have. No one can live with the absolute, certain, un- avoidable knowledge of the exact date of his death. No one can continue to work and hope and dream when he knows what’s going to happen to him. If it’s going to happen, anyway, then why struggle? Why work? Why hope and dream? But work, hope and dreams have lifted man from the slime and set his foot on the path to the stars. Man, with clairvoyancy, wouldn’t be man. E.C.T. comichooks.<on- —= eee