Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

vagaries of an over-zealous mind. Mr. Chambers tock it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing through the pages. For a moment the nee of happier days swept over him. Then his eyes found the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago ~ that the very words seemed strange and unreal: Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth, yes, even of the universe. Millions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets, and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were... . Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slp away like a column of sand... . - His eyes followed down the page: _ Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself, but only with matters form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed. But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we vues an insight into the possibility and probability that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy. If a pin 1s thrust tnto a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow 1s two dimensional, the pin three dimen- sional. Yet both occupy the same space. Granting then that the power of men’s minds alone holds this umverse, or ai least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and en- vision other minds on some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelli- gence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we hve in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth. He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the University, had been forced into this hermit life. A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America—might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drug- store corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know 122 COMM|COOOLKSaE© m