Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
Cummings brought me to your mag. He is keeping me there. So
hold on to him. But, please tell him to forget all about
time and probe the mysteries of the infinitely large and
small, of interplanetary space, of future civilization and
future warfare.--Dale Mullen, 611 West Fifth, Topeka,
Kansas.
_The Effects of Cannabis_
Dear Editor:
I have sold magazines, written for magazines, and, now that
I have just concluded your April issue, I am editing
one--for myself. Specifically, one story, "Four Miles
Within." Inside of a radium mine! Chased by an amoeboid
body! Ooh!
Several years ago when I was a clinical chemist in hospital
service, the Roentgenologist, also a young chap, and a
surgical nurse and myself were so badly burned with three
grains of the substance enclosed in a lead capsule that we
were crippled for nearly a month. [No fair. Your experience
was with pure radium. It was only radium ore in the
story.--_Ed._] Imagine being four miles inside of the earth
exposed to radium "ore"!
And chased and pursued by a gigantic amoeba! Oh, oh! That
must have been my pet mother-of-vinegar that escaped. She
was hard to herd. She took after my dad's pet fish which
fell through a crack in a bridge and was drowned.
In passing, it is interesting to note that persons can
vanish "into" a plane surface; say, "into" a fifth
dimension. My instructor in trig. must have been all wet.
And Dr. Bird catches a man withdrawing "menthium" from human
brains with a "needle," without the use of either x-ray or a
trephine!
And then low forms of life such as crabs and alligators with
very highly developed scientific knowledge! A few issues ago
octopi were in the lead!
And those "space" ships! Mars must be an interesting spot.
And those Martians! Sometimes they are ant-like, and other
times worms, and again human freaks! (I still prefer the
silver-green messenger I saw on the stage twenty years ago.
He was a gentleman and a scholar and no one yet has improved
upon him.)
And those radio waves that can vibrate matter in a straight
line! One Jackson Gee vibrates it in two straight lines.
(Rather funny at that.)
And people disappear into an atom by taking pellets! They
take the pellets into their system and that shrinks or
expands them. How does the author calculate that in "Beyond
The Vanishing Point"? The pellets must contain cannabis
indica (hashish) I guess. Once upon a time I was suffering
from an acute attack of colic and was obliged to use an
anti-spasmodic. I took cannabis, and in the delirium that
followed I shrunk small enough to walk into a mouse-hole
into which I had seen a mouse disappear a few hours
previous. The mouse was there and looked like an elephant. I
awoke in a sweat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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