In science-fiction one of the many things an author can do is to take an established trend andcarry it on to extremities. Such stories are rarely good prophecy since they cannot foreseeother developements of the future which are most likely to modify the trend with which they aredealing. But such stories make good reading nonetheless and can be delightfully unpleasant —as in the present instance. AUDIENCE REACTION by Robert F. Young illustrated by Paul Orban While the first mass-produced telempathy sets represented a tremendous step in the evolution of mass-media they were handicapped by a number of serious technical flaws. It is one of the paradoxes of our civilization that those very flaws led to a form of art which remains unparallelled even to this day. The first sets for example while they were able to focus the fictitious background and general narrative trend of the sensual proved inadequate in thewore exacting field of characterization. The participator had to fill in the charactershimself give them names and supply them with sufficient detail to bring them to life. Virgiths quotAll The Worlds A Stagequot p. 23 HE MESMERIZER whirled faster and faster. It became a wild kaleidoscope a vertiginous swirl ofinterblended colors. There was the usual transitory blankness that preceded identicationthen— He was an escaped prisoner. He was somewhere in the deserted section of the City of the RedSands Mars. His name was— His name was— Richard Forrester He relived a brief flashback: he had been born on Earth. Not long after the death of hismother his father had been convicted of illegal experimentation and sentenced to the Martianpenal colony for life. His father had fled to the moon taking the boy with him and foundsanctuary with the Interworld Scientist League