Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/101

Rh you speak. We know a few facts about the underworld. We would know more of this 'shell' of Eemeeshee's. Has Eemeeshee power? Can we go to him, as you have gone in the past? Will he teach us, help us to fight for the Red Legion? Will he show us how to work for the rights of the red men to life and a place to live? Will he help to make us strong again? These are the things we would know."

"I would tell you all these things. But it takes time, and words are very poor things with which to speak of things that the makers of the words did not know. It would be better if I took you straight to Eemeeshee myself. Then you would learn the answers to your questions and know the answers were true. I would not encourage you too much. But you are modern men. Things about Eemeeshee and his shell and about the wonders of the underworld may provide your minds with tools that to me would be useless. I am not a modern."

"You will take us to him, then?"

"Yes, my friends, I understand what you want. If it is not there where Eemeeshee still lives within his shell—it is nowhere!"

For a long time the group sat, staring into the flickering embers, waiting for the old man to talk. Now and then he would go on, then lapse into silence again.

"Eemeeshee has sat within a weird machine which he nor his fathers ever understood—and has not moved. The machine has fed him, protected him from all harm. It is that kind of machine. And all that time he has sat in possession of that fearful power which he has only occasionally used, according to legend. All that time the red men of earth were driven across the continent, have nearly vanished from earth. And Eemeeshee sat on, lazily paying no attention while his worshipping people died and vanished. He does not really think! But when we pray, sometimes Eemeeshee's (the machine's) long ears are out, and he hears the prayers of his red children. It is like the white man's radio; it hears across vast distances. But it hears only thoughts. And he cocks up these ears, sometimes, and then when he understands, he answers. Not because he wants to, understand. But because the mechanism of the machine makes the heard thought so strong that his own weak thought must obey. So we answer ourselves when we know how by making Eemeeshee hear us. Then, if it makes him work for five minutes, he is tired. He shuts off the machine; he is through. He may not turn the power into the magic ears for days, months or years. For he is not a thinker, this 'God' of ours. Those mighty things he could have done for the red men, he has not done, for he had no wish to do anything."

HY is he like that?" Lane's eyes were filled with the mysterious meaning of the old man's words, for Lane knew enough to know it could be so, exactly as Secumne said!

"Because Eemeeshee is a dreamer. A maker of his own dreams, and a dreamer of other's dreams, too. That machine in which he has lived so long no man knows when he entered—that machine can make dreams for the worm within it. It can also make those dreams one thinks one would like to dream—make them into vivid intricate and perfect patterns of life. Eemeeshee cannot read or write, has no knowledge of life. He has never worked, never moved a muscle except to please himself with the intricate pleasures of the living machine. He is not a man. He is a feeble creature of pleasure—a great bag of almost immortal flesh that lacks all interest in life as we live it. We are just the overhead scenery with him, which he can look at or not—as he pleases."

Stevens gave a long whistle.

"That is a revelation, Secumne. These new white ray from Europe who have conquered the cavern under Butte—are they like Eemeeshee? The white ray people of the east who have left the Indians in possession of their own caverns in the west—were they like Eemeeshee before they died at the European hands?"

"I cannot say these things for certain that you ask, O Son of Courage. I can say what I have heard whispered by the voices in the night. But you know how the voices lie to us; pretend to be spirits; pretend that everything they know is a secret and that only lies can be told us of the surface. You know how mad the voices are. Yet there are voices that are not mad—that are like your John Ahahne—good and smart men of the underearth."

"Go on. What have the voices said?"

"The voices sometimes say that this white newcomer ray people who have