Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/107

Rh EMEESHEE turned his vast, horrible head slowly upon them as Saba's sandaled feet sluffed on the smooth plastic of the floor. Within Lane's breast a terrific fear of the unknown, an overwhelming repulsion struggled to send him screaming and shuddering back into the darkness outside the alien luxury of this roost of terror. For Eemeeshee was truly no longer a man, if ever his race had been man. His flesh lay within the crystal complexities of the machine as though it were an ugly dough kneaded by some alchemist into a shape to frighten off the devil, and left there by his own fearful hands refusing the work. A great white sluggish pulsing thing, surmounted by two vast pillars that were his arms stretched out along the dial and switch banks of the mechanism that was his immortal home. And the face that he turned on them as his sausage-like, two-foot-long fingers ceased their slow spidering glide along the instrument panel—that face that surrounded those eyes was itself enough to give a weak man instant madness. But the terror of the eyes was the thing that held Lane and Stevens motionless though every instinct shouted "flee." Those eyes that surmounted that vast twist of white flesh and had watched the world for unknown centuries, held all the weariness and boredom; all the melancholy and hopelessness; all the alien, cold unhuman thought that is not thought as we know it. All the things that man does not believe in, were in those eyes. A lonely, terrible ugliness of spirit sat in that face. An ugliness of spirit that is the lack of identity, of brotherhood, with any other living thing. Lane read in the terrible face with its foot-long nose hooked and sickeling upward over the chin, that this being had never realized there was a kinship between him and any living thing. He was an alien entity, whatever his antecedents may have been. Eemeeshee did not speak, he only looked incuriously upon the two young Indian men, and his eyes inspected them as one inspects a fly upon a window pane with the utmost disinterest and careless acknowledgement that the fly has life. The ego that is man's normal possession shrank within Lane, and a vast sensing of cold aloneness came to him from Eemeeshee.

Saba raised her voice in a long sing-song of gibberish. It was an ancient language, a parent to the Quemaya, but not one that was understandable to either of them. These awful eyes rested for a brief moment on Saba, and Saba nodded and was gone.

They were alone with the terrible regard of those alien, inhuman eyes. They knew that he could read their thoughts of him with the mech with which his fingers slowly toyed. They knew that their thoughts of him were not complimentary, but how can a man think differently of what he sees than he does think? Lane knew this thing was getting off on the wrong foot, some way, but the key to making of this meeting with Eemeeshee anything but a terror was beyond him.

At last, when the long silence and slow regard of the eyes was becoming unbearable, a ray lanced softly down upon them from the touch of his sausage-long finger upon a dial, and a soft flood of thought swept into them from Eemeeshee. A vast understanding of this being flooded Lane at this touch of the mind upon his own. The thought queried softly, almost timidly, "Who and what are you? What do you want of Eemeeshee?"

Lane's spirits rose now. Mentally he resolved to make a real effort at being understood. Carefully he began at the beginning of their trouble in Butte; of the Red Legion and what it meant; of what they had been taught by the old men of their tribe about Eemeeshee; of how Indians had always prayed to Eemeeshee and had been rewarded with oblivion and a futility of nonentity for their worship. All these thoughts of themselves and what they hoped Eemeeshee might do for them mingled swiftly into a vast message to that atrophied might.

ANE knew he was making an impression, for a pale pink flush suffused that colorless great moon of horribly flattened flesh that was a face, the great nostrils opened a little, the lonely, world-weary eyes lit up with interest and again the meaning flowed into him from Eemeeshee.

"What is this people's power who have driven you forth, and why do you think they're a threat to me?"

Lane leaped upon his opportunity.

"Eemeeshee, these alien ray people come from afar, they have killed all the machine dwellers wherever their rays have touched. There is no reason to think they will not kill you too, when they know where you