Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/109

 all her time she was taken up ministering to the greedy laziness that was the mind of Eemeeshee. She had little time to think of other things in her life except Eemeeshee and his needs.

Now, suddenly, into her life of even tenor, of fixed and, to her, perfect habits, had come a turmoil of new factors. The ways of her life, the wishes of her soul, had that night turned into a new heated channel. The tall, strong, and grim-faced man, Lane, had made an impression on her vital inner self; a self that had not faced man in all reality, ever before. Only sometimes over the rays had she looked upon men far overhead—and mostly their thoughts were too simple and unbeautiful to interest her.

Saba knew, now, that no more would she content herself with knowing men from afar over the rays. She realized that from the fire of striving within the mind of the tall grim strangers, fleeing before a mysterior death, from the mind of Eonee Lane, their leader, and within the mind of the sleeker, stronger Stevens, that she would no more be content with the lazy empty life and luxury of pandering to the great appetite that ruled all this cavern, Saba was taking stock of herself for the first time in her life.

She had drifted with the calm currents of events, events that never happened here in the quiet dark, had accepted the half-life of this place too easily. Something had now been added which had transformed her selfish, lazy reflection of Eemeeshee's atrophied self-will to a sudden realization that she had been letting life go by while she too dreamed away everything that life might be in the luxury of the false sensing of what life was not of the dream mech.

About Saba where she leaned against her great old deliciously ornate vision mech in thought, watching the scene of Lane and Stevens before Eemeeshee, about her slept or dawdled some two score other women, of all ages. They were the harem which Eemeeshee kept in deference to custom among his kind, rather than for any real need or desire he had for them. There were few men in Eemeeshee's "court," for Eemeeshee usually detested men and their ambitions plaguing him to effort he did not desire to make. He banished the children of the place, if they were men, before they came of an age to make trouble. The old priest Watusojhe served as his advisor and general factotum. A half-dozen youths, children of the women, supposed to be children of Eemeeshee, but in truth fathered by the wanderers of the caverns—those men who spend their lives searching the endless labyrinths of the dark for the treasures that they sell to the space ships that come sometimes to certain customary places for this purpose. (The age-old custom of secrecy of the caverns forbids trade with surface men. Too, men of the surface world have little to offer that cavern people recognize as value. The rich, tremendous value of the ancient profuseness of productions of the vastly superior race make the poor values of surface man of little account.)

But Eemeeshee's solitary ways had given these women of his a hunger for human kind, and the strong youth and complex thought of these newcome Indians of modern surface educated ways was to them a wonderful thing. So it was that Saba and several others were watching the encampment and the scene within the crystal chamber over the ray mech, while the guard ways—which of old custom were supposed to be watched by someone always and which reached for many miles to the four quarters of direction—were now perfunctorily watched from a distance. On the screens, if they had looked, could have been seen the great rolling ray weapons in their ray-armored tanks sweeping nearer and nearer from the north.

But Saba was not thinking of attack, for there had been no attack in her lifetime.

Nor, in all Eemeeshee's centuries-old memory, had she noted in her reading of his mind any attack of importance for so many, many years. When the blazing bolts of energy flung themselves into Eemeeshee's crystal nest, there was little they knew to do about it. Warfare was the thing farthest from their minds as well as from Eemeeshee's thought.

VEN so, Saba had talked with the wandering treasure hunters, and knew a great deal about warfare by hearsay. In anticipation of such attack she had occasionally practiced with the great weapon beams that sat in ordered ranks everywhere about the great ancient dwelling place. And as she saw the searing bolts of deadly dis-fire come seeking them out over