Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/110

 the long pale penetrays, she leaped, to one of the tremendous weapons and sent the vast vision beam flying along the enemy ray paths for their source.

Horror struck into Saba, even the Saba who had experienced all the horror and terror that God brains could conceive in their synthetic adventure records. For the thought that flowed back to her along these conductive, teleaugmentive vision beams; that leaped out at her from the great vision screen: that thought was not human. Humans the men looked like, but what lived beneath their skulls made even Saba shudder and start back in fear and trembling.

They were things sent by a greater thing, a thing she had not met before in her limited life—and Saba had no time to analyze why these apparently normal appearing men were so luridly, so evilly different from men in their minds. She had no time for flinching, and Saba, seeing the enemy that had followed the caravan of fleeing Indian men, that had paused as the road led into territory unknown to them, that had been feeling their way along under the great mass of rocks that was their sky closer and closer to Eemeeshee ever since they had left familiar territory, acted.

They felt for an instant that terrible nearness of death they had brought to so many in their life. Then they died very quickly.

The horror that Saba had felt when she had seen and heard their thought upon the vision screen made her sear the bodies of those human beings until there was no more horror to hear from the minds, nothing to see, only a scorched, burnt, flaming, smoking place where their ray cars had been. On the cavern road where their wheeled ray mech had drawn up in line to steady the screens for firing sight, to lay down a blanket of accurate fire, now was only many scattered bits of smoking metal.

NKNOWING why the attack had ceased as suddenly as it had begun Lane and Stevens stood there, looking at the strange spectacle of the great soft worm-like body of the vast Eemeeshee turned into a raging, writhing, stricken creature.

Midway of the long softness had appeared a great burned hole where a ray had drilled him, and one of the long soft fleshy arms was cut nearly in two midway from the soft billows that were his shoulder. Lane could not help thinking as he watched that mayhap the rays who had struck at Eemeeshee had done him more of a service than a harm, for the lassitude that seemed a part of him had also been sheared away by the sudden hiss of the burning rays.

That great white thing reared upward and the unwounded arm moved with a terrible angry swiftness here and there upon the keyboard of switches; the many keys like an organ keyboard; the many pedals that protruded near his feet. He pressed, now here, now there, and on the score of cubical screens that made up the greater part of the body of the transparent machine appeared swiftly scene after scene of the great empty underworld of unending tubes of highways, of tiers of vast empty chambers filled with their dust-laden complexities of machines and forgotten wealth. Farther and farther Eemeeshee searched for the source of the attack.

Finally he found the smoking series of spots where the enemy ray mech had drawn up for attack. Wonderingly he looked at it, and as he looked the soft voice of Saba could be heard explaining to Eemeeshee that she had found and slain the attackers already.

Now Eemeeshee sagged again and the temporary vigor that had flooded him passed away. He began to moan and weep like a whipped child.

A score of Saba's women and Saba swept into the chamber, their sandaled feet making swift whispers of haste and pity, and Eemeeshee's wounds were carefully washed and treated and bound up. Lane and Stevens stood through it all, an ignored part of the great vacant immensity that is always the atmosphere of the Elder caverns. At last Saba came forth from the transparent winding passages of the machine where Eemeeshee lay like the great pupa of some vast insect thing of the past that was presently going to hatch into a winged god but had certainly not done so yet.

Saba paused, her lithe, full woman's form holding a great golden basin of water on her hip, her arm draped with bandages, in her hand a pair of ancient scissors a foot long.

“Saba,” said Lane, seeing now his chance, “this occurrence proves something to me that I wish you and Eemeeshee might fully understand. That is: you need our