Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/114

114 understand it was not self interest to kill a doctor, that one's own health depends on the health of medicine as a whole.

They had succeeded in their intention to wipe out all life in the sparsely inhabited caverns in the eastern states and had now progressed into the western caverns. Some few thousand people, intent on wiping out all life in an area bigger than the surface of the world—and succeeding due to the potent destructive power and vast range of the Elder race's weapons.

That was a terrible, a strange, weird scene: the death of these two murderous creatures. Standing before Eemeeshee, his vast form writhing like a great pudding bag, his great face with its long, upturned, outlandish nose peering down into their mind pictures augmented in a dozen screens before him, and behind the two terrified men the tall grey-white figures of the spider men, a dozen of them towering about the two men holding them there before Eemeeshee's great crystal machine home.

Eemeeshee's mind growing angrier and angrier as he summed up their bloody attempt to inherit the whole cavern world for themselves. Some million people, of the diverse and rather wonderfully informed kind that one finds sparsely scattered through the endless windings and tiers of the cavern world; men like Eemeeshee who had lived in the machines for centuries; men like Tch Tch who had evolved into a separate form of life, but whose clever fingers knew many a secret of the Elder science; people like Saba, who coupled with natural intelligence had had a lifetime of study under some centuries-old creature like Eemeeshee to become what man has always called the "sorceress" and worshipped; and the treasure hunters of the caverns—many, many of these they had killed by slow torture, wresting from their unwilling minds all their hard won secrets of the places where the Elder stores were hidden.

HE steady and successful progress of this attempt to inherit the whole ancient secret of the caves for one small group of a few thousand slavish robot-minded warriors, and their half dozen leaders such as the foremost, Deliar Da Sylva, dismayed and frightened Eemeeshee. But also gave him the courage of deperation.

Softly he pressed the stim button, lanced down a generously pleasant ray of stim-control upon the minds of the spider men, commanding them to kill these two bloody-minded captives. The gentle-natured spider men, without being able to help themselves, closed their long-fingered hands about the necks of these two from the far European Hellpits—and their breath soon stopped struggling to bring life to their bodies. Eemeeshee wanted the spider men to understand that all who lived bloodily as these men must die, and he wanted them to learn how to kill. The spider men left his presence wiser by a terrible intent to wipe out the Da Sylvas of the cavern world.

Lane looked down upon Eemeeshee's blue and gold and crystal nest of ancient technical wonder, the glory of its beauty marred—or enhanced—by the contrast of the tall weird spider men, dragging out the dead bodies of the two captives—and silently approved of Eemeeshee's resurgence of forgotten spirit. Had Lane been able fully to analyze the craven fear which had made Eemeeshee do this deed, and deprive their Legion of much needed information in one savage and fearful impulse to destroy an enemy, he would not have felt so approving of Eemeeshee. That ancient and complex brain was not a man's. Reading those minds had given Eemeeshee a terrible fear of this enemy that he must fight or die. He would fight, yes, because he must.

Lane turned to Saba, where she stood beside him watching the incongruity of the ancient wonder work and the peculiar and ugly life that moved about the mighty beauty of Eemeeshee's chamber.

"These allies of ours are not pretty, but they seem efficient."

"Eemeeshee should have preserved those lives for future reference," was all Saba said, and Lane did not notice her preoccupation. For Saba had noticed the craven fear in Eemeeshee and realized that all was not well with the great, pink-and-white and enormously ugly baby who was their leader. She inwardly resolved to keep an eye on future mental processes of that intricate and depraved brain that she served. Eemeeshee was a coward, she realized.

Eemeeshee's plans moved forward, driven by the desperation of Eemeeshee's full realization that the enemy was determined to wipe out all the older intelligents of the caverns, to have the whole cavern world as their private possession. Such an immense concept of selfishness had never been