Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/123

Rh Now again Saba called into the augment mech her command, "Advance!" and again the levers plunged forward, their cars lifted slightly and slid forward faster, faster, into the heart of the web of caverns where laired that evil acquisitiveness, that cruel, fleshy female thing Lane had seen for short moments before the attack began.

S THEY slid silently forward in the darkness Lane was thinking of a newspaper item he had seen a month before of a treasure of two billion dollars of bullion hidden by the Japanese in the waters of Tokyo bay. He connected their victory, inexperienced and inept as it had been, with this item in the papers. For if ray personnel and information and power was as all-embracing and wonderfully powerful and intelligent as some devotees of the secret rays say (and believe) he knew that two billion would not have lain there all that time it did. Too, if such as this Da Sylva had been doing her duty by the allies, instead of plundering along underground, she could have been in Japan; her rays would have seen this information of the two billion dollars bullion sunk in the harbor, and she would have acquired the money, for no one but the Japs knew it was there for months. He wondered how many proud and lazy ray were cursing their timid failure to invade Japan with the surface soldiers, when they read this item of missed loot in the papers.

But then, it might have been some loyal young fighter like Saba who had uncovered the stuff for the Yank soldiers. And it might have been their absence from the home caverns that laid the ancient place open to such as Da Sylva, their absence fighting on the front; unseen, unknown, unheralded—but fighting with the vast ancient mystery mech for their country which did not even know they existed. It was hard to reconcile their activities, if that was true, with their continued deprivation of such medically valuable information from suffering people the world over. This ancient secret, this time-forgotten monopoly, why did it go on? Lane looked back at Eemeeshee, snoring peacefully in his dream, and knew why.

Because those time-pampered, God-mech raised creatures who should have been like Gods; worshipped pleasure—were raised never to make an effort by the ancient all-providing living machines.

The Elder race must have had some stimulus from nature or from their own wisdom that the past of such as Eemeeshee did not have in their life. Else they would not have been the Elder race; they would have been such as Eemeeshee, and they would never have produced the mech that had made life so easy for Eemeeshee, and there would have been no Eemeeshe, and no necessity for struggling against the more evil groups of the caverns.

S THEY advanced, fire from the remaining outposts kept harrassing them. Not hitting much, but dangerously close, firing blindly as they were through Eemeeshee's opacity ray making the rock impervious to the penetray vibrants. Slowly, steadily, they found the source of those rays and wiped them out with flashing blasts of flaming energy through the resisting rock.

They could hear Da Sylva screaming thought-orders, her thought-voice like a banshee's anger in her desperation. It was a good feeling to hear that cruel voice facing death. It was good to know she was not relishing the last pangs of some long-tortured "creep" or slave human worker of hers.

At last she, too, fell unconscious under a bolt from Saba's ray, and the far outposts fell silent. They could hear over the telaug beams their frantic thoughts as they scrambled into the gravity defying hemispheres and shot away along the great cavern roads. Half their forces set out in pursuit, the other half made sure there were no traps, and took over Da Sylva's central chamber and her own garishly revulsive self.

Eemeeshee looked long and ponderingly upon Deliar Da Sylva's sleek, yet gross and revolting body. Her fate, what should it be, what could he do to punish her, as Eemeeshee's enemies were supposed to be punished of old time?

The others under Saba's swift thought-voice supervision took over the controls of the central master rays and swept the whole cavern labyrinth with a vast crisscross of seeking rays to make quite sure that the fight was really over and no man lying out in the dark for one overturning treacherous