Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/13

 "Now, the long vanished residents of these caverns had once been numerous and wealthy in the products that immortal minds which had conquered the problem of death could give. The God race, long ago had 'ascended into the blue of heaven in their fiery chariots,' the nomads told each other in the torch-lit darkness, as they gazed wonderingly about them at the machinery whose uses even the wisest man has not yet guessed and whose uses the ignorant tomb robbers and pariahs dismissed with the single word—magic. But that first wondering ignorance of the near-wild discoverers of the dwelling places of the Atlanteans' neighbors did not continue. For one day the inevitable happened.

"In a luxurious living place where the pillars were of sculptured metal set with sparkling brilliants like fruit and covered with the glitter of green glass-like leaves as a tree, and the walls alive with fearfully writhing figures in a frozen dance, a lonesome, lost child touched a button in a wall projection and screamed as the figures came to life and moved magically upon the wall. But there was love in the meaning of their movements, and there was thought in the sound that came from apertures in the walls. The thought that the waves from the wall carried to the child was a force that commanded him to love and to learn, to study and to think, to watch and to want, to become aware of what life could be and to strive mightily and cannily toward the things he wanted most. The force commanded him in such a way that he became the servant of the force.

"For in the wall was a strange thing that the Gods left, a machine that entertained and taught people and many and long were the hours the child spent in that chamber before stealing back to his mother. When he left he did not know enough to touch the button again and the machine ran on. Thus began the life of the First of the Latter Gods. Over his head stormed the armies of our first Pharoah, but the child heard them not; he was deep underground watching the magic of pictures that moved and talked, and listening with his brain to thought from a wire in the machine.

E BROUGHT his playmates into the secret of the magic button that made the figures on the wall move and live and that made the big room fill with heady music and with mighty waves of commanding thought. So it was that magic became the secret of outcasts, and the latter Gods the people who guarded the secret of the caverns from the scorned and feared men of the surface. Many and awesome were those secrets and poor and few their uses for them, but still magic lived again on earth. For they went to the surface with their strange secret weapons, fooling the surface folk and taking their gold and food and returning again to the depths, laughing with their talk of the sport it had been to make them think that ghosts were abroad, that demons and efrits had come for their souls or their gold.

"But some, like the boy who switched on the teaching machine, became aware of the great beauty and the mighty learning that lay in those machines, waiting only for the touch of curious fingers on the right button to spring into active life. These children of the caves became habitual explorers of the vast mysterious recesses, stretching on in ever different wonders into the depths, into the very heart of earth.

"Some of the machines gave off a sweet, overpowering pleasant beneficial force, invisible except as irridescence, yet force that awakened their minds and bodies into furious life and growth. Since the ancients were master builders these mechanisms did not wear out easily, having been built to endure. These inquiring, exploring young people, by virtue of the growth force that was in the magic machines, became mighty beings of vastly superior abilities and strengths. Beings superior to ordinary men by so far that they were, in truth, Gods!

"These gathered men about them, taught them the use of the stored weapons, the aircraft that lay in the ancient underground airship houses, and began again to build as the ancient Gods had builded. Great sections of earth came under their secret rule. In the northland the immortals ruled as Odin and as Wotan. In Greece as Zeus and his followers. In the sea as Oceanus, Jehovah, Jupiter. There were many who learned in time which machines had the power to make them nearly immortal and who in time came to rule their part of the world. Some of them built surface cities. In the northland the fame of Asgard and Valhalla reached far, though a man came to fear to talk to his God lightly. But the little people are