Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/137

Rh the people—which attitude is shown in their deliberate deprivation of all science of the advantages that would arise from a general knowledge of and study of the rays and mech with which their rule is enforced.

They hold that they won't turn over the info, that it is like an atom bomb in importance, and they are keeping it in their own hands.

I reply that I wish they would, because so many deros use it, too—and that they don't need to keep the whole of that science a secret. So much of it is purely benevolent and medicinal. Truth is, they are not educated, do not realize what they are doing in keeping the whole a secret still today.

I am saying there are millions of people besides Shaver who know there are vast caverns under earth, full of strange, miraculously potent machinery—and that they do not speak because it is so obvious that they would be misunderstood to the point of persecution.

I am saying that if our scientists were ALLOWED to have but one of these machines (which exist in great profusion and in fine repair) for study, that our whole technical development would be accelerated beyond imagination. I am saying that some of our modern developments are due to information about the Elder race methods that filter through the age-old "iron curtain" between the deluded surface races of man and the undeluded but oppressed races under our feet.

Man's age-old persecutors, the "Gods," the degenerate debauchers, the secretive age-old monopolizers responsible for these delusions we have and call history; the persecutors we have and claim do not exist; the condition of war and misery our races are in, once exposed would not, perhaps be so terribly harmful to him, would find a remedy.

I am saying that the people responsible for filtering through to us some of the technical secrets which find their way into our modern technologists' brains are due to friends among these hidden people, and that these friends in the underworld are the only members of that strange society that a sane modern man can consider as also sane.

The rest would be beneath our attention except that they can destroy us with the ancient mech (and do, regularly, kill many), debauch us with the ancient wonderful stim mech, and craze us with the detrimental rays of that forgotten science.

AM trying to show that it is possible and probable that there have been members of that society in the past who lived for centuries beyond the normal life span — as legend tells us. That they did so because of the nature of the ben-rays and canned nutrients still to be found in the sealed storerooms.

That there probably were rulers who lived for centuries, and that some of the most repressive and reactionary of the present-day rulers of the cavern groups MAY have been alive for two or more centuries.

That the medieval minds, cruel and vindictive and vandalistic, are so because they are still in a medieval state of development socially, and they were raised that way.

That these secretive, reactionary, sadistic minds among them are today holding back the whole race of man from ALL true development. That they are striving with might and main to place all human life under a rule of a malignance unimaginable, that is so horrible in its aims, in its degenerate cruelties, so destructive in its details of government that the race of man will perish if they succeed!

And you insist they do not exist—want an "artifact." (Can you get hold of an atom bomb to swap for the "artifact-mech"? It's a deal!)

I am trying to say that the enlightened ones among them who struggle against this goal need our help if we can give it—and that we can't if we insist they do not exist!

There are many things I have heard that I do not know are facts. To mention these along with the things I know are facts causes an almost unavoidable confusion.

I have heard that surface light and power and coal are possessions of the ray-people. I don't know it, I heard it. I have heard that some of them have harems of thousands of young women. I don't know it. I DO KNOW they have harems, and an oriental contempt for all western morality—but because of the nature of social life developed around the use of stim-rays, I can understand this different morality.

I KNOW many terrible things that I cannot find a way to tell except as fiction. These are things so lurid and impossible they are hard to make credible even in a lurid stf. tale. They could not be considered as facts by an ordinary man, because he has not seen and could not accept. These are looked for by those who know something of the great secret, and look for recognizable information in the "forbidden" field.

I KNOW they have weapon rays that kill at fifty miles and more. That they hit what they shoot at with these. A man cannot even think of such weapons without fear; still we must—and they have been with us right along.

I KNOW they have telaug beams that hear thought from a man's mind up to fifty miles and more. That is an extremely sensitive receiver, for the sending of one brain is not exactly powerful in voltage.

I KNOW they visit space, and receive visiting ships from space, some of which do not get away again. I don't know why they return to earth, for no one here is getting a square deal! The ships that return must belong to those who think they benefit from the repressive, throttling monopoly of all the good things of earth.

I am saying that earth's peoples are supporting a destructive, extravagantly luxurious and decadent "secret class" who rob us of our birth right—the science that could be learned from the