Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/143

Rh THINGS AS AVOIDABLE TRAIN WRECKS.

It must be faced. All right, we face it, and thousands of readers flock to our support with letters affirming our decision to attempt the heretofore impossible!

Here's hoping we succeed. For there are in the caverns such things as weather machines, set in a pattern to govern the whole continent, that can control the precipitation, the winds, the whole character of the weather. I have seen them operated, have touched the machines; but how do I tell it? I have as much trepidation about the attempt as Heirens. He (can you blame him?) flunked the test of courage. I face it. (Remember this is a "hoax" please.)

HESE machines, of infinite variety, are culled over by engineers from rival (underworld) countries such as England (for all we know) and what is not sold to them Is wrecked by the destructive nomads of the caves "so someone else won't use them."

Gypsies "know" about the underworld. Spiritualists insist on the reality of their "spirits." I know the gypsies are making better sense about the voices than the Spiritualists. They tell fortunes by allowing the secret rays to read their customers' mind—and make money. So do the spiritualists, but they say it is spirits. The gypsies say it is a "gift." It is! From "gypsies" under the earth. BUT NOT DEAD!

DID YOU EVER ASK THE WEATHER MAN WHAT BECAME OF THE RAIN THAT STARTED RAINING AND SUDDENLY QUIT, AGAINST ALL PROBABILITY? DID YOU EVER ASK A PRISON GUARD HOW COME CERTAIN GUARDS SHOT AND KILLED OTHER GUARDS? DID YOU EVER ASK THE MISSING PERSONS BUREAU WHERE ALL THE MISSING PEOPLE WENT? PERSONALLY (not by listening to the radio—but personally looked at the files comprehensively)? Did you ever talk to insurance investigators who ascertain the cause of fires, the nature of the mechanical failures in train wrecks, all the many things that go unaccountably wrong?

NO, YOU DID NOT! You assume there was nothing mysterious or frighteningly weird about any of it. YOU ASSUME THAT IT IS ALL PERFECTLY UNDERSTOOD BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF YOUR EDUCATION.

Fact is, a black witch doctor in Africa does know more about such things than you do. They don't close their eyes to all the unseeable things in life. But a "modern professor" does so close his eyes, and succeeds in closing most of his students' eyes.

All of which wouldn't matter, if most of our heritage in the caverns wasn't being destroyed and wasted and broken by idiotic handling by creatures with no wits or education whatever. It matters because our civilization could receive from just one piece of that "mech" a bigger boost than from many generations of genius. BECAUSE THAT MECH IS THE PRODUCT OF AGES OF INTENSELY CIVILIZED DEVELOPMENT BY A BIGGER, GREATER RACE, A RACE WHO HAD CONTACT WITH SPACE!

How to tell the American government there is something to learn about the rocks of mother Earth that can't be learned in a College of Geology, in an "Institute of Mining Techniques"? How to tell a modern over-educated bigot that our school text-books left out the biggest page—the history of the Elder race? HOW?

It can't be done! That answer tells me to give up, to write stories about anything else, to quit making dangerous statements about a people who might take umbrage and bump me with some of that wonder-weapon-mech.

Then a voice says: "Tell 'em, but right! Be a man!" (Now remember, bigot—this is a hoax, I confess.)

And I do. There are no voices is not true! Everyone can hear them and does at one time or another. Some of us hear them every day because we have interesting minds, and there is fascination in exchanging mental contact with our minds.

The trouble is I know better than to accept the general blindness about the invisible. They have not seen the bodies behind these invisible phenomena. I have! They have only deductive abilities which have no data to operate on that they can consider infallible. And they are lied to by fearful gentlemen who fear to state the truth, for reasons you must understand. If you don't understand why these gentlemen who know do not speak—just picture yourself doing it! (Uh huh!)

I should not worry, if I were them. For do not astrologists state regularly that the motion of the stars affects human events? Do not the spiritualists baldly state that the dead come back regularly? It must be all right to print anything in this United States. Maybe it is a Constitutional right? I hope so! For I have plenty to say that is apt to be misunderstood both above the surface and beneath. Of the two I fear the underworld the least! Above all the things that terrify me, I fear the bigoted psychiatrist, the worldly materialist, the know-it-all scientist.

The underworld is quite willing to let superstition be a veil for them. No income tax, do what they please with everyone, and a police force who call the mention of them superstition. Perfect! BUT there are plenty of them are smarting under terrible oppressions, sweat shop conditions, murderous arena battles for those out of favor, a lack of any justice of any kind from overhead. Those are our friends, they want a sane and normal life and justice. Truth is, even the profiteers who boost for the secrecy wish for the good old American army to man their ray guns when the wild dero attack from some "uncivilized" frontier of the vast cavern world. They find the weapons they had considered invincible are outranged by weapons of the dero (wild and