Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/145

Rh to get some cash out of selling the "secret.")

"Only one little table left. Had to sell the rest. They take everything." (Not fully understood whether she means they are removing all the antique furniture and apparatus or whether she means she had to sell her own possessions to get food.)

"Place your thumb toward dagger and twist. It's an idol and he uses it for a suitcase."

"Three fourths of the looting was carried on under our supervision." (Not fully understood.)

"The temp, is always 53%."

"New captives are always cold. Fire is a luxury. You get used to it, or you die."

"Feed the fire with Elder books." (Coal is in six inch lumps. Burned on open grate.)

"Many songs are attempts to get messages to you that you cannot help seeing—like: 'Midnight beaming, moonlight meaning.' but it doesn't ever work. Men are denser than dense. Tamper always blocks a person trying to get something across."

"They sold me! Brrrr. No fatigue, wonderful place to live. I believed them, went along in. It is! Wonderful! But the toilet doesn't work, and I'm starving and freezing."

"The reason people hear things more often in darkness, because when turn a telaug penetray on a house with a light burning, the light is carried down here to this end of ray—then they see it and stop us with tamper. Lying in the dark, you hear more, no one notices."

"A six-handed fiddle. I'd like to of seen the critter that played that thing. Must of looked like a grasshopper."

"The micro-show mech is great. It makes images of tiny races of people, only they are metal or glass or minerals—all different and they seem alive. A toy, I suppose, but they must have been popular, there are a lot of them." (A device I have seen operated—it takes the [for instance] chess-men idea, builds a living race of people in moving, three dimensional pictures; like seeing a new world.)

"She had faceted mirrors or jewels sewn on her ankles above her insteps with surgical thread—to make her feet twinkle when she walked. She had places to go worth going to." (Picture of beauty of the Elder race.)

"We saw a metal glider full of men frozen in ice! Not modern men, some ancient race—had gliders. What you call "latter gods," I suppose." (Means with penetray in the deep ice of a glacier, or ice cave, she saw deep in the ice a glider of metal with crew all frozen since God knows when.)

"The buyer is not well in the head. He forgets to get things—and we starve. So many are cut in the head; can't function properly." (Cut is an x-ray needle that is used for less-open arguments. A man with many enemies soon becomes absent-minded to the point of becoming unable to carry on his work.)

"We have had a warning, they come, not men! They are terrible." (Means, I think, they have been warned of impending invasion of creatures that are not men. Whether from space or from some unexplored part of the endless cavern labyrinths, I don't know. I thought they meant space invasion.)

"A new ray phenomena to me, the image in the mind is consumed by flames right in the mind. Appears to be a heat ray super-imposed upon the neural penetrative of the telaug beam."

"Evil ruled so long—stock him no good. Now have no children."

"A have-a-look shop."

"The neat and scarlet women."

ELL, there you are. A sample of voices heard and written down in the night. It is not a proof, except you have a mind to see that it could not be imagined, that it had to happen that way. The official dumb attitude we know already: "The man is deluded." But they're the same type of men who close our burlesque shows and go to honky-tonks or smokers in their clubs and holler "take-it-off" and get it taken off for them. Who squalk about juvenile deliquency and contribute to it themselves if they get a chance, and they get it. The same men who never give a sucker a break, and everyone is a sucker, potentially. The men who ban good books from publication on moral grounds and themselves do not understand morality or give a damn. But they have to look virtuous to sucker public, etc.

You can listen to the same old lies and believe there is nothing going on in the world that you are not fully informed of in the daily newspaper. Or you can think for yourself and find an amazing new world where things are happening—and a lot of it shouldn't happen. There is an in to be had, an in to "Forbidden Fruit," and many of these men who deny these things get plenty of that Forbidden Fruit. But it all costs us too much to ignore. We are losing lives of mighty development and god-like pleasure because we listen to fools who do not understand that themselves are greatest of all suckers for a lie.

Well, I'll quit now. These words are not a proof, and no set of words can be a proof to a mind that refuses them.

BUT I WARN YOU—IF THE ELDER MECH WAS GOTTEN INTO THE HANDS OF OUR GREAT TECHNICAL SCIENTISTS OPENLY AND WITH PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE OUR CIVILIZATION WOULD BECOME A HEAVEN. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN IF WE ALL CLOSE OUR EYES AND SAY IT DOES NOT EXIST.

This Christmas millions of toys were dug out of storehouses in the caverns, each of them worth a fortune to a surface manufacturer. "Ren-schur" (sure to run) toys, the finest of the elder race—and played with by ignorant grown people and wantonly destroyed. Such toys as no one but Aladdin or a modern cavern dweller knows exist. Each of them was based on some application of