Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/16

 change the whole future life of man. And they knew the cause of age and had conquered it! I must not fail!

Load after load of equipment and food came down the cable, and the telephone line which connected this remote hole in the depths with the surface world, which would await my call for return did months or years lapse before I used it. I set up the radio wave emitting apparatus which would activiate a needle in a radio compass at my belt every ten minutes so that I would never lose the direction of my base and my exit. Finally, with many of the sensations that Theseus must have had as he searched for the Minotaur, I set off through the vaulted halls lined with majestic and mighty mechanisms, covered with the dust of endless centuries. This dust was my insurance of safety for when I neared THEM, the dust would contain footprints and paths.

I came to vast machines built for unknowable uses as big as a city block. Often they were topped by a seat, massive and huge for a giant's form. I had seen some of these before, but had not thought there was much use in looking them over carefully as their age must have rendered them useless. It was whispered that some of these ancient mechanisms still worked.

I mounted the six-foot steps leading up to the great seat of a machine. An infinitely bewildering array of switches, buttons and levers were banked across the panel in front of the seat. Ten feet up, where a twenty-foot giant's eyes would be, was a shimmering white expanse. Was it a screen? Tentatively I pulled a few levers. A soft, thrilling humming throbbed through the vastness of the mechanism beneath me. On the white expanse a picture appeared, a scene on the surface of earth. I turned a huge knob and the scene changed. Like Odin's eye it swept across the country, how far, how many endless miles that penetrating view ray swept its automatic focus, I could not say.

Now, in ancient tales, such stories as those of Solomon's ring, of Merlin, of Aladdin's lamp, said that magic machinery was capable of nearly any miracles asked of it. Of what else was this monstrous machine capable? I soon found out.

WAS looking at a surface scene, a farm house in front of which was a big elm and leaning backward to see better in the screen above my head my hand inadvertently grasped a lever to support me. There in the scene of the house and elm a great wind sprang up whirling and whirling around the house. As I pondered whether the wind appearing so suddenly was a part of nature or made by the machine my other hand rested on a lever at the side of the huge seat and instantly an awful bolt of force struck the elm in the center of the screen and it disappeared, leaving nothing but a hole in the earth and a cloud of dust whirling in the wind. This machine was quite a plaything, I decided. I had better learn something about it. This eye, which like Odin's, seemed able to go everywhere and see everything, was just the thing with which to explore these caverns with and save my feet.

These caverns are not as one would picture them, full of stalagmites and stalactites and dripping with moisture. Quite the contrary, they are dry. The walls are of hardened, impenetrable rock and every half-mile great metal doors seal the passages from all water and air. Thick dust is the only sign of the passage of time; and this varies: some places there is very little, for the doors keep the caves sealed tightly. Some are corroded, though, and here is much dust and some dampness.

I swept the ray up the miles of caves beyond me, drinking in the colorful beauty of the ancient dwellings—the story of tremendous life that every bit of the work tells.

There is a brooding, deserted-temple atmosphere about these ancient homes. The mighty presence of the past life left something that still lives, quiescent but awesome: the vast machines, beautiful as no other machinery on earth, the silence, the waiting power. The ray swept along the far-reaching avenues. What was I looking for? Well, I found something, I can tell you.

They sprang into the vision screen suddenly as the ray swept past; they were gone. It took me an hour to find them again. Living things! Down here! I had heard of them, seen some strange things before. But I had not had an Odin's eye to watch them.

They were in what had once been some huge ancient's living quarters. The bed was a tremendous affair some twenty by