Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/17

Rh thirty feet. Sprawled about its expanse were a dozen creatures asleep in the rays that bathed the bed. The creatures were human, apparently, yet not human at all, on second examination. Living in the depths had changed them; they were as different from men as a potato sprout in the cellar is from a potato plant in the field.

The ray brought to the screen not only the things to be seen, but an augmentation of the things to be heard. I distinctly heard the creatures thinking, as well as saw them.

Their thought was as alarming as their appearance. The rays that bathed the ancients' bed were pleasure rays as well as soporific rays. They induced an ultrapleasant dream state in which the will of the sleeper found every wish coming true, tremendously true. But these creatures were not men; they were—degenerates—things.

Their wishes and dreams were of blood and death and tortures for their enemies and little else, for all the creatures they dreamed of seemed enemies. I had an impulse—a strong one—to pull that lever that had blotted out the elm tree and turn these sleeping curses into drifting dust. They called themselves Hobloks. A meanness sat on their faces, looking out and hating all life.

N APPEARANCE the sleepers were like fearfully anaemic jitterbugs, small, with pipestem arms and legs, pot bellies, huge protruding eyes and wide, idiotically grinning mouths. Super-goofy, I believe modern youth would call them. They wore clothes as men do, apparently clothes recently from the surface world, and as I tinkered with the focus of the monster eye in front of me a modern truck sprang into view, a trailer job closed and fitted inside for living. There must be a way of driving down here from the surface. These Things had contact with the surface! I must know more about that.

In another chamber near the sleepers were a group of normal-appearing people apparently fresh from the surface. Reading their thought I gathered that they had answered an ad in the paper; had been hired only to find at the end of their journey this place, and themselves in the hands of the Hobloks. They had been locked in for days and were completely at sea mentally. Just what did the Hobloks want with them? Could I get the answer by looking at the sleepers' thoughts?

One of them was dreaming of the reward he would receive for turning over the captives at their destination. And what a destination! If it was anything like the Things' mental pictures, it was some place. Much deeper in earth, it was; once the home of some tremendous being. The chambers were many city blocks in width and fantastically sculptured, lined with mechanisms. A fierce activity filled the place.

Sometime in the past, I gathered, some one of these cavern dwellers had turned on a growth force generator and lain down to sleep in it. The results were that he had become another, greater life. He had not turned it off, but stayed beside it and growth had made a super being of him. It was not balanced growth. He was a vast mass of pink flesh with sprouts of peculiar life protruding from him. This Thing was the boss of the place. The captives were destined to serve this mass of flesh. His appetite for women was enormous, to judge by the harem that surrounded him, stroking the quivering pinkness, carefully removing the sprouts when they were ripe, dancing for the vast eyes that surmounted the awful pile of flesh. I did not like this modern god.

In other chambers men were working on the ancient mechanisms, taking them apart, studying them, putting them back together. I could not get from the creature's mind more than a glimmer of what really was going on except that he knew the people laboring there were under a strong compulsion. They were robots to others who made them work. The workers were technically trained men from the surface while the masters were cavern beings whom the workers never saw. That the masters were also under compulsion from the mountain of flashflesh [sic] seemed likewise true.

In front of the mountain of flesh a woman lay writhing in an agony of desire. Wires led to her from several mechanisms within reach of the monster's hands. He made adjustments now and then on the dials of the panels. He seemed to be breathing in the augmented vitality of the woman. His huge eyes ogled as he strove to bend toward her. As her anguished limbs and striving body thrashed to a crescendo of awful torment—her heart gave way, her