Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/19

Rh little energies burst their flesh and fly away. Soon my slaves will bring the growth rays and I will start to grow again, to grow and feel young again, gloriously alive as I was centuries ago before the first ancient growth ray wore out. Then I will grow and eat and grow and fill all the caverns with myself; I will be all. By that time I will have learned to consume all matter, to make all things into myself. I will be Earth!"

"Hell," I thought to myself, "the darned Thing is senile, is a crazy old man; maybe once a super being, centuries ago; but now the strength in him has kept him alive while age has made a destructive idiot of him."

Just here my troubles began, for, hearing thought as I did it had never occurred to me that the one I listened to could also hear me. That there might be a way of handling this instrument so that I could hear without being heard had never occurred to me; nor had I realized that it might work both ways. Anyway, the ancient giant of growth heard me. I heard his commands ring on my ears as they leaped from his "robot-make" machine as he called it, a device making his thought so strong that the robots must obey it.

"Some surface man is spying on me with a ray," I heard him thinking. "Find him. Kill him or bring him to me at once!"

I heard him mentally rubbing his hands in anticipation of the coming delight of slowly killing me after he learned if there were others to worry about.

A cold sweat broke out on my face. I had no wish to become part of Mula's pleasure.

My life right now depended on whether Mula's creatures had equipment that would reach this spot. There was little I could do about it.

All at once I thought of the lever which had destroyed the elm tree in my first experimental manipulations. I got Mula's bulk in the exact center of my screen and pulled that lever fully expecting to see Mula dissolve into drifting dust. Instead he let out the most unearthly howl of pain it has ever been my pleasure to hear. Too much rock, I realized, between us for the bolt to be fully effective. Well, it was something to hear Mula howl and see his endless ripples of flesh quivering in agony like a scared dowager's double chins endlessly repeated and endlessly twitching in pain and terror. I stood up on the huge seat and howled into the screen:

"Mula, if you don't instantly call off your animals I'll fill you so full of pain you'll wish you weren't quite so big."

E PROBABLY didn't speak English but he grasped the thought behind the words.

Mula proved to be just a big, bad sissy after all. He couldn't take it. He was all placating, ingratiating thought as he gave orders sending his men back to their former positions. But I was stuck. I had to hold that ray on Mula and give him a dose of pain every time the thought occurred to him that perhaps I wasn't listening and he could now arrange my demise. I decided I needed help. Riding herd on senile super man Mula was not a one-man job.

There was only one place I could get help—that was that truckload of fresh surface captives waiting in the chamber by the sleeping Hobloks. I would have to do the job in a hurry or the man-mountain would put one over on me.

I swung the huge eye to its former focus on the sleeping crew of underworld slavers and in a twinkling had obliterated the bed on which they lay in their poisonous dreams. I had no desire to play with them; they seemed to know their way around down here and Mula was plenty to handle just now. I blasted away the locked door to the chamber of the captives and standing up to the screen yelled at their bewildered faces:

"Get in that truck and start driving. I'll tell you how to get out of here."

For the next hour I was busy as a postman on Christmas Eve, swinging over to Mula and giving him a mocking tee-hee and a jolt of juice and swinging back to figure out the path the truck must take to reach me. But the hour stretched into days.

Mula was in one vast quiver of frustrated rage fearing to give orders to seek me out and yet unable to bear the loss of his power which had been undisputed for centuries, from what I had read in his mind. He was pretty sure I was one of the Hobloks who had acquired big ideas on the surface and had decided to turn the tables on his meaty Majesty. I did not feel greatly