Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/20

20, for those anæmic super-goofs were not my idea of what to be mistaken for. Nevertheless I mouthed the mean-sounding nothings I had seen them use in their dreams and certainly I took as much delight in tormenting Mula as I knew they would have taken in tormenting me. How I devested that pile of fat, inhuman appetite!

OW had a growth force generator succeeded in creating this monstrous pollution? An increase in growth rate, in the supply of growth causing material, should result in an enhanced power of perception, a greater awareness of beauty, a mightier will to create, a really superior being with a will to make life something fine to have. How had a growth force mechanism succeeded in creating this monstrous pollution? It was too much for me. Even if the machine had failed centuries before something of the fine qualities it must have helped to grow in man should have remained. Was age itself, then, such a cause of corruption? It appeared so. But as I watched the ancient life in him I learned what really made him the horror he was.

From several places which I could not locate, rays came into the hall where his bulk lay—rays which subtly caused him to think. As I listened to these rays which seemed unnoticed by Mula I heard an idiotic murmur of utterly degenerate thought. Some creature in the distance was at some machine watching Mula and the idiocy of the thought was, through the strength of the great augmentation, causing Mula to think in the same way. Though I could see this occur, Mula was apparently oblivious of these creatures; yet, they were making him think!

I finally got it through me just how this had made Mula the thing he was. These creatures were the wild natural inhabitants of the caverns who had lived there since earliest times, fishing in the underground rivers, stealing some food from surface fields. Those I had just killed as they slept were some whom Mula had impressed into his service, but all through the caverns were some of these thin little half-men with protruding eyes adapted to the dark. Their only play was turning on the old machine to see and talk to surface people and to each other in the depths. Always some of them had watched Mula, his growth and his behavior, and the latter was much a product of their own idiotic little brains augmented by the mighty machines until the constant pressure of the great rays on him had produced an hypnotic effect on Mula. He had become as they were by the long effect of the distant, unnnoticed watching. They were clever imitators just as monkeys are and instinctively when one looked at them over the ray, they felt it and put on an unobtrusive mental attitude. It was evidently this habit which kept Mula from realizing what a great effect they had on him.

Watching them I also learned that they really hated and feared Mula and when he was unaware of them they had a way of introducing another destructive ray into the screen. Thus, with a strong magnification of Mula on their screen they would watch his brain and body with their small rays which the big machine augmented and carried into Mula's body. So it was, in truth, that he was nearly an idiot, as the connecting nerves of his brain had been mostly destroyed. He considered them as his allies and servants. It never seemed to occur to him that they were in truth his death.

This very subtle whittling at his huge brain, as habitual to them as a mouse's nibbling is to a mouse, was the very cause of Mula's oblivious attitude, as well as the hypnotic effect of all such huge rays. They did not want Mula to think of them and Mula obeyed the huge impulse post-hypnotically.

T TOOK several hours of observation for all this to be understood by myself. The creatures were very interesting. They watched surface people continually, whispering complicated lies in their ears. This was one of their greatest pleasures; in fact they had almost no use for the truth. Their whole life was one of watching over the big rays and figuring out childish deviltries to inflict on the surface men. Their secret—where and what they were—the surface men never seemed to figure out. Though most of them suffered from them more or less, they never spoke to each other about it for fear of being considered mad. Believing in invisible imps! It was too fantastic and stupid a thing.

This thing I watched, I slowly realized, had been going on since the earliest times.