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

Rh It was a fixed, repetitive behavior pattern as predictable as the fact that a maple tree will have maple leaves. And Mula had grown into the thing he was among these creatures. His growth had been distorted into the thing it was by their will, degenerate wills about him, augmented into a great hypnotic force by the ancient ray communicators. Here and there through the caverns little groups of these cavern imps lived in a beastlike condition and in some ways they were cunning as a rat, but also as stupid.

It is necessary to explain all this to you so that you will understand what the truck-load of escaped captives and myself were up against in making contact. As the truck and trailer came to a Y in the cavern roads I would tell the driver to "turn left" and immediately another voice in his ear would say "no, turn right!" It was the cavern imps at play; a procedure as instinctive to them as a rabbit's jump is to a rabbit. So it took many hours and I was a sleepless nervous wreck before the trailer job finally pulled up to my position.

Out of it poured a dozen job-seeking chorus girls and a half-dozen electrical and radio engineers—Mula's two desires, it seemed.

Most of them would not be missed for months as they had told their friends they were leaving to take a job in another city. How simple it was to fool surface people!

Swiftly I explained the set-up and showed the whole mess with the huge eye. How long we lived depended entirely on whether our surface education should prove better at getting the most out of the old weapons or whether the cavern dwellers' lifelong experience with the profound mechanisms would be too much for us. Already I could feel the far watch rays picking at my brain with tiny needle cutters though immediately I swung the eye in search of attackers. The sensation was gone and no way of knowing where to look next.

I realized that these apparently idiotic little people of the underworld had an immense potentiality for damage in their experience with reading the mind and their knowledge of the three dimensional geography of the endless caverns. The multihead effect inherent in the use of any telepathic appartusapparatus [sic] gave them immense mental facility while they used the apparatus; too, parasitically they used any brain with which they were in contact. Paradoxically, this habit did not make them more intelligent; just more aware of danger and harder to handle in conflict.

Their weaknesses were a monkey-like stupidity and the meanness which sat forever in their faces making them hate each other and every living thing.

SAW, in distant caverns, their little forms racing toward us to get at nearer ray mechanisms and blot us out. Or, what was more likely, capture us for the torture which was one of their pleasures. Of pleasure rays they had almost none. Mula had appropriated most of them or taken parts which rendered them useless. I picked off dozens of them, and as I swept the inumerable galleries with the eye ray, I saw several racing the other way. They did not care for any more argument with me.

Meanwhile the engineers swarmed over the vast machine at which I sat, marveling at its construction. All the working parts were sealed in an air-tight sheath of gold-colored metal; the thing was indestructible except by violence.

One of them, a big red-headed fellow who was an automotive engineer named MacCarthy, climbed to the huge seat beside me. Several of the women were there watching Mula's entertainment on the screen.

"That's him, eh?" said MacCarthy open-mouthed at his first glimpse of Mula's generous folds and ripples. "My would-be employer. If he's not absolutely the most bloated 'pollutocrat' I ever saw I'll eat my hat."

"Yes," I answered, "and any minute he's apt to figure out what to do to get rid of us. Get on your toes, man!"

"Well, it seems quite an apparatus you've got here. I don't believe in it, mind, but you can't argue with your own eyes. It must have a lot of uses other than peek-a-boo on the neighbors—it's so devilish big. One of those uses should solve our problem. But right now I'm mighty hungry. It couldn't just roll out a few loaves of bread, could it?"

I passed around my pack-load of concentrated food. It was supposed to last me six weeks but they made short work of the best part of it. I dispatched three of the men to my cache at the hole at