Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/28

28 little to say to a mind as deep and capable as hers. And we all felt this. But she was curious as to conditions on the surface and very interested in our answers to her questions. She was very disappointed as to the condition of science in general. We were given some refreshments; stimulating fluids of several kinds were served and little nut-shaped sweetmeats. We were somehow ill at ease at our own lack of life and strength.

Presently we returned to the lower floors. Some of the girls tried to join in the dance and did not do so badly. Presently we were shown to several chambers equipped with modern-looking beds.

HEN I awoke Queen Shola herself had come with a page bearing a tray of food.

"And this is the food you people eat that makes your young people so uniformly well-constructed, so very generally beautiful!"

"The ancients had vast greenhouses lit by artificial heating rays. We have repaired some of them and learned to raise all our food down here. These whom you think young people are, some of them, hundreds of years old. We have almost conquered age. We have learned to read the old books, many of them still exist; and age was a subject they were very interested in. They are very hard to understand but our multihead teams can manage to get the meaning from their simpler books for young people.

"Could I, O Queen, could I see some of those ancient books?"

She smiled, and all the graciousness a vast mind was capable of lay on her face.

"Why not?" she said simply.

This was a booklover's entrance into Paradise. My knees knocked like a prospective bridegroom's. The vast, intricately worked metal doors slowly opened as we approached. The stacks extended as far as the eye could reach in any direction. The books were of metal and most of them four to five feet square. The hours fled and I could not tear myself away. Both the Queen and little Fanny de Moina had gone away, perhaps understanding what this meant to me.

At last I held the book for which I searched on my knees. Even there it was too heavy. The pages were covered with those strange letters, a language to which few surface men but myself held the key. Laboriously I translated the pages, one by one. Here it was: under the symbol for Life—L—followed by the symbol for "on" followed by a symbol which meant to the Nth power—meant infinity. Swiftly I wrote those blazing words which would change the life of the world to something worth having if I could bring them back to surface man.

The Formula "Live On"

''O LIVE successfully is to conquer life's problems. This can only be done by changing the conditions of your life to eliminate the detrimental factors. Thus the influx of detrimental energy flows must be excluded, while the intake of beneficial energy must be increased. To prolong life indefinitely, even under deadly suns—a super-dense metal is particularly useful. This is true for this important reason—disintegrant energy cannot exist except it have an integrated particle to feed on—just as fire cannot exist without fuel. A beneficial force flow is a ray which is rich in the ultimate end product of disintegrance—energy ash. Take the most dense metal you can obtain—and force an energy flow through it at high pressure; those bits of matter which keep disintegrance alive will be excluded by the density of the metal, just as ashes fall through a grate and leave the burning fire above. The life-giving ash of energy from which all matter is reintegrated is the product of such a device. A flow rich in energy ash causes an immediate increase in the mental function to an amazing degree, as well as stimulates and causes a new growth—a more powerful and intelligent being is created immediately by subjection to such a flow. Immortality can be achieved by excluding all persistently disintegrant particles from the whole intake of the animal. This is the path which our race took to greatness, to the conquest of space, to life everlasting in the darkness of space.''

''Such metals can be obtained floating free in space, the product of gravitic space storm vortexes. These metals form the heart of our most important mechanisms—the growth-force generators.''

HE secret of immortality! It lies in "empty" space! Now I, and you, have the secret of the metal shield that can