Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/48

48 ill-fortune, answered the broken old man.

"You have that word, my Lord. Your wisdom, from one who has tried both Good and Evil, is worth to me quite an equal amount. I thank you, for the wise old man that you are."

"Another reason for my anger," cried young Zigor, who I noticed was not going to leave anyone else the center of the stage, "is the fact that you show these strangers the secrets of our ancestors when you have not allowed me even inside this room before. Well, it is my room now, and hereafter I shall say who comes and goes across the threshold!"

EHIND the old hag, who had once been, perhaps, a regal creature and fit mate for a rich and powerful Mephisto, but was now only a crazy old witch of the under-world, were trooping in a score of creatures, carrying various weapons, and ranging themselves behind the young Zigor. They were, some dozen of them, dwarfish, twisted-limbed products of the more ignorant life of the caverns, for only those with the wisdom regularly to use the more beneficial rays of the old mech grow up without rickets or worse, a complete dwarfing and distortion of the whole frame due to lack of sunlight. On their faces was a frustration, a pouting, as of a drug addict denied his drug—it was evident that the old Mephisto had not let them do as they pleased of late, and that the young Zigor Mephisto had promised to let them have their "usual" pleasures. Having seen somewhat of these "usual" pleasures among various nomadic people of the caves, I had no wish to be the victim. The other eight of the score of people behind the young Zigor and his mother, the bent and evil crone, were tall, well-formed, and not ugly, but on their faces was the stigma, the sign of enslavement to evil, and it was all too plain that with Zigor they expected gratification of those appetites, the indulgence in which has rendered all life in the cavern world sterile and barren of good for men. For the use of stim rays can be a good thing, a glorious enrichment of life; or it can be a horrible vice, a complete tool for evil enslavement of all the appetites and inner action springs of a man's mind. Under the tutorship of such as the old crone, I knew it could only be an evil thing, a false stimulation of the pleasure senses during the torture of victims, resulting in the mental conviction that only in sadistic indulgence could "real" pleasure be obtained.

No defense was possible to us, the overturn of directive power was sudden and complete. They all carried hand rays, deadly little wands that paralyze, or carried coils of rope, whose purpose I did not have to guess for long. Swiftly Solaris and myself were bound, and the little men did not bother to carry us, they just dragged us down the corridor and dumped us in one of the innumerable vacant rooms—those vacant rooms that served as a continual reminder of what should be there and isn't: wise men from the surface studying the antique mechanisms for the tremendous science that still lies here waiting for the intelligent inquirer.

What would become of the three girls, how they would fare at the hands of this young heir of a line as bloody and fiendish as the Mephistos—this young Zigor, whose temper I had surmised from his father's attitude towards him; was what mainly worried me, rather than my own fate. The awful dark of the caverns closed in on us with the clanging of the metal door, and into that black was plunged all my hopes for a future with Nydia; a future of building from the ancient science a new race of men, wise and able as the ancient races were. Too, I knew that death by torment was the least evil we could expect. Mayhap something far worse would be our fate, for the tales I had heard, and the things I had seen done by those raised to the evil tradition of cavern life—such as the things from Africa which had laid seige to our home-place—told me there are fates far worse than death. Which was what worried me about Nydia, for the more sensitive a person, the more idealistic and finely tempered the person, the more greatly do the mind-wrecking rays of the sadists cause pain. For to see your own mind made a thing not your own, not yourself at all; to see all the careful work of years in building the thing that is "yourself" made into an unrecognizable morass of uncontrollable desires, of filthy overpowering lusts that seem one's own; of made desires to kill and maim and torture arise and take root in your own brain as part of your character; that sort of thing can cause a mental anguish more terrifyingly painful than any physical pain.