Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/54

54 at my feet I" muttered Zigor—Nydia hearing him. Nydia answered him.

"What the word 'magic' means, translated into our own derivative tongue, is 'magnetic' or the 'science of magnetic'. Only by an age of development by a great race, following directly in the footsteps of those mighty by-gone teachers, could their man wanted to make the miracle of 'magic' live again, he could only lay the foundation by organizing a vast study group of young 'magic' be recreated whole and alive in any one brain. We can only learn simple bits of their true wisdom. These machines we can learn to use, but that is only somewhat like a monkey learning to drive a motorcar. It is not the true wisdom that built these mechanisms of mighty 'magic' If a man wanted to make the miracle of 'magic' live again, he could only lay the foundation by organizing a vast study group of young technicians and student scientists about the existence of these machines of the Elder race. Then in time, many centuries after, those people's children would begin to glimpse the true greatness of the Elder race and perceive how such a race might again be made to grow from the science of 'magnetics.' 'Magic' is infinitely more difficult than it appears on these records of the activities of men, who understood far more of the science than ever we shall."

"Bah!" ejaculated Zigor, taken aback at the difficulties she laid before his grandiose plans. "You are but a foolish blind girl—what can you know of such things?"

AM not foolish, Zigor Mephisto! You stupid bearer of a great ancient name—you nincompoop who plans what no man can fulfill! You are the foolish one, and if you do not lean on my wisdom, you will accomplish no tiny part of your plan. You have begun your work by destroying the thing most valuable to yourself—the minds of those about you. Now, without those minds, all thought must originate in your mind, and certainly you are no mighty thinker, certainly your mind will never conceive a plan capable of growing into a mighty kingdom such as you want it to. If you go on destroying and binding these peoples minds to your own, you will paralyze all possibilities of growth about you—nothing will happen that you do not order to happen, and from what I have seen of your mind, that means that nothing will happen. Within weeks, in all the surrounding country under the rays from this old fortress of Eg Notha, there will be no activity that you do not order, as you have said. What then will you do—will you think for all these people? Because Sathanas worked that way, do not think yourself able to do that. You do not have the mind to think for hundreds of people. For the most part, as soon as your mind turns from your rays to other things, all these people will drop their work and sink into immobility.

"You think that Chlio will keep them going, because you tell her to? That will not be the case, my foolish friend. Your first act was your most foolish one. You have stopped the main spring of life—thought. There will be no life spring from that act, but only sterile sloth; only shuffling, mindless animals about you; so long as you persist in such ideas. Sathanas, with all his might and power and wisdom, was inherently a fool, and if you look at the later records of his life, you will find him completely and irrevocably mad, wallowing in his own filth, while the remains of his empire stood mindlessly waiting for orders from a mind that had died of sheer stupidity—a mind that had persisted in wrong thought until his very acts had killed all possibility of life in him or those who followed him—a man who wallowed in vice and sadism till no thing about remained clean enough to live, and so died. You had better look at all these records before you conclude they contain a recipe for power. They contain quite the reverse.

"Sathanas was an adult immortal, driven from the realms where immortals dwell because he was insane, and his insanity did not thrive on this bitter earth where all men die, but only increased in its mad destructiveness till he had destroyed all hope of recovery. He had even lost the way back to space where men do not die—through sheer stupidity unknowing how to operate a ship in space. Sathanas was an exile who waited too long before returning to the dark spaces where immortal powers live—and his waiting was the cause of his death. I doubt that Sathanas had any real wisdom, or he would have known what caused death here on earth, and he would have fled that old age as men flee leprosy. Sathanas was a fool, one of the greatest fools ever to set foot upon this sad earth. Wise men flee our sun—all others stay and die!"