Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/96

96 in the augmentive apparatus like a great wind. If he had had the rays turned upward, he would have been heard like a great spirit of the winds, breathing in the skies, and that was why he was called the Breath-Master, because he did not shut off the intake of the augmentor, and was always heard breathing. Perhaps he did not know it could be shut off. He turned on the searching eye rays, looked about up on the slowly darkening surface in the evening calm. All was different up there than it had once been, long ago when he had watched the red men fight their wars. Their war-whoops had once been given in conflict even down in the cavern world. Long centuries had Eemeeshee sat, and his father had sat there before him. Eemeeshee did not know if he was a God or not, but he supposed it must be so; had not men worshipped the Eemeeshees for an age?

Eemeeshee wondered a bit where all the Indians had gone, and who these pale people with their ugly machinery and railroads and square houses might be who had taken over all the land above of late. He had not paid much attention to the upper world for a long time. Time didn't matter much anyway. Old Eemeeshee did not care greatly about the actual world. To him it was like an unwanted program on the televisor; too commercial to listen to: like the radio in the house of a person who does not approve of the commercially raucous sounds it emits. Eemeeshee seldom looked at the upper world. He only half believed in it, anyway. Dreams were much more real, and far more beautiful. The dream world into which his dream device plunged him was vastly more satisfying. Was it not more vivid, more full of sweet sound and pleasant sensation and mightier people and vastly stronger love? Eemeeshee was not in love with the world of the actual above his head.

Eemeeshee seldom talked to mere men. There were too many interesting characters in the library of wire film which furnished his dream mech with material, Too, the dream mech made these people real and when one asked them questions or talked to them, they answered. They were vastly more pleasing than mere people of the world over head. Certainly the dream world was one to live in; it rewarded him for every effort with an infinitude of pleasures.

There were few living men who really knew if Eemeeshee was a reality or a legend from the past. One of these was the chief of his servants. He kept the things of the world from interfering with Eemeeshee's pleasures. There was Saba, the keeper of his women. Like all the great of the cavern world, Eemeeshee was well supplied with women, but he did not bother them greatly. They lived altogether in the women's quarters. Under Saba's clever rule they kept busy and to themselves. They were not important, and to Eemeeshee, Saba was like a daughter; a daughter whom he protected from the ugly world of reality. It was better not to know how worthless it was.

In truth, he badly neglected the lives of the people around him, who waited on him hand and foot and even loved him a little. But, then, Eemeeshee was only a forgotten legend, and their lives only a reflection of the glories that had been the life of the caverns when the Red Man was a power on the earth above and had sent always young blood down into the ancient darkness to keep things alive and pulsing.

There was still a lot of life in Eemeeshee's great body. But it was a life that was not greatly interested in itself or in anyone else, either. Eemeeshee was a victim of the greatest vice on earth, the record-mech dreams of the Gods, and his practical knowledge of life and his machines or anything important to an ordinary man was in truth elementary—extremely so.

AR off from that hidden, forgotten place where the old one cogitated the vast mysteries of an existence he had never bothered to understand, the meeting of the Red Legion in the Law Offices of Eonee Lane and Jack Stevens began.

Stevens sat down, and Lane continued standing. In his hand was the paper Stevens had given him. He began to talk—low-pitched college English.

"A thing we have long suspected has been confirmed. The rule in the hidden places under Montana is no longer in the hands of the Red Men. A swift surprise attack gave the power into the hands of foreign white conspirators. They have deluded us into thinking no change took place.

Lane handed the paper to the man seated