Formula from the Underworld

I AM an explorer, by name Harte Man-
ville. My face is badly scarred, one
eye is missing. My hair is grizzled,
but I am still strong and active.

Ten long years ago I had first heard that
some works by the storied races of the Gods
still existed, deep in earth. While reading
a tale by Brandoch Daha called "The
Womb of Tanit" I had realized that myste-
rious and perhaps immortal life might still
exist in the bowels of old Mother Earth.
I understood from his words that some of
my experiences which I had explained to
myself as hallucinations induced by priva-
tion had been actual occurrences of im-
mense significance. I mused that it was an
infinite shame such sincere and top-rank
research minds of earth had to disguise
their work as fiction to get it before the
general mind at all.

Overcome with curiosity as to Daha's
reactions to my own experiences, I was
curious too as to what he might have to
tell a man who knew some of the truths
of the underworld. How he might loosen
up and talk when he met a man who knew
which small parts of his stories were fiction
and which great parts were not. I sought
him out and called upon him. I was not
wrong. Mr. Daha was very glad to see me.

During the course of our night-long con-
versation our discussion touched on the sub-
jects of the secret surviving worship of the
ancient Moon Goddess, Tanit, and details
of my expedition to plumb the depths of
the bottomless hole in the Cave of the
Bats in Virginia. The fact that we both
knew that immortal beings have existed,
do now exist, and will continue to exist,
brought up naturally enough the age-old
question:

"What is the Secret which keeps such
life from dying as other life does?"

I remember his words:

"There have been many things mistaken
for the Secret of Life. The phrase should
mean 'continue existence without aging'.
All right, this time it does. But you will
have to grasp with your head firmly, not
sleepily, to see the big meaning that can
lie in simple phrases.

"Since before the flood, there, exist in
legends stories of those creatures, the Gods,
who were immortal. Also tales of those
other kind, of scholars who learned the
secrets of immortality; tales of magi, of
genis, of peris, of fairies, of immortal

witch-maids, of sorcerers, of enchanters.
An enormous amount of smoke comes out
of antiquity about 'the secret of life' which
in modern words means 'how to exclude the
poisons that cause age from the human
body.' All that antique smoke indicates
very strongly that once that true fire of
wisdom from Prometheus existed; that
storied Atlantis, full of immortals, was;
that the Gods did tread earth, sinking
ankle deep in solid rock.

"Let us go over that possibility between
us. First, we will look at the beginning of
life. Why is it young, and not old, like its
mother? The womb of the mother holds
the flesh of the baby, it is young, she is
often aged. Why is this flesh not also old?
Because, interposed between her body and
the embryo are the walls of the womb.
Everything that goes into the baby must
pass. through the food tube which passes
through a large filtering organ called the
placenta. Obviously some poison is re-
moved. The baby's flesh is growing at a
swift rate, the flesh of the aging mother is
shrinking; it is more disintegrant than
integrant."

HE PAUSED. We both had a drink, he
lit a cigar; but before I could get
going he started on.

"I once translated an ancient German
work by Bokbe. It was a translation by
him of a very old Arabian work, which was
in turn from the Egyptian. God knows how
old the original is. I will read you my
translation."

He got up, pulled a pile of manuscripts
from a drawer, and selecting one, began:

"After Atlantis sank beneath the blue
roll of ocean sea, there still existed scattered
about earth similar cities to Atlantis. These
cities were not surface cities but were
buried beneath the earth in great and deep
caves to protect them from the deadly sun
which they knew to be the cause of age!
But now the cities were empty and dead of
any intelligent life; their mighty corridors
echoed to no laughing feet of the young
immortal they had once bred into the
storied races of the Gods. Instead, there
slunk about their streets the pariahs, the
lepers, the outcasts and criminals of the
upper world, fled from the too frequent
anger of the ignorant men of the surface.
They had found a refuge in these secret lost
cities.

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

13

"Now, the long vanished residents of
these caverns had once been numerous and
wealthy in the products that immortal
minds which had conquered the problem
of death could give. The God race, long
ago had 'ascended into the blue of heaven
in their fiery chariots,' the nomads told each
other in the torch-lit darkness, as they
gazed wonderingly about them at the
machinery whose uses even the wisest man
has not yet guessed and whose uses the ig-
norant tomb robbers and pariahs dismissed
with the single word — magic. But ' that
first wondering ignorance of the near-wild
discoverers of the dwelling places of the
Atlanteans' neighbors did not continue.
For one day the inevitable happened.

"In a luxurious living place where the
pillars were of sculptured metal set with
sparkling brilliants like fruit and covered
with the glitter of green glass-like leaves as
a tree, and the walls alive with fearfully
writhing figures in a frozen dance, a lone-
some, lost child touched a button in a wall
projection and screamed as the figures came
to life and moved magically upon the wall.
But there was love in the meaning of their
movements, and there was thought in the
sound that came from apertures in the
walls. The thought that the waves from
the wall carried to the child was a force
that commanded him to love and to learn,
to study and to think, to watch and to
want, to become aware of what life could
be and to strive mightily and cannily to-
ward the things he wanted most. The force
commanded him in such a way that he be-
came the servant of the force.

"For in the wall was a strange thing that
the Gods left, a machine that entertained
and taught people and many and long were
the hours the child spent in that chamber
before stealing back to his mother. When
he left he did not know enough to touch
the button again and the machine rap on.
Thus began the life of the First of the
Latter Gods. Over his head stormed the
armies of our first Pharoah, but the child
heard them not; he was deep underground
watching the magic of pictures that moved
and talked, and listening with his brain to
thought from a wire in the machine.

"TTE BROUGHT his playmates into the
■\*■ -1 secret of the magic button that made
the figures on the wall move and live and
that made the big room fill with heady

music and with mighty waves of command-
ing thought. So it was that magic became
the secret of outcasts, and the latter Gods
the people who guarded the secret of the
caverns from the scorned and feared men
of the surface. Many and awesome were
those secrets and poor and few their uses
for them, but still magic lived again on
earth. For they went to the surface with
their strange secret weapons, fooling the
surface folk and taking their gold and food
and returning again to the depths, laughing
with their talk of the sport it had been to
make them think that ghosts were abroad,
that demons and efrits had come for their
souls or their gold.

"But some, like the boy who switched
on the teaching machine, became aware of
the great beauty and the mighty learning
that lay in those machines, waiting only
for the touch of curious fingers on the right
button to spring into active life. These
children of the caves became habitual ex-
plorers of the vast mysterious recesses,
stretching on in ever different wonders into
the depths, into the very heart of earth.

"Some of the machines gave off a sweet,
overpowering pleasant beneficial force, in-
visible except as irridescence, yet force
that awakened their minds and bodies into
furious life and growth. Since the ancients
were master builders these mechanisms did
not wear out easily, having been built to
endure. These inquiring, exploring young
people, by virtue of the growth force that
was in the magic machines, became mighty
beings of vastly superior abilities and
strengths. Beings superior to ordinary men
by so far that they were, in truth, Gods!

"These gathered men about them, taught
them the use of the stored weapons, the
aircraft that lay in the ancient under-
ground airship houses, and began again to
build as the ancient Gods had builded.
Great sections of earth came under their
secret rule. In the northland the im-
mortals ruled as Odin and as Wotan. In
Greece as Zeus and his followers. In the
sea as Oceanus, Jehovah, Jupiter. There
were many who learned in time which
machines had the power to make them
nearly immortal and who in time came to
rule their part of the world. Some of them
built surface cities. In the northland the
fame of Asgard and Valhalla reached far,
though a man came to fear to talk to his
God lightly. But the little people are

14

AMAZING STORIES

great' gossips.

"Then a strange Evil came upon these
hidden rulers of earth; the Evil that cul-
minated in Ragnerak and Armageddon and
in eventual Hell and Earth's near domina-
tion by Hell. The Twilight and Death of
the Latter Gods was not a pleasant time.
For the sun is a fearful and deadly thing
in the same way that glow-metal is fearful
and deadly, and though these Latter Gods
learned much, they did not learn that the
sun throws an invisible pollen of poison
that infects all the energy of earth with
a horrible accumulating ever-fire that is the
true Cause of age. The machines that
gave them their strength and life and
growth contained filters that swept the
energy flows clean of these sun poisons;
but this second race of Gods did not learn
the secret of the filters and well though
they were builded the machines at last be-
came saturated with the deadly rust.

"XTOW, a good man is one whose will is
^ a flow of beneficial energy generated
by healthy cells, and his will is a force
bringing only good to all things. But as
the machines became filled with the disin-
tegrant motes from the sun's infection of
earth energy, these machines in turn af-
fected the great bodies and minds of the
Latter Gods with a destructive flow of
energy. A destructive, evil will, gradually
took the place of good will in their mighty
frames. So it was that one by one the
underground cities became Hells where men
were brought to amuse the mad minds of
their masters with unending agonies, for a
man can suffer long when his life is renewed
from the old machines. Many of the
machines still gave off a force that kept life
in the body even though that body were
racked with tortures that else would cause
death a thousand times.

"Gradually this evil stole over earth
and, not knowing the cause — the failure of
the filters in the machines to remove the
disintegrant dust of the sun — they fought
each other in such battles as still live in
the mouths of men.

"Evil and good fought titanically for
possession of earth, and Evil won, for the
ancient polluted mechanisms turned even
the best willed men into Demons of de-
structive will. Magic lived on as evil
witchery, as 'the works of the devil' and
the secret people of the underworld were

feared and hated as the curse they were.
They came to the surface in fierce raids and
returned again before the still sane rem-
nants of those who knew of the caves could
catch them.

"Here and there the white magic lived on,
ever hunted by the maddened men of the
underworld who were no longer men but
devils who strove to destroy all wisdom so
that no one should ever be able to resist
them. How well they succeeded is shown
by the darkness of centuries — "

Daha's almost chanting voice ceased. He
returned the paper to the drawer. Then
his voice went on, almost as if to him-
self.

"Those are an ancient God's words!

"Sometimes during the near past," he
continued, "probably soon after the advent
of gunpowder, it is said that they prac-
tised blowing up the entrances to the under-
world, to trap each other and to keep
themselves safe from their eternal raids on
each other; that now all trace of these
passages is lost. Others say that it is not
true, and that one reason Earth men are
so backward is that still, even today, wild
men come up from deep in the earth; wild
men with the weapons and the tools of
Gods, and steal secretly about the world
killing men of science so quietly and in such
a way that other men never suspect the
true cause of death. These hint that the
death of such men as Pierre Curie are not
accidents, that Pierre was murdered be-
cause that is the hereditary custom of these
things from the depths — to kill those who
approach in their studies the use of rays,
the properties of magnets, and strange
virtues that lie in synthetic animal mag-
netism. Some hint that the Legend of the
Wandering Jew, of the Watcher, of the
Hag, of the Howling Mother of Sin herself,
of witches and goblins, are still living
beings who live for no one knows how
many centuries, yet who become evil in
time even today because they never learn
that the antique generators always de-
generate into generators of an evil force
that overwhelms and distorts the will into
a kind of hypnosis of destructive command.
That men can never recover from these be-
ings, for they have the weapons of the
Gods, as well as certain wisdoms long
handed down secretly. That this evil hyp-
nosis by the defective machinery that they
now build or find still cah never be fought

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

15

against, for men are too foolish — the wild
devil-things of the caverns too wily and
well equipped.

"Then, too, there are very definite tales
that have come upon them. These are
served by the better of the smaller beings
of the caverns and sometimes men from
the surface too. But men are supposed
not to live down there long except they are
lucky and very strong. The conditions are
too different.

"/CERTAIN it is that many men secretly
^ believe this is the real cause of all
man's troubles and wars. That these be-
ings from the darkness come up still, flying
great globes of metal in which is machin-
ery that controls men's minds and actions
so that it is but as playing marbles or
chess for them to choose sides; and each
side backing armies of the surface people
play with them as the little Dutchmen of
Rip van Winkle played at nine-pins: play
with armies of nations at a game they call
Bickro — in their tongue — meaning bicker-
ing robots. That what is to us a war is to
them but a game.

"All this and much else of a still wilder
kind is whispered of and believed by many
men just as magic and witches were
whispered of and believed in Medieval
times, though not aloud, for men would
then and now tap their heads and scoff
did anyone say aught of the truth of the
underworld."

We talked of many things which I can-
not mention, but one thing I learned well
and that was where to look for the secret
of immortal life. For I had entered and
explored a bit of those endless caverns that
honeycomb the depths of earth, but I had
not realized that in the records of those
people who built them lay the formute and
processes which had made them immortal.
I knew that much writing still lined the
walls of those tremendously antique dwell-
ings. I knew that sealed-in portions con-
taining libraries of books whose pages were
of indestructible metal still lay untouched,
but that anyone had ever translated any of
the language or thought of doing so had
never entered my head. And to tell anyone
of the existence of actual working machines
and written books built in a time so antique
it is forgotten was, I knew, impossible.

But Brandoch Daha knew, had even
obtained from a miner one volume of the

metal books and had worked out a key
which opened that mighty thought to the
man who dared to enter the caverns. But
he was too old; and, too, he knew of the
dread and incomprehensible creatures who
dwell in those caves. His word pictures of
these beings had not made the project re-
volving in mind any more inviting. But
try it I would, I knew that, for I knew
myself. No one felt and answered the
•lure of magic more readily than myself and
those books were the source from which
came the 'Magic Books' which in all legends
and tales of the past are the strength and
wisdom of the sorcerers.

"Now that I knew the origin of these
ancient tomes from which rose the mightiest
power spoken of in all the past of man,
now that I knew it was true wisdom in
those books and that they could be gotten
at if one were hardy and intrepid enough,
the Devil himself — and well it might be
one as great lying in wait in the darkness of
those endless giants' warrens — could not
keep me from trying to get them.

"So it was that my long trek started."

* \* \*

LOWERED down the shaft of the Bot-
tomless Pit, a good mile of cable un-
reeling above me, I searched the walls
eagerly for an opening. At last it came,
one of those perfectly round, apparently
metal lined holes which are the only
entrance into the caves that were homes
of the Gods. What they were originally
intended for I don't know. Perhaps all
that is left of a breather pipe to the sur-
face and the pipe, of less durable materials,
disappeared to leave an opening in the in-
accessible caves of the past. Inaccessable
because the walls were made so hard no
metal will cut them.

A few sways of my body and my cable
became a pendulum to place me on a shelf
a few feet from that opening. Now, again,
I must enter the dwelling place of Evil, the
home of Dread; the beautiful structures,
once the homes of God-like beings, now the
dens of incomprehensible, often giant things
whose endless struggles for existence made
these caves a Hell. This search must not
fail, nothing must stop me, for now that I
had the key to their language — any bit of
their immense lore of science which I might
bring back could and most probably would

16

AMAZING STORIES

change the whole future life of man. And
they knew the cause of age and had con-
quered it! I must not fail!

Load after load of equipment and food
came down the cable, and the telephone
line which connected this remote hole in
the depths with the surface world, which
would await my call for return did months
or years lapse before I used it. I set up
the radio wave emitting apparatus which
would activiate a needle in a radio compass
at my belt every ten minutes so that I
would never lose the direction of my base
and my exit. Finally, with many of the
sensations that Theseus must have had as
he searched for the Minotaur, I set off
through the vaulted halls lined with
majestic and mighty mechanisms, covered
with the dust of endless centuries. This
dust was my insurance of safety for when
I neared THEM, the dust would contain
footprints and paths.

I came to vast machines built for un-
knowable uses as big as a city block. Often
they were topped by a seat, massive and
huge for a giant's form. I had seen some
of these before, but^had not thought there
was much use in looking them over care-
fully as their age must have rendered them
useless. It was whispered that some of
these ancient mechanisms still worked.

I mounted the six-foot steps leading up
to the great seat of a machine. An infinitely
bewildering array of switches, buttons and
levers were banked across the panel in
front of the seat. Ten feet up, where a
twenty-foot giant's eyes would be, was a
shimmering white expanse. Was it a
screen? Tentatively I pulled a few levers.
A soft, thrilling humming throbbed through
the vastness of the mechanism beneath me.
On the white expanse a picture appeared,
a scene on the surface of earth. I turned
a huge knob and the scene changed. Like
Odin's eye it swept across the country,
how far, how many endless miles that pene-
trating view ray swept its automatic focus,
I could not say.

Now, in ancient tales, such stories as
those of Solomon's ring, of Merlin, of
Aladdin's lamp, said that magic machinery
was capable of nearly any miracles asked
of it. Of what else was this monstrous
machine capable? I soon found out.

I WAS looking at a surface scene, a farm
house in front of which was a big elm

and leaning backward to see better in the
screen above my head my hand inadvert-
ently grasped a lever to support me. There
in the scene of the house and elm a great
wind sprang up whirling and whirling
around the house. As I pondered whether
the wind appearing so suddenly was a part
of nature or made by the machine my other
hand rested on a lever at the side of the
huge seat and instantly an awful bolt of
force struck the elm in the center of the
screen and it disappeared, leaving noth-
ing but a hole in the earth and a cloud of
dust whirling in the wind. This machine
was quite a plaything, I decided. I had
better learn something about it. This eye,
which like Odin's, seemed able to go every-
where and see everything, was just the
thing with which to explore these caverns
with and save my feet.

These caverns are not as one would pic-
ture them, full of stalagmites and stalactites
and dripping with moisture. Quite the con-
trary, they are dry. The walls are of
hardened, impenetrable rock and every
half-mile great metal doors seal the pas-
sages from all water and air. Thick dust
is the only sign of the passage of time; and
this varies: some places there is very little,
for the doors keep the caves sealed tightly.
Some are corroded, though, and here is
much dust and some dampness.

I swept the ray up the miles of caves
beyond me, drinking in the colorful beauty
of the ancient dwellings — the story of tre-
mendous life that every bit of the work
tells.

There is a brooding, deserted-temple at-
mosphere about these ancient homes. The
mighty presence of the past life left some-
thing that still lives, quiescent but awe-
some: the vast machines, beautiful as no
other machinery on earth, the silence, the
waiting power. The ray swept along the
far-reaching avenues. What was I looking
for? Well, I found something, I can tell
you.

They sprang into the vision screen sud-
denly as the ray swept past; they were
gone. It took me an hour to find them
again. Living things! Down here! I had
heard of them, seen some strange things
before. But I had not had an Odin's eye
to watch them.

They were in what had once been some
huge ancient's living quarters. The bed
was a tremendous affair some twenty by

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

thirty feet. Sprawled about its expanse
were a dozen creatures asleep in the rays
that bathed the bed. The creatures were
human, apparently, yet not human at all,
on second examination. Living in the
depths had changed them; they were as dif-
ferent from men as a potato sprout in the
cellar is from a potato plant in the field.

The ray brought to the screen not only
the things to be seen, but an augmentation
of the things to be heard. I distinctly heard
the creatures thinking, as well as saw them.

Their thought was as alarming as their
appearance. The rays that bathed the an-
cients' bed were pleasure rays as well as
soporific rays. They induced an ultra-
pleasant dream state in which the will of
the sleeper found every wish coming true,
tremendously true. But these creatures
were not men; they were — degenerates —
things.

Their wishes and dreams were of blood
and death and tortures for their enemies
and little else, for all the creatures they
dreamed of seemed enemies. I had an im-
pulse — a strong one — to pull that lever that
had blotted out the elm tree and turn these
sleeping curses into drifting dust. They
called themselves Hobloks. A meanness
sat on their faces, looking out and hating
all life.

TN APPEARANCE the sleepers were like

* fearfully anaemic jitterbugs, small, with

pipestem arms and legs, pot bellies, huge
protruding eyes and wide, idiotically grin-
ning mouths. Super-goofy, I believe mod-
ern youth would call them. They wore
clothes as men do, apparently clothes re-
cently from the surface world, and as I
tinkered with the focus of the monster eye
in front of me a modern truck sprang into
view, a trailer job closed and fitted inside
for living. There must be a way of driving
down here from the surface. These Things
had contact with the surface! I must know
more about that.

In another chamber near the sleepers
were a group of normal-appearing people
apparently fresh from the surface. Reading
their thought I gathered that they had
answered an ad in the paper; had been
hired only to find at the end of their
journey this place, and themselves in the
hands of the Hobloks. They had been
locked in for days and were completely at
sea mentally. Just what did the Hobloks

want with them? Could I get the answer
by looking at the sleepers' thoughts?

One of them was dreaming of the reward
he would receive for turning over the cap-
tives at their destination. And what a
destination! If it was anything like the
Things' mental pictures, it was some place.
Much deeper in earth, it was; once the
home of some tremendous being. The
chambers were many city blocks in width
and fantastically sculptured, lined with
mechanisms. A fierce activity filled the
place.

Sometime in the past, I gathered, some
one of these cavern dwellers had turned on
a growth force generator and lain down to
sleep in it. The results were that he had
become another, greater life. He had not
turned it off, but stayed beside it and
growth had made a super being of him.
It was not balanced growth. He was a
vast mass of pink flesh with sprouts of
peculiar life protruding from him. This
Thing was the boss of the place. The
captives were destined to serve this mass
of flesh. His appetite for women was
enormous, to judge by the harem that sur-
rounded him, stroking the quivering pink-
ness, carefully removing the sprouts when
they were ripe, dancing for the vast eyes
that surmounted the awful pile of flesh.
I did not like this modern god.

In other chambers men were working on
the ancient mechanisms, taking them apart,
studying them, putting them back together.
I could not get from the creature's mind
more than a glimmer of what really was
going on except that he knew the people
laboring there were under a strong com-
pulsion. They were robots to others who
made them work. The workers were tech-
nically trained men from the surface while
the masters were cavern beings whom the
workers never saw. That the masters were
also under compulsion from the mountain
of flash seemed likewise true.

In front of the mountain of flesh a
woman lay writhing in an agony of desire.
Wires led to her from several mechanisms
within reach of the monster's hands. He
made adjustments now and then on the
dials of the panels. He seemed to be breath-
ing in the augmented vitality of the woman.
His huge eyes ogled as he strove to bend
toward her. As her anguished limbs and
striving body thrashed to a crescendo of
awful torment — her heart gave way, her

18

AMAZING STORIES

body stilled; she died. The creature in
whose dreaming mind I watched this scene
was serenely, greatly satisfied at this death.
So I gathered was the man mountain.

As I watched, her body was removed by
red-masked attendants and replaced by an-
other living beauty from the surface. The
scene began again in the dreamer's mind;
he enjoyed it greatly.

THIS god was mad. Somewhere in the
depths his private hell was functioning.
These captives were destined for his pecu-
liar pleasures. Many of them were women.
The others were technical engineers, the
best minds an ad for trained men at a
fantastically high salary had brought. How
long had this been going on? The sleeping
creature did not know; all his life so far
as I knew.

But such things could not go on without
men's knowledge, you say. Well, having
used the ray machinisms and knowing their
power and seeing such things, I say they
can and do go on. For no one could
approach a listening ray mech without its
operator hearing. No person could think
or do a thing other than the operator willed
if he were watched and ruled by an Odin's
ray. The caverns do exist. I was there.

It suddenly occurred to me that I might
be in danger from these goofy Hobloks or
from the will-less men who served the form-
less master in the Hoblok's dream. And
once they located me, away would go all
my dreams of ancient books and the
formula for eternal life which the legends
so repeatedly attribute to them. I could
not fail! The whole future of man would
depend on my search, were it successful,
for any bit of their ancient science could
change the whole course of earth science.
If they spotted me on a ray I would have
short shrift I knew from the dreams of
killing that filled their sleeping minds.

I decided to attempt to see this private
Hell with the giant ray at which I sat.
It was the safest way to learn what it was
all about. Certainly I could not proceed
on my search without knowing where it lay
and how to avoid falling into the growth
monster's hands.

A couple of hours patient searching of
the depths with the amazingly penetrative
ray finally revealed one of the workrooms
where the red-masked servants of the mon-
ster stood guard over the enslaved engi-

neers. I quickly understood their slavery,
for a strong generator of thought waves
filled the room with a command, abstract
but powerful; stronger than any thought
they themselves could possibly generate.

"Work and construct from these ancient
machines powerful pleasure machines for
my enjoyment," were the thought waves.

Thus these highly trained men from the
surface, brought into the presence of this
strong thought command, worked at the
construction of pleasure nerve stimulators
for the mountain of pink flesh. Worked till
they dropped, only to get up and work
again.

Reading the minds of the red-masked
men who stood about like guards I found
little but a habit of obedience to com-
mands from their master. They had very
little mental activity; had been practically
robots since children.

So that huge Thing of flesh that had once
been something like a man was perpetually
bathed in hundreds of high-power stimula-
tive pleasure rays. His was a tremendous
energy devoted to ways of feeling ever
greater sensuous pleasure; pleasure which,
to him, consisted in stimulating a woman
till life energy killed her by its intensity.
Here in this underworld he had found ways
of getting a steady supply of prisoners and
an ever greater amount of pleasure stimu-
lating force rays. I did not like this Thing
whom his slaves called Mula. No, I did
not like him.

SO AFTER more protracted fishing with
the mighty mechanism I had activated,
but was finding difficulty in learning to
use accurately, I finally brought Mula him-
self into direct focus, saw him vast on the
center of the screen, smelt the sweat from
that soft, enormous, hundred tons of cor-
rupt growth. I heard the thought that ran
through the awful head of him. Listen care-
fully and I will try to tell you what a thing
like that thinks.

"The growth which has come upon me
depends entirely on certain kinds of rays
which the ancients knew how to make. My
robots are fast developing similar devices
to the one which made me into this mighty
life and then wore out to leave me to grow
old, never to move toward pleasure in
others' death. Ah, the sweet agonies of
these creatures desiring love — love— and
getting more desire of love till their flutter-

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

19

ing little energies burst their flesh and fly
away. Soon my slaves will bring the growth
rays and I will start to grow again, to
grow and feel young again, gloriously alive
as I was centuries ago before the first
ancient growth ray wore out. Then I will
grow and eat and grow and fill all the
caverns with myself ; I will be all. By that
time I will have learned to consume all
matter, to make all things into myself.
I will be Earth!"

"Hell," I thought to myself, "the darned
Thing is senile, is a crazy old man; maybe
once a super being, centuries ago; but now
the strength in him has kept him alive
while age has made a destructive idiot of
him."

Just here my troubles began, for, hearing
thought as I did it had never occurred to
me that the one I listened to could also
hear me. That there might be a way of
handling this instrument so that I could
hear without being heard had never oc-
curred to me; nor had I realized that it
might work both ways. Anyway, the
ancient giant of growth heard me. I
heard his commands ring on my ears as
they leaped from his "robot-make" machine
as he called it, a device making his thought
so strong that the robots must obey it.

"Some surface man is spying on me with
a ray," I heard him thinking. "Find him.
Kill him or bring him to me at once!"

I heard him mentally rubbing his hands
in anticipation of the coming delight of
slowly killing me after he learned if there
were others to worry about.

A cold sweat broke out on my face. I
had no wish to become part of Mula's
pleasure.

My life right now depended on whether
Mula's creatures had equipment that would
reach this spot. There was little I could
do about it.

All at once I thought of the lever which
had destroyed the elm tree in my first ex-
perimental manipulations. I got Mula's
bulk in the exact center of my screen and
pulled that lever fully expecting to see
Mula dissolve into drifting dust. Instead
he let out the most unearthly howl of pain
it has ever been my pleasure to hear. Too
much rock, I realized, between us for the
bolt to be fully effective. Well, it was some-
thing to hear Mula howl and see his end-
less ripples of flesh quivering in agony like
a scared dowager's double chins endlessly

repeated and endlessly twitching in pain
and terror. I stood up on the huge seat
and howled into the screen:

"Mula, if you don't instantly call off
your animals I'll fill you so full of pain
you'll wish you weren't quite so big."

HE PROBABLY didn't speak English
but he grasped the thought behind
the words.

Mula proved to be just a big, bad sissy
after all. He couldn't take it. He was all
placating, ingratiating thought as he gave
orders sending his men back to their for-
mer positions. But I was stuck. I had to
hold that ray on Mula and give him a
dose of pain every time the thought oc-
curred to him that perhaps I wasn't listen-
ing and he could now arrange my demise.
I decided I needed help. Riding herd on
senile super man Mula was not a one-man
job.

There was only one place I could get
help — that was that truckload of fresh sur-
face captives waiting in the chamber by
the sleeping Hobloks. I would have to do
the job in a hurry or the man-mountain
would put one over on me.

I swung the huge eye to its former focus
on the sleeping crew of underworld slavers
and in a twinkling had obliterated the bed
on which they lay in their poisonous
dreams. I had no desire to play with them ;
they seemed to know their way around
down here and Mula was plenty to handle
just now. I blasted away the locked door
to the chamber of the captives and standing
up to the screen yelled at their bewildered
faces:

"Get in that truck and start driving.
I'll tell you how to get out of here."

For the next hour I was busy as a post-
man on Christmas Eve, swinging over to
Mula and giving him a mocking tee-hee
and a jolt of juice and swinging back to
figure out the path the truck must take to
reach me. But the hour stretched into
days.

Mula was in one vast quiver of frustrated
rage fearing to give orders to seek me out
and yet unable to bear the loss of his power
which had been undisputed for centuries,
from what I had read in his mind. He was
pretty sure I was one of the Hobloks who
had acquired big ideas on the surface and
had decided to turn the tables on his meaty
Majesty. I did not feel greatly compli-

20

AMAZING STORIES

mented, for those anasmic super-goofs were
not my idea of what to be mistaken for.
Nevertheless I mouthed the mean-sound-
ing nothings I had seen them use in their
dreams and certainly I took as much delight
in tormenting Mula as I knew they would
have taken in tormenting me. How I de-
vested that pile of fat, inhuman appetite!

HOW had a growth force generator suc-
ceeded in creating this monstrous
pollution? An increase in growth rate, in
the supply of growth causing material,
should result in an enhanced power of per-
ception, a greater awareness of beauty, a
mightier will to create, a really superior
being with a will to make life something
fine to have. How had a growth force
mechanism succeeded in creating this
monstrous pollution? It was too much for
me. Even if the machine had failed cen-
turies before something of the fine qualities
it must have helped to grow in man should
have remained. Was age itself, then, such
a cause of corruption? It appeared so.
But as I watched the ancient life in him 1
learned what really made him the horror
he was.

From several places which I could not
locate, rays came into the hall where his
bulk lay — rays which subtly caused him
to think. As I listened to these rays which
seemed unnoticed by Mula I heard an
idiotic murmur of utterly degenerate
thought. Some creature in the distance
was at some machine watching Mula and
the idiocy of the thought was, through the
strength of the great augmentation, caus-
ing Mula to think in the same way. Though
I could see this occur, Mula was apparently
oblivious of these creatures; yet, they were
making him think!

I finally got it through me just how this
had made Mula the thing he was. These
creatures we're the wild natural inhabitants
of the caverns who had lived there since
earliest times, fishing in the underground
rivers, stealing some food from surface
fields. Those I had just killed as they slept
were some whom Mula had impressed into
his service, but all through the caverns
were some of these thin little half-men
with protruding eyes adapted to the dark.
Their only play was turning on the old
machine to see and talk to surface people
and to each other in the depths. Always
some of them had watched Mula, his

growth and his behavior, and the latter
was much a product of their own idiotic
little brains augmented by the mighty
machines until the constant pressure of the
great rays on him had produced an hyp-
notic effect on Mula. He had become as
they were by the long effect of the distant,
unnnoticed watching. They were clever
imitators just as monkeys are and instinc-
tively when one looked at them over the
ray, they felt it and put on an unobtrusive
mental attitude. It was evidently this
habit which kept Mula from realizing
what a great effect they had on him.

Watching them I also learned that they
really hated and feared Mula and when
he was unaware of them they had a way
of introducing another destructive ray into
the screen. Thus, with a strong magnifica-
tion of Mula on their screen they would
watch his brain and body with their small
rays which the big machine augmented and
carried into Mula's body. So it was, in
truth, that he was nearly an idiot, as the
connecting nerves of his brain had been
mostly destroyed. He considered them as
his allies and servants. It never seemed
to occur to him that they were in truth
his death.

This very subtle whittling at his huge
brain, as habitual to them as a mouse's
nibbling is to a mouse, was the very cause
of Mula's oblivious attitude, as well as the
hypnotic effect of all such huge rays. They
did not want Mula to think of them and
Mula obeyed the huge impulse post-hyp-
notically.

IT TOOK several hours of observation
for all this to be understood by myself.
The creatures were very interesting. They
watched surface people continually, whisp-
ering complicated lies in their ears. This
was one of their greatest pleasures; in fact
they had almost no use for the truth.
Their whole life was one of watching over
the big rays and figuring out childish devil-
tries to inflict on the surface men. Their
secret — where and what they were — the
surface men never seemed to figure out.
Though most of them suffered from them
more or less, they never spoke to each other
about it for fear of being considered mad.
Believing in invisible imps! It was too
fantastic and stupid a thing.

This thing I watched, I slowly realized,
had been going on since the earliest times.

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

21

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, degen-
erate 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 in-
stinctive 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. Th^
multihead effect inherent in the use of any"
telepathic appartus gave them immense
mental facility while they used the ap-

paratus; 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 for-
ever in their faces making them hate each
other and every living thing.

I 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 inum-
erable 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 gen-
erous folds and ripples. "My would-be em-
ployer. 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\ 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 con-
centrated 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

22

AMAZING STORIES

which I had entered, for food. The rest
of us set to work on the banks of levers
and buttons that surrounded the huge seat
and screen, trying different combinations
to see what happened. And plenty hap-
pened.

From a scoop-like opening at one side,
green globes the size of footballs began to
emerge. From another opening a whir-
ring and clattering issued. I was sure
something was broken but after a time a
strange looking mechanism emerged from
the opening with a shiny new appearance
like a Christmas bicycle. I stood looking
at it wondering what on earth it was when
it got up, walked toward me on four legs.
The girls screamed and began to run and I
was not far behind them. ButMacCarthy
stood his ground. AsNthe machine came
up to him it stopped and a round hole in
the top of it began to emit words of a
deep, rich, human quality.

The robot was a four-foot cylinder stand-
ing erect on four short jointed legs. Only
one of these legs moved at a time but very
rapidly so that the robot moved at a good
walking pace and swayed hardly at all.
From the top of the cylinder hung three
quite long arms. About the top part of
the cylinder were a dozen small apertures
covered by fine wire grids. What they
were all for I don't know, but the robot, by
its own behavior was well equipped with
senses

"God," said MacCarthy, "it's a robot.
Now what will we do with a robot?"

I HAD an idea. I called to MacCarthy.
"Take it a little distance away, if you
can. I'll turn the eye on it and see what
its insides are doing."

MacCarthy extended his hand as one
would to a child and the robot took hold
of his big red paw and followed him away.
I swung the huge eye down upon it and
instantly I heard its mechanical thought
answering my own.

"When you need food I will get it," it
said in abstract thought. "When you
sleep, I will watch. When there is work,
I will do it. What do you wish of me?"

Just how much could this robot think
was what puzzled me. I soon learned, for
the thought of the robot answered my un-
conscious question.

"I can think as well as a wild animal
times three," he seemed to say. Anyway,

some multiple of a natural animal's
thought was what he meant.

What the green globes were for was a
question that had bothered me since their
appearance. The robot heard this ques-
tion in my mind, released MacCarthy's
hand, went to the growing pile of glisten-
ing rounds, picked up one and mounted the
stairs to the seat bearing the globe. With
one metal finger he poked a hole in its
transluscent shell and held it to my mouth.
I tasted it and an ecstacy of flavor spread
through me. It was the nectar of the
Gods, put up in flexible glass. I whooped,
waved the green thing at MacCarthy and
the girls.

"It's canned!" I shouted. "Drink up.
It's on the house!"

"What a house!" I heard MacCarthy
say.

Then the robot sat down beside me,
took the controls of the eye from my hands.
There was nothing I could do about it; he
was built of that metal than which there is
no tougher that I have ever found. Me-
thodically the robot swung the eye in ever-
widening circles, looking — looking. I
watched the screen. The robot saw one of
the skinny Hobloks. Under the robot's
long metal fingers the thing leaped into
center focus. The robot seemed to pause
in bewilderment. It was not what he ex-
pected to see, it was plain. But the Hob-
lok was also at a ray mechanism watching
us. The robot took perhaps ten seconds to
read the thought in the Hoblok's mind,
then pressed a stud. The Hoblok rolled
over, apparently dead.

The robot continued his sweeping search
in ever-widening circles. But I was wor-
ried about Mula. Perhaps the robot
would— no, it was too much to expect. I
tapped the robot's metal top, pointed in
Mula's direction. Obediently he swung
the eye as indicated, much quicker and
more easily than I myself could. I waved
my hand to indicate farther and farther
and far as it was, Mula shortly appeared
in the screen. I could hear the robot's
mechanical mind as he saw Mula's much-
ness centered on the screen when a blaze
of light and deafening sound thundered
into our faces. I felt myself falling; knew
no more.

I came to with my head in the lap of
Fanny de Moina, a miniature edition

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

of Margie Hart who had fallen for Mula's
ad for females. She was bathing my head
with the liquid from one pf the green
globes and pouring some of it down my
throat. Either she was one of the most
ravishing creatures on earth or the green
fluid had remarkable properties.

"What happened?" I asked weakly.

"MacCarthy said Mula must have used
your ray path to conduct a heavy jolt of
juice back to you. The robot is still out
of commission. MacCarthy says since we
don't know how to fix a robot we'll have
to make another one. He started the big
machine making one. You know, Mr.
Manville, I didn't get a chance to thank
you for saving us from that overgrown
hunk of meat. He is the most unattractive
man I ever saw, that Mula." She leaned
over and planted a highly satisfactory kiss
on me.

"Just to show you I enjoyed being res-
cued from super fatty," she grinned.

MacCarthy and Murray, a radio engi-
neer, a lean, dark Scot, came up leading
a new robot different in no way from the
other.

"Meet Joe Robot the second. How do
you feel?" asked MacCarthy.

"Like I'd been kicked by a Mula," I
countered weakly, "but apparently I'm
still in working order. Now listen, you
two. Since we can't catch Mula any more
we're in plenty of danger. Sooner or later
he will get a ray centered on us and that
will be the end. We've got to figure what
to do in a hurry. Was the big ray injured
by Mula's juice?"

"Couldn't find anything wrong," an-
swered MacCarthy. "Those things are
built plenty strong. What a race they
have been!"

Allen, a tall, thin, Southern electrical
technician, spoke up, "We've been in a
huddle about the mess for a couple of
hours while you were unconscious. We
can't find an answer. We can't kill Mula
with this ray. We can't even look at him
any more. It looks inevitable. Sooner or
later Mula or the Hobloks will do for us.
Even if we run ; probably quicker if we run,
since this huge ray is our only weapon."

"If we could just talk the language that
robot is built to use," I mused aloud.

"There is a chance that there are other
beings down here as strong or more so than
Mula," I went on. "But how to find

them or get any help out of them — " I
didn't finish, for coming up the wide cav-
ern road were the three men I had sent
for food. Their coming had been an-
nounced by shouts from the girls who spent
most of the time at the screen.

"We have news," were their first words.

"We will soon have visitors and please be
nice to them. They were nice to us."

They had hardly thrown down their
packs and stretched when out of an opening
in the side of the cave popped a long car,
glided to a halt near us. A door slid open
and something emerged. Fanny promptly
fainted; the other girls screamed and went
into a complicated clinch with each other.
The three men who had just arrived ad-
vanced toward the creature in welcome.
He was a snail — yet, a man. A long,
lumpy brown body oozed toward us, and,
centaur-like above it rose the head, shoul-
ders and arms of a man. His neck was
surrounded by a foot-long frill extending
over his shealders downward. His mouth
was very big and toothless; his nose long
and prehensile: it quivered and sniffed at
us with a curiosity all its own. But his
eyes were big and brown and as gentle as a
St. Bernard dog's. He did not waste time.

""VT'OU will be surprised to hear me speak

* English, but I have had contact with

surface people before. I know you are in
trouble here. It is safest for you to come
with me at once, without more words.
Without my help you will soon be killed.
There is no time for delay. I will explain
things to you on the way. Please come
now."

Channing, one of the three who had just
arrived, spoke up.

"We were talking with him a long time.
His name is Hank. There is a horde of
them deeper in the earth, but not many
are strong enough to stand gravity this
near the surface. There are people like
ourselves there too; but they have lived
there too long to come to the surface.
I think he is our best bet. I don't see any
harm in him."

I gave the word, really much elated. I
picked up Fanny, who was preparing to
come out of her faint.

"Let's go, folks," I called. "This is
the subway. Can't keep the train wait-
ing!"

The interior of the car contained some

24

AMAZING STORIES

thirty seats. We loaded up our scanty
supplies; the green globes had become quite
a pile and Joe Robot the second was per-
suaded to carry Joe the first into the car.
This procedure much interested Hank, the
snail centaur.

"What is the origin of your people?" I
asked Hank.

"We have dwelt deep in the earth al-
ways," he began. "Our ruler, the immortal
Queen Tanitia, has explained that we're a
product of the laboratories of the ancient
Gods, especially adapted to difficult under-
world conditions, and used in pioneering
new borings before they were fully equipped
with apparatus adapting the deep caverns
to other forms of life. Thus we had inher-
ent abilities which enabled us to survive
when most men perished, except on the
surface."

"Does any of the ancient wisdom still
exist?" I asked, my heart in my mouth.

"Yes," he replied, "our Queen is very old.
No one knows how old. We have some of
their writings which we study."

God! my mission was close to success!

"You have robots," he remarked coming
back to the situation at hand. "That is
good. I have heard of them." The car
started slowly into the tube. The tube
was smooth metal. From the car's top and
bottom and sides projected wheels which
were in constant pressing contact with the
tube sides. The car was motor driven.

"What kind of a motor is this, anyway?"
I asked Hank.

"I don't know," he confessed. "It is an
antique like most things We use down here.
It runs on water. Many of these ancient
engines run on water. You put it in, the
engine goes, the water disappears. It is
all I know."

The car howled along at a tremendous
speed. It swayed hardly at all for the
projecting wheels held it rigidly in the
center of the tube. The tube dropped
steadily downward. Hours went by. Mula
was far away, I sighed with relief at the
thought. I found my weight had become
a trifle for the sigh caused me to lift gently
in the seat.

The car flashed along through a mam-
\_moth city now. It was larger and more
"beautiful than any of the caverns we had
yet seen. The tube in which we had
descended had come out into the city
cavern in a channel that ran through the

city on stilts, like surface elevated trains.
The top half of the car was transparent
and about us lay the ancient homes of
mighty immortal beings lit and tenanted;
looking much as it must have when it was
young. Across it hummed tiny heliplanes;
along the ways, many cars like our own
sped. Here and there glided or grouped the
snail people, not unlovely once you were
used to them. Their head crests glittered
irridescently when they moved. Theirs
was a gentle purposefulness as there is
about a good horse in action. Among
them I noticed many human forms like our
own though clad in short glittering tunics
and with long hair floating. They took
prodigious strides when they walked, I
noticed.

OUR car glided to a halt before a huge
doorway, flanked by snailmen at guard
holding, strangely enough, modern rifles.

Hank led us up the inclined plane alt a
vastly more rapid glide than he had shown
us near the surface. He seemed very
different down here; his breath slow and
even, his eyes gleaming with strength, his
frill standing out sharply beautiful, veined
like a big flower.

I rose several feet in the air at each
step. I weighed little, had a sensation of
strength I had never felt before.

We followed Hank's gliding form up the
ramp, around a glistening curve of trans-
parent walls through a hallway into a
courtroom glittering with lush human life
and brilliant with laughing, intelligent
young faces. At a desk on a dais at one
end of the place lay a woman. She rose
as we entered and came swiftly toward us,
her hands outstretched in greeting. My
heart leaped at sight of her, not so much
because of the beauty, but because of the
sensation of burning thought that lay on
her face.

"We know your troubles," were her
words, "because they are similar to that of
all surface people and because we have
the same troubles everywhere we go ex-
cept here. Here it is safe and we will
help plan a future for you."

Hank bowed low before her.

"Queen Shola, these are the people who
escaped from the great hulk Mula, and
this is the man who rescued them. His
name is Manville."

The Queen extended her hand to me.

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

"I understand," she said, "that Mula
did not enjoy meeting you."

"He did squeak a little about it," I
admitted. "How is it that you are so well
acquainted with our difficulty?"

"All over the world," answered the
Queen, "these caverns extend to within a
few miles of the surface and all through
the caverns playing and fighting with the
ancient mechanisms are the Hobloks and
their kind. Mostly they are mean and evil
and foolish; but they have been living with
the ray equipment for so many centuries
that its use has become instinctive with
them and many of them are very adept at
its various uses. They torment and injure
surface people to such an extent that there
is little hope for their progress, especially
as they are so totally unaware of the evil
or its extent. Just as the Hobloks have
made Mula a thing of evil, though he was
once a vital animal, so do they make of
many surface leaders foolish and evil crea-
tures through their continuous lies and
thought tamper.

"They thwart all scientific effort on the
surface. They stop every good thing be-
fore it becomes a part of surface life. We
have often tried to exterminate the crea-
tures, but we have only succeeded in
clearing a few of these deep earth cities
of their influence. In the far distance they
spy on us still. The ancient wave rays at
which they sit are too powerful for us to
overcome.

"If we try to make a clean surface place
so as to cure some surface life of their
influence and bring back the study of the
ancient science through the study of the
ancient machines, our efforts come to
nothing because we can never get enough
of the old ray positions in our hands to
protect ourselves fully. Our men become,
in a short time, foolish or insane from the
needling they get from unreachable old
rays.

"It seems impossible that intelligent men
could not overcome these foolish Hobloks.
But when they turn on the old rays it gives
them immense awareness; they are super
destructive. We have not succeeded in
freeing any surface life of them."

"You are the ruler of this great city?"
I asked Queen Shola.

"I am just a sub-ruler; I have been
appointed to rule over the humans of the
city. The real ruler is a very old and

immortal being whom we seldom see. You
will be taken before her presently."

"Immortal?" I queried.

"I know already why you came to the
underworld. We have been taking rec-
ords of your thought since before you ar-
rived. You came to learn the secret of
immortality. There is no reason," she went
on, "why you should not succeed."

"'"pHESE snail men seem very intelli-

* gent," I observed.

"There is a reason for their intelligence,"
she affirmed. "You see, the potentialities
of mind-reading apparatus are immense.
The multihead effect alone contains enough
power to pull the whole human race into a
wonderful new way of life. We have de-
veloped this side of ray work quite a bit.
You see, if we are in mental contact, my
brain's questions are answered automatic-
ally by yours, if it possesses the answer.
So that we are actually much more intelli-
gent than two people not in contact, are
we not? We are as intelligent as the num-
ber of brain cells active in your head multi-
plied by the number in my head which is
something like a thousand times as intelli-
gent as two ordinary people not in contact.
We have developed this principle — called
the Multihead principle — into mind teams
containing many hundreds of specialists,
each brain trained to use all the resources
of all the other brains. The result is a
group of men perhaps a billion times as
intelligent as an ordinary human. Would
you like to talk to someone trained in such
a school?"

I looked at her lovely, quizzical face
and suddenly realized I was talking to a
person as far superior to myself as a man
is superior to a worm.

"I think I am talking to such a person."
The simplicity and enormity of the multi-
head principle had floored me.

"The multi-head principle is one thing
we tried very hard to get surface people to
adopt. But they listened to the idiotic
tamper of our Hoblok opposition and fear-
fully refused to work on telepathic appara-
tus. In some ways you are still medieval,
you surface men. This principle is one
reason Mula gets along so well — hundreds
of minds are slaves to him and always in
contact. His mind uses them parasitic-
ally."

"They do have a reactionary attitude to-

26

AMAZING STORIES

ward some types of new things, it is true,"
I agreed.

"You don't know how hard we have
tried to make them able to be of use to
us. We are in constant bitter warfare
with the insane Hobloks. Come, I will
show you. The mind-record workers tell
me you are wholly trustworthy."

The rest of my party never missed me.
A group of uniformed officers surrounded
the girls, some of whom, like Fanny de
Moina, were real beauties. The six engi-
neers were likewise surrounded by a bevy
of underworld charm and MacCarthy's
red face was wreathed in grins. I guessed
he was describing the expansive Mula; I
could hear them laughing.

QUEEN SHOLA led me into an adjoin-
ing apartment. Here the walls were
a series of television screens on each of
which a scene of struggle was taking place.
On the center of each, some far distant
ancient giant of a ray generator, topped by
a Hoblok, sent vast streams of energy to-
ward the receiver. These were met and
neutralized by great black shorter rays
somewhere between. In the lower part of
the screen could be seen the uniformed
head and shoulders of a snail man, his
peculiar webbed hands manipulating the
defense mechanisms. At some of the rays
were humans, also in uniform.

"This particular war is ten years old,"
said Queen Shola. "You see, the ancient
rays were so built and situated that they
could not successfully fight against each
other so that no revolution could take
place by their use. At the same time they
are so strong and well constructed that no
weapon our weak modern minds can devise
will subdue them. It is a premeditated
deadlock so designed by the ancient God-
race. The Hobloks, of course, cannot
understand this and try to fight with them;
and, perforce, we must fight back with the
ancient stationary ray. It is all extremely
stupid and repetitive, but so far we have
not found the answer. We are defeated
by the brilliance of the ancient minds
which built and placed the ancient rays
as a check on any attempt to dominate
their life. Do you follow?"

"I begin to understand," I mused aloud,
"why Hobloks are such a menacing nui-
sance, yes."

"You see," she went on, "when you grow

a larger alligator you have created a
greater menace to your limbs. When a
Hoblok steps into an ancient ray operator's
seat he becomes a much larger bit of devil-
try though just as stupid and undesirable."

"Multihead stupidity is still stupidity."

"Exactly," she answered. "That is what
war is — stupidity multiplied by a force.
And that is what Hoblok ray is — stupidity
multiplied by titanic ancient force. Thus
all our brilliance and knowledge of growth
and science is neutralized by the Hoblok
multiple — titanic idiocy."

"They are charming creatures. How did
they get that way?" I asked.

"Endless centuries of secret parasitism
on surface people have given them a sort
of leech-soul! They never learned to use the
growth generators or synthetic food ma-
chines of the ancients, but they did learn to
use the view rays and some of the weapons.
They used them so long that the worn-out
machines give off a detrimental emanation
which contributed to the degeneration of
the original flesh pattern into the leech-
like form of flesh it is. They are in truth
a different form of life: more akin to such
parasitic creatures than to man."

"You certainly confirm my suspicions
on the matter. Have you tried bribery,
turning them against each other?"

"They have so little organization it is
not hard. We have had some success in
that line. But in reality we are fighting
the ancient mechanisms and when they get
hold of one, they live in it. It becomes
their life and they are unapproachable
then, as you learned yourself when you
argued with Mula. You could have held
out for years there if you kept careful
watch. Mula himself is checkmated and
made the thing he is by these creatures.
So he amuses himself with torture and
waits for death. His thought is now a
fixed pattern as is theirs.

"You will find many such products of
growth-force generators in the underworld.
Our own ruler is one. But she is different,
younger; and we ourselves have worked
with and renewed the growth-force mech-
anism till there is little danger of unbal-
anced growth."

"VT'OU mentioned that Mula's thought

* is fixed pattern as is the Hobloks.

Will you explain?" I asked Shola.

"When we look at an insect like a

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

27

spider or a wasp," she replied, "we see
only an exact repetition of all other spiders
or wasps, just as leaves on a tree are like
the other leaves on the same tree. Their
whole lives are exact repetitions of the lives
of all other spiders and wasps of the same
kind. This is also almost true of men:
they are merely repetitions of each other
and the past and the whole future of their
lives is predictable from the past. Only
when the intake of growth material is
greater than the intake of detrimental ma-
terial for long periods is there any growth
into new ways of life. There have been many
Mulas in the past of the caverns, and they
have almost all followed the same course
as the present Mula. Some parts of the
thing are ritualistic and traditional: the
red-horned masks, the torture — all are
repetitions of ancient times. Mula adapted
them to his own uses, which have also
turned out to be the same."

"This conflict is endless, then?"

"It has been going on for untold cen-
turies in these caverns with infinite slight
variations, of course, but always the same
theme: intelligent people trying to rebuild
the ancient wisdom and way of life always
thwarted by the degenerate creatures who
are, as you have seen, wholly destructive.
The ancient mechanisms do not wear out,
so the war needs no vast supply of weapons.
There are always more of the creatures
and even if there were no intelligent people
to fight, they would still fight each other."

We strolled back into the great throne
room. Fanny de Moina ran up to us and
took my arm.

"Look," she said in amazement, "I
thought I could dance!"

A welcome dance had been organized.
Under the very slight gravity these people
had evolved a most complicated and acro-
batic dance routine wholly impossible to
those not accustomed to weighing so little.
We could only watch, and the envious eyes
of the chorus girls, probably as good
dancers as surface earth produced, subtly
amused me. The flying, graceful limbs
and easy, almost floating movements of
young bodies whose feet only touched the
floor at intervals of seconds were an in-
finitely finer picture of the dance than I
had ever seen before.

The Queen sent a page to summon the
rest of the newly arrived surface people.

"The ruler has sent for you all."

WE ENTERED an elevator. We came
out on the roof of a tower which
overlooked the whole city of Loer. Like
a pent-house garden the roof was adorned
with living trees and plants and was
bathed in a rich, warm light more pleasant
than any sun. In the center was a round
building. As we approached it, soft invisi-
ble emanations exquisitely stimulating ran
over us, reading us and at the same time
waking us to an intense sense of pleasure,
of anticipation. Before the door was a
statue of many-breasted Tanit; not by
surface sculptors, but something by the
ancients. Its beauty was indescribable,
unthinkable, in truth. Their art always
leaves a man gasping. We entered softly.

She sat in one of the ancient god seats.
It was not too big. If earth has anything
approaching the ancient Gods in strength,
and in beauty, she is it. She was very old,
we knew; but time had left only a wise
crinkling about her eyes and humor marks
at her lips. Her skin was soft and fresh
and within her perfect body one could
sense the strength. About her were several
snail men and a trio of very young maidens
sat at her feet, one of whom softly
strummed a harp.

About her played a greenish ray. It said
to my nerves all things that nerves need
to hear, and all the things nerves are
pleased to feel.

Her hair was flame red; her skin that
white that often goes with red hair. Her
eyes were very dark and brooding, yet
very welcome to look at. One did not
turn away but looked deeper and saw a
friend. On her shoulder sat a crested bird
and at her feet lounged a huge lion-like
dog. Her feet were sandaled; her gown
a severe transparent Grecian drape. On
her large breast some huge emeralds glit-
tered. She was woman — all wise, desir-
ing woman-flesh and she was beautiful.
The force in her gaze was tremendous;
one could not help desiring her.

She talked and her voice filled the room
with woman-sound and the sensing pf a
mind too big to comprehend. Queen Shola
swiftly translated into English.

"You will have to stay with us a while.
The ways to the surface are not at present
open to us. We will try to make your stay
pleasant and of value to you and to us."

We talked a while, but our audience
was disappointing in that we had, in truth,

28

AMAZING STORIES

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.

WHEN 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 beau-
tiful!"

"The ancients had vast greenhouses lit
by artificial heating rays. We have re-
paired 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 under-
stand 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 pros-
pective 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"

rO 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 re-
integrated is the product of such a device.
A flow rich in energy ash causes an imme-
diate 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 in-
take of the animal. This is the path which
our race took to greatness, to the conquest
of space, to life everlasting in the dark-
ness 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.

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

FORMULA FROM THE UNDERWORLD

29

make us live forever — and with two ways
to construct it: By scientific work on mag-
netic vortex flows, utilizing exdisintegrance
to "pack" ordinary metal with energy ash
— or, by sending men out into space itself
in space ships!
Scientists — rocket men — listen to me!

This is all true! Work at it; I have neither
the ability nor the money. I have given
you the formula. I have done my part.
Do yours, for God's sake, while I still
live!

Harte Manville.
THE END