Thought Records of Lemuria

“**H**EY, Joe Raddatz, bring that dolly over here!”

I glanced up casually from my spot welding, then blinked in puz-
zlement as my eyes took in the area immediately around me. The
voice in my ear had come out of nowhere! No fellow worker in this Detroit
auto plant was near enough for his voice to be heard by me!

“What in the devil...” I muttered, then shrugged in mystification and
turned back to my work.

The moment I snapped the switch on my spot welder the voice came again.

“...know damn well this rivet won’t fit! Don’t tell me I don’t know a nine
thirty-second hole when I see one...” The voice died away, and although I
listened intently for a long moment, it didn’t come again.

The noon whistle blew and I knocked off. But I didn’t get much kick out
of eating my lunch. I kept thinking about hearing that voice when no one
was around me. Funny thing!

“Wonder who Joe Raddatz is?” I mumbled. I downed the last of my coffee
and put the thermos bottle back in the lid of my lunch kit. Then I got to my
feet, hitched up my trousers, and went down to the time-keeper’s cubbyhole.

“Do me a favor, Clocky?” I asked.

“Sure thing,” he grunted. “If it’s anything I can do without getting off my
fanny.”

“It is. I just want to know if there’s a Joe Raddatz working on this shift,
and where he’s located.”

Clocky twisted around on his high stool, faced an index on the wall, and
ran one finger down the row of cards that were inserted in little slots. “Radd¬
atz—? Uh—yeah, here it is. Sure, Joe Raddatz is on this shift. Works over in
section twenty. That’d be down at the far end of the building—he’s a riveter.”

“Thanks, Clocky,” I said, and walked back toward my section. I was frown¬
ing and the information I’d just heard was revolving in my brain like a silly
pinwheel, getting nowhere.

“Section twenty—” I mumbled, stumbling over a barrel of bronze welding
rods. “How could I hear a guy talking over there?”

I thought of acoustics, and pursed my lips. “Yeah, maybe I could, at that.”
They say there’s a spot in the old senate chambers in the Capitol Building
where even the faintest whisper can be heard from a spot ninety feet away,
and most peculiarly, can be heard at no other point. Acoustics is a funny
thing—just the way a building is built can carry sounds and direct them to
points where they couldn’t ordinarily be heard. Some caves are like that;

Thought Records of Lemuria

9

you can hear a voice a mile away, when it would be inaudible otherwise at a
hundred feet.

Thinking about it that way took all the mystery out of it, and I grinned.
“Takes a mighty little thing to make a guy think he’s dopey!” I said aloud.
I reached my bench and sat down to wait for the whistle to begin work
again. By the time it blew I forgot all about Joe Raddatz and acoustics.

A t two o’clock the voice came again. This time it wasn’t the voice of
Joe Raddatz. It was a new voice, hoarse and gruff; and there were only
two words he seemed to be able to fit together coherently. They aren’t the
kind I’d ordinarily repeat. A moment later I heard other voices—voices of
men all up and down the plant, and after an hour I had learned two things:
all of the voices came from the side of the plant on which I worked, from
one end to the other. I couldn’t hear them when I laid my welding gun down.
Somehow the two facts were connected.

By nightfall I had figured it out; the voices of the men were those who
were near, or in contact with, some machine attached to the wiring system
on my side of the building. I couldn’t hear any voices at all as long as I didn’t
have any physical contact with my spot welder.

I think I breathed easier. After all, there was an explanation that I was
perfectly willing and able to accept. The wire system, and the machines
connected to it, were somehow acting in a telephonic manner, picking up
voices, transmitting them through the electrical circuit, and reproducing
them in my gun. When I turned the thing in that evening, I spoke to the
stockroom supervisor.

“Pete, how about sending this in for a repair job—it’s out of order.”
“What’s wrong with it?”

“Gives me a shock,” I lied. I figured it was better to say that than go
through the rigmarole that would be necessary to explain how I heard voices
through it; and the possibility existed that he’d snort and say I was nuts, and I
wouldn’t get a new gun—and I wanted one. It’s nerve wracking to have to act
like a telephone receiver when you’re supposed to concentrate on your work.

A new spot welder didn’t do any good. The next day I heard the voices
again.

There was only one thing to do—I stuffed my ears with cotton.

And I still heard them!

N OW I began to get a little scared. I wasn’t hearing these voices; I was
thinking them! They were in my mind, soundless, inaudible. Mental
telepathy!

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Men about me, near or far, saying things, thinking things, and I could
hear every spoken word or every most secret though.

I knew I was receiving the thoughts of some of these men, because, for
instance, I heard: “Sure, Mike, you’re right about that... Right! If this guy’s
right, I’ll eat his shirt!... you’re the boss, we’ll do it your way ... and nuts
to you. After you’re down the line I’ll do as I damned please! For a foreman,
you’re the stupidest—” No workman would talk to his foreman like that.

I heard other things that were more convincing proof that I was hearing
thoughts, things that made me blush when I heard them; and I don’t blush easy!

Right now, for instance, a guy is thinking about his girl . . . Say, if she
thinks he loves her, somebody ought to put her straight! He’s a wrong guy,
but really, I ought to tip her off—

Hey, wait a minute, how would I prove the truth of my tip?

Dynamite, that’s what this is! I’ll have to keep my trap shut, or I’ll be put¬
ting my foot into it. I never realized how bad it might be to know what the
other guy is thinking, without him being aware, you know.

“Put him on the rack,” said a voice. I snapped off my welder and sat still,
frowning. Something was wrong with that voice, or thought, or whatever it
was. Put him on the rack? You don’t put people on a rack in an auto plant.
Tools, yes, or a lot of other things. Rack? What sort of a rack?

“It’ll pull him apart in an hour!” the voice went on with a note of horrible
satisfaction in it. “Nice and slow, so he suffers plenty! Put the ben ray on him,
so he won’t die too quick...”

My welding gun clattered to the cement floor. I stood as though frozen.
The hair on my head crawled. What was I hearing?

The voice was gone. All around me was only the muted roar of an auto
factory—the clanging, clattering, mingling maelstrom of busy machines
and busier men. Just noise, no voices.

I LOOKED down at the gun on the floor and I was trembling. What was
going on? That voice had been no voice, or thought, of a worker in this
plant... unless it was the thought of a madman!

A madman?

I sat down, white and shaken as the thought struck me. Maybe / was
mad! Maybe there were no voices at all. Maybe I’d never actually heard the
voices of anyone else. Maybe my own mind was cracking up, and inflicting
these weird illusions upon me.

But no. After all, there was Joe Raddatz. I had the name okay, and he
actually worked here. And there were other men in the plant whom I’d iden¬
tified since. Somehow, I had heard voices, and real thoughts.

Thought Records of Lemuria

11

Or was that insanity? Did insane people go insane simply because their
brain functioned too well? Is an insane person only a person whose brain is
more active than it should be? Is he using that nine tenths of his brain that
science says is just dormant and waiting for his future evolution into a high¬
er type of creature? Just what is insanity, after all?

They put people who hear voices into nut houses. But maybe they do
hear the voices. Maybe they aren’t insane at all. Maybe they are just like me!

I looked at the gun again. A thought struck me. If I’m nuts, then I’d be
nuts without the gun in my hands. I’d hear these voices any time; maybe all
the time. Pick up the gun and see—

I picked up the gun and watched it shake from the trembling of my
hands—

The horrible scream of agony that echoed in my brain jolted me right up
to my feet with a gasp, and with a cry of terror I hurled the gun from me
and ran. Through my mind echoed that scream of utter pain, the scream of
a human being in such torture as might be imagined only in Dante’s Inferno.
Somewhere, somehow, a human being was dying in slow agony — and I was
hearing him die!

I couldn’t stand any more. I managed to slow to a rapid walk, but I kept
on going until I got to Clocky’s cage.

“Punch in my time, Clocky,” I gasped. “I’m quitting. I’ve had enough of—
of welding,” I finished weakly.

Clocky stared at me peculiarly, then grunted, punched my card and
handed it to me.

“You can get your check at the office,” he said gruffly. “Sorry to see you go,
Dick.” He looked at me queerly. “Say, you ain’t sick, are you?”

“No—no!” I said hastily. “I’m okay. Just decided I don’t like welding. Be¬
sides, I want to take a vacation for a while. I’ve been working too hard, may¬
be. Guess that’s why you think I look sick ...”

I mumbled the last words as I walked away. I didn’t look back. Why
should I? One thing was sure. I had seen the last I was going to see of that
damned welding gun! If I wasn’t nuts, that gun would make me so sooner
or later.

A HALF hour later I was out of the plant on a street car heading for home.

?His hotel’s clear through,” said a voice. “He dug up a lot of stuff and he’s
getting too smart.”

I, Richard Shaver, was going insane, I was sure of it now! I sat there in
that street car with the awfullest feeling of fear I have ever experienced, lis¬
tening to the absolutely crazy babblings of my own mind. How could it be

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anything else? Even if this were mental telepathy, how could I tie up such
a phenomenon with the things I heard? They didn’t make sense. Even in¬
sane people make sense, but this last voice in my mind —his hotel’s clear
through —what does that mean?

“He’s dug the cellar of his house clear down to the caves,” the voice ex¬
plained.

The voice in my mind had answered my question! I sat as though I’d been
struck by lightning. But I still had some sense left in my head—I gasped out
another question, this time audibly and the man next to me turned to stare
at me blankly. “How deep is that?” was what I said.

“About three hundred feet—” said the voice, and suddenly there was a
startled note in it, and it faded away. At the same time, I felt a numbing
shock in my neck, in my spinal column, and I almost screamed with agony
from the blinding headache that sprang into being.

“Say, mister,” said the man next to me, “you’d better get home and to bed—
you look sick!”

I stared at him through pain-filled eyes. “Yeah,” I gasped. “I had better. I
am sick ... Got a terrible headache” I climbed to my feet and staggered to
the rear of the car and got off.

I walked the rest of the way to my room, fighting the blinding pain in my
head. I barely made it to my bed before I blacked out. And as I blacked out,
I knew a faint glimmering of the truth. Somehow, by some weird super sci¬
entific means, unseen beings had caused this headache—possibly the same
ones I’d heard talking that weird gibberish about the hotel—and that I’d
brought it upon myself by asking questions. I’d revealed the fact that I had
been listening in, and it hadn’t been a welcome discovery. The pain-filled

blackness into which I sank now was proof of that.

^ ^ ^

W HEN I awoke my headache was gone, but not my fear. I fled from
Detroit as though the devil himself were after me.

To no avail; I could not escape the voices. I heard them day after day,
night after night. It went on for months until finally I had become more or
less accustomed to them—until I began to understand the whole horrible
picture. And also came to understand the fate that was in store for me.

The voices came from beings I came to realize were not human; not nor¬
mal modern men at all. They lived in great caves far beneath the surface.
These alien minds I listened to seemed to know that they had great power,
seemed conscious of the fact that they were evil. However, they also seemed
to think themselves infinitely clever, but the truth of the matter was that
they were obviously stupid.

Thought Records of Lemuria

13

I discovered this from listening carefully. Their thoughts were incredibly
contradictory: to make things worse was to get along better, to make ene¬
mies was to be more powerful, to torment anyone was a personal satisfac¬
tion, to love any living thing was weak and stupid.

Who were these voices? Where were they? It took me several years to
figure it out, but finally I was successful. And when I finally had learned
the truth, they knew that I had discovered it, was becoming informed as to
them, their place of residence, their mode of living, their evil thoughts. And
since fear is one of their mainsprings, they feared me.

It was not too long before I could overhear them in my mind, plotting
my destruction, though why they should have had any trouble about that I
could not at that time understand. When I gained more knowledge of their
stupid, crazy mind’s workings, and learned that they believed they cannot
actually kill a surface man without first building up a frame for the killing
that will make it appear either suicide or accident or death from natural
causes, I began to realize what was ahead of me.

This belief of theirs is based primarily upon their fear of discovery and
its implications, plus a more realistic danger: though often stupid and usu¬
ally duped, there exist among these dero people many who are not as
malicious and evil as the worst degenerates, and these tero are impelled to
avenge murder committed for no really good reason, even when it is the
murder of one of the helpless, because unknowing, surface people.

(1) As dramatically as it is possible for me to do so, I have pictured those first weird
happenings that led me almost to the brink of madness, and then to the most in¬
credible adventure that ever befell a man. In order to give my knowledge to the
world without being suspected of madness, I must present it in the guise of fiction.
Remember that all this wordiness is supposed to be, but is not, just a way of con¬
vincing you momentarily of the truth of an obvious impossibility, for the sake of
the escape from dull reality which it offers you. So, allow yourself really to believe,
not just temporarily for the sake of the effect. This story will not seem like fiction
to some who will read it. For it is substantially true; the caves, the good and wise
users of the antique machines, the fantastic evil mis-users of the antique weapons,
all these things are true things and exist in secret in many parts of the world.

Keeping that secret has been a custom, a hereditary habit of the Elder underworld.
Surface incredulity and fear of the supernatural has made it an open secret that keeps
itself; for you will find that the case records of insane asylums are chock full of pa¬
tients whose only complaint was that they heard mysterious voices in their minds.

In this story, I intend to reveal the secret to the world, to those who have the
intelligence to seek to understand what I say. —Author.

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“He knows too much; we must kill him,” became a frequent thought I
heard in their minds, and it terrified me. I tried desperately to contact the
only ones I knew could help me, the tero, but I did not succeed. I was neatly
framed, and here is how they did it:

They framed me subtly and completely, so subtly that I myself, although
aware from hearing their thoughts what they were up to, did not realize
how to avoid the trap until it was too late. I fell for every one of their tricks,
because their devious deviltry and their incomprehensibly stupid motiva¬
tions were not yet clarified in my mind. It was under their control that I did
a thing that proved to their enemies, the tero, (whose vengeance they feared
and whose conscience they had to find a means of dulling by building up a
case sufficiently plausible to deceive them into accepting my fate as neces¬
sary) that I was no friend.

After that came the harpy hue and cry which has for ages followed and
caused the death of the best minds among surface men from persecution by
their own kind. Daily it rang in my ears while I fled from city to city to es¬
cape it. Yet, when my brother became involved and they killed him, I argued
with myself that I must be having delusions, that his death was natural, that
all this could not be without some mention of it in the papers or in books.

I SHALL not take more of your time to give the details of how the axe fell
on me; it is all too sordid. I assure you it did not do me credit, and I would
much rather forget it. Suffice it to say that my enforced escapade, which I
was blindly urged into by the subtle energy of the telepathy machines and
other incomprehensible mechanisms using rays and forces that surface man
never heard of, ended with my arrest and sentence to a state prison.

To this end I, a well-intentioned human being, had been driven by those
potent rays in the hands of evil idiots in earth’s hidden caverns!

But that I was thus imprisoned was not enough. They poured continuously

(2) This is a shortening of the term “detrimental robot.” It means, briefly, that they
are “people who are slaves to a degenerate mind.” Their brains have become radio-
actively poisoned by rays from the weird machines they constantly use and whose
use they do not fully understand and whose rays become detrimental because of
non-replacement of vital parts, which thus becomes impregnated with radioactive
accumulations whose emanations are harmful (just as radium must be shielded by
lead to prevent serious burns). Thus, all their thinking is along destructive chan¬
nels. Obviously, then, a “tero” (in contrast to a “dero”) is one whose thinking is
integrative, or constructive, in quality because his mind has not been poisoned by
radioactives. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

15

upon me pain rays that, added to mental control which continually got me
into disgusting, dangerous situations, kept me on the verge of madness
from despair for years. I learned at length and in infinite detail just what
Hell really can be, and at the same time I realized that such a Hell has been
the daily lot of many men of earth since earliest times.

There was no relief or way of seeking aid from the continuous and almost
unbearable torment. Had I complained to a prison guard that I was being
tormented by invisible rays, I would have been taken from the prison to
be shut up in a madhouse. I knew there would then be no hope of release.
Waiting and patience might at length gain my release here at the end of my
sentence; but in a madhouse, once certified mad by medical men, I realized
that I would not even have the solace of attempted flight from the dero rays,
to the end of my days. For from the talk of other prisoners I knew a mad¬
house to be a much harder place to get out of than a prison.

I know those dero only let me live because my life was a burden to me,
and because my torture was a delight to them and they feared no retribution.

I had become but a thin, haggard ghost of a man when release came from
a quarter I had lost all hope of ever contacting. In some manner the tero,
the sane, well-meaning members of that strange cavern life, seized control
of the area of land in which the prison lay.

M y torments ceased abruptly. A new and intensely wonderful life
began for me. For the first time in years I was able to relax, although
for some time I lived in dread of the return of the suffering to which I had
grown almost accustomed, as one grows accustomed to a painful limp.

I began to dream and my dreams were infinitely pleasant, though bizarre
in the extreme. I could not recall them wholly upon awaking until one night
she came to me in my dream, and that dream was as fresh in my memory
when I wakened as though it had been an actual reality. She came to my cell,
apparently, and sat herself upon the edge of my iron cot. With her came that
laughing spirit of youth and mischievousness which I had almost forgotten
as the face of freedom. The oppressive feeling that is a part of prison life
vanished; she had brought her free face before my eyes.

She seemed clothed in a soft luminosity that threw rays of strangely in¬
vigorating light upon me as well as showing her strange, rich other-world
beauty to me. She had hair of faintest golden tint, just off white, and it lay
smoothly drawn back from her brow and was caught at the nape of her neck
with a ribbon that was a pale green, a green that had lain so long in darkness
that it had lost its original color. Her eyes under arching brows were wide
and had no expression, yet her assurance in every movement as she came

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into the cell did not betray what I learned later, that she was blind. The eyes
were very large, and faintly blue. Her features were not out of the ordinary,
but strangely and beautifully exaggerated: the too-large eyes; the delicate,
utterly sensitive nose; the drooping, too-large lips that were made for ca¬
resses they had not received. Her beauty was far from the standard variety
one finds under the surface sun. She had that strange, wise quality men have
sung of as the witch maid’s alone since time began. When she spoke, such
vitality sprang into being on her strange face as woke every instinct in me
from the long hopeless sleep in which they had been plunged. Yes, her face
was freedom to me.

She wore a loose garment that hung from her shoulders to her calves and
was belted by a metal circlet of netted links into which was thrust a metallic
object which I recognized as a weapon of some strange kind.

I N MY dream I sat upright. My youthful visitor took both my hands in
hers, saying—

“Do you wish freedom so badly, then?”

I replied: “I want it more than life, but capture would be inevitable. Then
I would get no more chances to escape.”

“If you are willing,” her halting, apparently little used English voice said,
“I can take you to a place where no police have ever shown their face, and
where none ever will. You have only to agree to do as I tell you, without argu¬
ment, for one year. I can free you quickly, and in truth I need your services.”

I embraced with enthusiasm any prospect of escape, and could not imag¬
ine that “doing her bidding” would be anything but pleasant. I agreed to her
proposition, adding some fervent prayers of confused and stumbling words
that I hoped expressed my infinite despair and the bright face of the hope
she brought me.

Thus, came to me Nydia, as I called the blind girl after the blind maiden
in Bulwer Lytton’s “Fall of Pompeii.” In the morning after that first dream
of her I found upon the cot that pale ribbon she had worn about her paler
hair. I knew then that it was more than a dream and I looked forward with
mounting anticipation to further meetings with a person who could come
to a man as a dream and leave behind an actual memento. How had that
ribbon gotten through those walls and bars?

It was some time before the magic was explained to me. She had prom¬
ised me that she would very soon find means to release me from the prison,
and that mysteriously actual ribbon was a constant reminder in my pocket
that she had powers beyond present day wisdom. I still do not understand
how those antique teleport mech’s work, but work they do, and she had

Thought Records of Lemuria

17

sent the ribbon over it after she had shut off the dream-maker machine. But
I will explain that later.

After that, she came to me frequently, sometimes she was just a kind of
projection, and sometimes her sweet, actual body lay in my arms, I swear. I
grew accustomed to her visits and the hopes I began to entertain built me
up more and more in morale, particularly as I was no longer tormented. In
time I realized that she loved me truly, a man who had not seen a woman in
many years of imprisonment. She loved me in dreams more vivid than any
reality could be, made so by the stronger than human thought impulses sent
over her strange dream-making instrument’s rays.

She loved me with the first maiden love of a girl for a man, for she herself
had long been a prisoner in one of the caves and was but now set free. She
read in my heart all that I was, and our mutual and long desire for freedom
that becomes a constant part of one’s thoughts after long imprisonment
brought about between us a kinship that blossomed swiftly into glowing
love for each other. So, it was not long before she told me all was ready, that
she would come that very night during the darkness before dawn, to release
me, and to take me with her into her hidden home.

T hat same night the key grated in the lock of my cell door and I was not
surprised to see the guard standing there as if dazed, his eyes unseeing.
By then I understood something of her powers, and understood that he was
a man under mental control. Behind him I could see reproduced the form
of the blind girl, her transparent form bending over a huge old mechanism,
her face a mask of concentration. The guard waited until I had emerged,
almost cringing in my dread lest this was just another dream from which I
might awaken, then he locked the cell door behind me, the cell now empty
of its victim. We walked to the outer door that led from the corridor. This
he opened and stood waiting to lock it again after I had passed out. I looked
at him curiously, for his face was peaceful as in sleep and his eyes were un-
seeingly fixed ahead on space.

Silently as a shadow I slid out and no sound ever was so sweet as that
door’s lock clicking shut behind me. I sped across the open grounds and
into the nearby forest and there beside me again was that transparent slim

(3) Teleport mech—a means of transmission over a distance of an actual object by
means of tele rays. This machine could transmit a solid thing in a way that might be
comparable to the way a photo or map is transmitted by radio. However, there is
a difference in principle which Mr. Shaver has never been able to fathom from his
study of the machine. —Ed.

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ghost of a Nydia leading me by the hand. To my undying amazement, the
projection of that miraculous ancient mechanism felt as solid to my hand
as real human flesh, though very different and thrilling because of the aug¬
mentative nature of the mechanism. Love with augmentation is immensely
more desirable than normal love.

For miles that phantasm led me deeper and deeper into the hills. In the
dark I could visualize every stone and bit of dead branch as though my feet
had eyes of their own. They did—a blind girl’s electric perception, devel¬
oped since she was a child in the use of those miraculously potent and in¬
destructible mechanisms, was able to sense those trifling obstacles and lead
me clearly among them.

As last we came to the base of the mountain, to where it reared rocky
slopes to the night sky. In the cleft of two rocky shoulders yawned a door.
It was a strange door, for it was covered with earth and grass and small
bushes, all alive and growing. As soon as our feet crossed the threshold, the
great mass of the door lowered silently and I knew that no man could detect
where that door might be.

T he dim light inside the cave I found emanated from long tubes running
along the walls, which contained some self-actuating material which
glows. Once, it was probably productive of a strong light, but now it gave off
but a dim glow. The blind girl sensed my thoughts and spoke: “In other of
the caverns there is brilliant light which can be switched on and off. There,
the tubes are wired to one of the ancient dynamos, which must now and
then be replenished by water, which is the fuel of many of the ancient power
generators. In those caves, the dwellers have normal eyesight.”

Into this twilight the ghostly little figure continued to draw me on. We
emerged at length into a vast room, around which could be dimly seen huge
mechanisms of incomprehensible uses. Beside one of these stood a soft, utterly

(4) Such doors into the caves are few but they do exist and no other door is so
worthy of a man’s search. Always provided the door is not one that opens upon the
hiding places of the evil life that is in many parts of the caves, there is no door that
can open life before you as that door to the underworld. Read on and you shall learn
something of the pleasure and wisdom that opened door offered me, a criminal es¬
caped from a state prison. You shall learn, too, that there are other things yet more
wonderful than the seemingly impossible feat of a blind girl snatching a convict out
of a prison. —Author.

(5) The water is disintegrated by some unknown process. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

19

enticing figure that was the duplicate of the phantasm that had led me here.
The screen still glowed brightly from use.

As my footsteps rang on the ancient polished stone of the floor, this lit¬
tle figure raced toward me unerringly and threw herself into my arms. Her
no longer-dropping, flower-red mouth sought mine like a starved animal
scenting meat. As she left the receptor screen of the ancient mechanism,
the phantom beside me disappeared abruptly.

“Dick, my poor love! You are safe with me at last. It has seemed so long,”
cried her voice that was music to me who had starved for the tender tones
of a woman’s voice for so many years.

My arms went about her slender child’s form. I leaned my face to those
questing lips and learned more about love in two seconds than all the past
of my life had taught me. The little witch had left the augmentor beam on
me and only those who have loved under those ancient impulse augmentors
can understand the depths of love. I knew that I had never really lived until
that fierce moment when our love sprang into flaming life.

At last we stood, just looking at each other. I felt sure that Nydia could
see me, her intent wide eyes were fixed so surely on me.

“I cannot believe that you do not actually see me!” I exclaimed.

“Almost I do,” she responded. “You seem much bigger, now that you are
here. My mind can see you, in a way that you will learn to see, too.”

I looked about for the first time. I realized that my little sweetheart was
but poorly clad, not at all like the projection she had made of herself into
my prison cell. I learned later that that projection was largely mental, so that
her likeness went clad as she would have liked to be clothed. In reality her
garments were but a few well-worn rags. I myself could have wished I wore
less than my prison denim, for the temperature was high, as it is in deep
mines. Her fair hair, her large unseeing eyes, her paper white skin, were as I
had seen them in my prison.

The vast round space where we stood was surrounded by hulking, mysteri¬
ous machines; they stood dimly gigantic in the faint light of the cavern lamps.

I ASKED Nydia where her people were. She said with a little laugh that
they were leaving us to ourselves at this moment of our meeting but that
I should meet them soon enough.

“Oh, Dick, in some ways they are different from surface folk, and you
must not let these differences disturb you. They are prepared to welcome
you heartily because I love you and they love me. But it is not our custom to
admit surface people to our hidden ways, for they are so apt to fear us and
thus hate and be a danger to us. Greet them naturally and show no fear or

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repulsion no matter how they look to you. We are different from the kind
of human you are used to. We need men like you to aid us in our constant
struggle with the living devils that inhabit much of these underground war¬
rens. But when we try to approach men for this purpose, they fear the whole
thing as madness or ghosts or whatever they have been taught. You see, we
are forced to fight the devils because we wish evil to no one and cannot be
glad when others suffer, and that is a way of thought that all the evil cavern
wight hate and seek to destroy.”

She led me from the huge machinery cavern into a smaller room that
was a strange mixture of architectural magnificence, the work of the Gods,
and old hand-made wooden furniture that must have been brought into
that place two hundred years ago, or more. We sat on a wooden bench that
was a half of an oak tree, split length-wise, with wooden pegs for legs. She
told me more of her people. They had come from England’s northern un¬
derground seventy years before. They were but few, only twenty living in
the ruined splendor of that ancient God’s retreat. Most of them had never
read a book, although Nydia had a few poor samples of modern books. But
they had read men’s minds over the ancient beams that penetrated through
miles of the rock of the hills and was so conductive and augmentive one
could read a man’s mind many miles away. In some ways they knew more of
life than does the ordinary man by far.

Many of them had contacted surface folk and striven to persuade such
persons to join them but had been rebuffed probably from a fear that their
soft invitation was a mental delusion or masked some snare. For those men
who know of the ancient secret know also of the evil it has always done,
hence fear all ray people though many are wise and good and try to nullify
the evil and reduce the torments inflicted by the degenerate evil members
of that strange life.

O F THE twenty in this group at least a half-dozen were blind because
of their heredity, like Nydia. For many of the cavern people come of
stock that lived so long in almost total darkness as to become blind as the
fish in cavern rivers become blind. Ages of life in the dark had developed
other senses than sight in their particular family, compensatory senses. The
others, strangely enough, had very large eyes, much too large for normal
vision, with great black openings in the iris. Evolution had developed the
faculty of seeing in the dark in these. Their skins were often light brown; or a
paper-like, bleached white; or a mottled, strangely lumpy appearance which
came of a disease peculiar to the caves. They are not like surface men, these
dwellers in the caves.

Thought Records of Lemuria

21

But these tero were a kindly lot and a friend of Nydia’s was a friend of
theirs. I soon saw that they had little comprehension of the terrific signif¬
icance of the ancient secret of the caverns’ mechanisms or the value of a
knowledge of their uses. It was difficult to realize their lack of imagination
and their casual acceptance of the facts of their age-old customs in regard to
surface men. It is not, after all, so many years ago when all such people were
burned as witches and sorcerers. They had never attended a school, yet their
knowledge in general was surprising for people raised in practically total
darkness. It is because they absorb general information from reading many
men’s minds. The fact that rickets is not common among them I attribute
to the beneficial rays which the ancients made a part of the pleasure-ray
machines which they are proficient in using from long practice.

Perhaps our education and its consequent results in thought are not
as important or remarkable as we of the surface believe. Certainly, our
thoughts offer these tero small temptation to join us; they prefer, I think
wisely, their seclusion. Nydia, not alone among her kind, but rare, had vast
plans and different ideas than theirs; she had always urged contact with
surface people and had at last fallen in love with a surface man and brought
him with her into her cavern home.

T he space within the mountain was an Aladdin’s cave, beautiful beyond
a modern man’s imagination. The hall where Nydia next led me, saying
it was a hall where the group met for any social purposes, was pillared by
mighty metal simulations of trees, hung with crystalline, glittering fruits. In

(6) Wight—an elf. In this case, the dero people. -Ed.

(7) Ray people are taken to mean all of the modern underground race, both the
dero and the tero. They are called “ray” by Mr. Shaver because that is the means
they use to spy upon surface people, and to talk to them, and to perform the many
weird things their machines are capable of doing. It is by rays that they operate. For
instance, have you ever had a fearful nightmare in which you have been faced by
horribly realistic monstrosities such as your waking mind has never conceived, to
your utter terror? This dream might have been produced in your mind by tele-pro¬
jection from the dero creatures of the caves who delight in causing surface people
horror and terror. There is another and more significant reason behind this practice,
and that is to build up superstition and fear in surface people that has been proved
their greatest protection against discovery by upper-worlders. They fear discovery
because it would mean their extermination by a vindictive human race, seeking to
revenge itself upon its age-old torturers —Ed.

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every one of these great rooms stood several of the enigmatic ancient mech¬
anisms, themselves beautiful of form and shimmering with prismatic color.

Some of the machines had a startling way of talking; when one neared
them, they would speak in a strange tongue, beautiful sounding words of a
meaning incomprehensible. That is a strange sensation, hearing a machine
speak to you. I suspect they were equipped to announce their need of oil or
other minor adjustments, as we equip mechanisms with red lights to indi¬
cate need for adjustment.

The solid, gleamingly polished and super-hard floor of rock was inlaid
with weirdly beautiful designs and symbols which I deduced were writings
in the Ancient’s lost language. Imperishable metal lounges, once proba¬
bly covered with the “shining fabrics which the Gods alone could weave
stood beside the gleaming, ancient “mech,” as the cavern people call the
old machines. It was in this great room that later that same night, or day, I
should perhaps say, Nydia’s family and other members of that group for¬
mally welcomed me, the surface man who had joined them for the balance
of his life.

A mong the cavern people, marriage is purely a personal matter, people
either live together or they do not, and it is no one else’s business. I often
think their attitude in this respect is the correct one. In the caves, when two
people promise themselves to each other, they keep their promise; which is
more than I can say for surface life. Nydia spent exactly one week showing
me that what happened to Tannhauser in the Hollow Hill with the goddess
Venus can still happen to mortal man. She had studied the uses of the antique
pleasure mechanisms under masters—some of whom I met later. For one
week I experienced all the pleasures of a God’s nuptials; tremendous stim¬
ulation generators poured super-powered pleasure impulses through every
nerve of my body at their full capacity. If a man could die of pleasure, I am
sure that I would have died then. But my tender-hearted Nydia was no slave
of pleasure. She was a sweet normal girl in love and I learned more of what
infinite pleasure life could hold in that week than ever mortal man did before.

At the week’s end, my little blind witch began to talk of other things than
love and of honeymooning. I will admit that I protested at length, but she
gave me her reasons quietly but firmly.

“There is much you must learn, my innocent, if you would live very long
down here. We may at any time be attacked by savage, mad ray-men from the
evil places. You do not yet know how to fight or work with these tremendous

(8) “Shining fabrics which the Gods alone can weave” is verbatim from “Ulysses.”—Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

23

weapons. We cannot wait. Besides, you have promised to do as I say for one
year, and my purpose in making you promise this to me was just that, that I
might teach you to be of value to us in such a fight.

“I am yours and you may do with me as you please,” I told her gravely, and
I meant it.

“I shall show you, dear lover, the true nature of those whom we must fight
against if we are to survive,” she said, musingly. “There is so much to tell you,
to teach you, that I hardly know where to begin. But first of all, you must
know whom it is that we must battle against. Come!”

She led me to the great hall where I had first met her and paused be¬
fore one of the mechanisms. Her hand on the control, she swung a huge
distance-ray beam and almost immediately upon the visi-screen a scene of
utter horror became visible. I could hardly believe my own eyes’ evidence.
That was a Hell, a real Hell, I looked upon. Men hung swinging from hooks,
boiled in fluids, writhed on racks, thirsted in the stocks, sat on spikes tug¬
ging to get off, lay under hammers that crushed them inch by slow inch, or
slid inexorably into machines that sliced them gradually with the thinness
of a microtome.

N TDIA explained the horror, and I got at last the full significance of the
ancient legend of Hell.

“You see, they will not allow their victims to die, but keep them alive
through every torment by the use of the beneficial rays. When a man is
nearly dead, they place him in one of the vitalizer machines for a day or two
and he is healed up completely. Then they start him through the thing again.
Do you see those shriveled bundles at the side? That is how the victims look
when they finally do die.”

We watched the horror for a space and Nydia concluded—

“Some of those men have lived in that torment for twenty years. This
is our enemy’s pleasure palace; a Hell for helpless victims of their lust for
blood and pain. From immemorial times, they have had such Hells in the
underworld, and it has never ceased. You see, you surface Christians are
not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in
order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive. And
they are very careful about letting a victim die, for that would end the fun.
There has always been a Hell on earth, and this is one of them. Every man
who falls into their hands, from the caverns or from the surface, faces one
of those torments-to-the-death you witness. It never mentions such things.

(9) One of various instruments used to cut sections for microscopic examination —Ed.

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your newspaper, does it? That bunch of misbegotten spawn of an afreet
fears all living men.”

“Do any surface men know of this thing?” I asked her.

“It’s impossible to tell them of such things,” she answered. “Since there is
no logical reason for anyone behaving as they do, none of the motives that
animate surface people being evident in such activity, they can’t believe any
tale of modern Hell. Even if you show them projections of the tilings that
go on in the evil caverns, they are sure that it is a concoction made up to
frighten them, from motives wholly mischievous. The truth is, almost none
of the surface people believe in the existence of evil raygroups from antiq¬
uity down to the present day. They don’t even understand the detrimental
robotism which is the underlying cause of such a horror. And there is no
way to tell them, short of taking them there. Even if they knew, what could
they do? They have no weapons to fight an ancient ray weapon, nothing they
could do would stop the thing. Since most of the victims come from among
us cavern people, surface people never miss anyone without having a simple
explanation for the disappearance.”

S HE twirled a dial on the great apparatus and swiftly the picture on the
screen swept through the beautiful caves and came to rest on a group of
things that should not live.

“Do you see them?” she demanded. “Those things that could not live

(10) A monstrous evil jinni, a demon, a horrible giant. —Ed.

(11) Detrimental robotism—actually the two words from which dero is derived, us¬
ing the first two letters of each word. Thus, it can be seen that a dero is a being who
is a robot (or slave) to a detrimental process of thinking, a process that always ends
in something bad. Dero people’s minds are affected, so that their thought processes
are warped into evil channels. Picture the brain as poisoned, and picture a thought
as something that must make its way through the convolutions. This is not actually
what happens, but it is an analogy that will help you to understand. Conceive of the
thought as a good thought, such as doing a good deed. But by the time the thought
has gone through the brain and transmitted into action, the thought is no longer a
good deed, but a bad deed. For instance, you are impelled by your thought to help a
blind man across the street, but by the time you get to him to do it, your thought has
changed so that you trip him and laugh as he falls into a mud puddle. That is the way
a dero thinks, and why he always does evil things—his brain is so poisoned by detri¬
mental energy that all his good thoughts end up bad. Pure thought, say the philoso¬
phers, is always good. It is only rendered bad by the effect of a sick human mind. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

25

but for the beneficial rays they bathe in perpetually? The worst thing about
them is their fear of technical men. They are so stupid they think that mod¬
ern science might produce weapons affective against their mighty antique
mechanisms, so they particularly persecute and obstruct modern scientists
on the surface, although the truth is, it is improbable that men can produce
anything equal to the ancient work in even centuries of effort.”

“Have you had many other surface people here?” I asked her in wonder.

Nydia shook a sad little blonde head.

“It is very difficult,” she admitted. “I have planned for years on recruiting
and training a group of men who would be far superior in ability to those
evil ones we fear. But surface men fear us, chiefly because they have heard
the whispered lies and horrible thoughts of the evil ray-men.”

I looked with loathing and sick disgust at the things that were now pic¬
tured on the vast visi-screen. In truth, they could not have lived save for the
protection and beneficial force rays of that Elder Race that had once lived
there. Small wizened imps, goggle-eyed, their goblin appearance was that of
walking dead men. And dead they would have been except for the synthetic
body electric which the ancient generators of life force pour through their
bodies forever. Because of this supply of super energy, these evil people live
on long after they would normally be dead. It is this fact, also, that makes
them evil, for they are in truth not able to create thought, and only the
slow decay of their brains is energized by the synthetic electric, which is the
real cause of the evil, destructive nature of their thought. It is not genuine
thought at all, but a reflection of the decay in their minds, which is a disin-
tegrant pattern, not a creative one.

Nydia explained all this to me very clearly, and I know she was right,
for they looked extremely unburied, long dead, but horribly alive. I believe
that if they were cut off from this ancient supply of life-generating electric
mechanisms, they would not live a week. Some of them hung over balco¬
nies around the scene of that hell upon which I had looked sickly a moment
before. They were obviously gloating evilly. Others were talking over the
telepathic ray mechanism with people on the surface.

“To torment their victims is their greatest pleasure. They have little ability
to enjoy other things. And they are always amusing themselves torturing
helpless beings who have fallen into their hands. It is a terrible thing to un¬
derstand, but it is true.”

W 'HERE did this particular group come from?” I asked Nydia.

“The ancestors of this group came from underneath Arabia. They
came long before we did, more than one-hundred and fifty years ago. Some

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of them are one-hundred and fifty years old, too, I have learned. The Arabs
knew them as afreets, the devils that whisper in sand blowing at night, or
scream like lost souls in the sand storms, and mislead the poor Arabs, caus¬
ing their death with lies or tormenting them with pain rays.”

But those afreets, or goblins, upon which I stared on the visi-screen
were not whispering in the wind or the sand. They were, instead, lisping
into the straining ears of some of the most influential tycoons of the sur¬
rounding surface industrial area. The lies they told! I learned later by my¬
self, reading the minds of some of the rich, that many of them believed in
the power and efficiency of the Secret Ray of America, which they thought
was a service like the F.B.I, for the purpose of searching out escaped con¬
victs, bank-robbers, extortioners, kidnappers, etc. To these tycoons the
ray-dero from the hidden caverns posed as a secret service, hard at work
solving several murders and robberies they had committed themselves.
They were amazing mimics, considering that they had little real intelli¬
gence, but only a pseudo-thought arising from their long experience in
reading men’s minds.

“My dearest Dick, you must learn very quickly all that I can teach you,”
murmured Nydia tensely. “Then you will be better able to help our sane
group—who are really very good and wise—protect ourselves from those
mad ones. At present we are able to hold them off, but at any time they may
get the better of us. They are really mad idiots, in spite of their clever mim¬
icry of sane people’s actions. They slay us whenever they have an opportu¬
nity to do so without loss or danger to themselves.

“Come, now!” Nydia continued, “—into the ancient thought record li¬
brary. You shall read the history of the great race who builded these im¬
perishable caves and the indestructible machinery which is capable of who
knows what miracles. These records tell of a time when the Great Ones
lived on earth long before history was recorded by writing. Thus, you shall
know more about the earth and the life of Man in the past than any other
living man from the surface—more, too, than most of the cavern people, for
few of us study long enough to learn to appreciate and absorb the wisdom
that lies in such places as this library of the recorded thought of the mighty
men who were once called Gods by people of earth. This is the place that
has made me intelligent and worthy of life. You will become a great man if
you use this wisdom, my lover.”

Into yet another chamber Nydia led me and guided me to a huge chair,
like a giant’s dentist chair, though the upholstery was missing. She pushed
me into it, and I was lost in its tremendous size, which made her laugh delir¬
iously. There were several flexible metal straps which she fastened about my

Thought Records of Lemuria

27

wrists, waist and neck. Then she took a strange helmet, fastened to a heavy
cable, and placed it on my head.

“Lie back and relax. You will soon be another person, entirely in another
period of time. Do not let the double sensation of being two people at once
worry you; it does not last long. This is the greatest experience the ancient
wisdom of the caverns can offer you, to read the mighty thought—to actual¬
ly become as a God of the ancient times.”

I saw her throw a Titan-size switch on the wall and in a flash—

I WAS not Dick Shaver, but another man entirely. I stood in a forest of tre¬
mendous fern trees. Beside me was a long, enormous cylinder of smok¬
ing metal, still hot from its recent passage through the upper air. From it
emerged a woman, larger than I, and in her arms, she carried my child.

The fern trees seemed topless, stretching up until distance made the tre¬
mendous fronds seem fragile and delicate to the eye, at last disappearing in
the mists. In the sky I could see many similar cylinders and knew they were
decelerating and would come to rest at last near us. I knew that we were
members of an Atlan colonizing expedition, sent to this blazing new sun

(12) When I gave the world the story of Mutan Mion (In “I Remember Lemuria!” in
the March, 1945, Amazing Stories) as my own memories, I could not reveal exactly
how I remembered the far past, without bringing the story down to the present day.
Thus, it was that editor Ray Palmer mis-named it “racial memory.” So now I shall
explain the actual truth of how it came about that the ancient, forgotten past can
live today, exactly as it was, in the mind of a modern man—myself.

Through scientific, indestructible mechanisms, the Ancient Ones’ thoughts
were recorded on a kind of micro-film, sealed in non-corrosive containers. Placed
in one of their thought-record projectors, these records yield more precise and ac¬
curate information about that ancient life than any of our history books about more
recent events. By the nature of synthetic thought electric flows given off in strength
by these particular mechanisms, the person “reading” the record feels he is him¬
self the person experiencing the occurrences described in the thought-record. The
flow of image-bearing energy from the record is so much stronger than one’s own
energy of consciousness that the experiences produced from the record remain in
the mind more vividly than any actual experiences. Thus, these records control the
mental processes in such a way that the past is lived again in a more vivid fashion
than one’s own life. These records left by the Elder Folk are a more faithful tran¬
scription of actual history than any other records kept since. —Richard Shaver.

(13) Atlan—one of the three major races of space, the other two being the Titans
and the Nortons. —Ed.

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and its planets where life was furiously fecund, capable of developing a cre¬
scendo of growth into complex forms that would from our landing onward
be guided by our skill and wisdom. My ship was the first to land of the col¬
onizers of planet three under this new star named Sol.

“Put the child back in the ship, Lia,” I called to the woman. “Then help me
get out the materials for our house. The sooner we are safe within its walls
the better, for we can’t tell what forms of inimical life may have been devel¬
oped since the tests were made so long ago by the explorers.”

“Yes, Lord of my Heart,” answered the obedient Lia.

The two of us began to haul out from the cargo compartment of our
spaceship the sections that enabled us easily to put up the walls of our new
home. The walls contained giant spider-web coils which would set up an
impeding magnetic field that would allow only beneficial energy to enter my
home. The house walls, once the power was turned into them, set up a huge
force field which allowed only waves of a certain frequency to enter the in¬
terior. This particular frequency had been determined upon by exhaustive
tests of the beneficial and detrimental content of the electric and magnetic
waves sent out by the star, Sol, overhead.

From time to time as I, Duli, and my wife labored over the rapidly rising
structure, other spaceships drifted down into the great clearing where we
had landed first of all upon this planet which we called Lemuria, or Earth.
These were fellow colonizers, who immediately set about erecting their
homes as Lila and I were doing. It seemed that no time at all had passed
before the pioneers had settled down into more or less regular living in
their new environment. The days passed eventfully, for each one brought
immense new vistas of the possibilities that lay in the immensely more fe¬
cund and different growth from anything we had known.

Within the chambers of that house I knew those beneficial vibrants from
that new sun would build up a charge of increasing potency, for the waves
could enter, but, due to the direction of the flux of the field in the walls,
could not get out again. Thus, the house Lia and I had constructed became a
great trap for beneficial energy and within it we, Atlan children, would grow
swiftly to great size and immense strength and unbounded intelligence.

I LIVED through what seemed years of time. I saw the cities grow. Over
our homes, after a time, we erected domes of crystalline plastic. The air
within each dome was not dusty or poisonous, but was a prepared mix¬
ture of gases, germless, fortified with health giving nutrients, odorless, su¬
per-penetrating, an ever-present agent for physical well-being.

The light, always on where needed, never oppressive, was a soft lumi-

Thought Records of Lemuria

29

nosity that possessed a beneficial force all its own, even contributing an ad¬
ditional push to the forces that make life grow in beauty and strength. The
natural electric magnetism of earth’s force field, which is in itself an agent of
integration or growth, was strengthened and focused on the sidewalks and
in the living chambers of those wondrous cities, so that the natural rate of
integration growth of matter was increased by hidden mechanisms focus¬
ing overhead magnetic field lenses.

These field foci were formed where the light and happy feet of our people
were led most often in pursuit of that pleasure that we called work.

For work was pleasure to us, in the increasing flood of strength and
awareness that in ever greater tide flowed through our limbs. For in these
cities of new life age was conquered and youth growth never ceased. When
a physical body grew too large to continue living in comfort on earth, these
larger beings graduated by stepping into a car, kept at the bottom of a long
rock tube pointing at the stars far above. With similar companions they
took their places in that space car. Then through them and through the met¬
al body of the car rushed a flow of force, which, countering the friction of
the penetrative particles that cause gravity rendered the car weightless.

(14) This thought record story, given to Mr. Shaver by Nydia, was a logical one to
begin his education into the past history of the Earth, for it depicts the arrival of
the first Atlan colonists on the Earth, named by them Lemuria. The reason for col¬
onization was that our sun was then a new sun, still sending out radiations from a
carbon fire only, and not from the poisonous metals, radium, uranium, polonium,
etc. (the heavy metals), and was thus a healthful place to live. Even so, the colonists
built their homes in a manner to keep out the poisons that cause old age, which
might be present in some small quantity.

Our sun, today, from which the Allans fled 12,000 years ago (see “I Remember
Lemuria!”) because it was causing the disease of old age by projecting minute dis-
integrances down on the Earth in a steady rain, is the answer to the riddle of death
our scientists seek to solve. In water, the poisons are present in heavy suspension,
especially in thermal springs; in the air the poison floats forever with the tiny this¬
tle downs of dust it has infected and to which it dings; it settles in the leaves of
plants—so that we take the poison in with every drink of water, with every breath,
with every bite of food; and as a consequence grow “old” by tissue and cell inability
to restore itself fully because of the hindering and ever-present Are of disintegrance
from the accumulations of radioactives. Age is nothing but a radium “burn”; a dam¬
age to the living cell so that its functions are gradually stopped and retrograded
until restoration by normal process is impossible. When the cells can no longer
renew themselves, we die. —Ed.

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A small explosion mechanism like a large cap pistol of the repeating
type began a gentle hammering on the rear of the car, and weightless as
it was, the car swiftly gathered momentum, vanishing into space in a mo¬
ment, for where weight is not present inertia is not present either. So on
the reverse flow gravity beam the graduates of Earth rose into space and
voyaged through the empty void like a flash of light, presently to slow and
circle slowly about another planet, double the size and weight of Earth until
the great beams of reverse flow reached up and eased the car down into the
heart of another great city, deeper and bigger than the one those beings had
left, and much finer and more beautiful, for the builders’ minds had broad¬
ened as their bodies grew through the centuries.

D ULI, the pioneer, lived a long and active life on the planet Earth and
I, Richard, lived it over in my own brain through Duli’s recorded
thoughts. Duli became an Elder of the ruling council in the city of Barto on
the planet Mu for he was kindly and wise. Many fine sons did Lia give
him and life was one swift stream of pleasure and beauty and hard work that
of itself seemed only sport to the ever-increasing strength and intelligence
of a being who lived under the amazingly beneficial conditions of Barto on
Mu. In Barto the life that was being built up for the people being bred in the
ben-rays was surpassed by no other city on Mu.

But with the passing of years and the increasing growth and size that
came with them, arrived also the day when Duli realized that the time had
come for him to graduate into a broader life than Mu could offer. He knew
that he must leave his sons and the work he had been doing on Mu for a
greater planet and its fuller opportunities for life. He stepped into the great
spaceliner with Lia at his side...

Blackness suddenly hurled itself down upon those vivid thoughts that
had usurped the mind of Richard Shaver. He ceased to exist as an Elder of
the Council of Barto on Mu, and returned to the existence of the convict

(15) The Lemurians say gravity is the result of the condensing (or fall) of infinite¬
ly tiny particles of disintegrated matter that fill all space (our scientists call it the
ether) into existing matter, such as the Earth is. The friction of these falling particles,
falling through matter, causes that “push” we call gravity. These particles Mr. Shaver
calls “ex-disintegrance” (or “exd” for short). Here we see the utilization of some sort
of force which neutralizes the friction of gravity, and thus produces weightlessness,
with the result that a space ship can be driven against gravity at great speed with
only very tiny rocket blasts, like little popguns. —Ed.

(16) Mu—an abbreviation for Lemuria. Earth —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

31

who had escaped from state prison because a blind girl from the caverns
had loved him.

^ ^ ^

I , RICHARD SHAVER opened my eyes and felt quite cheerful again under
the spell of the little blind witch maid who was laughing merrily at my
bemused awakening.

“It puzzles you, Richard, does it not? You have lived over a century of old¬
en days yet here you were, all the time under my eyes. You were but reading
in the manner in which we read down here, the record stored in the caves
long ago of the life of an ancient Atlantean.”

“But it was real. I actually did live it,” I protested, almost incredulously.
“I must have been that man, Nydia. How else could I have known the most
intimate thoughts of his mind?”

She shook her head from side to side, smiling.

“It was real, but not for you, save as you experienced that ancient Atlan’s
own thoughts. These shelves that line our library here are packed full of
such records.”

“Have you read them all?” I wondered.

“Yes, Richard, all. For I am not contented with a bare existence as it is
lived here in the caverns. I long for a fuller, wider life such as those ancients
lived. So, I have read and studied all these records and they are now part of
my own knowledge.”

I was enthusiastic as I glimpsed the possibilities her words opened be¬
fore me. In that little blonde head was packed knowledge of earth-life that
scientists would give their lives to acquire and place before the surface
world. And I, also, could gain that knowledge for myself and perhaps man¬
age somehow, someway to pass it on. Oh, it was a brave thought.

“It is not harmful, then, this reading of old records? No risk is entailed by
this vicarious living in strange and perilous scenes?”

“How could there be?” she responded simply. “You sit here, quite relaxed
and comfortable, and in your brain alone you live many other lives, acquir¬
ing thus those experiences and that knowledge which would otherwise take
many, many years of life in many forms to gain. Are you willing to learn
more, my Richard? Do you wonder that I care not to spend my life in dalli¬
ance with love, heavenly as it is thus to pass the days with you?”

“You are right, my Nydia,” I cried, enthused. “How wise you are, dear
love!”

The blind girl’s strangely thrilling voice continued as I stared at her, my
own face all wonder at the seeming magic at her finger’s end, that could
touch a switch and relive an existence.

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T his is stupendous,” I stammered, dazed at the vistas of wonder her
words opened before me.

“Ponder, my Richard, upon the science you have absorbed from the read¬
ing of that one ancient wise man’s thoughts as they coursed through your
brain. After you have read and thus lived many lives through the records
in these caves you will find that there is not a machine down here that you
cannot understand and operate. You will even learn something of how they
were constructed. Then indeed you will be a most useful member of our
little group, for you may then be able to help us devise more efficient ways
of outwitting and out-fighting those devilish dero I have shown you.”

“If you can teach me through these records how to fight those Things
you tell me are your bitter enemies, get on with it!” My voice, the voice of
Richard Shaver sounded strange in my ears, as though an older, wiser voice
had come from my lips.

I felt that to my surface years I had added those other untold years of an
ancient Being’s wisdom.

“Very well, my Richard. You shall voyage forth again.”

Nydia selected a bulky roll of record from the racks and held it so that I
could see the words graven on the case. She read them: Life and Wars of Bar
Mehat of Thor, Hero of Three Worlds.

“You shall live a great hero’s life and you shall see and speak with Jormun-
gandur, the Worm that encircled the world. This is a record of which I am
most fond and I have read it often,” the blind girl told me.

She slipped the roll into the mechanism at the top of the chair, adjusted
my head-band carefully. Her lips touched mine almost with reverence, so
grave was that caress. I sensed that the life of Bar Mehat, the hero, meant
very much to my little blind maiden. It was with repressed impatience that
I awaited the touch of her finger on the control that was to open for me the
door to a more vivid and exciting world.

I BECAME another man, a greater being physically. My body was huge
yet I was aware that I was very young in actual count of years. My sturdy
legs were cased in knee boots of glistening gold-colored synthetic leather,
my body in a skintight covering of overlapping golden scales that formed a
flexible protection like armour. Upon my head I wore a scarlet helmet that
contained thought detection apparatus, for I heard voices and movements
nearby although the chamber where I stood was apparently empty. One

(17) Jormungandur—In Norte legend, a son of Loki. Also known as the Midgard
Serpent—Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

33

voice sounded, although distant, particularly peremptory. It was a feminine
voice and one that I, Bar Mehat, recognized with a little grimace of half
annoyance.

I tossed my head petulantly so that the red-gold hair that fell to my
shoulders in shining waves swung loosely with the action. One of my broad,
red-haired hands touched the lever of the console before which I stood. A
clicking mechanism stopped and was followed by a musical hum like the
spinning of a giant top. Dim luminosity pulsed about me. In a four-foot
circular mirror above the console a silvery aura flickered madly, to coalesce
slowly into the likeness of a young and attractive woman.

Her lips moved and it was then as though she were present in the room
with me, for her voice sounded with clarity in my ears.

“Bar, the thing is growing faster than our control of it. It actually threat¬
ens all life on our planet. Jormungandur is not a joke.”

“Certainly, he is no joke; but why fret yourself, who are on land, about
Jormungandur who lives in the sea?”

My laugh was loud and free. Women! How they worry over nothing! “As
long as he kept to the sea why should I worry about him?” cried the young
woman resentfully. “It is because he is creeping up out of the sea that I am
disturbed. His body now completely circles the earth. His tentacles have
spread over half the unsettled portion of Afrik. They are a hundred leagues
long and they grope continually for food.”

“That is not so good, fair cousin. His tentacles are entirely too many,” I
growled.

“He has them along his whole body,” cried she. “If he takes a notion to
crawl out of the water for a breath of air it means the ruin of all the Atlans’
work on Mu.”

“Has no one done anything to check the Worm?” asked I, in some won¬
derment, for although the Covenant forbade direct attacks that might result
in death, yet there was some allowance for self-defense in cases of unbridled
encroachment even against an honored and intelligent ancient like Jormun¬
gandur, who was friendly to the early Atlans.

“We have a dozen great dis-rays raving at the tentacles but as fast as we
disintegrate them, he throws out others. It seems futile even to continue for
we get nowhere with all our efforts.”

“Jormungandur,” I mused aloud. “The Worm that encircles the world.
Why, Gracia, he was here before the Atlans colonized Mu. Mu is practically
his property. Are you sure that it is quite legal under the covenant to attack
him, even if the attack seems futile?”

“This is no time for joking. Bar Mehat of Thor,” somewhat acidly expostu-

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lated the young woman. “Either you agree to bring sufficient military forces
to take a planet from Mephisto himself, or you do nothing, and I look else¬
where for assistance against this peril. All my Afrik possessions are now
completely under The Worm’s tentacles, you—you boudoir decoration!”
cried my cousin with scathing implication.

I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. Gracia’s wrath was so easily aroused,
and Gracia at white heat was not hard to look upon.

“I shall arrive to banish The Worm before another sunrise,” I promised.

“I trust you are not too sanguine,” she snapped. “It will take some doing to
banish him. Bar. Farewell until the morrow.”

M y hand reversed the lever. The image of the pretty young woman
faded from the surface of the mirror and once again it reflected only
my broad face.

I mused to my reflection: “The Worm, a threat! Gods, one should really have
known that it would happen someday. Now I, the simple warrior am called
upon by my dear cousin to do my duty by my family. And in what a cause!”

My face in the mirror grinned at me wryly.

I thought, that as chief heir of all the possessions of the Province of Thor,
I could muster enough military strength to take a planet or even to blast
Jormungandur. I addressed myself to the task by pressing a stud marked
“General Alarm to Thor Guard” and spoke rapidly and authoritatively.

“Officers of the Thor Guard are to muster all strength at once for an expe¬
dition against the Worm Jormungandur who has become a threat by tossing
his tentacles over much land in search of food. Anything that can fly or float

(18) The natural nature of life is to go on living forever. Death is not a part of the
scheme of life. It is only the result of radioactive poisoning from an “old” or metal¬
lically disintegrating sun. Thus, here on Mu at the time of Bar Mehat, the sun was
sending down only beneficial radiations of carbon, which is not a poisonous ele¬
ment, but on the contrary, the basic element of living forms. Thus, nothing grew old,
or died, except by actual destruction through accident or through killing. All things,
including vegetation, continued to grow so long as there was a source of “raw mate¬
rial” and energy. A living thing grew through two processes: the replenishing of its
body cells by transmuting foodstuffs into living cell matter; and by assimilating the
disintegrated matter which fills all space and which science today calls the “ether.”
The reader will remember that it is this, condensing and falling toward all matter
(which also includes living beings, naturally) that serves to build up the universe,
and as a byproduct of its function, causes the phenomenon we know of as gravity,
by the friction of its progress through matter. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

35

on water, throw a ray or carry a bomb is to be made ready for extended
travel immediately. All available weapons are to be loaded and ready before
midnight tonight. Destination Afrik. Bar Mehat speaking.”

Through my mind in an undertone to the business now in hand ran the
history of the Atlan struggle with growth on this planet of Mu. Under the
beneficent rays of the new-born sun nothing aged or ceased growth, and
existence had depended therefore, those first centuries of our colonization,
upon keeping encyclopedic notes on every form of life on the globe, in or¬
der the better to forecast the future development of each species. For as the
humble caterpillar changes to the miraculously different moth, so did these
new creatures of Mu develop startling metamorphoses and variations. Since
none of them died, and since but little of the planet was as yet explored or
settled, strange and numerous were the threats to our continued existence
which came out of the dense jungles or out of the fathomless depths of the
seas, ravening down upon our attempts at an ordered and cultured life.

Most of these tremendous monsters of growth had been slain like the
Giant Man, a freakish growth of the earliest days, who had attempted to
eat everything living on earth, but had at last been slain by our hero Byrr,
and whose body in rotting had fouled the air of the whole planet. Or like
Fenris the Wolf, who before he died had sired a race of giant wolves which
still infested northern forests. The number of giant life forms that made us
Atlans trouble were legion, but somehow Jormungandur the Sea Worm had
escaped our general war against them. The Worm had always seemed safely
confined to the seas and he had moreover agreed to the terms of the Cov¬
enant, hence the Worm had never been considered as a threat to existence
on Mu, despite the fact that under the fecund rays of the newborn sun his
growth would have been predicated as in itself a threat.

T he jungles in which lived those giant variants of life were, if considered
for themselves alone, terrifically beautiful dreams of life growth. The
trees seemed to grow upward forever, and to be topless. There was no aver¬
age size from the tiniest stalk to the trunks of some ancient trees that were
acres in extent. They were the result of centuries of unimpeded, unchecked
growth under completely favorable conditions. For as yet nothing aged and
died on Mu.

As most of the spores of life on Mu had originated on distant planets un¬
der aging suns rather than by spontaneous generation under the new sun’s
beneficent warmth, there were of fruit and flowering a-plenty.

Those flowers were often of such monstrous size that could stretch my¬
self out in one as in a swaying hammock.

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So also, all trees tried their best to emulate Ygdrasil.\*^°> There were many
serpents in the dense forests and in adventuring therein one was quite likely
to run into the giant body of a rainbow hued reptile whose girth was too great
to climb over and whose head and tail were both out of sight in the distance.

The hunger of these things was beyond description, but the supply of
every form of life was of an abundance that cannot be even imagined. The
monster Scylla by the whirlpool Charybdis; the Worm; the frost giants whom
I, Bar Mehat, and my intimates often visited, as had my ancestor, Thor.

I had recollections of my home city, Atlansgaard, colloquially called
Asgard, not far south of Ginnunga Gap, a canyon of abysmal depth to the
north and east, separating the civilized area of the Northlands from the
Dark Lands, as the wild and practically unexplored land of the Giants was
called. Those giants were a race from a der planet. They had been ship¬
wrecked on Mu and as yet there had been no particular reason to banish
them, driving them back to their home planet. They were comparatively
ignorant and as far as we Atlans knew, harmless. They were called Frosts;
why, I myself, could not have explained. They were of huge stock, running
from thirty to fifty feet in height. I knew that under Mu’s non aging sun their
growth would in due course be something terrific and I realized that their
existence was a problem that would have to be settled in the not too-far
future. There were many such problems and the Atlans were not yet well
enough entrenched-on Mu to have solved them all satisfactorily. There was
much tendency in the life forms of Mu that was alien; it had to be weeded
out eventually, since only conflict can be expected from life forms not of the
same source pattern as our own.

I EMBARKED on the flagship of the fleet that in a matter of hours was
flashing over the tremendous sea of earthy waves that was North Afrik.

(19) How big the tremendous flowers of the dark under-forest were, it is difficult for
Richard Shaver to judge, since surface folk of today measure everything by comparison
to the average size of a man, and the Atlans of the new planet Mu had no such criterion.
Bar Mehat’s size was governed, as was that of other Atlans, by the age of his parents and
his own age, two variant factors that resulted in a wide variation in size, which did not
run uniform to the years of age, as in modern man. As nearly as Mr. Shaver can judge.
Bar Mehat was about twelve feet high and a very young man at that, as his parents were
huge giants of the far planet of Atlan. His years on Mu were under twenty. —Ed.

(20) Ygdrasil—Norse myth: the world tree whose roots and branches bind together
heaven, the earth, and hell. Today the California redwoods still live, to prove that
such monstrous growths once existed. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

37

Our space ships settled behind a convenient range of mountains over
which we could see the tentacles of the Worm writhing like titanic serpents
against the morning sky. Here and there blazed the fiercely brilliant orange
of powerful disintegrating rays and even at that distance the smell of roast¬
ing flesh was noticeable; unpleasantly so. We broke out our smaller scout
planes for reconnaissance. I went aboard the foremost, for I wished also to

(21) Cerberus, who guarded Hades in the latter days, after the flood had receded
and death by old age came upon the world, is well known. But these were the later
days, that “twilight of the gods” and of their greatest battle, “Ragnarok,” when the
poison of our aging sun’s induction had maddened those who tried to remain on Mu.

It can only be conjectured for surface men, what life was like when the sun was
new. Since nothing aged, the forms of life were of mighty, ever-increasing size. The
legend of the Worm that encircles the world and to eat must consume his own tail,
was probably as near as one could come to any description of sea-monsters whose
farther ends would be out of sight when one glimpsed their gaping maws. Men, too,
were mighty of size, yet there were some very tiny, the products of a science beyond
present-day mankind.

The “seeing rays” of those ancient scientists reached everywhere, and from this
our religious faiths have derived their teaching that “God is everywhere.” Those
rulers were probably widely aware of all near and far surroundings on Mu, for their
beneficial rays and potions made them so. They moulded life forms to their will.
They precipitated energy ash (ether) and from it synthesized the elements they
needed most. Space travel was so commonplace with them that they thought of it
in the same terms in which we of today think of motor cars.

What we can And of their thought is Interesting especially in its multiform con¬
cept known for short as MAG-ic, the word being derived from IC, later Greek for sci¬
ence, and M-AG, or Manaugmented. This magic reached its height before two things,
both long expected, happened. The carbon layer around the sun burned down to the
heavy metal underneath. Sunlight became increasingly poisonous, since it contained
minute quantities of disintegrant metals; disintegrant flaming lead, radium, titanium,
uranium emanations Ailed the bright sunlight. Old age, long prophesied, appeared.

Then began the periodic migration to a new, carbon-coated sun. Most of those
Elder Folk left Mu for planets of kindlier augury. But some of those brilliant beings,
loving “Mu” as they called our mother earth, remained, Aghting the poisonous ef¬
fects of sun metal with their extended knowledge. Before its accumulations could
bring on old age, they would extract it from their bodies magnetically. Thus, keep¬
ing their immortal youth, sheltered in their deep caverns from the heavy metallic
induction of our sun, those remnants of the race of immortals stayed on, to be the
source of our legends of the gods. —Author.

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visit my incensed cousin and reassure her that all was well since I and my
forces had come into the picture.

As our scout planes shot upward, a long vee of strange planes boomed up
from the south and shot past our formation in a northerly direction. I had
thought I was familiar with every type of plane on Mu, from jet to nose-ray,
but the design of those planes was entirely strange to me. They disappeared
from my sight, but not from my questing mind. Strange planes above Mu
were not to be ignored; their presence might be forerunner of grave trouble.

Within minutes, my arms embraced the very attractive knees of my
charming cousin Gracia and her tirade of feminine near-invective poured
itself upon my defenseless masculine head.

“Wise Bar, of the blood of the great Thor, could not any fool have fore¬
seen this? Jormungandur, nonetheless, came on the Rolls of the Covenant.
Explain that, you feckless dreamer!”

“Sweet cousin,” I protested meekly, striving to stem the flood of that
aroused ire. “I did not create the Covenant.”

“A most fortunate fact that you didn’t. Do you know what lies under those
reaping arms, blind and stupid one? Do you know what that beast of the
abyss of ocean has eaten?”

“Gracia—”

“Ten thousand acres of parasites I developed, to destroy alien plant
forms. Now, in one week, that infinitude of belly has destroyed ten years of
our best labor.”

I tried to block that tirade with a recital of the magnitude of the forces
I had headed for the retribution that must necessarily be laid upon the
Worm for his rebellious action against the Covenant, behavior code of in¬
ter-racial law.

“Look, cousin, I have complied with your wishes. Last night my fleet as¬
sembled on the waters of Jotun Bay outside my windows in Asgard. It is a
heterogeneous collection, I will admit, but look how little time you’ve given
me to get it together. Glossy jet-planes, Gracia, some submersible fliers, and
some heavy-bodied passenger planes to carry men. Not to mention three
thousand top fighting men.”

She shrugged her shapely shoulders and wrinkled her nose distastefully.

“I notice that you have not brought your armored space-ships, hero.”

I was quick to pick up that in rebuttal.

(22) Der planet—detrimental energy planet. One on which an aging sun pours its
rays, and causes, in addition to age, a mental detriment, insanity. Our Earth, today,
is a Der planet. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

39

“Because, fair cousin, they are too unwieldy for surface work. Yet, I did
dispatch several with large cargoes of foodstuffs and ammunition and other
supplies for our base on the Gold Coast.”

She heaved a deep sigh of unwilling resignation.

“Oh, I presume you have done the best you knew how,” she stabbed.

I COULD not refrain from grinning. Gracia was not a good loser and she
had lost out with me thus far, for I had not failed to think of everything at
my command that might be needed in that mighty fray that was scheduled
to take place between us Atlans and the Worm.

I knew that killing a thing with the growth rate and titanic strength of
Jormungandur was not going to be a simple matter. His body encircled the
whole earth and was of incalculable mass. Its nature was much that of
the starfish; break it in twain, and both halves grow. That his great age had
developed mental reactions of a kind similar to human thought was known
to us from the fact that this had been true of other monsters of growth on
Mu. I was shortly to learn just how far this mental development of the oldest
and most monstrous creature on Mu had been carried by the beneficial rays
of the newborn sun.

I returned to my scout plane and thence to the flagship of our air fleet.
My ship was equipped with the mechanisms that would put all space at my
command, to be seen and heard and to throw my voice into the ears of those
whom I willed to hear it. I had the ship hover over that part of the ocean
between the continents of Atlantis and South Afrik, that particular spot
where it had been said that men had talked with the Worm many a long day
ago. I switched on the vis-ray, and it sank miles deep into the murky depths.
At last, after I had turned it hither and yon, there glowed on the visi-screen
like twin moons the awful eyes of the most ancient life on Mu.

The telaug revealed his thoughts to me and I pitied him as that river of
desperate and weary meaning flowed from the thought cloud like the drift¬
ing soul of a lost sea. The Worm was hungry. He was weary of the emptiness

(23) Obviously here the description is not an accurate one. By Bar Mehat’s own ad¬
mission, earlier in this thought record, all of Mu (Earth) has not been explored. Ap¬
parently, the known portion of it (except for casual observation from space ships)
consisted only of Europe and Africa, and a portion of Asia, probably just east of the
Norse countries. Thus, the Worm, Jormungandur, occupied the Atlantic Ocean be¬
tween what is now the above-mentioned continents and the continent of Atlantis
(also included in the known portions). Its sire must have been tremendous, perhaps
as much as five hundred miles long. —Ed.

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of a life that contained nothing but slumber and feeding. His groping tenta¬
cles were no longer able to find sufficient food and he was bitterly resentful
at a fate which had given him life which he found it difficult to sustain, and
later had given him thoughts so that he understood what he was. For long
I pondered that wretched but intriguing life that was the brain center of
the Worm that encircled the earth. At last I spoke, sending my voice to the
distant Worm’s lair.

“Garm,” said I—in Afrik and near parts Jormungandur was called Garm
— “Garm, speak to me. Give me an answer, for I am your friend if you will
have me so. From the darkness that shrouds you, from the gloom in which
you must wallow in the abyss of ocean’s depths, speak to me, who wishes
you well. It is Bar Mehat of Thor who calls you.”

T hat deep river of gloomy meditation ceased its slow flow and concen¬
trating itself reluctantly, looked out of the pale lucent orbs that were
Garm’s eyes. Great abstract thoughts welled up the ray and flung them¬
selves on the thought-cloud like corpses pushing upward for release from
the sucking ooze that clung to them. That husky, thick voice enunciated
words with heavy difficulty.

“It is long since Man has sought me out. What would you of Garm?”

“In the old days, Garm, you were one of the few of the serpent race who
upheld the Covenant’s code. Why have you forsaken the ways of peace?
Why are you now unfriendly to Man? Your body is now partly on land, and
it is land upon which my family has expended much labor. Now all that
constructive work is spoiled and many good men whom in the old days you
would have called friends, rejoicing that they lived on Mu, those men have
died under your long arms’ fatal suctions. Must we then slay you, Garm,
that we may live?”

Garm’s thoughts moiled over this problem. They flickered back and forth
without much consistent form on the thought cloud.

“Once I loved men,” he slowly answered at last, his thick voice dull with
a kind of indifference that troubled me, the listener. “I loved them for the
bright pictures they sent me and for the beautiful children they bore. I loved
them for the tales they told me of their lively doings in the sun. But now they
have long forgotten me, and I raven for food.

“I am grown too big to feed myself well, even though I draw from the
vast seas in which I lie. It may be that you must kill me, for I know not and
care no longer what I do. Life holds no significance for me. I have outgrown
life, perhaps.”

“Garm, I think that if you will but be reasonable, we may find some way to

Thought Records of Lemuria

41

feed you, so that you may continue to live on,” I offered, my emotion being
one of real sympathy for a creature so outgrown that we could not by any
means within our power send it to a larger planet. Or so I thought at that
impulsive moment.

The voice of Garm droned on: “Once a man of your line went a-fishing.
Yes, I recognize you for one of Thor’s line. For a joke I took the bait between
my jaws and raised up my head near his skiff. He was, like all of your blood,
a stubborn fellow and he pulled the bottom out of his boat, trying vainly to
land me. At least, that was his pretense.

“After I had carried him ashore on my back we talked for a long, lovely
time, he sitting on the sand and I with my head lying on the sandy beach
beside him. He told me a tale of another such serpent as myself, grown too
long for comfortable living on his birthplace, and he predicted that the same
fate lay in store for me, unless I found death by some other means. That
great serpent encircled earth as do I, and when the time came that abun¬
dant food was no longer available, he took his own tail between his jaws and
swallowed it, and after many years he died thus.

“It may be that I shall do that thing, though of late I do not love men or
their doings.”

I 'PONDERED the great Being’s bitter words and at last I spoke thoughtfully.

“You must know something of our thought magic, Garm? If you will do
that thing the other great serpent did, we will arrange that before you do
it you shall have many weeks of continual pleasure dreams. You shall sense
in dreams glorious matings and victorious struggles. We will give you the
equivalent of many lives of pleasure.

“This will take much energy that we could well spend elsewhere, but it
will be worth that to us to rid us of your overgrowing, enormous appetite
that is becoming so destructive. We will pay you in full and you know that
we are honorable. You can weigh this thing well. Will you take our word and
after your dreams die honorably, a true son of the Covenant?”

“Bar Mehat of Thor,” answered the great serpent, “if your dream-makers
deal honorably with me, so will I deal with you. And this you cannot have
known, that besides yielding up my life there is a thing or two which I have
learned that I will grant you freely without concealment. I know your magic,
but your dream makers may weigh the value of their own lives in the bal¬
ance of their calculation as to what dreams they give me, for I have means
of saving them or letting them drift on to death that will seize upon them
unawares. Tell them that, O Son of the Past Great, and bid them measure
me out abundance of glorious dreams in gratitude.”

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Thus, it was that I talked with the Worm that encircled the world. And
thus, it came to pass that Garm told me of things that I knew were true, for
I had seen that flight of strange planes that headed for the dense forests that
we Atlans had thus far left practically unexplored.

“Strange outlanders came over my seas in great ships and hovered long,
sending me their promises of many dreams, as you have done. But they did
not ask my death. Bar Mehat; they asked my living aid.

“I learned somewhat of their dreams, and their dreams are not my kind of
dreams. Bar of the old line of Thor. There is no light laughter, and there are
no gallant young ones with them. Their lives have been miseries of everlast¬
ing warring. I want no part of such wretched dreams.

“But they had a ray which they can put upon any part of my body and
through that ray control me. So, when I gave no consent to their supplications,
they forced a part of me to lay waste such portions of Afrik as lies between the
two great rivers. So, if you seek them out, where they have hidden themselves
within the Dark Lands, you will know whence any coming trouble sources.”

“I have seen their space ships, Garm. I knew them for outlanders,” I ex¬
claimed. “We shall take steps at once.”

T hey mean to take over the earth and to develop fecundly. They come
from a quarantined planet and have somehow eluded the Atlan der pa¬
trols. They believe they can win over the Mu folk before help can be called
in from greater space against them. How they expect to hold Mu against the
entire Atlan space navy, once they have won Mu, I fail to understand. But
they are stupid, despite their mechanisms of power, and perhaps they think
not of it, or expect by crafty trickery to cheat the Atlans into letting them
alone on Mu.”

An idea flashed into my mind as I stood staring at Garm’s vast head,
looking into his fierce elder-wise eyes, twin greenish silver moons flickering
through sea water.

“Garm, in the caverns where we breed life forms, our technicians have a
way of removing the brain from an animal, a living brain, and putting It into
a metal bottle where it lives on, fed by fluid foods and synthetic blood. Since
you are grown too big for this earth, will you consent that we may put your
brain into a bottle and keep it for a record of the past?

“You have certain wisdoms which you can teach youth, and you like the
young, laughter-filled folk of our Mu people. Later, after you have grown
accustomed to our ways on land, you will have many friends, and later yet
some colonizing expedition can take you with them and plant your living
brain into a young reptile on some other planet.

Thought Records of Lemuria

43

“You may live your life over again and again. Do the Der men offer you
anything of like value? And in return for this prolongation of your life, will
you then aid us against them?”

The limpid moon eyes nickered into near opacity as The Worm concen¬
trated upon this new and far more interesting proposition I had proffered.
I waited patiently for his response and felt certain it would be affirmative.
After all—

The thick voice came slowly after a long wait. The moon eyes had cleared
and shone greenly through the sea water.

“I accept your offer,” said the Worm. “I would fain live on and see your
brave new worlds that else I might never visit. I am ready to accompany you
when you give me the word that you are ready to attack those interlopers
from a quarantined planet. I dislike their warring and resent bitterly that
the people of Mu must be forced into battles because of them. Yes, Bar Me-
hat of Thor, I am your ally against them.

“And when the battling is done with, and you have driven them from Mu,
then you shall send me first the dreams for which I yearn in my now empty
existence. After I have had my fill of dreams, I shall let your technicians
take my brain and preserve it as you have said. Someday I shall again live
in liberty in the body of another serpent on some greater planet. Yes, Bar
Mehat, I agree.”

I was overjoyed at Garm’s decision for something told me that he would
be an ally not to be scorned in the battle that must ensue shortly between
my forces and those invaders from a der planet.

“I shall call you, then, Garm, when we make our advance,” I told him.
“You shall follow my forces—”

Something lively sparkled in the great green moons that were the eyes
of the Worm.

“I am to wipe up the debris of your victory?” husked Garm, with a note of
derision that piqued me a little.

“No, no,” I protested half-heartedly.

But Garm’s thick throat uttered a kind of snorting laugh.

“Rely upon it, I shall be with you when and wherever you lead,” said he
enigmatically, and with that our conference ended.

T hus, it was that when my forces made ready to advance into the Dark
Lands where the invaders had entrenched themselves in expectation of
our coming, Garm’s tremendous body flowed after the army of Thor’s men.
The sight of him was comforting as we pressed on into the night of the jun¬
gle. Like a mighty river of greenish black flesh encrusted with barnacles and

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sea plants, the titanic Jormungandur was a reservoir of strength incalcula¬
ble, in truth of a value of many armies because of those splaying tentacles
that absorbed all life they seized upon.

Like the mighty leaders of prior times I strapped to my back my anti-grav
packs and flitted ahead with my scouts. These anti-grav packs enabled us to
rise to a considerable height above the ground, which was a great advantage
in entering that jungle where otherwise we must have been obliged to spend
much precious time slashing down the heavy undergrowth. A number of
the scouts were to go on ahead, it was arranged, and I flitted not far behind,
with another squad of scouts directly in my rear. After these came the main
body of our troops. It was while I went on in this way that I saw the girl in
the trees, and learned what kind of enemy we had to face.

She was wearing an anti-grav pack and she had depended upon it to
escape the swaying head of a monster reptile whose coils lay over the rude
path that ran for some short distance into the forest.

She had apparently no weapons of defense or had lost what she had pos¬
sessed in her flight from the great snake. Now she was entangled in the
thorny, shielding branches of the tree to which she had flown, and the ser¬
pent seemingly did not care to thrash about against those prickly thorns
with which it was equipped. I alighted on the branch where the girl clung.

“What has happened? Have you no weapons?”

“It came upon me so suddenly,” she faltered, “that I dropped my ray-gun.
And what use is a knife against that scaly skin?”

I looked at the reptile. It would have to be eliminated, or its presence
would block the advance of my men. Moreover, the creature had set its
stupid mind upon capturing what probably seemed to it legitimate prey,
and it kept its evil eyes hypnotically upon the girl, who trembled with ap¬
prehension.

“The thing must be slain,” I said boldly, and let myself down lightly upon
the sloping back of the monster snake.

I SCRAMBLED up the scaly back to the bumpy ridge of its spine. Then I
pulled my disintegrating ray from the holster and blasted a shot through
the center of the spine, severing the spinal cord. I raced lightly, depending
upon the anti-grav pack to lift me as I leaped, until I had reached the head
of the titanic and maddened reptile. At every alternate bound I blasted an¬
other path through the spine, leaving behind as I went a paralyzed column
of motionless flesh. As I reached the taper of the mighty neck the great head
turned, jaws gaping to slay this stinging insect that had wrought such swift
destruction, but with swiftly triggered blasts I cut the last nerves at the base

Thought Records of Lemuria

45

of the head. Red threatening maw and evilly gleaming eyes dropped supine¬
ly to the earth.

The girl scrambled lightly down from the tree and threw herself at my
feet and flung her arms about my knees, embracing them with heart-felt
thanksgiving. There seemed to me no time for amenities and I lifted her
face and looked piercingly into her wide blue eyes. It seemed to me that I
saw mirrored therein a clean and innocent soul and I felt well rewarded for
my strenuous and perilous combat with that monster reptile. I surmised
that this girl was an outlaw Atlan, else she would scarcely have been at large
in the forests. I asked her directly.

“Yes, I am an outlaw.”

I did not care to take time to ask her why, but I did feel that she could
be trusted.

“We seek those who drive the great beasts to attack the Atlan cities. Do
you know where they have hidden themselves, maiden?”

The girl remained on her knees, but her limpid eyes were raised to mine.

“Are you the leader who seeks those evil people of the dark forest?” she
asked. I nodded in affirmation.

“Had I known that the leader of the forces was so princely, I would never
have fled the Atlan cities,” said she cryptically.

“This is no time to exchange pleasantries, maiden. Do you know the hid¬
den entrenchments of my enemy?”

“You must be Bar Mehat,” she said, ignoring my query.

“I am indeed Bar Mehat of Thor,” I assented with impatience.

“Then I am for you. I owe you my life. I belong to the forest people, of
whom you must know. We are outlaws and hide always from such as you.
Among us came, not too many years ago great ships with many guns.”

“I know. But recently I saw some of their space ships and knew invaders
had landed on Mu. Go on, maiden.”

“They are not like us,” said she. “They have skins colored and blotched like
lizards. Like the chameleon lizards. Somewhat on the order of man are they,
with four limbs. Their webbed feet have prehensile toes and their hands
are long-fingered. They have a long, fleshy tail that tapers to a whip-like
point, hanging from their rumps. They have large, flat heads and their eyes
are lidless and reptilian, and are covered with a translucent membrane for
protection. Oh, how evilly red those eyes can glitter!”

“Their features, maiden. Do they resemble men?”

“Oh, no. Bar Mehat. Their noses are small and flat and their mouths are
wide. They have no chins and their teeth are heavy fangs. Oh, they are most
horrible to look upon.”

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I LIFTED her to her feet.

“I take it, maiden, that you must be aware from your familiarity with the
forest of where these lizard men have entrenched themselves. Is your anti-
grav pack in good order? It is? Then come with me,” I ordered, and rose in
the air to flit ahead of the second squad of scouts that, seeing me in conver¬
sation with the girl, had halted in my rear.

So, we went on together and as we went the girl continued to tell me of
those pirates of space who had escaped from their quarantined planet.

“They promised us forest folk riche and power and security. Many fair
promises they made if we would help them drive out you Atlans. They come
from the forbidden spaces where death reigns,” she shuddered. “They do not
worship the dark gods of space as you Atlans and we forest folk do, for they
believe in no good thing. They have learned that death has not yet come to
Mu and they think that now, before the Atlans are too well settled, they can
drive you out and learn to live as the gods live, by studying your cities and
the minds of their captives.

“They are very evil and some things they do made me so fearful that I fled
into the deeper forest that I might see them no more. Ah, I cannot sleep yet
for thinking of their horrible life, their disgusting mottled bodies, the stink of
them. And on those who will not go their way they inflict torments, for they
hate the way of the Covenant. They are fools and stupid, though, to believe
that they could ever win over the wise Atlans who make friends so easily.”

We flitted on for a few moments in silence and I pondered much over
what the girl had told me.

“You see. Bar Mehat, whenever an Atlan sees how they work, he becomes
their enemy automatically, for it is impossible to know when one pleasures
or displeases them, so that it is inevitable that one will in the end be tor¬
tured to death. Oh, I am glad to see the men of Atlan coming here in force
to banish those foul invaders!”

A CRY arose from the scouts in the van and we hastened to join them.

The cause of the outcry was simple, after all. They had spotted a dero
hidden like a chameleon against a dark tree trunk, the faint patterning of
his lizard-like skin betraying him, for in his perturbation at our approach it
turned from rose to purple, to inky black, then again to faint rose. Our men
had overpowered him although he was armed with a projectile weapon.

The girl touched my arm.

“Did I speak truth. Bar Mehat?” she demanded. “Is he not as I described him?”
He was indeed as she had told me. I examined his weapon with inter¬
est. It was a glass-like gun activated by air pressure and Bred a tiny, brittle.

Illustration by Robert Gibson Jones.

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venom-filled needle that broke on contact, releasing the poison into the
veins of the victim. One of the great cats that infrequently lurk nearer the
confines of the forest gave me a chance to test the poison. I fired the gun
and the cat whirled and then fell as if paralyzed. Inspection showed that it
still lived, but it was incapable of any action, save that its furious eyes glared
upon us whom it had been unable to escape. We later found that the venom
was similar in effect to wasp venom in that it permanently paralyzed the
victim, but left him alive for future reference, as it were.

Later, too, we learned that the lizard men had wasp habits in yet other ways,
for they, too, kept their victims living for long periods before eating them.

I called for an augment helmet and ordered it clapped on the prisoner’s
flat head. It was a matter of a few minutes only when his thought, with tre¬
mendous augmentation, was flowing back over my entire following forces.
In this way I knew my men would be aware of just what they were about to
engage in deadly conflict.

These lizard creatures had evolved on a small planet under a very large
new sun. While it was not a deadly sun, its rays being full of beneficial vi-
brants, yet its disintegrant induction had been a tremendous factor in their
development. Their will to live had been great, but their will to destroy was
as full, thus coloring all their thoughts with vicious intent, for the will to
destroy and the disintegrant electric forces are one and the same. While the
seed of greatness was perhaps within them, it had been buried irretrievably
beneath a rigid discipline of the revolting kind which allowed the individual
little freedom save the right to reproduce.\*^®^

W E HAD barely finished the broadcast of the lizard man’s thoughts
when a tremendous crystal sphere sailed overhead and paused above
the midst of our array, for by now my forces had caught up with our scout¬
ing vanguard. Then, with a loud report, it flew asunder and there rained

(24) The venom of the wasp is shown on stung spiders, when it destroys the nervous
system but leaves the spider living, perhaps conscious, to be eaten later alive by the
wasp grub, a system of food storage. —Ed.

(25) In Atlan language there are three kinds of men: tew, normal man; dew, evil
man, and zew, useless man. These lizard people were for the most part zew. Equal
parts of good and evil in the character made their total effect in life merely a rep¬
etition of the status quo. But they were foolish enough to allow domination by the
dew, which rendered the total effect detrimental to all other beings and their own
true interests as well. Notice the world conflagration resulting from the devotion of
one nation to a detrimental energy robot. —Author.

Thought Records of Lemuria

49

down upon us tiny slivers of light that seemed faery spears, playing in all
directions. At least a dozen of my best men fell sprawling to the ground as
if paralyzed and at that we all knew what had been in that crystal sphere.
It was a bomb, full of compressed air and packed with tiny glass capsule
needles of the paralyzing venom of the lizard men. It was a most effective
weapon and we could not, unfortunately, determine its exact source at that
moment.

After that first one, sphere after sphere hissed down upon us through the
air and Atlan’s bravest fell in windrows. Some of our men thought it a good
idea to pick off the spheres with disintegrating ray rifles, but this resulted in
the bombs bursting high in the sky, only to rain the venomous needles more
widely upon our heads. I had ordered huge disintegrators, mounted high on
trucks at our rear, to drop sweeping fans of destruction into the forest ahead
of us. Their range was almost incredible, so that fires of many miles in width
sprang up ahead. At long last the spheres decreased in numbers and I felt
that our rays must have destroyed some station from which they had been
dispatched.

I had been well aware that to use a large disintegrator in the jungle was
an infraction of the Covenant’s code, but if any intelligent life existed simul¬
taneously with those lizard men in the jungle ahead, it was self-doomed
by failure to warn us Atlans of the impending attack. All rules are tossed
overboard in war, sooner or later. That forest fire, which under ordinary
circumstances would never have been allowed to rage, among those trees
so big that a man could hardly grasp their immensity even with his imagi¬
nation, was a sight never to be forgotten.

We Atlans have a curious way of putting out such fires. We have an at¬
omized carbon ray which we spray into the down-drafts around the flames.
This is activated carbon, more inflammable than ordinary carbon, and di¬
vided with extreme fineness so that its particles are driven along by certain
waves of light. Thus, an atomic carbon ray is formed which is sprayed over
the fire. The carbon did not, as might be thought, increase the intensity of
the fire, for the finely divided carbon combines with the oxygen of the air,
blanketing the whole area with carbon dioxide, so as the rays swept the fire
ahead, it died.

A S THE fire broke a way through, my forces marched, leaped or soared
over the smoking jungle. To the danger from the enemy army that must
be ahead was added that of falling limbs from the great trees that stretched

(26) Apparently, the heat of the combination was lost by its dispersion. —Ed.

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a mile overhead. Some of those giants, remnants of the first early growths,
were six or seven miles tall. These gargantuan trees now stood blacked at
the base, and at infrequent intervals limbs as long as several city blocks
and weighing from twenty to a hundred tons would crash near us. Once
in a while the smoldering embers would burst into flame that would leap
skyward through the now dried-out framework of lower limbs, but a few
well-directed sweeps of the atomic carbon rays extinguished these as fast
as they sprang up.

It was a relief to all my thirsty, soot-covered men, when we sighted the
enemy’s camps. Uttering shrill cries calculated to fill us with apprehension,
the lizard men at once set up a barrage of venom glass needles to halt our
advance. Here I had made some preparations which I believed might be the
answer to that type of attack. Forewarned by our prior experience I had or¬
dered that some of our huge disintegrators en route, approximately a hun¬
dred, be adapted to prepare from their rays what is called a wind-ray. This is
a dual ionizing ray, one ray positively ionizing the air and another negatively
ionizing the air. When the rays are held far apart a gentle breeze springs up
between them as the molecules of air, drawn by the attracting charges they
bear, rush down to neutralize their charge and are pushed aside or spread
by the outer in-rushing air. When they are held closely together and highly
energized, a terrible vortex of inrushing and up-rushing wind is formed.
These hastily adapted devices were posted like horns of a crescent on either
side of our advancing lines.

As the first crystal gloves hissed overhead, these wind-rays swung into
action. Thus, the globes, instead of falling, shot into the air like rubber balls
on a tossing fountain and, juggling them like circus performers, our ex¬
pert ray men flung them back into the air over the enemy’s camp and then
released them, to harry our tormentors by their own venomous weapons.
This return barrage was greeted by howls of dismay from the lizard men as
their own pigeons came home to roost.

Our penetras came into action also, sweeping over the whole area
in our van, so that whatever was opaque became transparent. What had
seemed merely earth and forest growth for half a mile ahead of my forces
was revealed, so that we saw and knew what the lizard men were keeping
behind walls. In fact, the penetra rays were so powerful that for miles ahead
the whole enemy work lay revealed as if we saw it through glass. This was

(27) Penetra— visi-rays which penetrate and make transparent any object on which
they are trained. Thus, in projecting visi-rays through earth, the penetra is used as
a carrier ray. —Ed.

Thought Records of Lemuria

51

done by bathing the whole area in penetrative rays of a nondestructive na¬
ture and sweeping over this with other rays that carried finely divided sele¬
nium and other chemicals in the same way that our fire-extinguisher rays
carry carbon. These luminosity rays act in the same manner that stains act
on a transparent organism under the microscope, bringing out the details
in different colors.

W HAT we beheld was most intriguing to my forces. The men bellowed
with huge guffaws over the outlanders’ methods. In improvised un¬
derground pens they had collected overgrown monsters of every descrip¬
tion. Held in those narrow tunnels, and fed but little for a long period, these
creatures had become ravenous with bestial hunger. Various types of disin¬
tegrating rays and venom-ball throwers, as well as other weapons the nature
of which was strange to us then, had been attached to the animals’ backs.
The purpose of this arrangement was obscure until the lizard men threw
open the barred doors to the tunnels.

Out rushed the maddened beasts. Mammoths, titanotheres, titanosaurs,
dinosaurs and huge serpents rushed down upon us. The ray apparatus on
their backs was automatic, sending a beam in a wide arc ahead of the beasts.
This beam, a dual ionizer like our windway, completed the circuit when it
struck metal. It was then that we realized the new peril we were encoun¬
tering. The resulting flow of current through the beam activated the firing
mechanism for the disintegrating ray. Since all our weapons were fabricated
of metal, while those of the lizard men were made out of glass or plastic,
these enraged living ray-tanks loosed upon us were more than a subject for
laughter, as we had thought when we first saw them through the walls of
their tunnels.

At first, we held off the terrific onslaught. Our superb gunners picked
off the beasts as rapidly as they approached within range, yet the heavy dis¬
charges released into the air began to blanket the whole fighting area with
a stifling, thought-blocking disintegrating charge. One could hardly move
one’s limbs because of the effect of this detrimental electric, which leaped
like Hell-fires from every bush, every piece of metal, every blade of grass,
making the vision hollow with the disillusion of despair.

It was not long before our fire was slowed by this subtle nerve-paralyzing
influence and the beasts pounded nearer in overpowering numbers, their
combined weights shaking the earth beneath us, their great maws roaring,
and over their fierce heads flashed ever the automatic fire rays, every flash
marking a hit on some metal weapon of ours. Whether this was defeat, or
whether the disillusion from the strong detrimental that so subtly held our

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minds under its potent spell was powerful enough to check our aggressive
action, things began to look very dark for Mu. And then—

O VER our cowering heads reared the vast bulk of The Worm. No metal
to complete a circuit in that engine of destruction! His curling, mile-
long tentacles lashed out, and every beast they touched was caught up,
crushed, and tossed aside, a menace no longer. He was the most awe-in¬
spiring being I had ever seen, with the great moons of his eyes reflecting his
fierce battle joy. One could almost hear the thought in his vast dragon head:

“After all these dull, uneventful centuries, what bliss to fight again for the
sons of the friends of my youth! Yea! It is good!” From the throat of Garm
a great rumbling roar issued and seemed to shape into words. “On, Atlans!
On, Altans!” And the mighty serpent hiss terminated the roaring words.

The great Worm’s bulk blotted the sun from overhead so that we fought
in the shade as though twilight had descended upon us. From our van we
could see the planes of the lizard men taking to the air as they retreated in
mad rout from this unconquerable serpent of the ancient days long past.
For following upon the appearance of Garm the invaders were, for the most
part, speeding away, leaving behind them their dead and wounded and the
blazing ruins of their camp. The maddened beasts which they had starved
and then released upon us were careening off in all directions for the con¬
trol rays that had kept them advancing upon us in attack now stood aban¬
doned, their tall masts no longer flashing with energy sparks. The battle was
over, save that a few of our fastest planes trailed the fugitive enemy, their
purpose not to do battle, but to determine the destination of the lizard men
that we might report it to the Space Police.

We bivouacked amid jubilant cries of triumph.

I T WAS some days later that our battered columns wound slowly back into
the green cultivated areas surrounding my cousin Gracia’s white marble
mansion. As we marched, we could see in the far distance Garm’s acres of
scaly body flowing swiftly into the sea. I sped on in advance of my forces, by
the aid of my anti-grav pack, and came to a stop at the marble steps, where
my cousin stood awaiting me and, on my ears, again fell the unending re¬
criminations of her anger.

“How could you have let those ignorant, undeveloped idiots from a der
planet so nearly defeat you. Bar Mehat? Jormungandur himself hardly saved
you from destruction. How could you have marched into the face of that
ominous situation without preparation, without any special weapons, with¬
out prior scouting and information—?”

Thought Records of Lemuria

53

Her voice went on and on, and I began to think that she was probably
right and I, an impractical dreamer, unfit to head the troops of Atlan. My
too costly victory told this as well as did the faces of those of my most val¬
ued men who still lived.

“I know not, cousin. Youth and ignorance of such traps may be my only
excuses,” I told her stupidly, for my heart was sick, now that all was well over,
at thought of those dead we had left behind in the Dark Lands. “I cannot
think of anything else,” I apologized.

“It might be well if you did a little thinking, nevertheless. Bar. The Space
Patrol is on its way. When it arrives one of its officers will take charge here in
command of our Atlan forces and you—you are going back on one of their
ships, for you have signally failed to distinguish yourself on Mu. When you
are back on Atlan, my cousin, you had best go to the College for Warriors
and learn a little something of how to take care of yourself and safeguard
your men when you lead them.”

I stood with head hanging, for I had no words to give her. She was prob¬
ably in the right, I thought. I would enter the College for Warriors upon
my return to Atlan and I would study diligently and prepare myself in the
latest military science so that Mu would be better for my leadership when I
returned to that planet.

A S I stood, suddenly blackness rushed down upon me and I knew no
more of my cousin, or of Garm slowly withdrawing into the sea, or of
anything until a light flashed through the darkness and I became aware of
an odd popping sound as of a suddenly released run-down record.

I wakened to the soft laughter of the blind maiden as she switched off the
thought record reading machine.

Her hands fell light on my shoulders and she leaned to kiss my forehead
before she removed the apparatus from my head.

“The record film broke,” she told me regretfully. “They are so very old, it is
surprising they have lasted so long. Perhaps it is of little consequence, after
all, for that record of Bar Mehat ends when he returns to Atlan.”

The faint sound of a gong rang through the cave and we took each other’s
hands and went together to the dining-hall where the entire group custom¬
arily met for meals. I was for hours in a kind of daze, for it seemed to me that
I was still Bar Mehat and not Richard Shaver.

Later I realized the lessons from that life I had vicariously lived. It was
that anger and warfare, struggle and death, are the fatal fruits of der, and der
was the distortion of the magnetic fields of the thought cells of a mind by
disintegrant electric. And Mu, in those earlier days, had not turned indue-

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tively under the new sun long enough to induct the great charge of detri¬
mental electric which makes our life today the hell it really is. It is not good
to be a man on a quarantined planet of der. If one reads the ancient books
that exist always in these old, abandoned planets, one learns that life away
from an aging sun is immortal life, while on a der planet it is a brief moment
of existence and thought under a blasting sun of death.

As this knowledge sank into my mind from the great brain back of Bar’s
thought-record, a terrible despondency seized upon me. I realized that
Earth was now such an outworn living place, quarantined from the great
immortal life of space because der means warring and men of earth think
der thoughts. If only we could build again such houses as the Atlans built,
which barred the entry of all detrimental energy flows, or even live in caves
as did the later Atlans to shield themselves from a deadly sun, we might be¬
come again something more than the mere insects we now are.

A S MATTERS now stand, I have become one of the underworld, of those
who have been called trolls, gnomes and goblins in the old days. We
are the same today and still my friends here fear surface men. Eor man can¬
not understand or believe any other form of human life but his own, and
they fear us greatly when they learn of our existence. Yet those of us who
are kindly intentioned need man’s understanding and assistance, for our
lives are struggles for existence against the malefic schemes and powers of
the evil and idiot denizens of the caverns. Because I realize the tremen¬
dous importance of our continued existence as an intelligent group, I have
thrown in my lot with Nydia’s little band. Nightly I stand my watch against
the devils who have made their homes in the farther caves. Our life here
is purchased at the price of never-failing vigilance. We peer over the old
visi-rays, focusing the ancient lenses to the farthest range and sweeping the
caves with them for the slightest indication of attack, that we may turn it
back before it reaches us.

Daily I spend much time reading the ancient thought records, bringing
thus to my knowledge the lives of the mighty, ancient God-race that existed
immortally before our sun aged and they adventured elsewhere. The tale of
that aging sun and of the flight of the Elder Eolk from its effects is written
in those ancient thought records.\*^®' Eor as the sun ages it grows more dense
and as it becomes denser it throws deadly fiery particles out with its light
beams. These gather in the body and like radium they never cease to burn;
they are atomic fire and deadly in their final result. In time their accumula¬
tion burns and withers life away, just as radium would do if we swallowed
it. Only ignorant men, who could not flee into space, remained here on

earth to father modern man, for the Immortals abandoned their out-grown
dwelling places here when they took to their space-ships and flew away to
settle under more favorable conditions on other planets.

It is my constant hope that someday earth men will waken to the exis¬
tence of these ancient cavern dwellings, full of marvelous machines and
secrets of science infinitely greater than theirs.

It is full time that mankind awoke. I live on only in that hope. Until then,
I bid the surface earth farewell. I remain here in the caverns, absorbing wis¬
dom against that day, and loving (as only those can love who live under the
rays of the ancient mech) my little blind maiden.

—Richard S. Shaver

(28) It is this record that was presented by Mr. Shaver in his first story, “I Remember
Lemuria!” When Mr. Shaver presented it to us, he did not explain how he knew it,
except in the manner described in the opening of this second story, as a mental
impulse from underground minds received at first via his welding gun in a Detroit
auto plant. Ignorant as your editor was of the real facts surrounding Mr. Shaver’s
story, we decided to call it “racial memory” to make it more credible to our readers.
We are forced now to retract that, and to admit also, that your editor was the most
doubting of all Thomases at the beginning. However, when you read the amazing
reactions to this first story, published in Discussions, in the new special section
devoted to reporting readers’ discoveries and reports on Mr. Shaver’s Lemurian
story, and in the Editor’s Observatory, you will be faced with the same amazing
facts which have made your editor look a little silly for having perhaps harmed the
credibility of an incredible story by trying to make it less incredible. —Ed.

(29) Actually, Mr. Shaver is no longer in the caverns, but back on the surface, as
we shall have occasion to demonstrate later on; but Mr. Shaver intends to present
in each issue from now on, one of the “thought record” stories that he listened
to while in the caves—and thus, for continuity, we have ended this story where it
should properly end, in the caves, with more to come. —Ed.

MER'WITCH OF ETHER 18
(Included on The Shaver Mystery Compendium vol. 4).

Nydia has her own adventure in ZIGOR MEPHISTO’S
COLLECTION OF MENTALIA (Included on The Shaver
Mystery Compendium vol. 5)