part0005

T HIS is a re-statement of a lost history of our planet, fragmentary, muddled in spots, baffling, containing unsaid implications so startling as to be incredible, yet impossible to dismiss from an open and reasonable mind. It may be illusion, madness; but it is, then how sane are you? What do we really know of the past beyond recorded history? If there was such a past, you say, then why do not vestiges of it remain today: in language, in mythology, in ancient ruins? Ah, but they do remain! And I intend to point them out to you. If, when I have finished, you are not convinced, then, of course, this is fiction—to you. To me it is the truth. I believe it. To say otherwise would indeed be a fiction. But do not let me press my own opinions upon you; rather, let me try only to entertain you. What your own opinions will be, having read what I have to say, may be surprising. Now, however, make your mind a blank. Erase from it all preconceived ideas. Begin with empty space before the earth was. Erect only, a clean, white mental screen upon which I can write my word pictures; fragmentary, disconnected, with ill-constructed continuity, so that you receive it just as I had to receive it, just as I learned the story from all sources, some strange and unbelievable, some not so strange. For this is not a story, but a history, with gaps that I cannot fill in, and which can never be filled in, to my way of thinking. Too much has been irretrievably and tragically lost. And some of it that I do know, I do not understand . . .

Avoiding star trails, flinging their world-ships forever along the darkest paths of deep space; spreading their seed, their mighty children, ever wider across the sweet black face of Night, where Age is not.

Onward they plow, building ever more ecstatic fabric into their homes of everlasting delight, the infinite skill of an age-old mechanical science making easy their way, seeding the darkness. Harrow and drill and seed; planting civilizations on dark planets as men plant mustard seed in fields.

But some seeds fall among thorns; planets lost in the bright abandoned deserts of sunlight, the deadly gamma rays of atomically flaming worlds whose matter is disrupting.

Such seeds are we—you and I and the women we worship—condemned so soon to wither into age and decay because of the sun, to become an ugly, rotting nothing beneath the sod. Yes, though trapped in Death, immersed in Life-destroying radioactivity, we on Earth still contain the seeds of that immortal life that lives in the ether’s darkness. We are the lost children of the Gods!

It all began because I broke my leg.

If I hadn’t been forced to stay in the hospital, I would never have picked up the old Bible and started looking for traces of the source of the mechanisms that made the voices.

It was the only thing there was to read. I had always puzzled about the real meaning of the Mene, mene, tekel upharsin written on the wall by a hand without a body. You remember, it was Nebuchadnezzar’s palace . . .

Puzzling about what strange tongue it might be, I began to conjecture where it must have come from, what it must have been. I ruled out mysticism, angels, and other forms of fantasy, and stuck to things I knew personally were actually true, supported by observable and known facts, things I felt were self-evident. To make it possible for a hand to appear without a body—a hand writing in an unknown tongue—indicated concealed devices and personalities of a training beyond anything Babylon had to offer.

That deduction made it a must for a greater race to have inhabited the world in past time unknown to recorded races, for such science to have been active about old Neb’s palace. I began to conjecture how it must have been able to remain concealed in gigantic caverns where the writing of that Elder Race still was spoken and written by hidden dwellers in long forgotten caverns. They had to be underground; there was no other place for them.

I began to wonder how they would build a language if they went about it, a Universal tongue, simple enough for use by many divergent groups of races.

I spent that winter working out that language from pure deduction, and I hit the nail on the head. For, each letter that has come down to us stood then for a basic actuality in nature. For instance, V stood for “vital” or sex appeal; K meant “kinetic” or motion; D was “disintegrance” or breaking down, etc. After a while I had a working language key and I correctly translated Mene Tekel Upharsin for perhaps the first time!

I was right, for the hidden people in their cavern world whom I had deduced told me so, when, leaning back with a self-satisfied air, I said:

“All right, I know you’re there, you might as well admit it.”

They did admit it. They knew there was no longer any reason to conceal themselves from me, for I knew! They had written Mene Tekel on Nebuchadnezzar’s walls from that same silence, and now they were watching me while I translated, so many centuries after! That was the most delayed message man ever received! (1)

It was then they began the long series of teachings which have told me of that world of the past which was so far ahead of our own as not to be comparable. Most of the teachings came from wire recordings so marvelously realistic and so ancient as to be unbelievable. They said they had vast libraries of these wire records, and played them back to me by means of a mysterious telepathy, mechanically augmented so that I could hear it. These I give you now, the story of the Elder Race on Earth. It begins properly with the story of the race that was the Elder race to the Elder race of our Earth—their forebears. . .

The great planetquest, our quest for a broad steading for all our numbers through space, was in truth a flight from disaster.

We were the rear guard of the race fleets. Many endless years we had trailed the flight of the fleets, scenting with our augmentive rays the minute traces of their passing. A sensitive mind, a reaching conductive ray, an augmentive set of rex tubes—and there is little that one misses in the emptiness of the void.

Then too, we had the course, and a battery of our best minds hooked to each other with telepathic rays, watching the stars spin slowly past and change their constellations and relations, checking the new formed combinations with the charts.

But, near Orphad, a great and malevolent star, we drove into a vast cloud of detrimental ions. Before we could switch out our perceptor rays, into our brains smashed the deadly energy from the disrupting ions. Our neurals wove together in incomprehensible stupidity. There was no reason in us, no sensitivity to pick our way through the myriad trails of the ether, no way to see where lay the path of our fore-runners, for now we had absorbed the intent toward disillusion and despair!

We knew still a great deal. Our ship was filled with the influx of the stupefying energy, and we knew that for us the race had passed on. For us was left only a desperate attempt to win free of this vast space sea of deadly energy into which we had plunged so blindly into blindness itself. Easy to understand why we had to escape the insidious increase of that influence which had made us so blind!

But only to win free, to jet on and on toward some clean area of space—never again to see our people, our own cities. Our way of life was gone! We were caught up by Fate in some other path. We were de!

Stupid we were, and knew it not, to give up the search for the plain trail left us to follow, but there is no understanding the stupidity given a man by an influx of disintegrant ions into his mind. We had been hooked up so closely, following with many inter-tuned mental perceptions the vague scent of the passage of a myriad of ships—so many and so long before—that the inrush of deadly radiation along our beams had left us all with a pretty complete set of spoiled mind films. Our memories were dim and distorted, and our thinking angry and of a despairing kind. We saw no use in living, and thus found our way out of the deadly tide, only to fall into senseless arguments, even into actual physical clashes, on what course to take.

Of sense there was still much, but where there is magnetic error in the thinking mechanism, knowledge of the error’s presence is little help. The error works out no matter how one checks the logic on paper, with mathematics. It will come out in misdirection. There is no way of avoiding the falling into the paths of such error. De tides are like that, and few survive their first immersion in their denser coils in space. We survived, we flew on, but we knew that for us life would never be the same—never really life !

Eventually we picked a green planet, beneath a new sun of clean fields, and set down our ships to try our limbs in walking on earth again. Weak were our legs, hah!

For twelve years we had not touched soil, and for four of those years we had fought to clear the flank of the race fleet from the dogged pursuit of the Demad legions. It was their appearance among the planets of our home galaxy which had determined the Elders upon the long search for a space area clear of all Demoniac life.

For four years we had had to battle madmen, organized legions of killers, trained in unending space battles to a savagery and tenacity beyond belief—the degenerate descendants and leavings of some once wonderful culture-descending upon us out of the Hell-swarm of some planet group where increasing de tides had scoured away all reason and left only de mad minds; to battle suicidal mad men equipped with superior ships, for four long years of flight, that the race might survive!

And then to lose their trail through some stupidity of failing to note the needles that show always on the big red master dial the de tides flowing ahead! How could we have missed it?

But in such flight, there are the merest fractions of a second to note such details, and someone had failed to watch the board for an instant and see the madness dead ahead.

Now we knew we could never rejoin our race! Even if we knew where they were, we could never go to them. For now, we were what the Demad legions had been, men infected with a growing insanity of anger and evil and fear. Errors of logic would lead inevitably, now, to conflicting interests. And any child of a clean race knows that men’s interests can never conflict, for they are identical and therefore parallel!

Yet, when the magnetic fields of the mind cells are deluged with de energies, the mind insists that the interests of men are conflictual, insists until men find themselves at each other’s throats.

We saw it coming—in the angry excited speeches and squabbling in our off-duty watches. We saw it in the group of some two hundred ships who suddenly deserted us and took their own divergent path.

But what can reason and sanity do with pure unreason? There is no existing predictional table that can tell or explain what angle of peculiar intent false logic will take next!

When the fleet lifted again from the green planet, our own fellows of the ship Darethra found some trouble in the grav-gens. She would not lift!

We were tired, and we knew some mad slaughter might break out—would surely break out—between the divergent factions forming in the fleet. As if it mattered from whom the orders came, so long as they were good orders. But they were having “political” arguments, blows were thrown with bare fists into friend’s faces—madness, madness!

We remained, though our ship was fit enough—two hundred men tried in each other’s company for twelve long years. At least we could not distrust each other, even in madness.

Two hundred men—and not long after the fleet had lifted, two more ships settled to the green plains near ourselves, the Endra and the Dond!

I laughed, for our captain’s sweetheart was the first mate aboard the Dond , and her friend who was Rex equipment operator aboard the Endra had always set her eye on me. But one is in no hurry when one lives a thousand years. I wondered how long we would live now, filled with disintegrating atoms and sub-atoms?

The Endra and the Dond were female battle-wagons. Among the Eld, our own race, women go to war as well as men, but the sexes are separated, for they worry too much about each other when in danger. It decreases the strain of battle not to have your very truest love in plain sight when under fire. There was much rivalry between the female and the male crews, and between battalions and other groupings, each sex seeking to demonstrate once and for all which sex is superior. They had never quite succeeded, somehow, in proving it either way.

Friendly rivalry, from which we all derived a lot of fun. That was before the day of the Demad invasion. We could have fought them off, but it was not worth it. Their very existence told our scientists that the whole area of our planetary system was becoming infected with the nearing tides of life-blighting disintegrance. So, it was hardly worth fighting for. Our loved homes we abandoned to them, took off in peaceful surrender of the whole Lantic group of planets.

Too abject, it seemed to the Demad rulers. So, they sent their fleets after us. To enslave such arrant cowards seemed to them a simple task.

But we taught them differently! It was the need to delay their pursuit till our space-spanning speed built up that kept our own ships from following the trail until it was faint, so faint we mistook the way and crashed into the flood of—stupidity!

Now, I stood beneath a great beech tree, watching the Endra settle to her landing on the tall tufted grass of the plain. We named the plain the Delaware, for it was there we learned to be aware of Del , life under the taint of detrimental. D and L and aware, the Delaware. (2)

All of us knew we were facing a new pioneer life, without the resources of the wisdom of our ancient race at hand in minds of living Elders. They had gone on to a clean area—and we would not follow if we could, for now we were an infected and apt to madden group of people who could only bring trouble to their loved race.

We were on our own, and our desertion from the others dictated by a greater awareness of the doom of approaching madness that was coming for all of us unless we planned ways of avoiding the worst effects of error in our minds. I think we all realized that our main purpose must be such a plan, for a way of life in which we could avoid all friction leading to deadly conflict in the future. Some way of applying our ancient laws of logic toward a smooth working life-tic must be worked out. Some way of establishing a colony here, where we could weather the gradually building impact of false logic upon our future.

That meant we knew we were settling here, in this unknown tiny system of planets, under this bright new sun, on this lush newly vegetating planet. A settler needs a wife, and these tall maids knew our minds, intuitively, as we all knew things in those days.

So, it was an exciting and serious meeting of two hundred maids and two hundred men. But the same number of women now approaching from the Dond. Two women to each man! Then I laughed, because I knew my women. Somewhere out of sight, one more ship must be circling, preparing to land for a tryst planned ahead.

That would mean four hundred couples to begin the lost colony of the Lantic peoples here. It would always be the lost colony, I knew. Lost and determined to make the best of it. Just as I was determined to pick the best woman out of those four hundred for my own.

As if a man ever does the picking! My sweetheart was already winging toward me on swift feet, her arms extended, and all my plans dissolved in a rush of joy at sight of her face again. What face could ever be sweeter than hers? She was the best, I knew then—for me!

Her name was Mistip, but I always called her Misty. She was fifty and I was seventy. That was very young for marriage, but this was different. We all knew there would be no margin of time or of deference or tolerance in the error-stricken minds we now carried on our necks. Not for flirtation or the endless courting and partying and transference of affection from one to the other that makes up the love life of the normal Eld citizen of marriageable age. In such proceedings there is too much room for jealousy, which was bound to come in our de infected condition.

Jealousy we knew only from our early teachings in the ways of demoniacs. But we knew those teachings were true, and that jealousy would rear its head and cause deaths among us now. So, we were wed as quickly as might be, after a short betrothal. All of us married irrevocably, within the yar. Even so there were two near deaths in brawls over mates.

Thinking that way, all as one, the tale of four hundred marriages sounds like one man’s thought; but we were used to thinking as one, in unison and agreement, toward a common end.

Now each day took away a little of that agreement. We thought individually, as one, instead of as units of one great race animal.

Still we built, and thought, and planned and made of the Delaware valley a great garden for our little company of eight hundred.

Our ships we drew into great tunnels in the bedrock, and laid them up there until need arose. Our homes we drilled from the same rock, and overhead our plants flourished in orderly rows, all the many experimental plantings from which we would select the seed for next year’s planting.

Now we learned the eating of meat, and strange and horrible it was to let the life-blood out of a deer. No harder thing I ever did than kill a sweet young fawn, that Misty and the child might eat.

Monotonous it was not, but hard in many ways after the luxury and the ease of Lantic cities. Yet there was a great thrill in planning our life-way, in knowing that what we were building would be our own, and not just inherited from the ancient work of our race.

Whatever the beginning, whether exactly as I have just outlined, Earth and her peoples grew, after that beginning, into one of the greatest of those space homes of titanic human-like life. That much I know for sure, the mightiest of space Gods has touched here, stayed here, built here.

I know this because even today our humble earth is called “The Great Tomb’’ because of the important residual “scientific” apparatus and machinery left here intact. It was and is called “The Great Tomb” because too, the people who lived here did not ever leave, as so many have thought (including myself). For the most part they died in their tracks!

That is why so very much of their possessions are still intact, because they left it exactly as they used it. Was still intact, I should say, for many centuries of ignorant and malevolent vandalism have destroyed the most valuable relics of Earth. Through the Halls of the Gods have trampled a horde of insane savages—no, not one horde, for century after century and war after war, those who passed were intent upon complete destruction.

Perhaps the greatest and most correct reason the great race died in their tracks and left their cavern homes in Earth complete with all equipment is this tale they tell of the great Demad legions of space, immortal madmen, gods who have become devils. These creatures, powerful beyond our concept, and insane beyond our imagination to picture the condition of illogic, have through the ages adopted as a custom the process of sending out vast armadas of space warships with the slogan: “The Heavens must be lit through the Alfier region. Dispel the darkness, cast the fire . . .”

Giving such orders, the Demad ruler sits back and watches his night sky—as afar his ships plunge on and on into dark spaces like our own “coal sack” and release upon the larger planets of eternal darkness, at intervals, great bombs of a kind of tremendously infectious atomic disintegration, like our own atom bomb, but completely capable of setting a whole planet afire in a twinkling, the-atomic fire racing over the surface and transforming the dark body within short days into a burning sun. They watch stars set ablaze by their own orders, and they do this because they know that now the great men of the cold planets, the true Elder race, will leave the areas thus set afire, will depart rather than waste even one of their mighty and valuable citizens in a war against such madmen—and they must leave such dark planets at once the suns are set ablaze, to escape mortality and destructive madness from the de waves of such fires. They migrate ever farther away from the powerful rulers who set such heavenly conflagrations.

This battle of the planets, taking place over distances incredible, goes on and on, the de rulers ever striving to widen their control areas and take over the immensely valuable and luxurious caverns of the dark planet dwellers by driving them out with new sun blazes. The strategy is to get a bomb to a planet despite their alert and mighty patrols of ships. After that, they know that in a short time every true cold planet Elder human will flee from the disintegrate which distorts all true life into an evil and false pattern.

This is the great story of space. It is also the story of how the Elder race of Earth died in their tracks when the sun became a nova because of a bomb dropped before the sun was a sun, when it was only a dark planet.

The centuries passed, and the descendants of the original four hundred couples now number many millions. The face of the planet has been transformed, and the search for the path of the race of Eld been forgotten. Other planets have been colonized, but the new race has a vigorous love for the “mother” planet, now called Mu.

There are many surface buildings, but the great rock borings of their real homes and factories, deep in the safe bed rock, have been driven on and on. Now the whole planet is an under-network of tiered caverns.

Forests and farms cover all the surface except the poles. The rivers are held from floods by dikes which run along each side, rounded and tillable hills, really, which parallel the rivers everywhere.(3) In the forests, underbrush is nonexistent. There are only the mighty trunks and the soft leaf mold. Everywhere, nature is held in the firm control that is the life-science of Eld.

Their science, cut off from the supervision of the ancient masters of Eld, has taken some new angles.

One of these is the variform technique of life production.

The minds of these people did not have our fixed viewpoint of man as a four-limbed animal, a standardized repetition of himself. They decided to try to produce a man more adapted to the new environment and to this end they produced a number of hybrids from the best seed obtainable. This had happened during the early stages of the race’s growth on Mu, and the hybrids, those that had proved fertile and survived, had sired a number of strains of variant life forms.

Of these perhaps the most numerous were the Snake People, who have survived in legend. They settled the southern hemisphere almost to the Antarctic, which was in those days much more temperate. (It is generally held that the pre-diluvian poles were not at their present position, but the north pole was somewhere in North America around the present state of Kansas, the south pole in the latitude of Australia.)

They had also amphibious humans, calls Mers, or mermen. There were also those whose existence is most completely recalled by legend, the goat-legged Pan and his kind.

Arl, a girl of the latter group, was a student at the medical school in Tean city, a great underworld center of learning. Much of her collection of thought recordings still exist.

Arl of Atlan, descendant of Mistip, paused for a moment beside a pool in the culture forest to peer into the dreams in her own eyes. To peer at her own loveliness, to think her thoughts of life, to feel the kiss of the morning wetness on her feet, to scent the growth and to sense the fire of the light that was coming to make her world even brighter in its new freshness.

Arl, running her hands over her own sleek flanks, her serpent agile waist, touching her wrist where Mutan Mion had laid hold to keep her forever.

Arl, and the darting dragon-fly hanging for an instant to gaze into her dreaming eyes, the soft splash of the great frogs from before her unheeding feet, and the ripples widening on the mirror of the water. Ripples that torted the vision of her into idle magic, so that she put her hands to her hair to part and turn and plait, squatting on her softly mottled goat-footed legs to peer again at herself, beautiful and free and in love.

The image cleared and she leaned, staring into her mirror, looking for some sign of him still left in the wide eyes in the water, or on her pointed breasts or in the firm-set lips quizzically pondering the nature of love.

Arl is but a girl, and to the Eld race, youth is a brighter, more vital and younger thing than to us, who age so much faster. Her slim, active body is encased only in a transparent and glittering sheath of protective plastic. Her skin is not white, but a rosy pale purple. Her legs are a somewhat darker purple, mottled with pure white, and they end in a pair of cloven hoofs. She is a product of the variform technique of the birth laboratories, her family is a line of specially cultured humans whose seed has been altered by delicate microoperations to produce a more vigorous body, better adapted to the conditions of Earth life.

On her arm is a band with the medical school insignia, which was then as it is now: the caduceus and serpent. On her breast is the larger insignia of her own class in school, a man’s figure struggling with the great snake, disease.

She sits now in school beside Mutan Mion, young student newly come to Tean City, listening to the bearded and horned Titan technicon medic:

“So it was that the race of Titans, sprung also from other ships lost from that migration of long ago, settled neighboring planets and eventually came into contact with the Atlan race.”

His heavy voice seemed to conceal some emotion, some vague fear, as he went on in the exact syllogism of the technicon pedagogue .

“It is sad that so many of our ancestors lost contact with the original Eld, for if we had had the benefit of their knowledge of space and of the nature of suns, we would never have settled on orbs revolving about such an unstable body as our sun is fast becoming. Let me tell you why our sun is no longer to be trusted—has, in fact, never been a body that a wise astronomer of Eld would have picked for a source of warmth.

“Once that sun was a great cold ball, hanging desolate and frigid and unnoticed by any eye. Once it had been a mighty living planet, in some forgotten time. It had swung for an age around a dying sun that no life upon it ever saw, for it was covered with a heavy layer of dense clouds. The planet’s forests, living in the dense dripping fogs for many ages, had deposited coal beds untold miles in depth, for no fire had ever touched them, the fog not allowing any fire to burn. (Venus is such a planet now, but much smaller.)

“So, our sun hung, forgotten, a great ball sheathed in pure carbon, waiting for combustion to turn it into a source of heat.

“A meteor struck, huge enough to overcome the moisture of melted air and ice, and the fire spread. Not long after that event, the fleet of the great race of Eld passed by, and our forebears lost the path of the fleet, and came to these planets.

“Now a carbon fire is a clean fire, containing no dense elements. But when the whole surface of a major planet bursts into flame, then the more deadly fire of disintegrate begins in the depths, and if the core contains any elements but plain rock, you have in time a sun whose rays are detrimental to longevity in any life living under those rays. Such a sun was ours, not one to pick for long-continued colonization. It was madness and ignorance in our forebears which has doomed us to a battle that we are bound to lose, a battle against the increasing malevolence of our own sun.

“Only a few centuries ago, life was nearly ageless upon our Mother Mu. This planet was clean then of the thrown bits of disintegrance which are disastrous to all life.”

Arl and Mutan Mion hung upon his words, for these were statements of facts and theories upon which the future of their people depended. It meant that this planet was not a feasible place any longer for life.

Mutan Mion rose to his feet.

“You mean that our sun has exhausted the original carbon shell, and has now become a sun of the Desun class? Then it must be set about with many space buoys to warn off travelers, and abandoned forever to the tides of de which it will create about itself!”

The teacher paused, eyed Mion closely.

“You are new here, and I suppose you have not yet heard of the projected migration of all Atlans, Titans and Variforms, of all human life, from the sun planets? It is so mighty a task, and the need so great and heartbreaking, the loss of everything our people have been building on these homes for all these centuries—all because the original colonists lacked a good knowledge of the nature of disintegrance. You see, they knew something of de; they had run into it in space, it had devastated their own home planets and caused the migration which brought them here. But they did not know that suns themselves were the real and only source of de, for their own original homes had been clean and dark, and this knowledge was not widespread. No, they did not know that this sun would begin to build about itself an increasingly detrimental ionic layer, a great potential force forever increasing, until it engulfed all its planets, one by one, in the ugly force that causes all degeneration.”

I am a young man of Sub-Atlan of the State of Atlan, which is a loose federation of all the Lantic peoples.

I have been a student of painting under Artan Gro, who sent me to Tean City to the aged Titan teachers to learn the way of life needed to make me what he thinks I may become, a leader.

I have entered the Medicro schools there, in the company of Arl of the Ramen family, she of the quick goat feet and the plumed tail. I am a small man by Atlan standards, but to average humans I would be called a giant. My strong points are a certain practicality of viewpoint, a quickness of muscular coordination, the clean strong-limbed build of the pure Atlan race strain. My weak points are too numerous to mention. I have a sense of inferiority due to contact with the mighty older members of the race, and a lack of confidence in my own judgment.

I have brown hair, greenish blue eyes, large square hands, a body too long for my legs. My clothes are scant, the caverns are warm. I wear a harness of soft leather, rather plain except for tooled designs, my one ornament a blue heron feather and ruby clasp in the telaug device I wear on my head. It looks like a cap of openwork leather. Nearly all of our race wear such a device. Oral conversation is used, but amplified with mental additions and explanations simultaneously.

Tonight, I am taking Arl to a dance.

The dance had reached a peak of delight when Arl and Mion joined the couples on the floor. They were both terrifically aware of the stimulating electro-magnetic exd(4) flows mingled with the penetrative ions of nutrient chemicals, driven into their bodies by the sonic vibrations mingled invisibly with the musical sounds. The ionized air conducted the natural body electricity each to the other, making awareness of the other a vital and complete vision. They were also aware of the ecstatic bodies of all the other dancers.

Mion’s arms held Arl, a bundle of vitality to which he was attuned and attached by invisible conductive radiants permeating the hall, synchronizing even his thoughts to her wish. As he lost himself in increasing and oblivious pleasure, that fear which had been a nagging undercurrent for so long became a deadly ray of blackness, searching through the throng for a victim . . .

Struck —and through all the complete awareness of the ecstatic throng ran a terrible wave of augmented terror which each young mind picked up and added to and transmitted with its own added quantity of augmentation.

The victim was a horned young giant of the Titans.

The dying young Titan, writhing with the terrible pain of a ray that was burning out his insides, was the first man Mion had ever seen killed. The smell of the burning flesh, the terrible sorrow and loss that struck at his sensitized mind as he realized the potential value of a cultured son of the mighty Titan teachers to the race, the sheer crude vandalism in the wanton murder there before the throng of dancing, carefree Atlans, sickened him.

With his last living effort, the tortured young human pointed out with one smoking arm the path along which the deadly ray came. But no guard ray flicked on to short out the deadly energy. As the whole crowd realized this truth, a concerted rush for the entrances began. It was unheard of, that the rodite(5) ray should be unmanned!

(5) Ro is mental force. To ro you is to make you do things against your will. A large generator of thought impulse can be set up to ro a whole group of people. Row the boat now means physical force, not mental force. Ro the people was an ancient method of government, in which all the people thought along ro guided lines. The name of such government was “romantic.” Ro (controlled) man (man) tic (science). It is the same concept as used by some scientists when they say “hypnotically conditioned.” It is not necessarily an evil government. Any person who is ro is weaker than the mental impulses about him. Rodites are the workers who tend the guard rays, and are “slaves” in a sense that they are ro to absolute loyalty, and therefore mentally incapable of treachery. Literally translated, a rodite is a ‘life pattern synchronizer.” —Richard S. Shaver.

The forty-foot body of a serpent woman glided to the fallen young Titan, cradling the dead and already horrible young head in her arms, tears on her cheeks. Incongruous to any but an Atlan was that race love, that realization of the terrible social condition that could allow such a murder, on the snake woman’s face! Mion felt to the core of his young soul the truth of his teacher’s words: “It was madness and ignorance in our forebears that has doomed us to a battle that we must inevitably lose, against the increasing malevolence of our own sun.”

My name is Artan Gro. I am a teacher of art in the city of Sub-Atlan. One of the hardest things I ever did was to laugh young student, Mutan Mion’s aspirations into despair—and one of the most intelligent acts of my life. He was not cut out for sublimation—his mind was one to cut through to needed action.

It was I who dialed the number of young Arl of Ramen and told her to watch out for Mion and set his feet upon the path of learning. She followed my instructions to the letter, and kept me informed of his progress.

Painting the nude, with stim(6) rays to increase the erotic impulse and effect the necessary sublimation of the impulses into steady creation of art form, is to me the greatest expression of value in life. But I have the good sense to know that a society staggering on the brink of chaos cannot afford to develop artists from leaders, or to make dilettantes out of engineers; and Mion had the mind that cuts to the core of things, the genius for simplicity and truth, a natural leader. I had noted the gradual degeneration overtaking my people, and though I love art, I could not contribute to that degeneration by allowing even one young man to take a path that would make of him a less creative person than nature intended. And Mion was no artist.

(6) Stim rays mechanically augment every cell impulse to a power untold. It seems that every tree carries a beautiful face; every breeze is like a bath in elixir; every sensation of sex has the value of a thousand nights of love. It is a mechanical way of accentuating every possible pleasure. Even reading a book becomes an emotional experience of high caliber. — Richard S. Shaver.

My good wife, Lady Lila, who is also my model upon occasion (possibly to keep my mind from straying, and possibly because she loves me), was the intuitive match-maker who suggested we let Arl know the innocent young Mion was headed toward the temptations of Tean City. I have never been allowed to forget how successful our finagling turned out for all concerned.

As I look back upon the tremendous changes that have occurred since that day, I sent young Mion packing, to become the very vessel and conduit to bring the forces that caused those changes, I congratulate myself and my own dark Gods upon their foresight .

Let me play the thought records collected for me by Arl of the family of Ramen and Mistip, saved for me through all that hazardous time. I like to think this was her way of rewarding me for directing her to the value of Mion. I will start with Maiya’s thoughts—Maiya, the serpent woman who saved her people. Her story is important because it involved all the southern hemisphere of Mu.

I am Maiya of the Snake People. I am she who saw her beloved struck down by the mad rays at the dance. For long years I had kept the young Titan at arm’s length, though I loved him too. I thought it was too alien a match for his love to last, that some woman more like him in appearance would take him from me in the end. Would that I could have foreseen that my self-denial should cost him his only chance for happiness before his death!

It was through him that I first met Mutan Mion and his Arl of the plumed tail and goatish legs. He had taken me to Arl’s apartment to show me that such dissimilar bodies could overlook their differences in genuine love. After her departure with Mion (in that flight into space that became a triumphant return with the war fleets of the Nortan federation) I myself left Tean City, and journeyed southward to the great cities where dwell only those whose blood has been combined in a curious admixture with the reptilian strain. We of the Serpent People are not so conscious of our differences from the other nations of the Atlan peoples in ordinary times—but now, under the stress of this postponement of the migration away from our sun in the face of the obvious break-up of Atlan government, I wanted to do my part to warn my people not to depend upon the Central government in Tean City, not to depend upon the central council in Sub-Atlan. I wanted to wake them up, to migrate themselves to a new and cleaner environment before the evil that had slain my lover, that I knew was about to engulf all the people of these Northern cities of four-limbed Atlans, engulfed them too in destruction.

And I was successful!

We of the Snake People have arms, shoulders and torso similar to four-limbed Atlans. But from the waist down we have the body of a python, so that we do not walk, but glide upon our bellies. Our skins are whiter than other races, due to some reptilian determinant. We cannot stand so much sunlight as the darker skinned races. Our scales, below the waist, are green with narrow red and yellow patterns. These patterns are different, and among us serve to indicate the family, for they are the same in relatives of the same family groups. We originated in laboratory experiments undertaken long ago to combine the strongest features of reptilian life with the best features of human life. We are slower of growth than humans, but much longer lived; and few ordinary diseases of mankind have any effect upon us; we are immune. Our longer life gives our mentality longer to mature, so that our greatest members are mightier scientists than those of ordinary Atlan blood. We are a proud people, very beautiful, and virtue is a fetish with us. We are hairless. Along our backs and up to the center of the forehead runs a row of short spines, culminating in a crest upon the forehead, this crest is ordinarily spread over the skull, but in excitement or activity the crest rises, forming a crown of spines with a web between of fine-scaled serpent skin. This crowning serpent crest is one of the proudest ornaments, and its lack betokens a serpent human from a racial stock of some other strain. The greatest of our families, the mightiest of our historic heroes, are always pictured with this crest erect.

I, through some accident of throw-back to the human genes, do not have this crest, but have instead a head of silver hair, of which I am ashamed when among the Serpent People, but of which I am rather proud when among humans of normal appearance.

I have an extremely high intelligence quotient, and was sent by my family to Tean City to study under the superior medical experts there. I know many ancient secrets known only to my own people, who came to Earth separately from the first Atlans, and later joined with them in the Federation.

Tonight, I attended a dance with the young son of my Titan pedagogue, who has fallen in love with me. I was very interested when Arl of the goat legs and Mutan Mion appeared on the dance floor, for I had decided to watch this couple to determine if such dissimilar mates can remain in love and be happy. That would decide me in considering the suit of the young horned Titan for my hand in marriage.

The Serpent People, whose origins are lost in the antiquity of far space voyagings, may in truth be a true race, and not a product of any clumsier hand than Nature’s own. No one knows anymore. They claim a greater antiquity than even the Titan’s who came to Earth after the Atlan’s settlement, and look upon most other races as “young” races. Certain it is that their cities betray an alien beauty, a glory of age-long development of the art faculty, and their customs and peculiar cults and religions have nothing whatever in common with ordinary Atlan beliefs and teachings.

Many of their cities are on the surface, set among the wild mountains of what is now South America, then called Serpena. Beneath these glorious towers and arching fairy bridges, of course, the network of living caverns reach on and on through the safer bed-rock of the planet. But the Serpent People are enamoured of surface forests, of wild rocky scenery, and often set their cities among the most impossible of crags and on the brink of some bottomless abyss, anchoring them with their machine art, giving them trusses and bases of everlasting but rock-like plastics. Across some wild abyss their slender spans reach and reach again, weaving a spiderweb of strange beauty, always wholly in keeping with the wild natural scenery of their site.

When the Elders of the Serpent race first began to notice the growing deviations of emotional instability which heralded the increasing malevolence of the sun, they took steps to safeguard their citizens from its worst effects by abandoning the surface cities, forbidding any citizen to remain above ground for more than a few days at a time.

Maiya, who had taken her own atmosphere flyer for the journey from Tean City to her home, flew over these empty abandoned husks, sorrowfully musing on the symptoms of decay already apparent. No banners flew from the towers to announce that the dwellers were at home to callers, no sound arose from those spiraling streets, no light burned. Here and there some jungle plant had sprung from wind-blown seed, had reared an upstart head of fern-like plumes, or twined a vandal climbing hand into the masonry, and everywhere were the clouds of birds now making the cities their homes. The great condors roosted on the topmost towers, buzzards and hawks spiraled lower down, pigeons and parakeets swung in phalanx or brawled in riotous combat.

Through the streets roamed wild hogs; a great jungle killer stalked the flanks of the herd; a jaguar crouched along the roof gutters of a once lovely home.

To Maiya’s homesick eyes, which had last looked upon these scenes when they flashed with gem like night lanterns, swarmed with brilliant festivities, nested innumerable flying craft, these desolate scenes were heartrending.

She settled her lone flyer among the others before the pillars of the Intram, went in along the deserted ticket windows, down the stairs to the beginning of the tracks. Traffic had ceased, she saw, but single coaches had been detached and waited there, motors humming, to carry any passenger to the depths where the Serpent People had withdrawn. Maiya wondered what they expected to gain beside putting off the day when they must entirely abandon Earth?

Maiya busied herself, alone in the speeding car, with rubbing a light volatile cleaning oil upon her scales. Soon her forty-foot length of reptilian beauty gleamed with a metallic lustre, each scale a flashing gem of brilliant color. Then she combed her long silver hair till it shone in soft waves about her high cheek-boned face, darkened her lashes and eye-brows, touched her cheeks with color.

The car swept out into the vast dome of the Intramend, which formed the circular focus of tunnel rail tubes from every part of the world. Straight as a string, from the huge domed cavern, led vast tubes bored through the rock, to every great city of Mu. This was the famous “Intramend” —meaning end of every train track, a word with the same meaning as our own “all roads lead to Rome.”

As Maiya glided from the car, she stopped in astonishment, for the scene was now so vastly different from the place she remembered.

Every track had been cleared, and as far as her eye could see stretched row on row of great spaceship hulls, in all stages of completion. The Intramend had been turned into a vast factory, and her people were building there a mighty fleet of their own. This was astounding because always before the Serpent People had left the larger part of ordinary mechanical labor to the great Atlan centers in the north hemisphere. They had been content to pursue their own bent, to remain the theoretical, technical and scholastic giants of Mu, who considered themselves a little above plain hard work with the hands. Mentally, the older citizens of the Serpent People looked up only to the Titans, of vaster age and greater life-experience, for the Titans were not so truly sprung from Mu itself, but from a space-spanning race seldom to be found settled upon any world.

Never had Maiya seen her people so intent upon manual labor, never had she seen such bustle and work-a-day activity among them. The scene brought home to her the terrific changes come over her world as no other could. It was evident they had cut loose from the Atlan federation, and were now doing all manufacturing work themselves, not relying upon the northern states for any help.

Maiya glided to a telescreen set in a pedestal of stone, stone a part of the floor itself since the world was made, and swiftly dialed the number of her cavern home. Some of her family should be there, to send for her.

The screen revealed her home. The silent, empty interior depressed her. The auto-answer of the mech assured her that all of the seed of Raful were now away at their duties, and indicated a readiness to record any message until their return. Maiya released the lever with a little sigh of displeasure. It was not a cheerful homecoming for her.

Sadly, she made her way to a waiting car, deciding to go to her empty home and to sleep. Many things come right, magically, during sleep. Tomorrow they would all be present, welcoming her.

With a sigh of anticipation of the usual pleasant dreams—distributed to all by a kind of educational board who were in truth more like guardian angels in function—Maiya, just before drifting into sleep, awaited the contact with the dream-makers. This was an integral part of all Elder culture.

But tonight, she did not dream as expected! She fell, instead, into a deep troubled sleep. She seemed to be drained by some ugly energy, knew she was giving of herself, of her life force, to something . . . It was not a dream!

She was unconscious in sleep, but something of her mind remained aware, the part that had expected a welcome dream from her old familiar ray-friends of the dream-makers. Instead, she was contacting something unpleasant with her mind, something unusual and wholly undesirable. This thing was busily engaged in filling her mind with frustrational concepts of futile activity. She was on a treadmill that hastened toward some evil destiny, and could not get off. And all the time it drained her stupefyingly—and asked questions.

She was a person experienced in a lifetime of dream-sleep, well accustomed to the semi-awareness of the dream state. She sensed the dream rays of her friends sweep past, unknowing that she was home. After they had passed, the oppressive hiding something came back, to torment her sleep with its unfamiliar and ugly prying. Then, it tempted her:

“Was not her seed the finest in all Serpena’s many ancient lines of blood? Who was she to deny the future its right to be born? She must mate” —and abruptly the thing provided for her a dream image of a mate, but one she could never consider except with complete disgust. In spite of her will the powerful rays filled her with a nasty kind of lust for it.

Abruptly something seemed to frighten the thing away; it disappeared, and the familiar fantastically pleasant pictures of a dream ray swept over her and passed on, un-noticing her presence or the ray that was upon her.

At once the ugly dream began again, an ugliness sourcing she knew not where, but she sensed in the mind behind it many things. There had been days of very hard work for the thing, and nights of incessant indulgence where every ugly lust had been gratified. Now it had behind its days of doing nothing but watching. What was it watching? She sensed it had been watching some member of this household, and she knew then it was a spy ray, for her family were all apt to be engaged in important defense work for the safety of her people. It had been taking notes of the sleeping minds in this house for a long time. Taking thought records from the sleeping minds of the details of the routing of supplies through the tubes to the huge Intramend which was now the focus of all activity. Taking record notes constantly, and hence had observed her entrance at once, seized its chance to search her mind .

Suspicion grew into a struggling little alarm bell in her mind, trying to awake her, but the thing would not let her go. With a half sigh she relaxed her mind, and bent her will instead to hear more clearly what the tormenting mind was really thinking, back of its half contemptuous sex play with her sleeping self. Seeking out, as only an experienced dreamer can, that mind’s secrets, seeing there the plan of attack which its forces were about to launch upon Serpena. That plan caused her to awake with a great cry of despair and sorrow for her people.

Even as she cried out, the black ray of forgetfulness struck her mind, wiping out every image from her inward picture screens, extracting with its hungry blackness every vagrant thought energy from all the thinking places of her active mind. Then it was gone, fled from her too-great awareness, leaving her sitting there trying vainly to remember what it was that had awakened her that had seemed so important. She could not remember anything except that she must remember!

Maiya flowed angrily from the great round serpent sleeping couch, began to undulate in a waving stream of glittering strength about the circular chamber, round and round. What was it she wanted to remember that the thing had erased as it fled?

At last, bit by vague bit, her mind re-erected the almost vanished images of that dream. New energies poured across her mind from now awakened cells, touching the still present imprints with new-birthed activity. Something about imminent attack, something about terrible doom for all her people!

That had been a spy ray, and its departing attempt to erase its visit from her mind had been a bit too hurried. She had pumped the fact of imminent attack from the thing!

It had been an ugly dream, full of peculiarly atrocious sensual images and unnatural impulses toward sex acts never dreamed before by her, sleeping or awake. The character of the creature proved the presence of an evil spy, here where never before had such a thing been recorded.

A creature with a wholly vicious attitude toward the sacred fields of night thoughts, the most private and sacredly guarded possession of the individual, open only to authorized members of the dream-makers, sworn to teach good and to use no opportunity to extort wealth or to inflict punishments, sworn to a strict observance of complete neutrality and beneficence in their nightly visits into the minds of the citizens. The dream-makers, almost an ascetic cult who had little other contact with the mass of life than through their dream-rays, could never have been responsible!

Some depraved thing had such mechanisms in use over the greatest city of Serpena! Some enemy thing could invade and mock her own inner self in sleep!

Maiya knew that the unwanted and unnatural dream experiences and reactions and memories would continually crop up in her after life as guilt complexes, as a barrier between herself and any intimate friend who glanced into her mind. She knew there would be a taint of conscious sin, of evil will in herself, now, after what had been done. To so people her mind with things such as she by conscious choice would never have allowed to occur to her, was to violate her quite as much as if the thing had scarred her face with acids!

To a mind trained in the use of the telaug, doing the most intimate acts and psychologically manipulating mental states and convictions during sleep is a method of medicine vastly more effective than psycho-analysis. These methods of treatment during sleep were more sacred than any other thing to the members of those races of the past. They were a normal part of their schooling, and it would no more have occurred to one of the Titans to use such private material and delicate power for selfish ends than it would have occurred to Ben Franklin to kick his little granddaughter in the face.

It was hard for one raised in the strict convention of the sacredness of sleeping thought to realize that any human creature could exist which did not recognize the sacredness of possession of self, the individual’s right to privacy and immunity from spiteful tampering with the very base of her sanity, or her character.

Maiya knew that the subtle evil done to her would affect her all her life; that much of the very birthplace of beauty and poetry in her mind had been destroyed by the sullying of the fair fields of thought with the hateful phantasmagoria of completely repellent experiences and sex reactions; the clumsy pawing over of her innermost heartstrings; the ugly summing playing on those strings with an unknown creature’s blunt moist fingers of evil lust!

In Tean City Maiya had come to understand there was evil seeping into the minds of the Atlans from some secret and terribly powerful source that could not even be thought of as existent without danger of death.

But here, in her own beloved home city, to find a similar horror crawling through the sweet and sacred dream fields of the sleeping citadel of the soul of her race!

A terrific anger grew to white heat in Maiya’s breast. She sprang to her own ray mech and swung a search beam in invisible diffuseness far over the city, searching for the scent of the evil mind that had thus trampled her most private garden of inner life .

Far, too far for her effectively to focus and read, she noted the sullen force field of ugly magnetic, sensed it wink suddenly out, knew that sudden absence signified hiding, deduced the presence of a powerful alien mech some distance to the north of her position.

Hurriedly Maiya swung her ray, spoke to the night-watch, and the great search beams all swung to the indicated position, caught a distant movement, a speeding flyer heading for the vacant caverns long abandoned for the newer and better equipped southern borings.

Whatever creature it was, Maiya was of two minds about it. Nothing so beastly could possibly be intelligent enough to represent a genuine threat to Serpena, one part of her mind reasoned. Another more correctly functioning segment of her mind assured her that evil of any kind is necessarily beastly, and can seem apparently stupid, but that all harm inevitably springs from such living creatures. Hence if there was in truth danger of attack, this thing in its escape would lead directly to it.

In our modern world there are two kinds of people, the eye-minded, and the ear-minded.

The former see the world with simple surface vision, and record in their memory that surface impression.

The latter pay more attention to what they hear, and remember best words they have read to them, or that they overhear. Musicians are more apt to remember a song than the slim beauty of the singer.

In the ancient world there was a third type of mind, and this type predominant among them. They were the kind who are telepathic-minded, they sensed things with the telaug, or without the use of artificial aids, and they remembered best what is sensed that way. Life, when one senses so deeply and completely with the mind itself in the use of the telaug, is a vaster and more vivid thing than it can ever be for the two modern types of minds—the eye and the ear minds.

These people are more alive than anyone can be with only eyes and ears. It is not a woman’s outer curves or color of hair or skin they fall in love with. It is not through the eye’s vision that woman strikes into the heart of man with the ancient all-conquering arrow. No, they fall in love with a mental impression of her complete being, her character, her inner nature.

This vast difference between modern life and the ancient world is very hard to convey to one who has never experienced augmented telepathic message contact. It is a contact infinitely more sensual and revealing and satisfying than lip to lip and thigh to thigh as we moderns meet in love.

That sort of love is deeper, more complete, more completely real to all the senses than is eye or ear love, which, when the deeper characteristics are at last laid bare to us, proves often to have been but a snare, a delusion of nature’s most vulgar devising.

It was this deep love of mind to mind that Maiya had borne for Vorn, the Titan youth slain by the hidden evil in Tean City.

They had mingled an infinitely sensual perfume of ecstatic, stimulated thought of vast intensity, and complete revelation each of the other. Maiya knew the great inner self of the lad and could not lose her memory of it. There remained with her a terrible and deep sorrow, a vast hurt and deprivation of mind. Such loss is much greater than is sorrow today for we usually know little of what lies beneath the surface of a mate’s smile.

In the ancient world, they knew truly the constancy and complete candor of uninhibited passion wholly revealed each to the other over the telaug and stim. Each tiny inner impulse can become a great poem of meaning under the influence of life rays, meaning never confused or ambiguous.

In the world of complete and constant mental contact each with the other, a people so welded together by complete knowledge and confidence engendered by that knowledge, this wholly beautiful and unrepressed mental intercourse forever growing into greater and more binding ties between the race units, is the real story of the people of the ancient world.

To bring that story to you, hampered by your inexperience with the actual nature of mental contact over telaug beams, requires your best effort to understand the sort of life we would lead if everyone would always know each little hidden thought in every mind merely by swinging their beam and looking. And every living chamber was equipped with one or more telaug devices of an infinite variety of modifications of function—in vastly greater profusion than our telephones.

To understand your own heritage of the instincts of right and reason and justice and virtue and normal goodness, you must correctly imagine that world, for it was the source and growth place of those instincts which we have still with us.

Some things lead us to suspect these valuable and ancient instincts may be dying out. It might help if we understood how they came into being in the first place. They are not the products of the law of the jungle or the survival of the fittest as some would have us taught.

Our own sensuality is a pale and puny violet, bleached and anemic, beside the passion flower of vital red hues that was their pleasure in each other. When they truly loved, there could be no doubts or double dealings. The nature of their contacts precluded the possibility of our own tawdry shams and pretenses of unreal passions .

Our saying ‘‘beauty is as beauty does” is the simple truth of beauty in a world where minds meet on a plane where eye vision is but the frosting on a cake of infinite richness. No outward appearance however lovely could gloss over an inward ugliness or poverty of soul, a hateful will, or a jealous disposition. The outward appearance would not even be noticed for the instant shunning of the inward hideousness of soul.

Those leading the revolt against the long-dominant groups of ruling families of the Atlan Federation were a secret clique of notorious renegades. They were hidden in the abandoned caverns of that already old network of borings, those constructed by the first space rovers to touch Mu when it was first burgeoning into gigantic plant growth under the sudden heat of a young just-born sun.

Their leader was a creature named Zeit, once an Elder of early Atlan politics. He had been exiled to space for a flagrant cruelty, but had his aberrations been more clearly understood, he would have met a more just fate.

The people of Tean City, of all Atlan bloods, he now hated for having judged him. He had returned to Mu secretly, burning with a long-range plan for complete revenge upon those who had bested him in his grab for power. He had holed up in the abandoned tubes unobserved. Gradually gathering about him all the outcasts who had fled through the centuries to the empty caverns, he had organized a powerful secret society—and in the end seized control of the innermost governing chambers of the Federation rodite.

When Zeit’s activities placed his lieutenants in the heart of the rodite system of government—a government functioning by powerful control fields which could be broadcast to whole cities of people, so that they must obey the strong penetrative synthetic neural currents—he was able to keep the channels of communication blocked so that no whisper escaped to any powerful group apt to oppose his plans.

Thus, every one between himself and complete power over the Atlan peoples was murdered, and their deaths kept a secret.

It was this period of interior crisis which saw Mutan Mion rise to fame by managing to escape and to bring to Mu the fleets of the Nor races.

It was the ships of the Federation, those built for the planned migration from Mu, which Zeit seized and sent against Serpena, with a scheme of annihilation which he hoped would eliminate their strength from the struggle in the open which he knew must sooner or later come to pass.

He did not know that out in space the Nor fleets were gathering for a descent upon Mu, and he thought that only the Serpent people of the southern caverns stood between him and complete domination of the whole planet .

He had achieved complete isolation from all the rays that guarded Atlan cities by confining their activities to exclude any possible search of the abandoned tubes, which left him channels of movement covering nearly the whole of Earth.

To contact the mind of a creature who had grown to adulthood from a childhood spent about the hidden evil nests of Elder Zeit’s followers was so shocking to Maiya as to be unbelievable. She could not reason how such a creature could have grown and attained strength to injure—unmeasured, unjudged, and unknown!

Indeed, there was no known place on or in the planet where the thing could have grown except the hideaways of Zeit’s forces about which she had never heard. She thought at first the thing must be from space, an alien from an evil star. Yet, quite distinct in its mind, was the consciousness of being a resident of Mu! These she knew must be the murderers. This creature was one of those who had killed Vorn, and every energy in her body became a raging intent to revenge that murder of her beloved, to rid Earth of all its kin.

Maiya glided from her still empty home, cascaded her glittering curves in swift waves down the ramps to the rolling ways where waited a car that would take her to the hangars of flying craft.

Governed wholly by unreasoning anger, she flowed into the round padded cockpit of the jet flyer, a weightless shell, with anti-grav units giving it a dead weight of less than an ounce. She shot the throttle forward, and the tiny needle jets lifted the feather-light plane in a sharp curve out into the center of the great boring leading toward the place where she had seen the vehicle of the evil thing disappear.

Maiya unconsciously planned to kill the thing with her bare hands. It had polluted her mind with its night snooping; it had vandalized the lovely gardens of her mind, so long and carefully cultivated, with ill-intended manipulations which destroyed the basic impulses toward beauty, the ever-growing dreams which were the reverse side of reality where the roots of future occurrence were already alive as little seeds of thought. She had been mutilated in the very birthplace of the future pattern of her life.

Her plane flashed along far ahead of the pursuit sent out by the military, The Clan Alon, the Serpent warriors. They saw the rash flyer dash after the fleeing spy, and sent their own planes less unwisely along the same path while huge search beams from the stationary ray sent tel-pentra, the luminous visionray, through all the rock ahead. Their own small telaug beams flickered here and there to pick out any alien activity.

They all knew no one would venture out into their power on such a mission unless sent by a greater force in hiding beyond. They had no wish to fall into a trap, and they did not know their own loved Maiya had burst the bonds of sanity and was in the grip of overpowering rage. They could not even try to keep up with the rash lone plane hard on the trail ahead, hard after the shadow-pale distant image of the spy.

Maiya emerged from her trance of unreasoning anger to find her plane slowing against some invisible barrier. The barrier grew stronger, seized hold, began to draw her on as she reversed jets to pull free.

Irresistibly she was drawn mile after mile, to stop at last before the massed ranks of a battle fleet of spacers nested there in the unused caverns of the earthquake zone.

When the first brutally strong augmentation struck her mind, Maiya realized to the full the completely hideous nature of the enemy. The lack of humanity and normal goodness of heart were a revelation still too new to be expected. She felt a degradation and a nakedness never before sensed by her anywhere. Her sensitive, exotic inner self lay bare before those officers of the waiting fleet, and the vandals idly picked her soul to pieces with shafts of vastly augmented criticism, of evil suggestion, of idle, too-powerful stimulation of the glands that cause eroticism. In minutes she lay exhausted, sobbing, outwardly unhurt, but mentally stripped and outraged and violated in every deep holy sanctum of her being. Rage struggled to rise and throw off the evil stimming touch of alien mind to hers, but no mind can fight the energies of the dynamos behind the telaug beam. Spent with resistance she lay quivering, waiting for the deeper outrage to come.

The speeding flyers behind Maiya’s little craft saw her capture, knew that it meant a source of power that could only exist on a battle spacer of hugest size, which meant too great strength for them to attempt attack. They brought the jet planes to a halt, swung in tight circles, sped back the way they had come with the news of invasion.

But the men who had kept their presence and intentions secret from the people of a whole planet for centuries did not mean to have their lives risked now in open combat. They could not reach the distant flyers, indeed only vaguely detected their presence on the trail from Serpena, but they knew that the time for the execution of their plans was now.

They had been hard at work in preparation of their attack for many weeks. They meant to destroy all life in the southern borings at one stroke.

Across each tunnel leading to the Intramend they had melted down the rocks into a great plug of immense strength. Against this still cooling plug they had stacked hundreds of cubic yards of their strongest explosive. It was not an atomic explosive, but one nearly as powerful though slower of action. Thus, each great highway of rock became the barrel of a gun, and they were at the trigger awaiting the placing of the bullet. The “bullets” were being gingerly placed to be fired down each great barrel toward Serpena, and the creatures handling them were dying from the mere presence of the deadly stuff. These were a kind of “slowed down” atomic bomb, capable of giving off tremendous quantities of radioactive gases, and of a weight carefully calculated so that the whole sum of bombs would make the southern network untenable. For years, if no serpent man lived to start the atmosphere regulators pumping, or the radioactive particle extractors to functioning in the air ducts. These were a recent installment, placed to clean the air drawn from the surface of the sun poisons which the Serpent technicians recognized as causing both age and evil.

The paramount purpose of the plan was to render the ships waiting in the Intramend useless for their purpose, to ground the fighting forces of the Serpent people indefinitely, if any survived the initial attack.

Maiya now lay coiled within a locked chamber in one of those long dark shapes of dread power. Her prison was within the ship of Admiral Dartin, who had been Elder Zeit’s right hand in every maneuver that required tactical knowledge of space warfare.

Maiya, alone of all her people, had any inkling of the doom about to be visited upon them. She, in her mental contacts with Dartin and many others since her capture, had inevitably glimpsed the plans in their mocking minds. Now and again her great serpent body uncoiled, sent her round the metal walls of the ship’s brig, seeking, seeking for some way to get word to her people before the first immense charge of explosive announced the end of Serpena.

In her mind, the picture of Serpena’s toiling, faithful millions suddenly blasted with billowing radioactive gases, forced through all the network of living caverns by the pressure of the exploding bombs, racked her with horror.

Behind the barriers, the long ships, once proud members of the official fleet of Atlan, now actually agents of Atlan’s destruction, waited. The eyes of the renegade crew of dero minds watched, intent each one upon the scene on the other side of the barrier of still-hot melted rock; waited with clenched jaws the terrific detonation of the tons of Nitol lying in ranks, great black blocks of the strongest explosive known to the Atlan science. Intently they watched the engineers gingerly placing the great shells full of Doonin, which was their equivalent of our U235, though designedly a slower explosive than our atomic bomb. The shells, vaned and pointed, were coated over with a babbitt-like metal for their accidental contact with the smooth rock walls of the tunnel, which they did not quite fill with their bulk. The Nitol was placed so as to explode in consecutive timing so as to generate a gradually building up gas pressure which would set the shells of Doonin on their way without the shock discharging the balanced forces chained inside. In their nose was a proximity fuse set to discharge upon nearing any large metallic object. Those noses of the bombs all lay pointed toward the death of the Serpent people. They watched the hand of the Admiral moving in decision upon the firing lever of the heat ray which would fire the first tunnel-gun.

Inside the largest of the waiting, expectant ships, Maiya waited too, sensing from the widespread fields of the telaug communicators now activated, the many minds’ greedy anticipation of the coming holocaust. Sensed and heard and saw more clearly and vividly than ever human does with eye or ear the final terrible preparations of the death of all her people. Knew it all, knew there was no hope of the attack being averted now; it had gone too far. Found herself helpless, and raged against that helplessness, sent her glittering, scaled beauty round the prisoning metal walls, fought the door hinges and the heavy lock bolt with her bare hands in desperate raging against her own helplessness. At the last she fell into unconsciousness at that first terrible shock of the first titanic explosion beyond the shielding walls of rock before the fleet.

She fell into unconsciousness with all her inner mind knowing, screaming, that that shock was the murder of her people. Her mind went on, even in the dark of sudden sleep, counting the repeated firing of the projectiles in each tube, close and far away and farther—on and on—fifty far-off rail tubes used as gigantic gun barrels to eliminate her people, the Mighty Race of the Serpent of the Southlands, forever from life.

The first great vaned projectile outsped its own sound waves, rushed down upon the great circular domed valley of the Intramend where labored all the best artisans of Serpena. Rushed nearer, sending before it only the compressing air which could not escape, but increased to vast proportions of density in resisting the passage. That air, transmitting along its singular body the increasing-pressure, began to blow from the tube mouth into the Intramend. A gentle breeze, swiftly increased to a torrent of howling wind, a siren blowing some terrible alarm—and the great bomb rushed nearer on its flight across half a continent.

Those gathered laboring minds, all the best of the ancient race, intent there on the problem of the swift creation of many ships to bear many people, heard the suddenly rising howl of wind from the tunnel mouth. Deduced together, in contact as they were, the meaning of the sudden howling wind from the tube. Estimated from the rate of change in the pitch the probable speed of the projectile and the distance from them. Guessed from their knowledge of such things that all life in the southern caves would cease to exist within short seconds. Many of those engineers knew just what fraction of time’s unit was left to them to the tenth decimal, but only one also knew what must be done in the fraction of a second remaining.

From no other race of beings could any reaction have arisen in time to avert the holocaust.

But from an engineer at work testing the controls of one ship the exact answer to the suddenly proposed problems arose instantaneously. The motors of the ship roared, he lifted the great hulk, swung its nose a fraction of arc, gave it full throttle directly into the roaring maelstrom of air forcing its way from before the on-rushing weight. Left the throttle full on, blazed up that rocky trail to his death with glory in his heart, thankful that he had been able to place this ship before the approaching doom in time.

It was several seconds before the next projectile began to roar its approach with pressured air from the next adjacent tube, seconds of time in which every mind present had analyzed the sound and the sudden suicide of the engineer at the controls of the departed ship. Even before all had glimpsed the stark necessity of a suicide for each missile being fired against them, another ship lifted and shot into the roaring tube. Those serpentine half-human bodies contained heroes’ hearts.

Into the other ships rushed the pilots, struggling to be the first to lift one of those half-finished hulks and fling it successfully against the deadly onrushing object whose nature they guessed correctly without needing confirmation.

That confirmation came now from the first tube mouth in a terrific blasting concussion as the first hero met the bomb with his ship’s bulk, and ship and bomb burst together into one flare of terrible sound and heat—and the gases of that explosion began to bellow forth upon the Intramend.

From that point the strange battle, occupying only the short-paced seconds of desperation, became a pageant of heroism unexampled in any history. Each ship able to fly took its place at one or another of the fifty tubes leading northward. Each of them contained two men, one pilot and one co-pilot to bolster decision if fear conquered. Into the tubes they roared at full throttle, not waiting longer, to meet the onrush of certain death before it could come upon the whole working force in the Intramend. The remaining engineers wheeled out powerful blowers from the stores, placed them before the tube mouths and began to build up a back pressure of air to hold back the deadly gases as much as possible. This itself became soon a deadly game of death, trying to get the blowers placed and bolted before the tube mouths before the deadly gases now pouring forth in increasing quantities struck him down in death. Each knew their activity meant sure death, but none fled. Instead, from the southern end of the great space of the Intramend began to pour stretcher bearers, wheeled enclosed cars of the nursing corps, dashing up, picking up the bodies of those struck down, and wheeling away out of the deadly burning gas.

Some tube mouths almost became blocked as two or more ships trying to enter at the same instant nosed into each other, but their mental contacts made instantaneous decisions possible. One always jetted back in time to allow the first to pass. Thus, it was that disaster was almost brought upon them because of their heroism rather than because of their cowardice.

It was a scene of suicidal heroism. No one who saw it would ever forget. Those mighty near immortal creatures so loved their fellows they were anxious to be the first to give up a life infinitely more valuable and lengthier than is the case today.

Maiya, weeping alone in her cell aboard the admiral’s ship, could not know how heroically the men of Serpena had met the threat, how successfully they had blocked the gun barrels pointed at the heart of their ancient race.

Now, from those rock tubes the crash of ship and bomb, the awful detonations confined in the tubes blasted forth into the great dome, reverberated, were reinforced by the next and the next. Fifty titanic explosions pounded each their terrible hammer blow to build up a vibration earth-quaking, rock shivering. The great dome of the Intramend quivered and cracked across and fragments fell in a rain upon the toiling people. As this stupendous concussion reached its climax of crushing sound, the people still alive in the great domed chamber fell unconscious, blood streaming from their eyes and mouth and ears. Succeeding and increasing waves of force burst blood vessels in brain and lungs and flesh . . .

Serpena had been saved, but at a cost too great for estimation, at a sorrow the annals of that race would never cease relating.

Saved, by one pilot’s quick senses and unerring deductive powers, by his ability to translate instantaneous thought into almost instantaneous action.

In the dead center of the circular plane of the floor some dozen of all the horde of toiling engineers, workmen of all grades, metal-workers, draftsmen, welders, riggers still stood. This was the dead area where the succeeding waves had neutralized each other and left an area of safety. These stood silent, their coils quiescent, their eyes filled with tears, as the full realization of the disaster was borne home, now there was no need for instant action. Silent, awestruck by the magnitude of the heroic suicidal exhibition of supreme courage. It had all been too swift for any observer’s mind fully to comprehend and analyze. Now, feeling the loss of their fifty ships, perhaps more than the loss of their hundred-odd sons and brothers aboard their ships, they stood berating themselves for placing mere metal above the value of human lives. Yet, for so long had they toiled abuilding the sleek, powerful vessels, they could not adjust to proper evaluation.

If Maiya had seen that sight, how she would have been proud to be of that singular race, instead of half doubtful of her own reptilian lower half as somehow an unworthy part of her existence.

These dozens busied themselves reviving the fallen, assisting the now inpouring rescue crews, or stood pondering the creeping clouds of gases seeping past the stop-gap blowers which roared with power as they tried unsuccessfully to hold back the terrible pressure of confined explosion in the far tubes’ shattered length. Then they gave orders to begin the construction and placing of permanent bulkheads to create a complete air seal against the radioactivity that was even now burning about their faces.

Half alive themselves, they watched the glowing gases begin to pour from the circle of openings. Some of them knew that this gas was the real weapon sent against them, and that it was still coming in in ever greater quantities. This weapon was not yet rendered ineffective, and only more suicidal effort could stem the flow of insidious, sure death.

Their whole people were still in danger if they did not succeed in plugging forever that series of openings.

Orders were given to evacuate the Intramend; and even as the wounded were being carried out, these heroic workers began their own death work, throwing together the metal sheets in rapidly welded bulkheads, racing the big lifting cranes to place them over the openings, and dropping dead at their labor as the burning gases ate through their lungs.

Help now came from the upper levels where the workers of the other shift had been sleeping, more blowers and more were wheeled into place to try to stem the gas—but such gases have a way of spreading into adjacent air with great rapidity. The Intramend, even as they worked at the fifty tube mouths, was being completely sealed off from all the tubes of the southland. And as the call went out to them to leave their efforts and come out, there was none left of that first horde of serpent men to answer, for each had died trying to do his duty to his race .

Each of those dead had foreseen his own death in that required answer to the need and had met the need without hesitation. Those only had survived who had been struck unconscious by the concussion and were borne away to the hospitals.

Zeit’s Admiral, Dartin, as soon as the last of the improvised gigantic cannons had been detonated, led his fleet upward to the surface, out into space beyond reach of ray-watch, then southward in a great circle, coming down beyond the lower limits of Serpena to enter the tubes again in the area now known as the Horn. It was then a frigid place, unpeopled either above or below the surface, but there was an entry placed there for the convenience of trade with those space people who require a frigid temperature to be comfortable.

Dartin’s fleet sped northward again, deploying in an ever wider front as more and more tubes branched off northward. His intent was to come upon whatever remnants of Serpena’s military still remained alive, and complete their destruction down to the last individual. Ships deploying right and left through each divergent tunnel, Dartin sped northward, confident, and his path was one that any child’s mental equipment could have deduced would be his next move.

If he could have seen the magnificent instantaneous reactions of these serpent enemies of his, he would not have rushed northward so confidently.

Southward, through those same tiered and branched corridors, was flaming an answer to his threat. With space detectors activated in the nose assembly, the warplanes of Serpena searched out the far scent of motion, of heat, of vibration of engines. Searched, found his location, and stopped to launch toward him a special weapon of their own, reserved for centuries against need; a weapon that Dartin had never even heard existed, it having been secretly invented before his own birth.

It was a common torpedo with a proximity fuse, but prisoned in it was a substance with a special affinity for the Atlan fuel, which was a combination of liquid hydrogen and certain toluene derivatives. It was these derivatives which the weapon acted upon, combining to form a gas more poisonous than cyanogen.

Atlan ships, when operating in atmosphere, took in atmospheric oxygen to conserve the liquid oxygen in their tanks, and this was the opening toward which the weapon was directed. Since the weapon had never been used, Dartin had taken no precautions against it. The gas was not supposed to affect the ship in whose fuel chambers it was generated, but the next ship behind in the tunnel passages along which they traveled. Most ships in atmosphere conserved their supplies of air by using atmospheric air, and the Serpent warriors aimed a flight of these torpedoes toward the Atlan renegades, hoping against hope they were not prepared for its somewhat obsolete nature.

The torpedoes burst about the leading ship in a fury of sound, and the great ship of Dartin rocked and vibrated but passed on seemingly unhurt. Dartin laughed at the futile nature of the attack and pressed on, more confident than before. But his own jets were now spewing forth a deadly gas into the path of his own fleet, following through the tunnel. The gas billowed behind him, invisible, and the air ports of the following ships sucked it up. One by one his fleet fell, veered from straight flight to crash into the tunnel walls.

It was a specialized weapon, designed for use only in the particular conditions under which Dartin was operating. It would have been useless in space or in open air, but in the tunnels, where Dartin sped toward the now fleeing Serpent war-fleet, it was deadly.

That gas wiped the life from a half-dozen ships before the rest brought up and gave reverse jets full throttle to blow the gas from before their path, to drive themselves backward out of its proximity.

Dartin, signaled by telaug that his fleet had run into disaster, stopped his own ship, jetted backward to rejoin the ships now far behind. Passing through the tunnel now filled with deadly gas, his stupidity cost himself and his crew their lives.

The next in command, a captain, Carnir, realized that against the powerful Serpent armament the caverns were no place to fight space ships anyway. He led the flight from the southern caverns into open space, leaving behind some seven ships of the line, once the Atlan federation’s best ships.

Aboard one of these empty hulks, rolling in idle drifting upon the clouds of gas, was one being still alive. It was Maiya, listening with her mind for the cause of the silence and the cessation of activity.

Sealed within her prison, Maiya scented the gas stealing through her ventilators, knew that death had struck back at the death-merchants aboard. Her half-frantic involuntary attempts to escape ceased. The calmness and piercing correctness of her mind returned. Hardly had she made sure the gas was seeping in than she was at work tearing strips from the hangings, stuffing the ventilator grills, the cracks about the door, searching every corner and crevice for the tiniest path of incoming air that could mean her death.

She had hardly given up this toil as both complete and completely useless when the great ship suddenly bounded forward. The dead pilot had fallen from his seat and the weight had thrown the throttle forward. It crashed against the cavern wall, rebounded, again and again, as the robot pilot took over automatically and fought the rebound until the ship was in level flight down the center of the great boring. As the ship approached a curve in the tunnel, the auto pilot registered obstacle ahead, nearly cracking Maiya’s ribs as the drive power shut off and the fore jets smashed on again.

There, Dartin’s flagship of the invading fleet hung, empty of all life except Maiya’s. Once again, she fell into despairing, frantic activity. Her long and glittering body drove her round and round in aimless, final effort.

At last, exhausted and smothering, Maiya tore away the strips she had placed so carefully about the doorways and lay full length with her nose to the thin poisonous draft blowing in from the corridor outside.

Eagerly she breathed in the air, knowing that it must cause her death; but death was better now than this smothering air of her cell . . .

Far overhead, the Serpent ships arrowed upward to meet the Eagle ships of the Atlan federation.

The Eagle and the Serpent had been friends till this day, allies, members both of the great federation of Atlan peoples. Now they were at each other in fury, the Serpent unknowing what creatures had replaced the former Atlan officers at the controls of those ships.

From a concealed opening north of the one used by the renegades, the Serpent ships shot out and up, forming as they ascended into a tight wedge, the point at the fleeing Atlan ships.

Captain Carnir, his knowledge of the deep-laid plans of Elder Zeit telling him to avoid open conflict which would reveal that they were not genuine Atlan soldiery, was in a quandary.

If he fled there was doubt he could avoid betraying the hiding place of Zeit’s forces. If he stood and fought, they were bound to learn the truth. There was doubt in his mind that he could escape the lighter and more maneuverable Serpent ships in a flight into deep space and safety. His none too agile mind could find no way of doing the right thing, and if he headed for sanctuary and the stronger forces of Zeit’s main stronghold, he feared Zeit’s anger for betraying his whereabouts and his true identity.

He knew that offense for him was a better solution than flight, for his ships were heavier and better weaponed; but these Serpent devils were renowned in handling their type of ship. He had his doubts of his nondescript crews’ gunnery and ability in a long-distance, heavy-weapon battle. And at close quarters, the lighter weapons of the Serpent ships would be as effective as his own.

The fear of Zeit’s terrible anger made him head for the moon and the greater speeds possible in the moon’s zone of weightlessness. If he could reach the zone first, his jets would give him a vast lead while the Serpent ships were pulling up into the zone. He had seen that displeasure of Zeit’s visited upon too many other officers to risk it for himself.

But his decision did not matter. As he circled the moon, his speed now giving him an increasing lead on the pursuit, he saw approaching from behind the moon the vast shapes of alien spacers, an armada, fearful in size, beyond.

“Nor ships!” he exclaimed in dismay, even as their first bolts blasted his craft out of existence.

Maiya, expecting to breathe in death from the air now coming through the crevice, was astounded to taste in her nostrils the clean freshness of air just revivified and recharged with integrant ions by the air conditioner.

Outside the ship the most deadly gas known to Serpent science had drifted and eddied in a strong concentration.

All caverns have interconnecting corridors, in which are placed air pumps to circulate cleaned air. In the air pump is a magnetic screening device to extract all unwanted substances. Recently, due to the increasing radioactivity of the air drawn from the surface, a new screening device had been installed, designed to reduce the radioactive content of the air.

It was this latter device which saved Maiya. All the ships of the fleet had helped to carry the great atom bombs, and some of that radioactivity still remained in the hold. The quietly drifting ship lay close to one of these cross corridors, and the emanations from the metal of the hold infected the air about the ship. The little fan that drew air constantly from the tunnels and through the detector device had drawn air from directly about the big craft, and set off the pumps because of the contaminated air. When the big fans went on, a blast of clean air swept about Maiya’s prison, soon was circulating everywhere through the craft.

It was a sensation like awaking from a tomb, when Serpent soldiery at last boarded the drifting vessel and opened her prison. They found Maiya, and some knew this was she who had warned the watch of the spy ray and then rashly pursued him, and whose reckless pursuit had definitely betrayed the secret of the oncoming attack.

To Maiya, receiving the gift of life again, and knowing instead of despair the glad feeling of freedom and safety, the faces of her people were the most beautiful of faces. She kissed the warriors as they stood outside her door, glided out and up to the control deck, and felt only a terrific exultation as she avoided the strewn bodies of the renegade horrors Zeit had used in his attempt to overthrow a nation and a race.

When the Nor ships settled at last upon the surface above Serpena, it was Maiya who was led forth to receive the accolade as she who had alerted the watch against the madness from the north. Vanue, Goddess of Nor, deathless Titan of Dark Space, spoke to her, placing one great hand upon her silver hair.

“It is the blood of such as you we wish most to salvage from this doomed planet. The Serpent race has lost many heroic lives in this struggle, short in time, long in destruction for you and yours. I have chosen several heroic survivors of the battle in the Intramend, and yourself, to accompany us to Nor for training in our schools. Then, in time, you will return to your people with vastly more to give them than you now can.”