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MANY hundreds of miles away, and many miles underground—a living being turned slowly from his vast crystalline instrument panel. It was good to hear his name "Eemeeshee" again upon the lips of men. Once, long ago, the red men had plagued him nigh to death with their prayers; he had shut off the listening electric ears of the huge machine that brought to him the thoughts of men up in the sunlight. Time had slipped by in the strange dream life he led. He had turned on the great magic ear again, and had heard but one voice questing him from among the many thought voices intermingling, the voice of Eonee Lane of Butte, Montana. Delicately he had sought with the directive dial needles for the source of that thought, and had almost brought the scene in the law office into his screens. But it was too far; he had given up after a time. Eemeeshee was not industrious.
Mayhap you have seen ancient Indian drawings of their gods floating in the air over the heads of their rulers. Horrible appearing things, with. foot-long noses and wide ears like an elephant, gross bodies and peculiar looking limbs. Those artists were not liars, for...
Eemeeshee's nose was over a foot long. The end of his nose turned up in a sickle from the weird growth that had distorted him—due to the peculiar rays of the ancient machine in which he lived. Eeemeeshee's head was vast and horrible too, and his body was a mass of flesh too vast to worry about any more and Eemeeshee hardly thought of his appearance. It was not important. Few things were important to Eemeeshee.
The growth rays of the machine in which he sat, and which had kept him alive through the slow drag of the centuries while he dreamed away his too numerous lifetimes, had made him grow unaccountably in some ways—in others not at all. His face was seamed and lined, yet the flesh was soft and pink as a baby's flesh. He belonged to a race unknown to surface man!
Long ago, his ancestors had found that certain machines of the God caverns, if one remained within them, kept one alive century after century. And the living in them was very pleasant, too.
The magic of the Gods who had built them gave to one endless dreams at the touch of a button. Endless dreams of love, of Goddess-like women, of glory and war and conquest. In fact, one had only to think when one had punched the dream button, and whatever one wished became a reality in a dream more vivid than ever was reality.
That family had few children. The dream life does not make for that. But some they did have, and servants by the score. So that wherever one of the great living machines was to be found, there was found one of the strange and ancient dwellers within. The men of the surface once worshipped these invisible listening ears, for they might be persuaded to do great magic for one, if one asked them correctly—and frequently.
SOFTLY Eemeeshee turned from the listening place, his heavy breathing soughing in the augmentive apparatus like a great wind. If he had had the rays turned upward, he would have been heard like a great spirit of the winds, breathing in the skies, and that was why he was called the Breath-Master, because he did not shut off the intake of the augmentor, and was always heard breathing. Perhaps he did not know it could be shut off. He turned on the searching eye rays, looked about up on the slowly darkening surface in the evening calm. All was different up there than it had once been, long ago when he had watched the red men fight their wars. Their war-whoops had once been given in conflict even down in the cavern world. Long centuries had Eemeeshee sat, and his father had sat there before him. Eemeeshee did not know if he was a God or not, but he supposed it must be so; had not men worshipped the Eemeeshees for an age?
Eemeeshee wondered a bit where all the Indians had gone, and who these pale people with their ugly machinery and railroads and square houses might be who had taken over all the land above of late. He had not paid much attention to the upper world for a long time. Time didn't matter much anyway. Old Eemeeshee did not care greatly about the actual world. To him it was like an unwanted program on the televisor; too commercial to listen to: like the radio in the house of a person who does not approve of the commercially raucous sounds it emits. Eemeeshee seldom looked at the upper world. He only half believed in it, anyway. Dreams were much more real, and far more beautiful. The dream world into which his dream device plunged him was vastly more satisfying. Was it not more vivid, more full of sweet sound and pleasant sensation and mightier people and vastly stronger love? Eemeeshee was not in love with the world of the actual above his head.
Eemeeshee seldom talked to mere men. There were too many interesting characters in the library of wire film which furnished his dream mech with material, Too, the dream mech made these people real and when one asked them questions or talked to them, they answered. They were vastly more pleasing than mere people of the world over head. Certainly the dream world was one to live in; it rewarded him for every effort with an infinitude of pleasures.
There were few living men who really knew if Eemeeshee was a reality or a legend from the past. One of these was the chief of his servants. He kept the things of the world from interfering with Eemeeshee's pleasures. There was Saba, the keeper of his women. Like all the great of the cavern world, Eemeeshee was well supplied with women, but he did not bother them greatly. They lived altogether in the women's quarters. Under Saba's clever rule they kept busy and to themselves. They were not important, and to Eemeeshee, Saba was like a daughter; a daughter whom he protected from the ugly world of reality. It was better not to know how worthless it was.
In truth, he badly neglected the lives of the people around him, who waited on him hand and foot and even loved him a little. But, then, Eemeeshee was only a forgotten legend, and their lives only a reflection of the glories that had been the life of the caverns when the Red Man was a power on the earth above and had sent always young blood down into the ancient darkness to keep things alive and pulsing.
There was still a lot of life in Eemeeshee's great body. But it was a life that was not greatly interested in itself or in anyone else, either. Eemeeshee was a victim of the greatest vice on earth, the record-mech dreams of the Gods, and his practical knowledge of life and his machines or anything important to an ordinary man was in truth elementary—extremely so.
Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06 - June 1947