"I understand," she said, "that Mula did not enjoy meeting you."
"He did squeak a little about it," I admitted. "How is it that you are so well acquainted with our difficulty?"
"All over the world," answered the Queen, "these caverns extend to within a few miles of the surface and all through the caverns playing and fighting with the ancient mechanisms are the Hobloks and their kind. Mostly they are mean and evil and foolish; but they have been living with the ray equipment for so many centuries that its use has become instinctive with them and many of them are very adept at its various uses. They torment and injure surface people to such an extent that there is little hope for their progress, especially as they are so totally unaware of the evil or its extent. Just as the Hobloks have made Mula a thing of evil, though he was once a vital animal, so do they make of many surface leaders foolish and evil creatures through their continuous lies and thought tamper.
"They thwart all scientific effort on the surface. They stop every good thing before it becomes a part of surface life. We have often tried to exterminate the creatures, but we have only succeeded in clearing a few of these deep earth cities of their influence. In the far distance they spy on us still. The ancient wave rays at which they sit are too powerful for us to overcome.
"If we try to make a clean surface place so as to cure some surface life of their influence and bring back the study of the ancient science through the study of the ancient machines, our efforts come to nothing because we can never get enough of the old ray positions in our hands to protect ourselves fully. Our men become, in a short time, foolish or insane from the needling they get from unreachable old rays.
"It seems impossible that intelligent men could not overcome these foolish Hobloks. But when they turn on the old rays it gives them immense awareness; they are super destructive. We have not succeeded in freeing any surface life of them."
"You are the ruler of this great city?" I asked Queen Shola.
"I am just a sub-ruler; I have been appointed to rule over the humans of the city. The real ruler is a very old and immortal being whom we seldom see. You will be taken before her presently."
"Immortal?" I queried.
"I know already why you came to the underworld. We have been taking records of your thought since before you arrived. You came to learn the secret of immortality. There is no reason," she went on, "why you should not succeed."
"These snail men seem very intelligent," I observed.
"There is a reason for their intelligence," she affirmed. "You see, the potentialities of mind-reading apparatus are immense. The multihead effect alone contains enough power to pull the whole human race into a wonderful new way of life. We have developed this side of ray work quite a bit. You see, if we are in mental contact, my brain's questions are answered automatically by yours, if it possesses the answer. So that we are actually much more intelligent than two people not in contact, are we not? We are as intelligent as the number of brain cells active in your head multiplied by the number in my head which is something like a thousand times as intelligent as two ordinary people not in contact. We have developed this principle—called the Multihead principle—into mind teams containing many hundreds of specialists, each brain trained to use all the resources of all the other brains. The result is a group of men perhaps a billion times as intelligent as an ordinary human. Would you like to talk to someone trained in such a school?"
I looked at her lovely, quizzical face and suddenly realized I was talking to a person as far superior to myself as a man is superior to a worm.
"I think I am talking to such a person." The simplicity and enormity of the multihead principle had floored me.
"The multi-head principle is one thing we tried very hard to get surface people to adopt. But they listened to the idiotic tamper of our Hoblok opposition and fearfully refused to work on telepathic apparatus. In some ways you are still medieval, you surface men. This principle is one reason Mula gets along so well—hundreds of minds are slaves to him and always in contact. His mind uses them parasitically."
"They do have a reactionary attitude to-
