conceived by Eemeeshee. But he knew their project was possible with the Elder rays.
The day before their big push started northward, Lane dispatched a large packet of blueprints, plans and transcriptions from the Elder writings to a certain famous engineers club in California. His purpose was to leave in the hands of civilized men a full account of the affair if disaster overtook their attempt to reclaim the northern caverns for the red men. It would have saddened him to have seen the secretary of that club open his package.
The "educated" secretary read the explanatory letter carefully and consigned the whole packet of Elder wisdom to the wastebasket as the work of a deluded madman.
So many efforts of so many great men have been lost through the inability of "educated" men to give credence to any wisdom outside their limited "education." The plans and blueprints would have given modern men the secrets of the beneficial force flows, as well as the transmutation apparatus and the other mechanisms he had been able to understand and have blueprints drawn. But the "educated" secretary of the famous engineers club "knew" transmutation was "impossible."
This done, and his conscience free, his duty to the race of men fulfilled—he thought—Lane bent his energies to making of Eemeeshee's war a success. He knew that all their lives depended on winning this struggle; for flight would save none of them from the terrific range and sensitive detection of the Elder race machinery in the hands of murderers.
THAT advance! Those endless, vaulted halls extending on and on into every varying shifting translucent pearly color, pillared with rose and soft gleaming purples and transparent gold—endless shimmering beauty.
Along the parallel gigantic roads, made to carry the vast traffic of a world packed with giant people of an energy and a titanic industry now lost to the mind of man (forever?); along those roads leading on and on into the mysterious beauties of a wonder land, rolled the weaponed, ray-armored cars of the ancients. Rolled? Floated! For the cars were half-spheres, floating on antigravity devices. Automatically they kept an unvarying height off the floor, the same height from the ceiling, no matter how many variations the construction had built into the way. A good thousand of these cars they had run out of the abandoned arsenal storerooms. Under Eemeeshee's instructions, learned to run them—and gold and the Red Legion had provided men to operate them, trained the men for the past months in their operation, in handling the titanic weapons built into the ancient war vehicles.
"How can such portable weapons fight the more massive fixed ray installations?" Lane had asked Eemeeshee.
"I will show you, for you must practice the maneuver so as to be able to form and strike simultaneously. See these markings on this huge stationary dynamo? That mark indicates the 'gens' or 'negs' of power the dynamo will generate. One kind of dynamo generates the beneficial 'gens' of energy, the other makes the 'negs' of detrimental weapon energy. Some dynamos marked with 'erg' generate a kind of mixture of both which has a multitude of uses, according to the nature of the mixture.[1] The number of these units indicates the range of the ray, the focus intensity being equal. This dial indicates the focus intensity of the beam, which you have already learned. Increasing the width of the beam decreases the range, as you know. As this machine is
- ↑ Gen was an antique word meaning to create energy of a certain beneficial kind. Thus it had been adopted as the word for the unit of flow of beneficial energies from the dynamos designed to furnish the synthetic life-energy flows upon which the underworld life was based—as is our civilization upon the production of wheat. Thus "gen" was to their supply of life energy the word of unit as volt is to electric flow.
Neg was the reverse word unit, meaning unit of inverted destructive. De power. As volt is to electric, so is neg to energy flows which "negate" life. Note persistence of their word "neg" in our word "negate" to "neg" a "te" flow is to neutralize the life energies.
Erg is the word for unit of power of another kind. Between the opposed natures of gen and neg electric lie many in-between kinds of energy mixtures, as complex in nature as are compounds of molecular mixtures in chemistry to the element's relative simplicity. Mostly these are useless, and an erg is the unit of measurement for these mixture-flows. It is a unit used to indicate the degree of useless power mixed in their gen flows. Thus a current is 90 gen to ten erg; nearly pure life energy value in the creation of beneficial electric.
