their life that they cook on stoves Ben Franklin would have called obsolete; sit on wooden benches; slave in child labor factories; are two hundred years behind us socially. Many of their pieces of furniture (brought in in past, much of cavern needs furnishing) would bring a fortune as Victorian and pre-Victorian antiques. (Not speaking of Elder race antiques.) For, since the days of telegraph and newspapers and radio, the secrecy has required an almost total lack of commerce or intercourse between the worlds. (Before the days of newspapers, there was commerce.)
And it is a world, the Elder World, and it does contain wonders in the still working ancient mechanisms, but it also contains the most brutally reactionary minds on earth; as well as the most modern and liberal minds in certain groups.
They can't have radios, because radio can be traced. (Many freighters had to give up radio when crossing enemy waters, as the radios rebroadcast a wave that can be detected.)
They can't have clean modern markets full of good food from America's canning factories—the commerce necessary to fill them would cancel their "secrecy." Thus this reactionary policy from the past is just as disliked and as unpopular among them as it would be among us if we even knew it existed. Thus such enterprising young men as myself have backing more valuable among them than among the surface people. Truth is, I have more friends among the cavern people than on the surface, and far more valuable ones.
They want the ancient barrier to the full development of their life removed, too, just as much as "we who know" on the surface want it removed. They want the sweat-shops made humane down there, they want better living conditions, better sun camps where they can take their days on the surface without worrying about watching eyes. They want less restrictions on their life, and the "secrecy" custom is the most irritating and harmful of all their restrictions.
Such things as Hecate, the blood-sucker, will exist among them in the future if the science monopoly continues. Such things have plagued their lives in the past when the great ben-mech rays were more potent than today. The rays and the superior nutrients found in the storerooms of the Elders kept them alive much too long—and they were evil. But we do not think we have any immortal Hecates today.
BUT, TODAY, we do have a parasitic (class of) creature battening upon us, who has developed a technique of parasitism as highly evolved as a vampire bat's, and as ingrown in his nature! This is the "reactionary" behind the "secret" monopoly of the antique Elder weapons and pleasure mechs—and he is the enemy we seek to expose. He is the enemy I would die to harm in any way; to wrest but one of the mighty Elder secrets from his unworthy and unusing hand. I would die cheerfully for the race of man. It was what I expected when the Shaver Mystery series began; but I found there were more of the cavern peoples in my way of thinking than I had expected. Publicity was its own protection.
For he deprives them quite as much as he does us, and it rankles them much more because they are fully conscious of his cost while we are ignorant even of his existence. We do not see the young girls go into his harems; we do not see their wrecked bodies later. We do not know of his awful abuses of the rights of man or see the tortures and battles in his game arenas; do not see the human pieces in his "Bickro" games. (Human chess to the death.)
But they do know all these horrible things and they want the course of decadence changed and reversed as much as myself. So it is that we try to give you what you naively call "proofs," it is like a blind man trying to ask a man with eyes to prove that he sees.
One either "knows" of the underworld or one does not. It is very much like a seeing race with eyes living beside and among a race without eyes who refuse their existence. BUT WE ARE PRESENT AND WE DO SEE! (We meaning those on the surface "who know.")
But for a man who doesn't care to go out and question pimps and prostitutes, criminals and dope peddlers, yeggs and assassins; who doesn't care to pore over newspaper and police files for strange and unexplainable occurrences, or Missing Persons lists for data on the losses to the underworld; for a man who would like something more than eye-witness accounts from the lips of such "unreliable" humans; who doesn't care to question the personnel and inmates of an insane asylum on "what the voices say" (which I will admit could develop into an embarrassing expedition), there is a simple method of proving to himself that the Underworld (in the Classic sense of the word UNDERWORLD) does exist in all its miraculously preserved wonder-mech, building on building and boring on boring, city bowl on city bowl and city tier on city tier—deep in the earth—peopled with a citizenry of diverse and numerous skills in using the ancient mech to cause miracle and devilment.
This method is in the application of the Shaver alphabet to the English language and indulging the deductive faculties in tracing the words of the Elder tongue which still can be found, many of times in a good state of preservation, in our own English language.
Those college products who have been endowed with a complete knowledge of the past history of every word by etymological wizards of the colleges, by those professors who assume that the past students of the evolution of languages have all been correct in their assumptions, and have carefully grafted all this hoary paraphenalia of error upon their students; those gentlemen are the men who have the greatest difficulty in finding any sense in this alphabet.
They cannot successfully make the mental adjustment necessary to a study of the alphabet,
