battle, and definitely revealed the Sioux Indians' origin as Tihuanaco, in South America, and revealed their secret tribal history which told of this battle and how they lost knowledge of the whereabouts of their city and became roamers.
Couple this with an incredible flood of letters from readers, claiming they believed the story, and correcting our mistake in attributing it to racial memory, and many letters claiming identical experiences in more or less detail and you have your editor's basis for hastily publishing the second story by Mr. Shaver (who had been stunned by receiving payment for his first, since he had intended it solely for publication so that the knowledge might not be lost) and calling it "Thought Records Of Lemuria."
These thought records are metallic strips of film on which thought is recorded, and which, when played back, causes the "listener" vicariously to experience the events recorded thereon. These records are played back to Mr. Shaver by beaming them into his brain from the caves by means of the telaug ray.
By means of teleportation, another faculty of the "rays," Mr. Shaver has seen the caves, been there, spent much time, although he confesses that so real are the "records" that it is impossible to determine (from memory) whether the event happened, or was only simulated in his mind.
Deluged by thousands of letters, and faced with such evidence that here we had something that was definitely not a fraud, your editor made a special trip to Barto to investigate. While there we heard Mr. Shaver's "voices," but to our vexation, the gist of them was that we were "a dope." Later Shaver confided he had requested them to "lay off" while your editor was there. However, we did determine that the "voices" were not due to microphones, hidden on the premises, but were either real, or in our own mind. Self-hypnosis the experts would call it. Let's say that's what it was, and save the experts more postage.
We did find out the following things: (1) Mr. Shaver is perfectly sane. If he is not, we are all nuts; (2) He is perfectly sincere about the caves, the people in them, the Titans, the space ships, and his experiences with rays, projections, voices, pains, etc.; (3) He does not attribute one single experience to what we might term a "ghost" for lack of a better term. Witches, poltergeists, goblins, gremlins, fairies, dwarfs—all of them are real, physical, alive, being either the real thing or the teleported or telepathed image of the real thing.
We found out, also, that he is an extreme materialist. He does not believe in life after death, or that man has a soul, or that things have a basis in something invisible and immaterial. If such exist, he says he has no proof, and therefore will neither accept or reject. Man may have a soul, he says, but you can't see it, taste it, feel it, smell it or hear it. Therefore, he isn't concerned with it, because there is nothing he can do with it even if he could prove it existed.
Why dream up an "astral being" to explain a thing that can more logically be explained with something requiring less faith, and more science? If you hear a voice, even if it claims to be your dead grandmother, why credit it to something that cannot be proved, when it is more reasonable to credit it to something so simple and logical as a machine as simple as radio, and the speaker's voice a real voice in a real person's larynx whose residence is right here on this earth (or under its surface) rather than in a misty "spirit world"?
The cave people, says Mr. Shaver, have themselves created these superstitions to conceal their real existence, and thus obviate any real attempt to find them. Who would look for something he does not believe to exist? That is why the caves remain secret, he says. Even if we do see a dero, we call him a ghost and pull up the bedsheets.
Mr. Shaver told us how he began to hear his voices through a welding machine he was operating, which at first picked up the thoughts of his fellow workmen, and later, weird things that terrified him. Such things as horrible screams from someone being tortured, unseen people discussing outre subjects, speaking matter-of-factly of a world that, by all rights, could not possibly exist.
Mr. Shaver quit his job and fled. But no longer was the welder needed for hearing the voices. Then came years of horror, pain, terror, flight. The "voices" became aware of the "eavesdropper" and Mr. Shaver felt he was going mad. Yet, before long, he became convinced that it was true, and beneath him lay a vast, ancient warren of abandoned cities, filled with super-scientific machines, deteriorated by time and radioactivity to much less than the beneficial result they had originally had, and operated by a race of degenerate madmen.
To "brief" the whole concept given by the series of stories written by Mr. Shaver, the Earth is honeycombed by "caverns" which are inhabited by good and bad human creatures who are victims of detrimental radiations from old and "diseased with radioactivity" machines, and also victims of a vast "secrecy" which has become so traditional that it is maintained at all costs.
These creatures (and incidentally all surface races too) are descendants of the "abandondero" who were those unfortunates who could not be evacuated from the planet when the original races who built the underground cities left this planet because they had discovered that the sun was throwing out radiations that caused aging, and
(Continued on page 175)
