All-Story Weekly, March 1, 1919 — page 110: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A52 pird that had greeted us. of perturbation indeed at this. where we had seen it. told him that it had appeared when we Screens has He gave evidence He asked On guatd again, I emerged from the cliff. “Tell that not to Yolara, nor to Lugur! And warn Larree,”’ he said, earnestly. I asked why. He shook his head. And then, softly, his thoughts clearly finding un- conscious vent in words. ‘““ Have the Silent Ones still the power— even as she says? Is the old wisdom yet strong? Almost do I believe—and it comes to me that I would be glad to be- lieve—and what said Songar? That these strangers—”’ He broke off and once more fell into » silence. I cite these two happenings for the light they cast upon that which I have still to tell. Come now between this and the pre- _lude to the latter half of the tremendous drama whose history this narrative is—in- terlude, rather, between what has gone be- fore and the second curtain soon to rise so amazingly—only scattering and necessarily fragmentary observations. First—the nature of the ebon opacities, blocking out the spaces between the pavil- - jon-pillars or covering their tops like roofs. These were magnetic fields, light absorbers, negativing the vibrations of radiance; liter- ally screens of electric force which formed as impervious a barrier to light as would have screens of steel. They instantaneously made night appear in a place where no night was. But they interposed no obstacle to air or to sound. They were extremely simple in their incep- tion—no more miraculous than is' glass, - which, inversely, admits the vibrations of light, but shuts out these coarser ones we call—air—and, partly, those others which produce upon our auditory nerves the ef- _ fects we call sound. Briefly, their mechanism was this: [For the same reason that Dr. Goodwin’s ex- position of the mechanism of the atomic engines was deleted, his description of the light-destroying been - omitted by the Executive Council. The benefits of such a discovery to the armed forces still in the field are obvious. Added \ | 1 ’ i | + 2 ] ) 1 ALL-STORY WEEKLY. to this danger is the amazing simplicity of their construction. It can be confidently predicted that these screens will shortly be in use on the seas as protection. against submarines and as cover for infantry attacks on land by Allied forces —J. B. K., President, I. A. of 5.] There were two favored classes of the ladala—the soldiers and the dream-makers. The dream-makers were the most astonish- ing social phenomena, I think, of all. De- nied by their circumscribed environment the wider experiences of us of the outer world, the Murians had perfected an amazing system of escape through the imagination. The dream-makers were recruited from the /adala, and must have been extremely powerful—far more so than the vulgar fortune-tellers of earth, because to a cer- tain extent the sleep visions they induced were their own—or were they? At any rate, they led a precarious life, because if their patrons were annoyed by unpleasant sleep experiences they suffered for it either by death or by cruel beatings. At the one feast I attended I saw them summoned to the side of half-drunken wo- ‘men and men to ply their mysterious pro- fession. And before the sixth sleep I myself was induced by Rador to call upon one. I remember slipping straight out of this con- sciousness straight into another—visions of a young world—nightmare figures—steam-— ing jungles—monsters—a bestial shaggy woman beast whom I, also a beast, loved brutally. But enough! They were intensely musical. Their fa- vorite instruments were double flutes; im- mensely complex pipe-organs; harps, great and small. They had another remarkable instrument made up of a double octave of small drums which gave forth percussions remarkably disturbing to the emotional cen- ters. Their development of music was, in- deed, as decadent—if that be the right word to use—as the activities of the dream- makers. They were—I quote an extraor- dinary phrase of O’Keefe’s—“ jazz-jag hounds!” It was this love of music that gave rise to one of the few truly humorous incidents of our caverned life. Larry came to me— cS (E() 006) ANCE (EO)