Heh, heh….a little more Shaver -

Thousands of us are shanghaied into the caverns each year to serve the dero as slaves, playthings or food, for we are a perennial favorite on dero tables. With ben rays, torture can be prolonged for months or even years. A popular dero pastime is to disassemble their victims under a ben ray, leaving them as living dissections. Surface women are wired full of “sex stim” and used as living furniture, the dero taking pleasure in their undulations; others are given “growth stimulation focused on breasts till they get enormous and give milk like a cow which they use for a beverage.”

In addition, the dero use their ray mech to seed death, deception and “tamper” (a favorite Shaverian word) throughout the surface world. The demons, elves, and trolls of legend were dero, it goes without saying, and black magic was merely ray trickery. Nowadays, dero antics are often attributed to secret services. Shaver claimed that the dero sometimes impersonate FBI agents on the telephone, and hinted that many rich, powerful families have been replaced by dero-controlled doubles. The Nazis were dero puppets and the Lindbergh kidnapping was a dero job.

If you doubt this, you may be suffering from brain damage. Vast numbers of surface worlders — you, me, and most certainly Richard S. Shaver — have been slyly lobotomized by cutting rays projected from the caverns. In an early letter to Palmer, Shaver apologized: “they have cut most of the nerves and they are inoperative entirely….much of my brain is injured by them, you must forgive my forgetting — my wandering from the subject, it is the result of injuries — repaired again and again by the ben, but always the little imps start their destruction again.”

In addition to the dero, the Cavern World harbors small, hunted groups of tero (integrative ro), Elder descendants who, for reasons never adequately explained, have not succumbed to detrimental radiation. These tero are locked in ceaseless combat with the dero, and some befriended Shaver: “Right under my feet men die on racks because the dero…have caught them trying to help protect Shaver.”

The dero and tero populations of the caverns are dwarfed by a mass of human slaves as well as tribes of depraved freebooters who have drifted down from the surface world during various eras. While not as luridly evil as the dero, these too are a pretty loathsome crowd, vicious gangsters who slave and smuggle in alliance with topside criminals. Each major city apparently has its subsurface equivalent inhabited by these thugs, and many a “runaway” gets sold down the shaft. But wait, as one is constantly tempted to say: it gets worse. When the saucer summer of 1947 rolled around, Shaver blithely incorporated it: of course the saucers are the same vessels once piloted by the Elders. Unfortunately, “today the ships from space come not to help us, but to plunder.” Elder ships would not stray so near a detrimental sun. Our near-space, alas, is dominated by the Medieval Illicit, a cartel of space pirates and slavers.

These, then, are the secret forces behind history, the age-old order that Shaver was attempting to topple with his revelations.

No school like the old school!!

Of conspiracy theorists, that is. :)