Shaver lived in the Cavern World with Nydia and her tero band for eight years. At last, however, the dero reclaimed their old base, killing everyone but Shaver, who managed to escape to the surface to write letters to Ray Palmer.
It is, of course, to state the painfully obvious that none of this could have happened. Still, that point duly made, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the story is impossible even by Shaver’s own account. Put aside the consideration that Shaver’s absence from the world for eight years could not have gone unnoticed. Forget that no one has ever produced evidence of an extraordinary prison break of which both the authorities and the press would certainly have taken notice. Simply consider Shaver’s claim to having been jailed for “many years,” and then being housed in the Cavern World for eight. We have already seen that Shaver’s known biography and whereabouts unambiguously undercut any such assertion. It is virtually certain that in reality Shaver resided in a mental institution during most or all of the mid–1930s and into the early 1940s.
To the end of his days, Ray Palmer stuck to the story of the strange experience that allegedly befell him when he first met the Shavers. Like Shaver, Palmer tended to be vague about dates, but apparently the incident took place at some point before Amazing ran “I Remember Lemuria!” and Palmer was trying to figure out exactly what he had in Shaver’s peculiar claims. One presumes, then, that the visit occurred sometime in 1944 or, at latest, early 1945.
Palmer recalled that he arrived at the Shavers’ Pennsylvania farm near midnight after a long trek from Chicago. He chatted with the couple for a couple of hours, while Dick Shaver spoke frankly as if he thought Palmer already knew the secrets of the caves. Before he was shown the guest bedroom, he would write, “I was sure of one thing at least—Mr. Shaver was not consciously perpetrating a hoax.”
Editor and author Ray Palmer (1911–1977) helped the Shavers and other authors publish their outlandish stories in books and magazines; he also published his own incredible tales (Mary Evans Picture Library).
As Palmer lay in bed, he heard voices emanating from the room to which Shaver had retired. (Dorothy Shaver had stayed up to wash dishes and feed pets.) Though Palmer was sure Shaver was sound asleep, voices —from Shaver’s mouth, to all appearances—began to speak. There were five of them: “a woman’s voice; a child’s voice; a gruff man’s voice; and two other male voices of varying pitch and timbre.” They were talking in distressed tones about a horrible incident they had seen earlier in the day—a woman’s being physically ripped apart—at a location four miles away and four miles beneath the surface.
“What’s all this about?” Palmer allegedly blurted. “Let me in on the secret!”
In response the childlike voice said coldly, “Pay no attention to him. He’s a dope.” (Apparently, tero speak in 1940s American slang.) Then the voices switched to one Palmer did not recognize, and they were all speaking excitedly at once. Palmer swore, “What I heard could not have come from Mr. Shaver’s lips—it was humanly impossible!”
A Shaver tale published in a 1948 issue of Amazing Stories (Mary Evans Picture Library).
Even in private, Palmer, whose actual personal beliefs were usually hard to read, even for those who thought they knew him, would cite this experience as a major reason he believed the Shaver Mystery to be based in reality, however defined. In an interview a few years before his death, he defined that “reality” as an astral one. “Mentally,” he said, Shaver “entered a very real world. And I don’t believe it’s in actual caves in the earth. … If he went anywhere, it was into the astral.” Of course, the astral notion solved all difficulties, geographic, chronological, and evidential. Shaver didn’t have to be anywhere except in his head, which kept its own time.
Until 1948 Amazing carried regular Shaver Mystery material, variously credited solely to him, to him as co-author, or to another writer assigned to write stories based on the Shaverian vision. The letters-to-the-editor section was filled with communications from excited readers, either pushing the speculations forward or relating their own anecdotes of encounters with the unknown. Little of the latter directly “confirmed” the Shaver Mystery, and the few letters that did are sometimes suspected, fairly or unfairly, to be Palmer concoctions.
While some readers were thrilled, others were outraged at what they judged to be a shameless hoax. That hoax, they charged, not only insulted their intelligence but discredited the emerging science-fiction genre as it sought literary respectability. In September 1947, at its meeting in Philadelphia, the World Science Fiction Convention denounced the Shaver material as a “serious threat to the mental health of many people” and a “perversion of fantasy fiction.” Palmer, however, didn’t care; he was indifferent to the genre’s desire for respectability. He had never been known as a champion of literary SF. His was a purely pulpish heart, his SF crude and loud. The Shaver Mystery, in other words, fit right in, except for the small detail that it purported to be true.
The June 1947 issue was devoted entirely to the mystery. It would be the last to afford such extended space to the subject. By this time, though, Amazing Stories’s owners, Ziff-Davis, were losing patience with what they judged an embarrassing debacle, not to mention a potential pain in the pocketbook, as organized SF fandom threatened a boycott. Shaver, who had ambitions to success as a pulp-fiction writer, continued to contribute stories that made no authenticity claims, but the mystery itself was turned over to a small fan organization, the Shaver Mystery Club, which had its own bulletin under the editorship of Ziff-Davis employee Chester S. Geier. By 1948 Shaver was out of Amazing altogether, and soon Palmer was out of a job, replaced by Browne. Accounts differ as to whether he fell or was pushed.
It is certain that Palmer had minimal enthusiasm for Ziff-Davis’ plan to relocate its editorial offices to New York City; so had Curtis Fuller, the editor of another Ziff-Davis magazine, Flying. The two launched their own periodical, the digest-sized Fate, the first issue dated Spring 1948, under the rubric of Clark Publishing Company. Its inspiration was the sustained public interest in flying saucers, following the first widely publicized sightings (and the invention of the term) from the previous summer. Fate also covered a range of “true mysteries,” most prominently psychic phenomena, but Shaver merited only a single article in 1950. Fate readers who expressed an opinion made it clear that they desired no more (“entertainment for morons,” as one miffed reader sniffed). Fuller privately thought that Shaver was a nut.
Before Shaver and Palmer introduced them to the world, nobody had ever heard of the tero and the dero (or their equivalent as high-tech, super-or sub-human combatants representing subterranean good and evil forces), but as noted, others would step forward to tell tales of them once the news was out. Such yarns gave Shaver’s stories credibility, at least if one didn’t judge them manifest nonsense. A word of caution is in order here, however. As already noted, Palmer was not above manufacturing bogus material under other people’s names, as Fuller learned in the early days of Fate. So while we may note that a man signing his name Ralph B. Fields published a letter in the December