Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) (2 page)

Chapter 2: Futuremen’s Return

GRAG. Grag the robot, the metal giant of the Futuremen!

Joan felt herself set down, very gently. She heard voices, Grag’s booming metallic tones saying apologetically:

“Joan! Ezra! I didn’t know it was you. The alarm rang, but there was no way of knowing who was coming in.”

Another voice, silken, sibilant, saying angrily, “You big cast-iron stupe, you’ve scared her half to death! Look out, she’s going to faint!”

She did.

Lights, darkness, confusion. A dim sensation of being carried. Then she was lying somewhere in a vortex of swirling mists.

Shapes hovered above her. They were terribly indistinct. Ezra. Grag’s looming metal bulk. And another face, white skinned, peculiarly slim and pointed, that looked at her with brilliant eyes and spoke her name, and she answered. “Otho!”

The mists closed in again. And she was searching, desperate, sick with the pounding of her own heart, and she could not see —

Another form came clear. A small, square, transparent case, hovering man-high above the floor — a thing utterly strange and yet familiar. The artificial “body” that housed the living brain of Simon Wright.

Simon would know. She must ask him. But she could not —

Somewhere, in another universe, a voice called her. It was like no other voice.

“Joan! Joan!” it said, and her mind and heart fled toward it, fighting back the mists.

A spinning blur of light, a sense of all her being leaping upward, and he was there, bent over her, his gray eyes anxious, the strong remembered lines of his face softened now almost to tenderness.

“Curt,” she whispered. “You’re alive. You’re safe.”

She began to cry. He kissed her, and she clung blindly to him.

Then suddenly she sat up, thrusting Curt Newton away. She stared at him, her eyes bright with tears and fury.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” she cried out. “Why did you let us think you were dead? Haven’t you any heart at all?”

She looked around at the others, Grag and Otho and the Brain. The Futuremen looked away, embarrassed.

Even Simon, the Brain that long ago had lived in a man’s skull but lived now in a cubical case, with serum for blood and a serum-pump for heart — even he shifted uneasily on the unseen magnetic beams that were his means of motion, his lens-eyes looking away from her.

Big Grag, ordinarily capable of unhuman immobility, fidgeted clankingly. And the android, most manlike of the three, human in all but origin, dropped his bright ironic gaze.

“You must have known how we felt,” she accused. “You came back — how long ago? Weeks, months? You came back safely, and you didn’t tell us!”

She was trembling, now. She turned on Curt Newton almost as though she wanted to strike him.

“I’m sorry, Joan.” Captain Future stepped back, not looking at her. “I — we knew how you’d feel. But we couldn’t tell anybody. Not just yet.”

In the harsh light from the ceiling dome, his face showed lined and tired. It had hardened somehow, and changed. It was the face of a man driven by some iron purpose, and the eyes had a shadow in them something dark and strange.

Ezra Gurney looked at him intently. “You must have had a reason. A good reason.” Being older, he was willing to reserve his hurt and anger. His voice shook with eagerness as he went on.

“Did you reach Andromeda galaxy, Curt?”

Captain Future said briefly, “We reached it.”

Even Joan forgot her emotions in the sweeping wonder of those three words.

“You reached it,” she whispered. Then she sat quite still in awe. Andromeda galaxy. An alien continent of suns, washed by the farthest tides of space. An incredible, magnificent journey. Curt Newton had dreamed his dream, and made it come true.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Ezra demanded. “The secret of the human race’s origin?”

Curt shook his head. He said indirectly, “A lot happened. Trouble, near-wreck, the usual hazards. We were lucky to get back.”

He smiled abruptly, a smile that pretended to be easy and was not.

“Will you two trust me? There’s something I have to do, and I want you both to go back to Earth now. I’ll be along, and then I’ll tell you all you want to know.”

Joan got up. She took hold of Curt and looked into his eyes.

“You’re afraid,” she said. “Afraid for me, for us, if we stay here. Why?”

“Nonsense.” His scoffing retort had an unconvincing heartiness. “Go along now, Joan.” He looked at Ezra over her shoulder, a glance full of hard meaning. “Take her back, will you, Ezra?”

THE BRAIN spoke, in his dry, mechanical voice. “Curt is right, Joan. We have much to do, with the specimens we brought back with us. You’d only be in the way.”

“Sure,” boomed Grag loudly to her. “No fun for you, looking at a lot of old rocks and things.”

“Stop lying to me, all of you!” cried Joan angrily. She looked around at them, Captain Future and the incredible trio of his comrades. She saw that even in Otho’s bright mocking eyes, the dark shadow lurked.

“You are afraid. Every one of you. You’re afraid for Ezra and me, or you wouldn’t want us to go. You brought something back with you, that’s it! You brought something back, and you’re afraid of it. So afraid that you didn’t dare let anyone know you had returned.”

No one answered her. And in the brooding silence of the laboratory under Tycho, a breath of fear touched Joan and Ezra Gurney — a black and freezing breath of terror from beyond the intergalactic abysses.

Ezra spoke, asking of them all, “What did you find out there?”

Curt Newton answered slowly. “Some of the history of the Old Race, the ancient humans. We hoped to find them, but didn’t. They’d gone on long ago, to some farther part of the universe. The Old Empire, ebbing back toward its unknown center, as Rome ebbed back when it fell.

“But we did find worlds where they had lived. Worlds of deserted, silent cities, worlds of death, worlds of mystery.”

The Brain said in his precise, emotionless way, “We found many records and inscriptions, in the language of the Old Empire — the so-called Denebian tongue we could already read. They were half-ruined, half-effaced, by time. But even those broken records told a strange, grand story.”

Like a man haunted by a dream far greater than himself, Curt Newton began to tell that story. Red head bent forward, eyes seeming to look beyond time and space, he spoke.

“Some of this you know already. You helped us track down the mystery of mankind across the star-worlds of our own galaxy, until we found that the answer lay still farther on, beyond the gulfs of outer space. Well, we know now that answer lies even beyond Andromeda. But we have learned a great deal.

“We know how the human race, the Old Race, came from some unknown birthplace and spread out across the universe. The Old Empire, that held whole galaxies as we hold worlds. Even some of the details we know — how the Old Race battled for supremacy against the pre-human alien empires, such as the Linids.”

The muscles drew tight around his mouth. He said that name again, very softly.

“The Linids. The wise and dreadful creatures who were before man, and who came so near to stopping his march of empire — so near to destroying the whole human adventure. They were great and proud, the Linids. They held whole galaxies for ages before the little creeping bipeds came. They did not like the intrusion.

“Out there on Andromeda galaxy, long ages ago, the last battle between Linids and men was fought. And our remote ancestors won it. That’s what we found, the half-effaced records, the broken memorials, of that eon-old struggle. That, and the cryptic clues that merely deepened the mystery of our racial origins.”

Curt Newton was silent for a time, caught up in the passion of his dream. His three strange comrades looked at him in silence too.

Ezra Gurney felt again the strength of the bond between the Futuremen. He and Joan could never, even by the greatness of their love, quite penetrate that inner bond of the four. Always, a little, he and she would be outsiders.

Joan said quietly, “You found more out there than knowledge. You might as well tell me, Curt. Because I will not go away.”

“No,” said Ezra. “Nor I. We’ve never backed out on danger yet.”

Captain Future’s haggard eyes sought Simon Wright. “What shall I do, Simon?”

The Brain answered, “They have made their decision. It is what they want.”

“Very well,” said Curt. His hands fell on their shoulders, gave each of them a strong grip. He smiled, and this time the smile was very weary, but not forced.

“I should have known.”

He led the way, then, across the great central room of the laboratory, a vast circular space cut from the lunar rock, crammed with apparatus of all kinds. Smaller rooms and corridors opened off the main room. Living quarters, chambers that held supplies, the corridor that led to the hangar of their ship, the
Comet.

Two small, queer beasts, completely dissimilar to each other, came rushing up to Joan and Ezra and leaped frantically around their legs.

On Ezra’s strained face flickered a brief smile.

“I see you and Grag still have your pets, Otho.”

Joan could not stop for them. Eek, the gray, snouted, metal-eating moon-pup, and Oog, the fat little white mimic-beast, had been dear to her. But even their gamboling welcome could not break her spell of dread.

And the two little beasts drew back from her when they saw the door to which Curt Newton was heading, the door of one of the smaller chambers. They backed away, as though in fear, when he opened that door.

“In here,” said Captain Future.

Joan and Ezra stood quite still, looking in. There was a machine in the center of that rock-walled room. A cage-like thing of crystal rods and shining wires. It seemed very frail, to hold what was in it. It pulsed with a steady rhythmic beat of force throughout its rods and coils, so that the crystal flickered with diamond points of light.

“The machine,” said the Brain, “creates a complete stasis within itself. Within that cage that appears so simple, time, entropy, motion, cannot exist.”

JOAN had shrunk back against Curt. Her eyes were fixed on what lay there, so still within its cage of force.

The thing had a central core of denser darkness, cowled by looped dark capes and veils. And core and capes and veils seemed solid, tangible — but not like flesh.

The design and function of this creature were so completely alien to the known evolutionary scale that their eyes could not comprehend its form. Yet something in the frozen immobility of the cowled thing and its folded and floating veils hinted a protean
impermanence
of form.

Even now, lifeless and insentient as it was, a feeling of power lay in that cryptic cowled form. Joan felt her flesh draw in upon itself with instinctive recoil, and it seemed that in her heart she could feel a black and icy tide that flowed from the thing, a sense of horror at beholding something so completely divorced from all life as she knew it.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“One of the first lords of the galaxies,” Newton answered. “A Linid.”

Somehow, just to know it had a name made it less shocking. Joan forced herself to look again.

“We found it,” said Otho slowly, “in one of the dead cities of the old human race, out there.”

“I found it,” Grag corrected him. “I was the one who broke open that crypt under the Hall of Ninety Suns. And if it hadn’t been for me, you couldn’t have moved it.”

“Strong back,” said Otho, “weak mind.” But his heart was not in his gibing. The dark sleeper held them all in a mood of awe.

“And millions of years ago, things like that were the lords of creation?” Ezra said, incredulously.

Curt nodded broodingly. “Yes. They held the galaxies before man. They warred with man, with the Old Race. Yet it was not man alone who doomed them. A species has its day, and theirs was done.

“They passed, like many another great species, largely because of a change in natural conditions. We think, from what we learned, that in the Linids’ case the fatal change was that of entropy, the increase of cosmic radiation somehow adversely affecting their alien form of life.”

“That thing,” Joan breathed, “dead and perfectly preserved for all these ages!”

Captain Future’s eyes had a queer look.

“That’s just it, Joan.
It isn’t dead.”
His words echoed in the rocky vault like the living voice of danger.

As though by common instinct, they drew away from the door. For a time no one spoke. Then Simon Wright supplied the explanation.

“The records tell us that the Old Race won the galactic war with the Linids — but that even they could not destroy them. The Linids were a form of life too different for human science to destroy. They could only prison them, using a stasis of force like this one.

“There were warnings. If the stasis were lifted, the Linid would regain life and consciousness. It would be as though all these eons had not passed. It would regain its full power — and the records caution all who read that the Linid had a terrible power —
a power of utter possession, against which only the jewels of force are protection.”

“If the stasis were lifted —” Joan said. “No! Curt, you’re not going to —”

Her voice trailed away. Curt’s face was a thing cut from granite.

“We’re going to lift it — a little. Enough to revive the thing, but still keep it prisoned. We’re sure we can communicate with it telepathically.” He was drawn and sweating with strain, with worry, with a fierce excitement.

“We know the risk we’re taking. But we’ve got to do it! This survivor of a vanished eon can tell us things about the past that we’d never know.

“But you shouldn’t take that risk, Joan. You and Ezra must go.”

They answered as with one voice, “No.” And Ezra added, “From the look of that thing, you may need an extra hand.”

Curt sighed. “All right. We’re not going into this completely without defense. There were jewels of force also in the Hall of the Ninety Suns. The Old Race must have used it as some sort of meeting ground with the Linids, where they parleyed for the rule of Andromeda. We brought them back, too.”