Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) (3 page)

He produced them, from a guarded locker. They were like no normal jewel. They were round and large, and black with the utter depthless blackness of the Linid itself. Each jewel formed the center cross of a light metal headband.

In a vast and crushing silence, the six armed themselves, donning the headbands. The Brain made his secure by binding it around his case.

“We don’t know how these jewels work,” muttered Otho. “It’s to be presumed that they’re effective.”

Simon Wright said dryly, “I think we can trust the Old Race. Are you ready, Curtis?”

“Yes.”

“Then let us go.”

They went back into the room where the cowled shape of darkness slept. Now Joan and Ezra saw beside the stasis-machine a tall and boxlike apparatus with an ordinary loudspeaker set in its face.

“That’s the telepatho-mechanical interpreter that we’ve constructed,” Otho told them.

Simon Wright explained. “The jewels protect against mental attack by shutting out all foreign telepathic impulses. We could project thoughts but could not hear the telepathic answers. But that apparatus will take the thought — impulses of the Linid and translate them electronically into audible speech, so we can communicate with it without danger.”

He looked at Captain Future. And Curt, after opening the switch of the interpreter, stepped past it to the glimmering cage.

His hand reached out. Carefully, with infinite caution, he moved a rheostat, one notch... Two. The pulsing flicker of light faded just a bit in the crystal. The rods and wires dimmed their brilliance.

And the cowled shape of darkness stirred. Curt stepped back from the machine. Otherwise, there was no sound, no motion among them.

The Linid’s capes and veils coiled and unfolded languidly about its central core. And there was a subtle chill that struck Curt’s mind even through the barrier of the jewel, a faint dusk of horror.

The Linid had awakened.

Chapter 3: Alien Enemy

CURT NEWTON was distantly aware of the rocklike stillness of his own body, the muscles drawn tight to the cracking point. Somewhere deep within him there was fear such as he had never known in all his adventurous life, an atavistic horror that comes usually only in nightmare. His heart pounded with such vaulting excitement that he found it difficult to breathe.

The dark veils shifted and swirled within the crystal cage. Slowly, fighting against the partial stasis that still held it, the cowled thing put forth its shifting members, unfolding, probing, testing.

The capes and veils touched the shining rods. They recoiled, and presently were still, but not as they had been before. They were alive now. They rippled with a terrible bridled strength. They were crouched and waiting.

Curt knew that the Linid was watching him.

He could see it watch. The central core of darkness beneath the veils had taken on a somber gleaming, and he thought of the hearts of dark nebulae seen from space, the clusters of brooding suns. He looked into that sentient core, and sensed intelligence, wisdom — a force primal and resistless as death.

A force that reached out subtle fingers to his mind, and then recoiled, even as the physical body had done. The jewels had reacted to their proper stimulus. Captain Future saw that he and the others were enveloped now in dusky auras that shrouded them from head to foot. He guessed then that the “jewels” were intricate receivers and transformers, gathering the telepathic thrust of the Linid mind, amplifying it, using as a shield of defense. Advanced application of the old, crude principle of fighting an adversary with his own strength!

Curt was suddenly, passionately grateful for the jewels of force. That faint touch of the Linid’s mind against his had been enough. It was like the touch of withering cold that lies in the great deeps where no life has ever been.

Curt spoke, forming his thought clearly into words so that the others should hear and understand. This was the test. If the Linid was truly telepathic, as they were convinced, the shrouds of time could be ripped aside from the face of cosmic history.

Think strongly. Think clearly. Project the thought outward through the dusky aura of the jewel. There must have been communication once between man and Linid, in the Hall of Ninety Suns!

“Can you hear my thought? Can you hear me?”

He waited, and there was no answer. The creature watched, and brooded.

Curt’s heart sank. Could they have misunderstood the records of the Old Race? No, he should not believe that.

“Answer me! Can you hear my thought?”

Silence. The dark cowls stirred, and beneath them the black core gloomed, and there was no sound from the telepathic interpreter.

Without knowing how he knew, Captain Future sensed that the creature’s silence mocked him.

He strode forward, and there was a towering anger in him now, partly born of fear.

“So you cannot hear me,” he said savagely. “You cannot speak. Very well. You shall sleep again.”

He reached out his hand to the rheostat.

The veils rippled strongly, and the dark core gave out a bitter gleam. Abruptly, startlingly loud on the tense air, the toneless metallic voice of the mechanical interpreter spoke out.

“I hear you, human!”

A small gasping whisper ran among the five who waited. Sweat broke chill on Curt’s body. The thing was done.

But he did not take his hand away. He held the rheostat, looking straight into the heart of the alien being, and he made his thought masterful and harsh.

“You know that you cannot escape! You know that I have but to move my hand, and you will sink again into helpless unconsciousness.”

Again, no answer. Curt’s voice, matching the thought he projected, suddenly crackled.

“You know that, do you not?”

This time the toneless mechanical voice answered with sullen slowness.

“I know it.”

Captain Future’s forehead was damp. He was trying to win psychological authority over a mind so vast and strange he could not even comprehend it.

Yet that mind could understand his power to chain it again in frozen, unconscious stasis! He was counting on that as his lever to force from the Linid what he wanted to know.

And what he wanted to know was the secret of the galaxies’ history, of humanity’s origin — no less! A superhuman tension grew in Curt Newton as he saw himself on the last threshold of the mystery that he and the Futuremen had tacked across space and time.

He spoke in a hard voice. “Linid, there is something I can give you. And there is something you can give to me — knowledge!”

“Knowledge?” jeered the metallic voice. “Give the knowledge of the galactic lords to humans, so that they may use it against us?”

“Not that kind of knowledge,” Curt said swiftly. “Not knowledge of weapons or forces. But knowledge of the galaxies’ past, of your race’s past, of my people’s past.”

“Shall I tell the wisdom of the Linids to the crawling, verminous new hordes of man? Human — no!”

CURT had expected that answer. He said steadily, “Remember, there is something that I can give you in return.”

“What can you give me, human?”

“Freedom! Release from the stasis that prisons you!”

He caught the Linid with that. He knew it, from the sudden swirl of its capes and veils, from the pulse of movement that ran through all the cowled thing’s strange body.

Joan’s voice cut in. Her face was pallid, horrified. “Curt, even for knowledge you wouldn’t
release
that thing?”

“It’d be crazy, suicidal!” exclaimed Ezra, aghast.

Curt did not turn, as he answered them. His thought spoke as much to the Linid, as his words did to them.

“I’d not release it here, never fear. A small robot ship would carry it, still in its stasis-cage, far across the galactic abysses. And far across the universe, automatic controls would lift the stasis, it would take very long — but time is little to this creature.

“Freedom!” he repeated again to the cowled thing. “Not immediate, but eventual. That is what I can give you.”

“My brothers will give me that when they come at last and destroy you humans,” retorted the toneless voice.

Curt felt a surprise. Then the Linid did not guess how long had been the ages it had lain unconscious — how much had happened in those ages? Yet after all, the creature had no way to guess.

He would not tell it. It would not believe him. He was sure. And there was no way to convince it.

“Have your brothers come yet?” Curt taunted. “Did they come while you lay frozen under the Hall of Ninety Suns?”

There was a hesitation of silence on the part of the Linid. Then, finally, came a counter-question.

“What guarantee have I that you would fulfill your bargain, human?”

Captain Future’s mind lit to a soaring exultation. He was winning.

“No guarantee, except my promise,” he answered flatly. “There is no alternative.”

“All the universe knows that man is the one creature who lies,” came the Linid’s bitter words. “But — I would be free again. I must trust a human. I will give you what knowledge I can, for freedom.”

Otho uttered a hissing sigh. “We’ve got him!”

“Then answer this,” Curt Newton said. “Whence, in the beginning, came our race?”

The question seemed to startle the Linid. “Do not you know?”

“If I knew, would I ask you?” Curt retorted savagely. “Answer, Linid!”

“Truly the sons of man are crawling vermin of an hour only, who know not their own fathers!” spoke the mechanical voice.

Curt disregarded the jeer. “Who
were
the fathers of man? From where did he spring?”

The cowled thing brooded, its capes and veils folding, unfolding. Finally the toneless voice of the interpreter came again.

“Humans, you are new upstarts in the universe. Ignorant of all its mighty past, even your own past. Yet how could you petty spawn of flesh, that die almost as soon as born, know the grandeur of dead cycles?”

“We Linids know. We are not of flesh like your flesh, we do not live with your life. For we are not children of the transient light but of the eternal darkness. Yes, children of the dark nebulae and not of the bright galaxies! So that
we
are not chained to rigid bone and flesh that must soon crumble and die, but are in body like the ever-changing yet changeless dark clouds where we evolved.”

Captain Future felt a shock of memory. He remembered how the first sight of the Linid had made him think irresistibly of the coiling gleam of the extra-galactic dark nebulae.

The toneless metallic voice seemed to grow louder, prouder — an illusion lent it by the words it spoke.

“Forth from our dark home, we Linids went long ago, we who can fly space bodily and need no crude mechanical ships! Forth we went to many galaxies, to conquer and hold them for our race.

“The glory of the Linids! The wisdom and the power that have brought great realms of stars beneath our sway! The wars that we fought across the starry abysses with other mighty races who challenged us and whom we met and defeated and destroyed!”

“All except the race of man!” Curt Newton reminded tensely. “Whence came
he?”

“Yes — man.” The interpreting voice spoke the words flatly yet they seemed to throb a bitter hatred. “The creature lower than the dust, that was raised up by the First-Born as a final challenge to us!”

NEWTON was as rigid as though the very portals of an eon-old, lost cosmic past were opening tangibly before him.

“The First-Born? Who were they, Linid? Who?”

“They were before the Linids,” came the sullenly slow reply. “They were not like us, nor like any of the other races, nor like you humans, say the legends.

“They were mighty in wisdom — all the universe knew it. But they were mad dreamers. They dreamed of a universe utterly and completely ruled by justice. And they set out to accomplish that dream.

“They could not do it! They, the First-Born, whom all the universe had whispered of for eons, could not subdue us Linids, nor even all our rival-races! They went back to their secret worlds, in defeat!

“They said, did the First-Born — ‘We failed to bring the universe under one law because, great as was our wisdom, we are not physically or psychically adaptable to all the varying worlds of the universe. Our dream is dead, and with it passes our reason for life, so we too shall pass. But, before we depart, let us raise up a new race that will be supple and adaptable enough to succeed someday where we failed.’

“And for such an heir, the First-Born raised up — man! The crawling apes, the unclean, chattering hordes of the far worlds, the liars, the cheats, the cunning ones! They said, ‘Though he is all these things, in him is the seed of power, of power someday to unite the universe under the law of justice as we dreamed of doing.’

“So, from the noisy apes, the First-Born developed your race, human! A race that had no attribute of the great galactic races, that had nothing but curiosity — curiosity that unlocked powers for it that it could ill use. So your race was first loosed upon the universe far away in lost ages, by the First-Born before they passed!”