Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) (4 page)

As the mechanical voice paused, Captain Future stood with a wild thrilling in his nerves.

Cosmic mystery dispelled at last — even though beyond it loomed deeper and older mysteries!

“So
that
is the secret of man’s cosmic origin!” breathed Joan.

“Yet apes evolved to man on Earth too, the scientists say,” muttered Ezra bewilderedly.

The Linid answered him mockingly. “Always and on many worlds, the humans whom the First-Born raised from apehood slip back quickly to the ape, and must toilsomely climb again.”

“But where did the First-Born do this?” Curt Newton pressed. “Where, amid the galaxies, was their home?”

“Not even the Linids know that,” was the answer. “Though there are traditions —”

The creature’s toneless, translated speech halted. A queer tense immobility had come over the coiling capes and veils.

“What traditions?” pressed Captain Future harshly. “Speak, if you wish eventual freedom!”

He was unaware, as he himself spoke, of a small gray shape that had crept silently into the room.

The Linid’s translated voice spoke, suddenly rapid. “I shall tell you what I know. Perhaps it answers your question. Listen closely —”

They strained forward, hungering for every word. And then, out of the corner of his eye, Curt Newton saw motion — looked, and saw Eek the moon-pup, going with a strangely swift and stealthy rush toward Joan.

Realization came to him with a sickening shock. He leaped forward, crying out a warning, and knew as he did so that it was too late, that he had made a fatal blinder. He had forgotten Eek. He had forgotten the moon pup’s highly telepathic mind. And the Linid had reached out and found the one unshielded, receptive tool. All this rapid talk, this promise of a final piece of knowledge, had been to distract their attention.

There was an alarmed uproar, triggered by Captain Future’s cry. Joan turned. Curt’s hand brushed the small hurtling body, but it was going fast, too fast. Eek sprang, unerringly, straight for Joan’s face. His jaws caught the jewel of force, and ripped it from the girl’s head.

Eek fell to the floor, taking the jewel with him, and was instantly docile. And Curt Newton made a desperate lunge for Joan. For she had whirled around, the instant the protective aura left her. She was leaping toward the rheostat of the stasis-cage.

The Linid had no use for Eek now, it had a better tool.

Joan was closer to the machine than Curt. He might have shot her — that alone would have stopped her in time. Her hand opened the rheostat wide, in an instant.

And, with supernal swiftness, the Linid was out of the broken stasis and had grasped her. Cowled dark veils and capes swirled and enveloped Joan as she stood blank eyed.

With a hoarse cry, Curt sprang forward. Grag leaped with him, uttering a booming roar, and Otho and Ezra and Simon.

They recoiled. They shrank back from what was happening to Joan. Ezra covered his face with his hands.

The Linid was melting into her body! The dark capes and veils, even the darker, denser core of the thing, were sinking into Joan’s flesh!

“— a
power of utter possession, against which only the jewels of force are protection.”

Utter possession. Curt knew now, with agonizing clarity, what the inscription had meant. Not just mental possession but
physical
possession also — the solid body of the Linid entering and interpenetrating the solid body of its victim, due to an unearthly power of manipulating its bodily atoms that only so alien a creature could have.

Joan stood before them, face dark, masklike and strange, eyes pits of swirling shadows that looked at the stricken Futuremen and Ezra.

Words that were not her own came mockingly from her stiff lips.

“Now, humans, shall we speak of freedom for me?”

Chapter 4: Last Weapon

TO CURT NEWTON, as they stood petrified, came the dreadful realization that he had at last overreached himself.

The Futuremen, in the years they had blazed their adventurous trail across space, had faced many dangerous antagonists. Had faced, and ultimately defeated them. He knew now it had bred overconfidence. It had made him dare pit himself against man’s most dangerous foe in all history, against a monstrous survival of elder eons to whom he was but a child.

“It’s got Joan,” whispered Ezra, his face deathly. “It’s got Joan, and there’s nothing we can do.”

Joan? Not Joan, the dark-faced, shadow-eyed puppet that stood and confronted them. Not Joan’s, the taunting words they heard.

“Shall I give you more knowledge, oh man? Shall I tell you more — before I speed back to rejoin my brothers in their war against the human spawn?”

The Linid meant to destroy them, Curt knew. Not from personal malice. But because they were its racial enemies. It meant to destroy them, before it left.

And it could do it using Joan as its tool. There was only one way to stop it and that was to break the tool it held.

To kill Joan.

Grag’s booming voice came falteringly, as the robot stood rigid with uncertainty. “Chief — what can we do?”

They all recognized the terrible impasse, Curt knew. They knew that only one thing would stop the Linid, and that was a thing that not even imminent death could make them do.

Raging self-accusation swept Curt. His foolhardiness, his too-great passion to solve cosmic mystery, had brought this end to the Futuremen, and Ezra, and Joan.

He would not let it happen. He would not. The old, cold anger, the emotion that was not human fury but a relentless thing learned of his strange tutors long ago, took hold of him.

“Hasten, human!” came the mockery again from Joan’s stiff lips. “Speak your questions! For my brothers await me, in the great struggle!”

Two things flashed simultaneously across Curt’s mind. One, that the Linid was again speaking to distract them, that in Joan’s body it was moving stealthily forward so that it might snatch away their protective jewels and have them completely in its power.

The other thing was a thought that crossed his brain like a thin lightning flash of wild hope. He had one tiny advantage over the Linid — one only. But he might use it as a weapon.

Not as a physical weapon. No such weapon could harm the Linid without slaying Joan. No, his last weapon was a psychological one.

The Linid meant to destroy them. It could use Joan to do it. His only hope was to divert the Linid from its intention, by psychological attack.

Curt spoke, to that which had been Joan. He said harshly, “Go back then to your brothers, if you can find them! Go back to Andromeda — and rejoice with them at their great victory over man!”

The Linid halted its subtly stealthy movement. It had caught a disturbing something in Captain Future’s thought.

“How long do you think you lay frozen beneath the Hall of Ninety Suns?” Curt demanded. “Years? Centuries? No — for ages! And how fared the Linid race in those ages? To victory?

“No, to death! Your brothers perished long and long ago, and are not known in the universe! Not known except for you, the last — the last!”

Contempt and rage flared in the words that came from Joan.

“A lie! You humans could never have won and destroyed my race!”

“Not we humans alone did so — the radiation that was increasingly deadly to them withered them!” Curt retorted swiftly. “The fatal clock of entropy has run far down while you lay frozen!

“Not in this galaxy, nor in Andromeda, nor the galaxies beyond, lives any Linid now but you! I have seen it — the ancient inscriptions of man that told of the passing of the Linids, the worlds that belonged to your race but are no more theirs. The memorials of man’s final victory!”

“Tricks! Lies!” flashed from Joan’s lips. “I hold this girl — I hold her brain, her mind, her memories, and in them I can see no such things as you tell.”

It was what Captain Future had hoped for, and he instantly pressed his attack.

“She has never seen those things! She has seen but this little System, no more. But I have seen — and I can prove all to you.”

“The sons of the ape dealt always in falsehood! You cannot prove.”

“I can!” Curt’s face was marble pale. “You can leave the girl and possess me — my mind, my memories of what I’ve seen. You can prove the truth, by that!”

He hung tensely on the answer. It was his only chance, he knew. His only chance to save the girl his own rashness had doomed.

The shadows in Joan’s blank eyes swirled — uneasily, disturbedly. He knew he had implanted a terrible doubt in the Linid’s mind.

WOULD the creature dismiss that doubt, reject him? He could not believe it. The being who had spoken with such passion and pride of his race could bear to remain long doubtful of such a dreadful possibility as Curt had affirmed.

Curt laughed, a jarring sound on the bitter silence. Reaching up, he caught the jewel from his head and flung it away standing forth unarmed. He laughed again, facing the dank peering shadows in Joan’s eyes.

“I offer you a stronger weapon against my comrades than the one you hold, and still you are afraid to take it. You are afraid, Linid — to learn the truth!”

“No,” whispered the alien voice from Joan’s lips. “My people knew not fear.”

The subtly distorted outlines of the girl’s body began to blur, to flow with the shifting of that strange and awful duality. The veiled and hooded shadow took form around it, swirling yet solid. It lifted — and Joan was free.

She fell, then, with only a small moaning sound to mark her plunge into unconsciousness.

The Linid hovered, and began to move.

Grag’s raging bellow shook the rock. The robot took one ponderous forward step and Otho, his lithe, incredibly agile body bent like a bow for action, leaped beside him. But Simon Wright’s incisive voice said sharply, “Stop! Curtis must do this thing in his own way.”

With a terrible reluctance, Grag and Otho obeyed. They would have given their lives, but in this struggle of two minds for supremacy they could not help.

Captain Future watched the coming of that shape of darkness. And in that moment he knew fear, such as no man had known since the ancient ages when this same battle had been fought across half a universe.

The black veils rippled and widened. The solid shadow covered him, shutting out the light. The heart-core of the Linid gleamed and brooded a cluster of dark little suns, pulsing, close, very close. The shadowy solidity whipped around him, a cloak, a pall —

It was in him, in his flesh, forcing apart the very atoms of his substance, interlacing them with its own, so that he would have screamed from the un-human pain of it, only that he had no voice. Their two minds locked together and to Curt it was like the bursting of an icy nova in his brain. The cosmos reeled and darkened —

They were one, Curt Newton and the creature out of the gulfs of time.

His mind was open to the Linid — his whole life, everything he had thought and done and seen, forgotten and remembered. And the mind of the Linid, because of that uncanny oneness, was open to him.

Not all the way.

Much of it was incomprehensible to any human. It was a tremendously older, stronger mind, so much so that Curt felt a sort of shrinking awe in its presence. It was not an evil mind. Only — different.

Some of its memories he now shared.

The swift free flights along the shores of the dark nebulae, the plunges into ebony vastness beyond the ken of man. The home-place, the cloudy worlds of mist and cold fire, striding dim and majestic across the universe, dank strangers even in their own cosmos.

The delights of thought, the unfettered strength, the ability to cross the intergalactic spaces naked and alone, learning a chill and vaulting glory from that kinship with the stars.

Above all, the pride and power that carried that race to dominance over all that lived in a hundred far-flung continents of alien suns.

Only glimpses, these. But enough to make Curt’s human heart almost stop in wonder.

And now he saw his own memories, coming back to him through the mind of the Linid, as it searched and searched him for the truth.

The dead and empty worlds, the cities without light or sound, the deserted stars. The Hall of Ninety Suns, forgotten shrine of vanished glory, with its inscriptions that spoke solemnly of a war and a species that had ended long ago. Record of death, of defeat, Epitaph of pre-human empire.

The Linid saw, and read.

CURT felt the awfulness of that reading. The pride, the assurance of power, shaken more and more by every scrap of knowledge gleaned from the mind of this small human creature it held so in contempt. The cruel, inexorable coming of realization — the agonized shifting of truth from a concept held through numberless ages to one sprung new-born out of this last hour.
The Linids rule and are great.
Not that, now.
The Linids are gone, and even their name is not remembered.

Curt felt the moment when the creature ceased to hope.
I am the last. My race is dead, and I am the last!