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

by Edmond Hamilton

  “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!”

  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 g
alaxies, 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 —