Captain Future 25 - Moon of the Unforgotten (January 1951)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “And where is Gurney?”

  “I will take you to him,” said Konnur. “Come.”

  He led the way down the long dim corridor and Curt and Otho followed. Behind them still came the grim-faced men.

  Konnur paused beside a massive door of some tarnished metal and pushed it open.

  “Enter,” he said.

  Captain Future stepped through into a long low hall that might have held a regiment. And he stopped with a queer chill shiver running through him. Beside him he heard Otho catch his breath.

  There was a stillness on that place. Above it and below it and through it was a sound, a deep and gentle humming that only made the silence greater.

  Spaced along the hall were many slabs of marble, mortuary couches hollowed deep by the pressure of uncounted bodies. Above each slab there stood a cowled machine as ancient as the marble, of a manufacture utterly foreign to any prosaic mechanism of Earth. They had been kept bright with loving care but even so a number of them seemed worn out and useless. It was the machines that made the humming, the whirring song of sleep.

  Men and women lay upon the slabs. Curt lost count of their numbers in the uncertain shadows. They lay as though in slumber, their limbs relaxed, their faces peaceful. Around each sleeper’s head was bound a strap of some unfamiliar metal, having round electrodes fitted to the temples. The electrodes were connected, not by wires but by tendrils of glowing force, to the hooded mechanism above, from which a somber light poured down.

  Otho whispered, “There they are — all the old ones who have disappeared from other worlds.”

  Old men, old women — the sad, the burdened, the careworn. They slept here on the ancient slabs and Curt saw that in their faces there was more than peace. There was happiness, the joy of young days when the sun was bright and the body strong and tomorrow was only a vague mist on the horizon.

  There were many Europans also and they too had found happiness under the humming machines. But in their faces was reflected a different joy — a lofty pride as though behind their closed eyelids passed visions of magnificence and strength.

  KONNUR beckoned. “Here your friend lies sleeping.” Curt stood beside the slab, looking down into the face of Ezra Gurney. The familiar face that to Curt was almost that of a father — and yet it was not the bleak face he remembered. The grimness was gone, the scars of time and pain had softened. The mouth smiled and it was the smile of a young man, a boy who has not yet lost the laughter from his heart.

  “Waken him!” cried Curt.

  And Konnur said, “Not yet.”

  Otho asked, “But — is it all illusion? Is he drugged or dreaming?”

  “No,” said Konnur. “He is remembering — returning — reliving. Everyone has times within his life that he would like to live again. The man Gurney has recaptured the period of his youth. He is young. He walks and speaks and feels, reliving every action as he lived it then. That is what we call the Second Life.”

  “But how?” said Curt. “How?”

  “These instruments of the ancients,” said Konnur, “enable man to remember — not just as a vague flitting vision but to recall with every one of his senses so that he completely relives the remembered experience.”

  Curt began to understand. Each experience left a new neural path in the synaptic labyrinth of the brain and the brief re-traveling of that path roused a partial passing re-experience that was called “memory.”

  The Twentieth Century psychologists had speculated long ago that what they called “redintegration” might seize upon one single remembered impression and evoke from it all the many sensory impressions of which it had formed a part. The subtle probing rays of these machines accomplished “redintegration” in the fullest sense.

  “And the memories of the fathers lie buried in the brains of the sons,” Konnur was continuing. “Those parts of the brain formerly thought purposeless are a great storehouse of ancestral memories, inherited through some unimaginably subtle change in the chromosomes that even the ancients could not understand.”

  “So that you can reach back through those layers of buried inherited memory?” exclaimed Curt. “How far back?”

  “Far and far,” Konnur replied. “Back to the days of our world’s glory, indeed — and is it wonderful that we prefer to live in the great past of Europa and not in its sad present?”

  Captain Future said soberly, “But that is a rejection of the only real life. It is a retreat, a dying.”

  “Yet it is glory and triumph and joy,” said Konnur.

  His hand reached out to touch the humming mechanism. There was something reverent in the gesture.

  “We do not understand these machines that give us the Second Life. The ancients had the knowledge and it is lost. But we can duplicate them bit by bit. You will see that many of them are worn out, beyond repair. We needed rare metals, the radioactive substances that are the core of the machine.

  “They are found no longer on Europa and so we needed money to buy from other worlds, to build new machines. That is why we brought these people here.” He nodded to the aging folk of Earth and the other planets who had come to Europa to live the past again.

  Captain Future faced Konnur. He spoke almost in the words of the young Europan.

  “This is not life but death! Your cities are crumbling, your people are wasting away. This poison of the Second Life is destroying your world and must be stopped!”

  “And,” asked Konnur softly, “will you stop it?”

  “Yes! I have sent for the other Futuremen and behind them are the Patrol — and some hundreds of your own people, Konnur, the young men who prefer to live one life rather than to die in two.”

  “It may be so,” said Konnur. “And yet who knows? The man Gurney came here to stop it. He changed his mind. Perhaps you will change yours!”

  Curt gave him a look of contempt. “You can’t bribe me with memories of my youth. They’re too close behind me — and most of them were not pleasant.”

  Konnur nodded. “I would not attempt anything so childish. There are other memories. The whole System knows of your long struggle to delve into the ancient past, the lost cosmic history of mankind. You, yourself, can live in that past. Through ancestral memory, you can live again in the days of the Old Empire — perhaps even before it.”

  He smiled and added slowly, “You have a thirst for knowledge. And there are no limits to the learning you might acquire in the Second Life!”

  Curt stood silent and there was a strange look in his eyes.

  Otho laughed, a peculiarly jarring sound. “There is nothing in this for me, Konnur. I had no ancestors!”

  “I know. The guards will care for you.” Konnur turned to Newton. “Well?”

  “No,” said Curt, with a curious harshness. “No! I won’t have anything to do with it.”

  He turned and there was a solid phalanx of men against him, barring his way. Konnur’s voice came to him softly.

  “I’m afraid you have no choice.”

  Irresolute, with a whiteness around his mouth, Curt Newton looked from Konnur to the guards and back again and a tremor ran through his muscles that was more of excitement than fear.

  Otho sighed.

  The guards moved forward one short step. Curt shrugged. He lifted his head and glanced at Konnur, challenging him, and Konnur pointed to an empty slab.

  Captain Future lay down, in the hollowed place. The marble was cold beneath him.

  Another man had come, an old man in a threadbare gown who stood ready at the controls of the machine. Konnur set the metal band on the Earthman’s head, fitting the chill plates of metal over his temples. He smiled and raised his hand.

  The machine came humming into life. A somber glow illumined Curt’s face and then two shining tendrils of force sprang out and spun themselves swiftly downward.

  They touched the twin electrodes. Curt Newton felt a flash of fire inside his skull and then there was the darkness.

  Chapter 4: The Unforgotten
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br />   ONE by one disjointed far-separated slices of his past suddenly came real and living again to Curt Newton. Each one was farther back in the past. And he did not just remember them. He lived each one with every one of his five senses, with almost all his conscious being.

  Almost all — but not quite. Some inner corner of his mind remained aloof from this overpoweringly vivid playback of memory, and watched.

  He was striding with Otho and Grag and the gliding Simon upon a night-shrouded world. In the heavens flamed the vast stunning star-stream of Andromeda galaxy and out of the darkness ahead of them loomed the mighty Hall of Ninety Suns...

  He was in the bridge of the Red Hope, Bork King’s ship. That towering Martian pirate stood beside him and the brake-rockets were crashing frantically as they came in fast, fast, toward the red sullen sphere of Outlaw World...

  He was running, running toward the ships. The whole world beneath him was rocking and shaking, the sky wreathed in lightnings and great winds moaning. He was back on Katain, that lost world of time that was rocking now toward its final cataclysmic doom...

  “Back farther — farther —” whispered the faraway voice, and the humming note of the machines seemed to deepen.

  “You will do as I say, Curtis!”

  Curt stood, rebelliously facing the implacable gaze of Simon Wright, in the corridor of the Moon-laboratory under Tycho. He was only a fourteen-year-old boy and he felt all a boy’s resentment of restrictions, of fancied injustice.

  “All I’ve ever seen is this place and you and Otho and Grag,” he muttered. “I want to go to Earth and Mars and all the other worlds.”

  “You will someday,” said Simon. “But not until you are ready. Grag and Otho and I have reared you here, in preparation for what is to come. And when the time arrives you will go...”

  He could not see very clearly nor could he understand. He had only an infant’s eyes and an infant’s mind.

  It was the big main room of the Moon-laboratory. A man and woman lay sprawled on the floor and other men with weapons stood over them.

  Simon Wright, his lens-eyes facing those men, was saying tonelessly, “You will pay for this very quickly. Death is coming now.”

  There was a rush of feet. Grag and Otho burst into the room. A terrible booming cry came from the metal giant and he leaped forward.

  To Curt’s infant eyes it was a whirl of staggering figures, a spurt and flash of light — and then Grag standing with Otho over the broken bodies of the men.

  The scene darkened — but the aloof untouched corner of Curt’s adult mind knew that he had seen the death of his own parents and their avenging by the Futuremen...

  “Back beyond his own memories!” whispered the voice. “His father’s and his father’s father’s...”

  He was in an ancient 20th Century airplane. Curt felt — felt, even though he knew it was a 20th Century ancestor who had really felt it — the pressure as he swung the plane around to dive toward its target...

  He was on the sun-parched deck of an old sailing-ship, becalmed, its sails hanging limp and dead. He started toward the stern...

  He was one of many men, men clad in bronze and leather, carrying long spears. They were running into a rude village of huts and somewhere there was a shrieking...

  Under a somber sky on a sere brown hillside he stood as a skin-garmented savage. The chill wind ruffled the dead grass but he saw the movement down on the slope that was not of the wind and he raised his heavy stone axe more alertly...

  “Farther —”

  Thunder shook the night sky and reverberated across the city of glittering pylons in the nearer distance as one by one the great liners came swinging majestically down.

  Curt Newton — or the faraway ancestor whose memories he now relived — spoke with casual interest to the grave robed man who was walking with him toward the starport terminal.

  “We’ll see what kind of officials Deneb is sending us this time! I must admit these bored sophisticates from the capital, with their patronizing attitude toward our Earth and its System, get on my nerves!”

  “But after all we’re only a tiny part of the Empire,” the other reminded. “Administrators who have to think of worlds across the whole galaxy can’t consider our little System as too important.”

  “It is important! Even though it has only nine little worlds it’s as important as any part of the Empire!”

  “Perhaps it will be someday. The Empire will last forever and someday —”

  EVEN as the scene changed the watching corner of Curt’s mind knew that for a moment he had actually lived in the legendary Old Empire...

  “Back farther still — farther —”

  He could hear them singing the song through all the ship. The old song that was like a banner streaming, the song that they had sung for generations in the mighty ships that went on and on through the intergalactic void.

  “How many, many centuries since the last of the First Born died — the First Born who raised us from the dust! How many centuries since we men went forth!”

  He heard and he looked ahead through the port and there was nothing but the same eternal scene — the vast maw of oceanic deep space with the hosts of the far-flung galaxies mere drowned points of light.

  All except the one galaxy ahead, the mighty wheel-shaped continent of stars that slowly, slowly, kept growing into a universe of fire and splendor.

  “By the arts that the First Born taught us, by the sacred behest that they laid upon us, we go forth to create the cosmic dream they dreamed!”

  The blinding revelation came only to that little part of his mind that was still Curt Newton — the revelation of that first epic coming of men to found the Empire of old, to fulfill the command of the mysterious First Born.

  If he could hear that song a little longer, that marching-song of the elder human race as it followed its destiny from far beginnings! If he could hear but a little more —

  “Now!” spoke the voice and light crashed destroyingly upon the whole scene — and he was Curt Newton wholly and lying upon a cold slab and waking — waking —

  It was cruel, that awakening, unendurably cruel — to have gone so far and yet not far enough! He heard himself cry out, an incoherent fury of demand for the machine to hum again, to send his memories plunging back along the endless track of time.

  Then his sight cleared and he saw Otho watching him, his green eyes calculating and ironic. He saw Konnur, smiling.

  Curt stripped off the metal band and stood erect. His hands were unsteady and somehow he could not meet Otho’s gaze. He tried to speak but the words did not come and in his mind, already fading, was still the burden of that song and the blinding light of galaxies untouched and new, ready for the conqueror.

  He shivered and Konnur said as though he knew quite well what was passing in the Earthman’s thoughts, “Remain here then. You can order the others away and remain here and follow your own dream. There are no limits to the memory of man.”

  “Yes,” said Curt to himself and not to Konnur. “One limit — the beginning, the time before ever there were men, before the First Born. Who — and where and how?”

  “Learn,” said the quiet voice of Konnur. “Send the others away when they come and remain and learn.”

  From a great distance then there came to Curt the sudden sound of fighting in the pass.

  For a moment he stood motionless, caught between that song of lost eons and the pitiless present. Then, savagely, like a creature driven against his will, he moved. He tore the metal band from Ezra Gurney’s head and shook him and shouted, “Wake up, Ezra! Wake!”

  The guards had started forward. Otho said sharply, “Wait! If you touch him now, it will only mean complete destruction for you all.”

  Konnur listened to the sound of fighting in the valley. He sighed and motioned the guards to halt.

  “Yes,” said Konnur, “let us wait. There is always time to die.”

  Ezra Gurney was looking up at Curt, his eyes
bewildered and full of uncomprehending pain.

  Captain Future turned away. He said heavily, “Konnur, go and tell your people to lay down their weapons. There is no need for bloodshed.”

  “Perhaps,” said Konnur, “it would be better for us to die fighting for the Second Life.”

  Curt shook his head. “The Second Life must be ended for Europa. By bringing in these folk from other worlds you have given the Planet Police and the Government power to act and they will act very swiftly. But... it...”

  Konnur’s eyes blazed. “But?”

  “It need not be destroyed. Go now and speak to your people.”

  Konnur hesitated. His gaze was fixed on Curt’s. Then, abruptly, he turned and went away. Curt took Ezra Gurney’s hand. He said gently, “Get up, Ezra. It’s time to go.”

  The old man got slowly to his feet and then sank back, sitting on the edge of the slab, his face between his hands.

  PRESENTLY he said, “I couldn’t help it, Curt. It was a chance to go back to the time when I was young, to the time when we were together and all that had not yet happened...”

  Curt did not need to ask whom he meant by “we”. He was one of the few who knew Ezra’s tragedy, the loved brother whom he had long ago been forced to slay as an outlaw in space.

  He took hold of Ezra’s shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I understand.”

  Ezra looked up at him. “Yes,” he muttered. “I think you do. Well...” He stood up, groping for something to say, something normal and expected. “Well, I guess there’s nothing else to do but go and face Joan. Is she angry?”

  “Not now,” said Otho, grinning, “but she will be.”

  Ezra smiled back gratefully but his heart was not in it.

  They went out of the place of the sleepers, down the long passage to the outer chambers. The noise of strife had ceased. They heard a tumult of many voices shouting and then Grag came striding mightily through the tall gates.

  He bellowed, “Are you all right, Curt? I knew Otho would get you into a jam!”

  Simon Wright glided beside him and behind them a press of eager dusty young Europans crowding like wolves.