Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Otho took the controls. The doors overhead slid automatically aside and the little craft screamed up into the starry heavens.

  IN WHAT seemed to Melton an unbelievably short time, they were threading the meteor swarms of the Asteroid Zone.

  When Asteroid 221 came into sight, the young Earthman nervously directed their landing.

  The rocky clearing was sunlit now and empty of life. Melton led the way across it. Curt's gray eyes were keenly inspecting the rocks underfoot.

  "This is the place," whispered Melton, stopping and pointing. "I heard it when I stepped on that flat rock."

  Curt unhesitatingly stepped forward, the other two following. They saw nothing unusual, but Curt felt the shock of invisible, tingling force. He knew that he had entered the path of a powerful, unseen beam. Then, strong in his mind came the alien mental sound of a voice he had never heard before.

  "I, Darmur, scientist of the world Katain, speak this message across the ages to come. My thought is being transmitted as an electrical vibration upon an achronic carrier beam which I am projecting forward along the time dimension. Thus, in every age to come, whoever steps into the path of the carrier beam will hear me.

  "You who hear me, listen to my plea! Our world, Katain, the fifth planet from the Sun, is approaching its doom. Within a few months it will be shattered to fragments. Nothing can stop that. It must and will happen. And when it happens, all my people of Katain will either be destroyed — or a worse tragedy will happen to them.

  "Our science is not great enough to enable us to escape the dreadful dilemma that confronts us. But it may be that in future ages there will be a science greater than ours, one able even to solve the secret of physical time-travel, which we have never been able to accomplish. If you who hear me possess such scientific knowledge and power, I beg you to come back across time to doomed Katain. Use your greater science to rescue us from the awful choice of disasters that confront us! The eternal gratitude of an entire race will be yours, if you can succor us in this terrible hour."

  The mental voice came to an end. Captain Future stepped out of the beam and so did Otho and young Brad Melton. Melton stared earnestly at the wizard of science.

  "You heard?" he whispered. "It was no illusion of mine, was it?"

  "It's real," Curt Newton replied soberly. "A cry from time, from the remote past of the System, for help. A plea transmitted into the only place where there might be the help they needed — into the future."

  Curt had been powerfully affected by that tragic, desperate cry from a doomed world, cast out into the un-guessable night of time!

  Time, as Curt well knew, was but a dimension. That doomed world of a hundred million years ago had as much reality as any world of today and it was calling — across time for help against cosmic disaster.

  "But what did that Katainian mean when he said his people were faced with destruction or worse?" Otho asked puzzledly.

  "I don't know," Curt admitted. "There's a lot that's mysterious about it. But one thing is sure. Far back across the time dimension, those people faced a ghastly dilemma."

  Chapter 4: The Second Moon

  CAPTAIN FUTURE was silent and thoughtful as the Comet roared back across the solar spaces toward the Moon. Melton watched him wonderingly.

  When they entered the Moon-laboratory, they found Simon Wright and Grag working with a complicated machine that consisted of a truncated metal cone, mounted on quartz disks and connected to cyc-generators.

  "Thought I'd try out that new principle of yours on our experimental time-thruster model, lad," explained the Brain. "What did you learn on that asteroid?"

  "The message is real, Simon," Curt answered.

  He repeated, word for word, the cry across time of Darmur, the long-dead scientist of ancient Katain. There was a pregnant silence when he finished. "Well, lad?" Simon asked at last. Curt's gray eyes were earnest. "Simon, a great race is facing supreme disaster, back there across the time dimension. Their world is doomed. Nothing can save it. We know that, for we know Katain did explode. But its people may be saved from the peril confronting them. We have the scientific ability to go back there, Perhaps we even possess enough powers to help them. Our duty is to answer that frantic cry from the past."

  "Aye, Curtis," the Brain agreed. "I knew you would see it so. But this will be the most dangerous adventure we've ever undertaken. We'll be going back to a wholly unfamiliar System, to perils we can't possibly anticipate."

  "We'll meet them as they come," Curt stated. His eyes were gleaming with eagerness. "We'll fit up the Comet with a bigger time-thruster, one powerful enough to affect the whole ship and everything it contains, and go back in it. Young Melton can guard our laboratory here while we're gone."

  "And we four will blaze across the time dimension to new worlds, a new universe!" Otho cried. "Now you're talking, Chief! At last we're going to do something different. Ho for the past!"

  The Comet lay ready in its underground hangar, poised for history's first journey to the past. The compact ship's inertron sides shone dully in the blue glow of krypton light that filled the hangar as the Futuremen hurried back and forth with last-minute preparations.

  Crowding the main cabin of the ship was the huge time-thruster, the construction of which had taken most of the weeks that had passed. Its heavy quartz disks and the massive metal thrust-cone mounted upon them hardly left room to pass. Heavy cables led from it back to the eye room, for the massive cyclotrons and motor generators were to furnish power that would force every atom in the ship to back up against the unchanging flow of time.

  Incredibly audacious, even to the Futuremen, seemed their coming expedition into the past. Yet all of them were bent heart and soul upon the mission they were undertaking. They were anxious to help the ancient people of a doomed planet, to make a bold attempt to bring scientific assistance to a race that must have perished long ago.

  Mystery cloaked the desperate situation of Katain. Darmur's time message had told little, except that his people faced some ghastly, tragic choice of fates, due to the coming death of their world. Nevertheless the bitter urgency of the Katainian's call through time rang in their minds. It was that agonized cry that had spurred on the haste with which Curt Newton and his comrades had worked on the building of the big, enigmatic machine that was to hurl them back across the ages.

  CURT came out of the ship. Brad Melton was watching the activity with wide, wondering eyes.

  "We're about ready to take off," Captain Future told the young Earthman. "Sure you understand everything you need to know to guard this place?"

  Melton nodded his head eagerly.

  "I'll know how to deal with anyone who happens to come prowling around the Moon, from what you've shown me." His eyes glowed with unashamed hero-worship. "Being left here to guard your home and laboratory — gosh, it's a great honor, Captain Future!"

  Otho came up with a heavy block of copper in his arms.

  "Thought I'd take this along," he said. "We might need it, Chief."

  "Good idea," Curt agreed. "I see Grag's bringing Eek."

  Otho turned sharply and cursed. The giant robot was stalking toward the Comet with the little, sharp-nosed moon-pup in his arms.

  "You're not going to take that blasted pest along with us, are you?" Otho demanded fiercely.

  "Why not?" Grag argued. "Eek's too Sensitive to be left here. He'd die of loneliness, the poor little fellow."

  "Poor little fellow?" repeated Otho, glaring disgustedly at the beady-eyed moon-pup. "Like as not, he'll try to eat up everything that's made of metal in the ship. You can't take him! You don't see me dragging along my pet, do you?"

  "Where is Oog, anyway?" Curt asked. "I haven't seen him lately."

  "Why, he's sleeping —" Otho began. He stopped, his face growing red. An amazing thing had happened when Curt pronounced the name "Oog." The block of copper that Otho had been taking to the ship suddenly shifted shape. With a bewildering protean flow of outline, it metamorphosed into
a fat, doughy white animal — Otho's meteor-mimic pet.

  "Why, there's Oog!" Grag bellowed in outrage. "You dirty, double-crossing son of a test-tube, you tried to smuggle Oog aboard, disguised as that copper block, and yet you wanted me to leave poor little Eek behind!"

  "Cut your rockets and take both of the blasted mutts!" Captain Future rapped out, at the point of losing his temper. "Maybe we'll be lucky enough to lose 'em both somewhere in the past. I certainly hope so!"

  Simon Wright glided out of the ship, moving toward them silently on his traction beams. He poised with his lidless lens-eyes fixed unblinkingly on Curt's face.

  "All ready, lad," he reported. "We might as well get started."

  Curt turned to the young meteor miner.

  "I'm trusting you to guard things here for us while we're gone, Melton. I've explained everything necessary to you."

  "I still can't understand how you will be able to move along the time dimension," Melton said hesitatingly. "You said your time-thruster used an extra-electromagnetic force that pressed atoms back along time. But how?"

  "It's simple enough," Curt assured him. "The orbital speed of the electrons inside an atom is what controls its movement along the time dimension. When the electron orbital speed is normal, the matter flows down the time river at a normal rate. Accelerate the electronic orbit speed and you accelerate its movement down the time dimension, directly into the future. Reverse the orbit and you force that atom back up the time flow, into the past. Is that clear?"

  "Sure — clear as the inside of a dark nebula," muttered Grag. "It gives me a headache, just trying to figure it out."

  "As though that iron skull of yours could ache," scoffed Otho. "It's simple enough, you buckethead. There's a double inverse equation involved —"

  "Get the devil into the ship and stop showing off what you don't know about mathematics," Captain Future ordered. "Start up the eyes for the take-off."

  SIMON WRIGHT glided, calmly into the Comet after the other two Futuremen. Curt lingered to give a sober last warning to Brad Melton.

  "We expect to return safely, but we're going back into unfamiliar worlds, unguessable dangers. We may not come back. If we don't return in three months, call Earth and notify the System President. There are powers and secrets in this laboratory that would be a menace to the nine worlds in the hands of anyone but the System Government."

  A few minutes later the Comet rose sharply from its underground hangar and darted steeply upward from the wild, Earthlit lunar surface.

  Otho had the space-stick. Grag had checked the massive eyes. He now came clanking forward to the main cabin, where Curt and Simon were giving the bulky time-thruster a final inspection.

  Curt, glancing out a window at the huge green sphere of Earth, laughed softly.

  "I was just thinking how mad Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall are going to be when they learn that we went off on this jaunt without them."

  "Aye, lad," the Brain rasped. "But we're already too crowded in here, with this machine, to accommodate any more."

  "And it would be too dangerous a trip for Joan," Curt added soberly. "I feel better, knowing she's safely out of it."

  "We're a third of the way from the Moon to Earth," called Otho a little later. "Is that far enough?"

  "Plenty," said Curt! "Hold her steady."

  The Comet came to a halt in space, hanging in the black vacuum between the silvery moon and the great globe of Earth.

  "Why did we have to come way out here before starting back across the time dimension?" Grag asked puzzledly.

  "You ought to know that," Curt reproved. "When we come to rest a hundred million years in the past, we want to do so at a point where no matter exists. If we appeared where there was already matter, there'd be an explosion of jammed atoms that would annihilate us. So we'll reappear in empty space between Moon and Earth."

  As he bent toward the complicated switchboard of the time-thruster, he added over his shoulder:

  "This thruster projects us back across the time dimension along the world lines of the Moon and Earth, so we'll be sure to appear between the two worlds as we are now. Then, having reached the past, we'll speed to Katain by ordinary space-flight."

  For long minutes, Curt Newton manipulated the rheostats and dials of the time-thruster. The guide-beams that would keep the ship following the world lines of Moon and Earth as it forced its way back up the time dimension must be accurately set. The gage that measured their progress along the time dimension in years must be rechecked.

  Curt finally straightened, mopping his brow.

  "All ready," he declared. "We'll turn off the time-thruster when it has driven us 100,014, 336 years into the past. That should bring us almost exactly to the time when Darmur sent out his time message from Katain."

  Otho looked skeptical. "How do you know when he sent it out?"

  "His message said Katain would be destroyed in a few months," Curt said. "Well, modern astronomers know the date when Katain was shattered. They've calculated it back to the year by the effect of the planet's explosion upon the movements of the other planets. Just to be certain, we're going a little before that date, You and I had better get our space-suits on, Otho. The thruster force might just chance to blow out a plate of the ship by a freak of unequal pressure on its atoms."

  They donned the suits. Neither Grag nor the Brain required such protection, since neither of them needed to breathe.

  "All right," Curt said finally. "Here we go. Lord knows how a force like this will affect us physically. Hold tight, all of you."

  HE OPENED the burnished handle that sent the power of the throbbing cyclotrons and motor generators into the time-thruster. The quartz disks beneath the great metal cone began to glow rosily, then luridly and finally with white brilliance. A shimmering, unreal radiance gathered on the metal cone and sprayed out through the whole ship. Curt felt a shuddering shock of force through his whole body, accompanied by a queer dizziness.

  "Why, this isn't as bad as I'd feared!" he exclaimed.

  He spoke too soon, as he discovered a moment later. The sensation of forces rending apart his bodily atoms increased by the second. His dizziness deepened to a staggering vertigo that made him reel with nausea. Through blurring eyes he saw that the others, too, were affected. This tremendous extra-electromagnetic force that was pressing every atom in them and in the ship, forcing those atoms faster and faster back along the time dimension flow, was now asserting its full effects.

  "Demons of space!" choked Otho from the pilot chair. "Look out —"

  Curt raised his head and peered drunkenly through a window. Space had gone crazy! The Moon was now hurtling around Earth like a racing ship, in reverse direction. Earth and the other distant planets were racing backward on their orbits around the Sun, almost as fast. Looking out into the Solar System as they sped back into its past, Curt saw comets that screamed in backward from space and cut around the Sun like bolts of lightning. And the mad backward race of the planets in their orbits was becoming ever more swift.

  "Hang on!" he muttered thickly to the others, shaking his head in a vain effort to clear it. "This is liable to become even worse."

  The cone had become a thing of blinding light that dazzled their eyes. Their legs could not support them and they slumped to the floor. Now the whole of outside space was a mere blur, a featureless gray immensity, so quickly were they speeding back across the centuries.

  Curt Newton wondered sickly if their living bodies would not be burst asunder by the awful pressure on every atom. Had he, in the confidence of scientific mastery, at last made too audacious a challenge to the blind, colossal forces of nature?

  Living flesh could not stand this ordeal indefinitely, he knew. Every atom in them was being buffeted by such forces as men had never felt before. He felt his brain darkening beneath the crushing force. He mustn't give way to it, he told himself. He must remain conscious to turn off the time-drive when they had reached the past age they desired. His blurring eyes
clung to the dial. One needle was crawling back across figures that represented millions of years.

  "We're nearly there!" he called hoarsely to the others. "I'm going to slow down."

  His hand unsteadily moved the burnished control of the thruster. Streaks of light — racing planets — began to appear again in dim space. They were slowing down more and more. The needle of the time gage moved more slowly across the figures. Captain Future watched it tautly, fighting against the crushing pressure inside his brain.

  "We're there!" he muttered and shut off the time-thruster completely. He felt the pressure upon his body relaxing and he began to recover his balance. He stumbled to a window. "We've made it! We've come more than a hundred million years into the past, to the time when Katain — Otho!"

  Out there in space, a massive sphere of rock fully five hundred miles in diameter was rushing straight toward the Comet. It was turning slowly as it boomed down on them. And it was here, partway between Earth and Moon, where there should have been nothing at all. It was Earth's second Moon!

  Chapter 5: Futuremen in the Past

  AS THE unexpected monster loomed across the whole sky before them, rushing upon their floating ship, Captain Future felt a stab of agonized self-reproach. He had been too sure of himself. He had not stopped to think that in this remote time Earth might have had two moons.

  Otho, in the pilot chair, had seen that onrushing monster at the moment that Curt shouted. No human pilot — not even Curt himself, the greatest of all spacemen — could have been quick enough to save them in that instant. Only the android, whose reflexes and reactions were swifter than any human beings, could have flung over the space-stick and jammed in the cyc-pedal as swiftly as Otho did.

  A bursting roar from the cyclotrons, a scream of tortured lateral and stern rocket-tubes, and the Comet executed a mad hairpin loop in the very face of the revolving, onrushing satellite.