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

by Edmond Hamilton

  "I thought he'd at least protest," muttered Curt suspiciously. "I —"

  "It's a trick!" yelled Grag.

  Zikal's ship, banking around, had suddenly opened fire with half its heavy battery of neutron guns. Deadly, brilliant beams lanced across space toward the Futuremen's ship.

  Captain Future had not been caught napping. Wary of Zikal's ready submission, he had been on the alert. He had flung the space-stick over sharply the moment he glimpsed the beams. The Comet skidded in a lightning space spin, the neutron beams stabbing above it. Curt whirled up in a hairpin loop toward the keel of Zikal's cruiser.

  "Get their rocket-tubes — disable them!" he shouted to Grag and Otho.

  Zikal's craft was looping desperately, trying to bring its heavy batteries to bear on the little Comet. But the Katainians were meeting the finest space fighter of a hundred million years from their own time. Curt Newton's lightning shift sent the Comet racing after the enemy, clinging to its tail. Next moment the pale rays of the proton cannon lanced at the Katainian ship as Grag and Otho fired.

  "Got their rocket-tubes!" yelled Otho. "They're disabled!"

  The unerring aim had fused the rocket-tubes of Zikal's ship into a molten mass of metal. Almost instantly an explosion shattered the rear of the Katainian ship as the back-blasting tubes blew up the cyclotrons.

  "We're boarding her," Curt said. "Stand ready, you two!"

  The Comet drove up level with the rent hull of the drifting wreck. In their space-suits, Captain Future, Otho and Grag leaped across the gap into the wreck, their proton pistols ready in their grasp. A scattered fire of neutron beams met them. Some of Zikal's men had escaped the explosion. But the three Futuremen waded forward, the guns kicking in their hands. They blasted continuous beams that sent space-suited men tumbling in scorched heaps. The survivors raised their hands in panicky surrender.

  Beyond them appeared Zikal's tall, space-suited figure, aiming a neutron gun. The Katainian's face was distorted with fury inside his helmet. His gun was leveled with deadly purpose at Curt. But before Captain Future could move, Otho had sprung forward with a yell of hate.

  Brilliant neutron beam and pale proton ray crisscrossed in the wrecked ship as Otho and Zikal stood and fired. But it was the Katainian who fell, clutching the breast of his suit and slumping dead to the floor.

  Otho looked down at him, eyes still burning with hatred.

  "That was for Ahla," he grated harshly.

  CURT led his two comrades back to the Comet after disarming the survivors in the flagship. Then he broadcast an all-wave command to the fleet of poison tankers that were clustered bewilderedly in space nearby.

  "The expedition to Mars is countermanded. Release your cargoes of gas, pick up the flagship survivors and return to Katain."

  There was no move by the tankers to obey.

  "Unless you do so in two minutes, we'll open fire on you!" Curt warned.

  The threat was sufficient this time. The unarmed tankers could make no effective resistance and their crews were stunned by the fate of the flagship. Curt Newton saw the valves of the tankers being opened. The compressed clouds of green gas that had been intended to destroy the life of the Martian people puffed harmlessly into space.

  The Comet led the way back to Katain.

  When they landed on the great spaceport at Vavona, Darmur and the Chief Councilor met Curt. Captain Future told them of Zikal's treachery.

  "But that's ended now," he concluded. "Darmur's ships should be bringing the uranium from the other planets to Yugra, The migration to Sirius can be carried out successfully."

  The Chief Councilor's aged face was pale.

  "It's got to succeed! The whole existence of our people is staked upon Darmur's plan, without recourse, and Katain is drawing near its end."

  Katain was indeed approaching the solemn hour when its existence as a planet would be terminated forever. That thought spurred Captain Future to superhuman exertion in the tumultuous, terrible days that followed.

  With Darmur and Jhulun, the Futuremen flew out to the little moon, Yugra. It was a barren, arid sphere of rock with scant vegetation. Curt inspected the multitudinous underground crypts, airtight chambers fitted with special apparatus, in which the mass of the Katainian people would lie in frozen sleep during the twenty years of the voyage to Sirius.

  Then they hastened to the device that was the heart of Darmur's great plan — the colossal rocket-tube that was to propel the little moon. It was like a giant well sunk deep in the rock of the moon, lined with tremendous thickness of the most refractory metals.

  "There are vast fuel chambers in the ground all around this firing-tube," Darmur explained as they stood at the lip of the shaft. "The uranium will be stored in those chambers in macerated form. It can be fed from them into the bottom of the tube, to be exploded as atomic energy."

  He pointed to a domelike glassite structure that rose on massive metal supports several miles from the firing tube.

  "The controls are in that place. The crew who will guide Yugra on its flight to Sirius will dwell constantly in that airtight shelter. It has food, air and water supplies for the long years the journey will take. The rest of our people, all those millions, will be sleeping in the crypts."

  Curt Newton and the Futuremen went to the control house with him and ascended in its swift elevator to the topmost level. Up here in the dome of the glassite structure was the massive panel of switches that would control the flight of the moon.

  "Everything was prepared long ago, has been ready for months," Darmur said, twisting his hands. "Everything except the uranium."

  "It will come, Father," Jhulun encouraged gravely. "Our ships at the other planets must already have collected the mineral the Futuremen forced across time. They will arrive any day now."

  Quietly, yet dramatically, Curt Newton pointed into the starry heavens outside the glassite dome.

  "I think the first uranium ships are coming now."

  THE space ships that began dropping from the heavens proved in fact to be those that had collected the uranium from nearby Jupiter.

  "We couldn't believe our eyes!" babbled the leader of the party. "We waited near the main uranium deposits on that world and the amount of uranium in them suddenly almost doubled. It was magical!"

  "Magic of the Futuremen's time engineering!" Darmur exclaimed, his eyes shining. "Hurry and unload the mineral into the fuel chambers."

  The uranium compounds were fed through automatic macerators into the buried storage chambers around the great firing tube. Some hours later, other ships with similar cargo arrived from Earth.

  During the following days, one after another of the parties of ships laden with the precious element came in from the more distant planets. The buried chambers began to fill with the mineral.

  "But we've hardly two weeks left!" Darmur said when the uranium was all stored. "Two weeks before the final conjunction and cataclysm. And we've got to get all the people of Katain here and into the sleep crypts."

  "The space fleet we built in preparation is ready," Jhulun reminded him. "We'll get it done in time, if the Sacred Star favors us."

  Captain Future looked curiously at them.

  "Do you Katainians know why Deneb is your sacred star?" he asked.

  As he told them Darmur's face became awed.

  "So long ago our remote ancestors came to this System from Deneb. Now we Katainians are going to leave the System, are returning to the stars from which our ancestors came. There is poetic justice in it."

  Chapter 20: Cosmic Destruction

  A VOICELESS dread hung over Katain like a pall. Jupiter's ominous disk was growing constantly more enormous in the heavens. Ground-quakes shuddered through the mass of Katain every few minutes. The seas were running against the lands in wild, high tides.

  The night the Futuremen returned with Darmur, a tremendous electric storm swept the city, Vavona, with mad bursts of rain and sheets of lightning.

  "The end is near," Darmur sai
d resignedly. "It may be that Katain's crust will shatter and let the seas pour into the molten interior, even before we reach conjunction with Jupiter. We must speed up the transfer of the people to Yugra."

  "Chief, I can't understand how all these Katainians are going to stand it on Yugra," Grag complained to Curt. "Darmur said they couldn't stand a different gravitation for very long and Yugra's gravity is far weaker than that of this world."

  "You forget that all these millions of Katainians will spend their twenty years on Yugra in suspended animation," reminded Curt. "With the vital activities of their bodies frozen, the lesser gravitation won't harm them. Darmur and Jhulun and the others of the control crew who guide the moon to Sirius will have to wear a form of gravitation equalizer."

  The tremendous storm was succeeded the next morning by an even fiercer electrical tempest. The day was dark as night. Sheets of rain and masses of hail fell from the savage sky. The ground quakes were stronger than ever.

  Curt Newton and the Futuremen labored in the night-black tempest at the big spaceport of Vavona, helping to shepherd the Katainians into the ships for the short flight to Yugra. The plan of transfer had been long prepared. The people were being taken in prearranged numbers.

  Captain Future flew out to Yugra, where Jhulun was superintending the reception of the crowds of Katainians who were constantly arriving. Here, too, the plan had been long ready.

  Each group of five hundred Katainians trooped down into its allotted subterranean crypt and lay down in the tiers of metal bunks. From disks in the ceiling radiated a blue force that froze their organs in suspended animation by absolutely balancing anabolism and catabolism of their cells. Then, as they slept, the crypt door was hermetically closed.

  "They will not awake until we reach Sirius safely and open the chambers," Jhulun told Curt. "They will be the same age as now, though we of the control crew will be twenty years older."

  More Katainians were arriving and entering the crypts. There was no panic as the people did so, but all of them looked back with silent yearning at Katain.

  Other ships were bringing prearranged cargoes of seeds, animals, tools, books and everything else that would be required for life in the new home.

  "We're going back to Katain," Curt told the Futuremen as the last million Katainians began arriving. "I told Darmur I'd bring him to Yugra myself."

  They landed on Katain in what should have been day, but was instead a storm-swept, terrifying darkness. Bolts of lightning revealed the spaceport surface, heaving perilously underfoot, and the Katainians thronging to the ships.

  Darmur was haggard, his eyes bloodshot from strain, but still stubbornly directing the final phases of the evacuation.

  "The last of us leave Katain tonight," he told Curt. "We shall have a last dinner in my home before we leave it forever."

  IT WAS a silent, bitterly nostalgic meal in the lovely bubble mansion, shared by the four Futuremen and Darmur and Lureen. The girl, with true Katainian courage, served the others as calmly as though it were no unusual night.

  "There will be dancing tonight in the pleasure palace by the spaceport," she said to Curt. "We wish to leave our world gayly, gallantly, not with tears."

  Vavona was a deserted city as they made their way to the spaceport through the shrieking storm. Jupiter was hidden from sight by the swirling tempest, but the ground rolled uneasily beneath their feet.

  On the lightning-washed spaceport, loaded ships were roaring away and empty ones landing. The last thousands of the Katainians were being taken to Yugra, but those who had a few hours to wait were dancing in the big pleasure palace nearby. Curt Newton felt his heart go out to these people who were abandoning their world for a stupendous migration, yet making this courageous gesture.

  The silvery, beautiful interior of the great pleasure hall was crowded with Katainian men and girls, dancing to the lilting strings of the orchestra. They were all young, for the older people and children had been evacuated first.

  "Will you dance with me?" Lureen asked Curt, looking up at him with sober violet eyes.

  Curt felt a lump in his throat as he danced to the music with the slim Katainian girl in his arms. Louder sang the music of the strings, trying bravely to drown the crash of thunder and the roar of departing ships.

  Outside, a trumpet blast blew sharply in a signal. Some of the dancers quietly moved out of the hall, unobtrusively leaving to take their allotted places in the ships.

  "Katain, Katain!" Lureen was whispering, her eyes glimmering as they danced. "Will the System of your future day contain a world as beautiful?"

  "I think not," Curt said gravely. "I think the beauty of lost Katain will be a legend forever."

  Trumpet blasts blared across the lilting music again and more of the dancers left. And again and again came the summons, until but a few dozen of the dancers were left.

  There rang a louder trumpet signal.

  "The final call," murmured Lureen. "We go now, the last ones to leave Katain."

  The music had stopped. The Futuremen were waiting outside, Grag towering grim and mighty in the lightning flares, Otho and the Brain waiting. Darmur came up to them, his face deadly pale. The other ships were taking off.

  The time had come to abandon this world forever.

  Storm buffeted them as they struggled across the spaceport toward the Comet. Continuous sheets of lightning revealed the last ships rising into the tempest. The tarmac rolled wildly to new quakes, almost throwing them from their feet. Even over the booming of thunder could be heard the frightening grind of the shifting ground beneath.

  Hail and rain smashed Captain Future's face as he helped Lureen into the ship, but old Darmur hung back.

  "Let me be the last to leave my world," he begged.

  Curt understood and respected the wish. He got into the ship with the Futuremen and held the airlock door open, waiting. Darmur stood out there in the flaring lightning, motionless. They could not see his face. Through the storm came the crash of falling buildings.

  "Better get out of here!" Otho cried. "This world's starting to break up already."

  "Take the space-stick, Grag!" Curt shouted.

  Darmur at last came inside, his face ghastly in the lightning. Captain Future slammed the airlock door.

  "Blast off, Grag!"

  THE Comet arrowed up on a steep slant through the inferno of night and storm that now shrouded the doomed planet. They burst out of the wildly boiling atmosphere of Katain into the clear vault of space.

  Lureen cried out in horror at what they now saw. Jupiter was now a giant cloudy moon in the heavens, bulking ominously huge and near with its ten circling satellites. Katain and its moon were rushing headlong toward fatal conjunction with the monarch planet.

  The Comet raced at tremendous speed toward the little, yellow moon. When they landed on the great spaceport near the control house, they saw that the last Katainians were being marched hastily toward the entrance of the labyrinthine underground fleet crypts.

  Jhulun came running up to them, the pallor of excitement and exhaustion on his face.

  "The last of our people have been checked," he said. "They'll all be in the sleep crypts in a few minutes."

  "Look at Katain!" exclaimed Otho, staring up into the sky.

  The planet whose great shield hung over them was now an appalling sight. It was wrapped in a seething envelope of clouds that parted now and then to give a glimpse of shifting land masses, of unleashed oceans running wildly over the entire world.

  As they looked, there came a shuddering of the rock surface of Yugra under their feet. The control house in the distance swayed slightly on its massive metal piers.

  "Jupiter's exerting its pull on Yugra, — too," said Captain Future. "But since this moon has a smaller, more compact mass, it shouldn't be so badly affected."

  "If it was my moon, though, I'd get it out of here on the jump!" Grag declared earnestly.

  Darmur shook his head. "We can't, start for some hours yet. We h
ave to hurl Yugra out of its orbit at the exact point at which a tangential course will propel it in the direction of Sirius. The course has long been plotted. We must adhere to it, or face disaster when we pass Saturn on the way out of the System."

  They ascended into the big control house. Its lower levels were thronged with an excited group of Katainian men and women. These were the Councilors, technicians and other experts who had been selected to act as control crew during the long flight to Sirius.

  They met Darmur with excited babble of half fearful exclamations, pointing out the slight, shuddering quakes that were beginning to be felt on Yugra. Darmur reassured them in a firm voice.

  "All these tremors were foreseen. They will not be strong enough to harm our firing tube, or the sleep crypts. We shall be leaving before Jupiter can cause too great a disturbance on this moon."

  The Futuremen followed the old scientist, Jhulun and Lureen up into the glassite dome of the control room. Here pale, anxious technicians were watching over the massive panel that was the heart of Darmur's plan.

  As they waited, Curt and Darmur checked again the calculations on which all depended. The disturbances on Katain's sphere were clearly increasing. Lands were sinking into the wild seas, new lands rising from them.

  "That's the danger point, the planetary crust under the oceans," rasped the Brain unemotionally. "When it splits wide open and the seas pour down into the planet's molten interior —"

  "I wish it was time to go," complained Otho uneasily.

  NEVER had individual hours seemed so endless to those waiting in the control room. The shocks that quivered through Yugra were becoming dangerously stronger.

  "Almost time," Curt warned finally, eying the dials. "The first blast must be fired precisely at seven-forty-three-eighteen."

  "Recoil chairs, everyone!" called Jhulun warningly into the amplifiers. "The shock of the first blast will be heavy."

  Curt helped strap Lureen into her chair before he took his own. Darmur's seat was in front of the center of the control board. Here, amid the rheostats and switches, was a small, red button. A blinker blazed suddenly in front of him.