Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation (May 1951)

by Edmond Hamilton

“Shut up,” Curt Newton told him. He looked, puzzled, at Simon. “No criminal did this — no ordinary criminal. The job of blanking these relays required tremendous scientific ability.”

  Simon brooded, hovering. “That’s obvious. Only an expert in sub-electronics would be capable. But that seems incongruous. Why would a top scientist come prowling in here like a common thief?”

  Curt turned. “Grag, will you see if anything else has been moved or taken?”

  The metal giant started stalking through the rooms. Curt remained silent and thoughtful, the frown on his tanned face deepening.

  Grag came back. “No. Nothing else has been tampered with.”

  “Yet it was,” Curt said slowly. He looked again at Simon. “I’ve been thinking. An expert in sub-electronics... Do you remember the nuclear physics man down at New York Tech whom we met at Government Center a few months ago?”

  “Garris? Garrand — some name like that? I remember. A nice little man.”

  “Yes, I thought so too — very eager about his work. But I remember now he asked me a question —”

  CURT broke off suddenly. He went rapidly across the big room, unlocked the vault door and inside the silent lunar cavern he went straight to the files.

  Simon had followed him. And when Simon saw the spool that Curt drew from the file his lens-eyes turned to Curt’s face with a startled swiftness.

  “Curtis, no! You don’t think —”

  “It was what he asked me about,” Curt said. “The Birthplace.”

  The word went echoing solemnly back and forth around the cold rock walls. And Curt stared at Simon, not really seeing him, seeing uncanny awesome things that lived in memory, and a strange look came into his face — a strange look indeed for the man Curt Newton. A look of fear.

  Simon said, “How could he know of the Birthplace?”

  That word had never been spoken to anyone. They hardly spoke it even among themselves. Such a secret was not for the knowledge nor the use of men and they had guarded it more carefully than the sum total of all other knowledge they possessed. Now the very sound of that name brought Grag and Otho to the door and wrought a sudden tension that filled the cavern with a waiting stillness.

  Curt said heavily, “He connected the theoretical possibility with the work we did on Mercury. He’s a brilliant man, Simon — too brilliant.”

  “Perhaps,” said Grag, “he only looked for the secret and couldn’t find it. After all, our filing system...”

  Curt shook his head. “If he could get in here he could find what he wanted.” He examined the spool. “He could make a copy of this and there would be no way of telling that it had been done.”

  He stood motionless for a moment longer and no one spoke. Otho studied his face and shot one quick bright glance at Simon. Simon moved uneasily on his gliding force-beams.

  Curt replaced the spool and turned. “We’ve got to find out about this man. We’ll go to New York, at once.”

  Very soon thereafter the Comet rose from the dark gap of the hangar-mouth and shot away toward the great green globe of Earth.

  Not much later, at headquarters of the Planet Police in New York, old marshal Ezra Gurney stared at Curt Newton in blank amazement.

  “Garrand?” he said. “But he’s a reputable man, a scientist!”

  “Nevertheless,” said Curt grimly, “I want all the information you can get and fast.”

  Simon spoke. “This is urgent, Ezra. We cannot afford delay.”

  The grizzled old spaceman glanced from one to the other, and then to Otho. “Something really bad, eh? All right, I’ll do what I can.”

  He went out of the office. Otho leaned against the wall and remained motionless, watching Curt. Simon hovered near the desk. Neither one of them was afflicted with nerves. Curt moved restlessly about, brooding, his hands touching things and putting them down again in wire-taut gestures. The intricate multichron on the wall whirred softly and the minutes slid away, on Earth, on Mars, on the far-flung worlds of the System. No one spoke and Ezra did not come back.

  Simon said at last, “It would take time, even for Ezra.”

  “Time!” said Curt. “If Garrand has the secret we have no time.”

  He paced the small neat room, a man oppressed with heavy thoughts. The sound of the door opening brought him whirling around to face Ezra almost as though he were facing his executioner.

  “Well?”

  “Garrand took off from Earth on the twenty-first,” said Ezra. “He flew a ship of his own, apparently an experimental model on which he has been working for some time in company with a man named Herrick, who is also listed as chief pilot. Destination, none. Purpose, cosmic ray research beyond the System. Because of Garrand’s reputation and standing there was no difficulty about the clearance. That was all I could get.”

  “That’s enough,” said Curt. “More than enough.” His face was bleak and the color had gone out of it under the tan. He looked very tired and in a way so strange that Ezra came up to him and demanded, “What is it, Curt? What did Garrand take from the laboratory?”

  Curt answered, “He took the secret of the Birthplace of Matter.”

  Ezra stared, uncomprehending. “Is that a secret you can tell me?”

  CURT said hopelessly, “I can tell you now. For it’s known now to Garrand and this other man.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Ezra, it is the secret of creation.” There was a long silence. It was obvious from Gurney’s face that the term was too large for him to understand. Yet Curt Newton did not continue as yet. He looked beyond them and his face was drawn and haggard.

  “We’ll have to go back there,” he said, his voice low. “We’ll have to. And I hoped never to go back.”

  Simon’s expressionless eyes were fixed on him. Otho said loudly, “What’s there to be afraid of? We ran the whirls before. And as for Garrand and the other one...”

  “I am not afraid of them!” Curt Newton said.

  “I know,” said Simon. “I was the only one who was with you in the shrine of the Watchers there. I know what you are afraid of — yourself.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Ezra said. “The secret of creation? Creation of what?”

  “Of the universe, Ezra. Of all the matter in the universe.”

  A strange wonder came on Gurney’s timeworn face. He said nothing. He waited.

  “You remember,” Curt told him, “when we came back from our first deep-space voyage? You remember that right after that we designed the electron-assembly plants that they’ve used ever since to replenish Mercury’s thinning atmosphere? Where do you think we got the knowledge to do that, to juggle electrons into desired types of matter on a big scale?”

  Gurney’s voice was a whisper now. “You got that knowledge out in deep space?”

  “In deep, deep space, Ezra. Near the center of our galaxy, amid the thick star-clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius. There lies the beating heart of our universe.”

  He made a gesture. “Back in the Twentieth Century the scientist Millikan first guessed the truth. The matter of the universe constantly melts away into radiation. Millikan believed that somewhere in the universe was a place where radiation was somehow built back into matter and that the so-called cosmic rays were the ‘birth-cry’ of the newborn matter. The fount of our material universe, the birthplace of material creation.”

  Awe was in Ezra’s faded old eyes. “And you found that? And never told — never let anyone guess —”

  “Garrand guessed,” Curt said bitterly. “He connected our work at Mercury with our mysterious voyage. He tried to learn what I knew and when I would tell him nothing he came to the Moon and risked death to steal our records. And now he’s gone to find it for himself.”

  Simon Wright said somberly, “He will only reap disaster if he tries to take it. I saw what almost happened there to you, Curtis.”

  “It’s my fault,” Curt said harshly. “We should have left no record. But I could not quite destroy it.
” He paused, then went on rapidly. “We’ve got to overtake him. What the other man, Herrick, may have in mind we can’t tell. But Garrand is a fanatical researcher, who will tamper with the instruments of the Watchers as I did. He won’t stop where I stopped!”

  Ezra jumped to his feet. “I can have cruisers after him in an hour.”

  “They couldn’t catch him now, Ezra. The Comet might. We’ll have to make certain preparations and they’ll take time. But even so we may catch him.”

  He turned, moving swiftly toward the door as though physical action were a relief from overpowering tension. Ezra stopped him. “Curt, wait! Let me go with you. I should, you know, if it’s a case of catching a lawbreaker.”

  Newton looked at him. “No, Ezra. You’re only trapped by the lure of this thing as I was. As I was... No.”

  Simon’s metallic voice intervened. “Let him go with us, Curtis. I think we might need him — that you might need him.”

  A look passed between them. Then, silently, Curt nodded.

  Back to the Moon, with five instead of four, went the Comet on wings of flame. In the hours that followed, the closed hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint of the desperate rushed activity beneath.

  But less than twenty-four hours after its return from Uranus the ship left the Moon a second time. It went out through the planetary orbits like a flying prisoner breaking out through bars, poised for a moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new kind of motion, then was gone into the outer darkness.

  Chapter 3: The Birthplace

  THE Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny gleam of man-made light falling into infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to the eye seemed crowded thick with burning Suns and nebulae.

  The five within the ship where silent. Four were busy with the memories they had of the time they had come this way before, with the knowledge of what was still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney, could find no words to speak. He was a veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran when Curt Newton was born. He knew the Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and back again and he knew how the naked undimmed stars could shine.

  But this was different — this voyaging of deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets and navies of the stars to their own harbor, this going in among them. In a way Ezra Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt Newton, could look at that flaming sky ahead and not be a little afraid.

  The Comet had come into the region of the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across space and time, carrying after them sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between and beyond the clusters and their trailing star-streams shone the glowing clouds of nebulae, banners of light flung out for a million miles across the firmament, ablaze with the glow of drowned and captured Suns. And beyond them all — the nebulae, the clusters and the stars — there showed the black brooding lightless immensity of a cloud of cosmic dust.

  The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within him. Men had no business here in this battleground of angry gods. Men? But was he here with men?

  “One-point-four degrees zenith,” came the metallic voice of Simon Wright from where he hovered above a bulky instrument.

  “Check,” Curt Newton said and moved controls slightly. Then he asked, “Dust?”

  “Definitely higher than average interstellar density now,” Otho reported, from his own place at the wide instrument panel. “It’ll thicken fast as we approach the main cloud.”

  Ezra looked at them — at the square, hovering metal case of the living brain, at the lithe eager android peering forward into the abyss with burning green eyes, at the giant imperturbable metal bulk of the robot.

  Not men, no! He was out here in the great deeps, rushing toward the mightiest secret of infinity, with creatures unhuman, with —

  Curt turned, and smiled briefly and wearily at him. And the clamoring panic in Ezra was suddenly gone. Why, these were his oldest staunchest friends, unshakably loyal and true.

  He drew a long breath. “I don’t mind telling you that it’s nearly got me down.”

  “You’ve got worse coming,” Curt said uncomfortingly. “We’ll hit the main cloud soon.”

  “The cloud?”

  “The great cloud of cosmic dust that surrounds the Birthplace. That dust is born from the Birthplace — and flows out in mighty tides through our whole universe.”

  “To be born into new worlds?”

  “Yes. Weizsacker fathomed that part of the cycle, long ago in the nineteen forties when he formulated his theory of the gathering of the cosmic dust into new planets.”

  Before them now rose a wall of Suns, glaring like cyclopean furnaces as the Comet seemingly crawled toward them. Almost it seemed that they could hear the clang and thunder of cosmic forges as their tiny craft approached and went between the flaming giants.

  White and wild flared a far-flung nebula to the left beyond that rampart of stars. But ahead there gloomed farther still the black cloud that now seemed eating up the universe with jaws of darkness as they steadily approached it.

  “No sign of any other ship outside the cloud,” Otho reported coolly. “Our detectors won’t range inside it, of course.”

  “They had too big a start,” Curt said broodingly. “Too many days. Garrand and the other must already have been on the world of the Watchers for some time.”

  “Unless the whirls wrecked them,” Otho suggested.

  “Wishful thinking,” Curt said. “We ran the whirls and so could they.”

  Simon said, “Curtis, you will not go into the shrine of the Watchers again?”

  Curt Newton did not look at him. “I’ll have to if that’s where Garrand is.”

  “You don’t have to, Curtis. We three could go.”

  NOW, Curt looked at Simon, his tanned face set and unreadable. “You don’t trust me with the power of the Watchers?”

  “You know what that power almost did to you before. It is for you to say.”

  Curt looked ahead and said doggedly, “I am not afraid and I will go in there after him.”

  Ezra Gurney, puzzled by the tension between them, asked, “Who are the Watchers?”

  “They have been dead for ages,” Curt said slowly. “But long ago they penetrated the Birthplace and conquered its secret and set up instruments to wield its powers. It’s why we have come. Garrand must not use those instruments.”

  “Nobody must use them,” said Simon.

  Curt said nothing to that.

  Gurney, looking ahead, saw the black cloud widening out across the starry universe like a great tide of doom, steadily blotting out the stars. A fitting cosmic shroud for the greatest of cosmic secrets, he thought. Its fringes engulfed bright stars that shone wanly through the dimness like dying eyes.

  “This dust,” said Simon, “is newborn matter, spawned by the Birthplace and pumped outward by pressure of radiation to flow out to the whole universe.”

  “And the — the secret itself — is inside?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no moment when the Comet plunged suddenly within the cloud. Rather the dust thickened steadily until all about the flying ship was a deepening haze, deepest and darkest ahead but drawing more and more veils behind them so that the stars back there shone like smothered witch-fires.

  The ship began to tremble as it encountered flowing spatial currents of denser dust. Struts and girders protested with slight creakings and then more loudly. They strapped into the recoil-chairs at Curt’s orders.

  “Here it comes,” said Grag in loud complaint. “I remember last time almost every bone in my body was broken.”

  Otho laughed. He started a caustic retort but had no time to voice it.

  To Gurney the Comet seemed suddenly to have crashed. The tell-tales on the panel went crazy and the recoil-chairs screamed in outrage as the ship was batted through the haze by unseen giant hands.<
br />
  There was nothing they could do but hang on. There was nothing even for Curt to do. The automatic pilot and stabilizers had to do it all now or they were finished.

  The mechanisms functioned staunchly. Again and again they snatched the buffeted little ship out of raging eddies of dust-currents and hurled it forward again. Now the whole hull was creaking and groaning from constantly changing stresses and the hiss of dust against its plates became a rising and falling roar.

  Ezra Gurney felt a quaking dread. He had already seen too much, had come too far. Now he felt that a universe become sentient and hostile was wrathfully repelling them from its hidden heart, from its supreme secret.

  The Comet fought forward, relentlessly impelled by its own mechanical brains, until the dust began to thin. It tore onward, still buffeted by swirling currents and drenched by radiation. And now, ahead, Ezra saw a vast hazy space inside the denser blackness of the cloud. And far away in this inner space, looming in vague gigantic splendor...

  “Good God!” said Ezra Gurney and it was a prayer. “Then that — that...”

  Curt Newton’s eyes were alight with a strange glow. “Yes — the Birthplace.”

  The hazy space within the denser cloud was vast. And at its center bulked and gleamed and shifted an enigmatic glory — a colossal spinning spiral of white radiance. Its whirling arms spanned millions of miles and it uttered cosmic lightnings of radiation that lanced out through the haze.

  Beating heart of the universe, fiery womb that spawned the stuff of worlds, awesome epicenter of cosmos! Cloaked and shrouded by the dense black cloud of its own making, safe behind its ramparts of terrible whirlpools and the wild tide-runs of untamed matter fresh from creation, it flamed across its millions of miles of space, shaped like a spiral nebula, spinning, whirling, sending forth its seed to the farthest corners of the galaxy.

  And to Ezra Gurney, cowering in his seat and staring at that far-off misty glory, it seemed that the eyes of men were not meant to see nor their minds to comprehend this shining Birthplace. “Surely,” he whispered, “surely we’re not going into that!”