Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “I get it now!” Captain Future exclaimed. “The magnetic beam that holds us is projected out through the coma to make that aperture. We’ll be dragged through that hole, perhaps without touching the coma!”

  The moment was at hand as he spoke. The Comet seemed rushing headlong toward destruction in the flaring sea of electric force. One touch would destroy them as lightning might shatter a toy.

  Straight as an arrow, the Futuremen hurtled toward that aperture in the coma. They entered it and Curt and Otho cried out and shielded their eyes. The blaze of force all around the ship was blinding in intensity.

  When he uncovered his eyes, hurt perceived with a thrill of hope that they were through the coma! Their ship was inside the spherical shell of the comet’s head, was being dragged at unabated speed toward a little planet that hung at the center of this vast enclosed space.

  A world here at the heart of Halley’s Comet! A little world that was the solid nucleus of this vast, mysterious wanderer of the void!

  “We’re through — we’re in the comet!” Otho yelled hopefully. Then, remembering something he added hastily to Crag: “I hope you don’t think I meant it when I said you were a better man than I. I was just handing you another rib, you poor metal imitation of a man!”

  “The same goes for me!” Grag bellowed angrily at the android. “I was just hoping to make death easier for you, when I told you what a swell guy you were — you offspring of a smelly retortful of chemicals!”

  CURT ignored the verbal combatants. Simon the magnetic beam comes from that little world! That means Joan and Ezra must have been dragged here in the same way!” he said excitedly. “If they’re on that world —”

  “We’ll never know if they are!” Otho groaned suddenly. “We’re going to be smashed to flinders when we hit that planet at this speed!”

  Curt, too, had realized their peril. It seemed they had miraculously escaped the coma, only to meet an equally frightful end. Their velocity was suicidal as they plunged toward the mysterious planet.

  The planet that poised here at the heart of the great comet was a small green world, blanketed by thick forests. It was drenched in the brilliant, unearthly glare of the glowing coma that completely surrounded it.

  At one point upon this small green world, there was a star-shaped white city. And they were being dragged straight down toward that city, whose alabaster domes and towers and streets rushed up toward them with fearful speed.

  Captain Future, nerving himself for the inevitable crash that meant annihilation, felt a sudden deceleration of their flashing fall. So sharp and swift was that slowdown that even through the cushioning stasis of force which protected them, they felt again a blurring of their senses.

  “They don’t want us to crash!” choked Curt. “Whoever’s operating that magnetic beam wants us to land in one piece —”

  “Chief, look at that!” Otho yelled, pointing unsteadily down.

  In the fiercely flaring light of the coma, the strange white comet-city lay close beneath their falling ship.

  Curt glimpsed a round court of spaceport size near the center of the ivory metropolis.

  It was toward that court that the ship was falling. The court was several thousand feet in diameter, ringed by white towers crowned with massive copper electrodes. At the center of the round court was a circular, silvery disk five hundred feet across. Around the disk rested scores of spaceships of familiar appearance.

  “That disk is the magnet that’s pulling us down!” Curt deduced. “I see people down there.”

  “Here comes the crash!” Grag shouted.

  It was not really a crash, their impact against the silvery magnet-disk. It was a jarring contest that shook them violently. But so greatly had their speed been decelerated in the last moments that the ship was not shattered.

  An instant after they came to rest, Curt and Otho were picking themselves up. Grag and the Brain were pinned helplessly now on the floor.

  “Help me get loose, chief!” the robot bellowed. “That cursed magnetic force is holding me —”

  He was suddenly interrupted by a sound of hammering and prying outside the Comet’s airlock door.

  “They’re forcing into the ship, whoever they are!” Otho cried His slant green eyes flared. “We’ve got a fight on our hands. These cursed comet pirates can’t kidnap us like this!”

  Curt and Otho jumped to pick up their proton pistols. But the weapons were pinned against the floor by the powerful magnetism beneath.

  The airlock of the ship burst open with a crash and a half dozen men charged into the cabin.

  “Holy sun-imps!” screeched Otho. “They’re devils of the comet!”

  EVEN Captain Future was for a moment petrified by stupefaction. These comet men who had entered did indeed seem utterly unearthly.

  They were tall, fair-haired fellows who wore sleeveless shirts and shorts of silvery cloth. They also wore long swords at their belts, and two of them carried gunlike weapons with electrodes instead of barrels.

  But these men glowed with dazzling light! From every inch of their bodies, from their hair, their faces, their arms and legs streamed a halo of brilliance that was like the corona of the awful coma itself.

  “They’re men, even though they do shine with light!” Curt cried. “Clear them out of the ship! If we can wreck that magnet —”

  He was plunging forward as he spoke, his fists flying toward the weird, shining invaders. Then as his fist hit one of the glowing comet men, Curt Newton felt a paralyzing electric shock along his arm.

  His body stiffened in agony. He realized it was not merely light that glowed from these shining men, but electric force. These were electrically charged human beings! The body of each was invested with an electric potential that should have been enough to kill them.

  “Get back — don’t touch them!” Curt yelled a warning to Otho.

  As he shouted, one of the shining electric men extended a hand and touched Curt’s head. The full electric shock stabbed to Captain Future’s brain, and he was plunged into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 4: The Cometae

  CURT NEWTON’S returning consciousness made him aware, first of all, of a strange, tingling sensation through his whole body. He felt as though he were lying beneath a super-powerful generator that was flooding every fiber of his being with electric force. “He is coming around now, Grag,” a familiar, metallic voice was rasping. “So stop your worrying.”

  Curt forced his eyes open. Grag and Otho and the Brain were hovering anxiously over him. The pets, Oog and Eek cowered close by.

  He lay on the floor of a small, cell-like room of white synthestone. There was a single heavy metal door, and a high, tiny window through which flooded a brilliant white light.

  “Simon, what happened in the ship after I passed out?” Curt cried.

  “I know what happened to me!” Otho burst out furiously. “One of those cursed shining men grabbed me the same as you, and I felt a shock that knocked me silly. I woke up here just a few minutes ago.”

  “And we couldn’t help you,” Grag boomed angrily. “Simon and I were pinned against the ship’s floor by that devilish magnetism from beneath.”

  “That is the truth, lad,” the Brain told Curt. “After stunning you and Otho, the shining men secured Grag and me with chains. Then they turned off the magnetism outside, and dragged all four of us, even the two pets, to this prison.”

  “Did you see anything of Joan Randall as we were brought here?” Captain Future demanded anxiously.

  “No, lad,” murmured the Brain. “She may be imprisoned like us somewhere in this cursed city.”

  Curt strode with nervous quickness! to the window. He drew himself up to it and stared out at the amazing city.

  Graceful alabaster buildings of white synthestone, crowned by bubblelike domes and slender towers, rose in his field of vision. He was looking across the great central plaza of the magnet-disk He could make out his own ship and other captured ships parked ou
t there. On the other side of the plaza bulked a large white palace with one huge, looming dome.

  Curt saw that in the white streets and green gardens moved many of the natives of this comet world, afoot and in six-wheeled power vehicles. They were all fair-haired folk, beautiful women, stalwart men. And all of them glowed with that dazzling, uncanny radiance of electric force. They seemed like angels of light inhabiting some strange celestial metropolis.

  Down upon the alabaster city poured a flood of white brilliance from the sky. For the sky of this comet world was the flaring aura of the comet’s nucleus. Completely enclosing this hidden world, this nebulous coma arched across the heavens like a firmament of scintillating white fire.

  “Who’d have dreamed that all this existed inside Halley’s comet?” muttered Otho, peering out with awe from over Curt’s shoulder.

  Curt’s gray eyes narrowed.

  “These comet folk are enemies of our System. They must be, or they wouldn’t have devised that great electromagnet which sucks distant ships in here by means of its beam.”

  “But what are these people?” Grag demanded puzzledly. “They shine just as though they were highly charged with electricity.”

  “By all the imps of Uranus!” Otho swore. “If you’d have touched one of them, you’d know that they really are electrically charged!”

  Curt Newton nodded quickly.

  “There’s no doubt about it. All these people possess physically an electric charge that should destroy them — but doesn’t. Simon, what do you make of it?”

  “It is strange,” muttered the Brain. “Yet life is electrical in nature. Even back in the twentieth century, Crile showed that the living cells of a body are tiny batteries which produce the electrical current we call life.”

  “Theoretically, all life may be electrical. But nobody ever saw electric people like these before,” objected Otho. “And why did they drag our ship in here? What are they going to do with us?”

  “More important what have they done with Joan and Ezra?” Curt interrupted. His eyes flashed. “If they’ve harmed her —”

  “I hear a tapping in the wall,” Grag suddenly announced.

  THEY listened. But they heard nothing for a moment. Then footsteps outside their cell door became audible.

  “That must be what you heard,” muttered Otho. “Our keepers coming.”

  A little panel in the bottom of the locked door was suddenly opened, and something was pushed through. Then the opening was closed.

  Their captors had left them two things — a bowl of synthetic-looking mush obviously intended as their rations, and a book. The book was a queer one. Its leaves were of thin, silvery metal. Upon them were pictures of objects and actions, and under each picture an unfamiliar word.

  “Why, it’s an elementary textbook of their language,” Curt said puzzledly. “Maybe they’re not really hostile to us at all.”

  “Maybe that shock they gave me was all in fun,” Otho retorted bitterly.

  “I hear that tapping in the wall again,” Crag interrupted.

  “That tapping is inside your skull, bucket-head,” Otho told the robot impatiently. “Four mechanical brain has stripped a gear, probably.”

  Crag, always sensitive to mention of his mechanical nature, flared up.

  “Why, you miserable little mess of chemicals —”

  “Shut up!” Captain Future ordered them sharply. “I hear that tapping, too. It’s an interplanetary code. Listen!”

  The sound came faint from one wall of their cell.

  “SQ?” it spelled out in the System’s universal code.

  “SQ — who’s there?” Curt translated. His eyes lit. “There are other prisoners in here with us. Maybe it’s Joan!”

  Hastily he rapped in answer, stating his identity and finishing with the same inquiring signal.

  The answer came quickly.

  “Are you new prisoners really the famous Futuremen? I am Tiko Thrin, a scientist of the Syrtis Laboratories of Mars. I’m sorry that you are also captives of the Cometae.

  “The Cometae? Is that what you call these comet folk?” asked Curt.

  “It is what they call themselves,” tapped Tiko Thrin. “I have learned their language and many facts about them, for I have been here ever since the space-liner on which I was traveling was dragged into the comet.”

  “Have you any knowledge of other prisoners here?”

  Curt rapped anxiously. “Especially Marshal Ezra Gurney and a girl, Joan Randall.”

  “Both of them are here in this city of Mloon,” came the quick reply. “I heard them brought in, many days ago. Ezra Gurney is still a prisoner in this place. I have talked with him many times in code. Prisoners in the other cells relay our signals from cell to cell.”

  “Ask him if he and Joan are all right,” Curt directed quickly.

  He waited with fast-beating heart for the answer, feeling a new hope. But when Tiko Thrin’s report came, it brought dismaying information.

  “Ezra is overjoyed that you Futuremen are here. He says he is all right but is worried about the girl. She is not here in prison, he says, but is somewhere in the city.”

  “Ask him what happened to her,” Captain Future bade the Martian anxiously.

  Again minutes dragged by before the relayed answer came.

  “He says that he and Joan were taken before the rulers of the Cometae, King Thoryx and Queen Lulain. They were asked to join the Cometae. Ezra refused and was brought back here. But the girl was not brought back.”

  CURT’S anxiety increased. Tiko Thrin tapped on. All prisoners brought here are first given a chance to learn the language and then are asked to join the Cometae. Those who refuse are brought back here, as I was. We are kept locked up until the solitary confinement makes us change our minds. Many prisoners have weakened and surrendered. Perhaps the girl was among them.”

  “If they’re hostile to the System, Joan wouldn’t join them under any circumstances!” Curt tapped back. “She may be trying to deceive them. Tell me, what are these Cometae planning that they need recruits?”

  “I do not know,” came Tiko Thrin’s answer. “It is obvious that the Cometae are preparing some important venture, but I have no idea what it is. They are only obeying the orders of the Alius in what they do.”

  “The Alius? Who are they?”

  “That, too, I don’t know,” the Martian replied. “I only know that the Alius are the real masters of this strange comet-world, and that these Cometae regard them with a respect and awe verging on dread.”

  “Are the Alius men? What do they look like?” Curt demanded.

  “None of us prisoners has ever seen any Alius,” Tiko Thrin tapped back. “The Alius never come to this city of the Cometae, but inhabit some mysterious place in the north. The Cometae speak always of the Alius as ‘the dark masters’ or as ‘they from beyond the veil.’ ”

  “Devil take all these mysteries!” Otho exclaimed violently. “What I want to know is — how are we going to get out of here?”

  When Curt tapped that question, Tiko Thrin’s reply was flatly discouraging.

  “I fear that even you Futuremen cannot escape this place. You will be confined until you learn the language of the Cometae. Then you will be taken to the rulers.”

  The Martian added a warning.

  “Do not attempt any rash attack upon the Cometae. They have very powerful weapons, as well as the protective charge of electricity which keeps their bodies immortal.”

  Immortal Curt repeated. “You mean that these electric folk are deathless?”

  “Yes. The Cometae cannot die unless they should leave this comet. Then they would perish for lack of the electric radiation that is their food.”

  “These Cometae live on electricity?” Curt tapped incredulously.

  “They do,” replied the Martian. “As you no doubt know, life itself is essentially electrical. We get our vital electricity from the chemical batteries of our body cells. When the cells wear out and can no
longer produce the vital electric current, we age and die.

  “But the cells of the Cometae have somehow been so altered that they do not produce this all-important energy but simply receive it from the coma’s electric radiation — the same radiation you doubtless feel tingling through your bodies now.

  “Thus the Cometae do not need to eat or drink, for their cells absorb their vital energy from the coma’s electric radiance. Because of that, they cannot age and cannot die — unless killed by accident.”

  “This is very interesting,” the Brain declared absorbedly. He had Curt tap a further question to the Martian. “Were the Cometae always like this, or were they once ordinary human people?”

  “I am sure, according to what is passed along the prison ‘grapevine,’ that until a few years ago they were ordinary humans,” replied the Martian scientist. “It is said that only a few years ago, the Alius changed them from normal people into undying electric men.”

  “Whoever these mysterious Alius are, they must wield incredible scientific power if they can accomplish a feat like that!” said Otho startledly.

  THE exchange of messages was interrupted by a deep vibration of sound that traveled through the window. It sounded like the note of a great bell.

  “It means that ‘night’ has come,” tapped Tiko Thrin in answer to Curt’s question. “There is no real night upon this world, of course, but the Cometae have a period of sleep which they all observe.”

  The activity in the city outside lessened. Soon but few of the shining electric folk were to be seen in the streets.

  Next “morning” the small panel in the door of the Futuremen’s cell was again opened and another ration of synthetic food thrust in to them. One of the Cometae guards spoke to them through the door, asking what seemed to be a question in his unfamiliar language. Receiving no answer, the guard went on.

  For three “days” the guard followed the same procedure. Curt spent nearly all of the time in intensive study of the Cometae language. He assumed from Tiko Thrin’s information that when they could speak the language, they would be taken before the rulers of these strange comet folk.