Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Curt Newton now realized that this was their sole chance of getting out of their prison. The door was never unlocked. The Futuremen had been stripped of every tool and weapon. Simple as their prison was, it seemed inescapable.

  Otho and Grag and the Brain also picked up a working knowledge of Cometae language from the textbook, though Simon Wright spent much of his time discussing with his fellow-scientist in the next cell the mysteries of this comet world. Crag and Otho, chafing at confinement quarreled endlessly, while Oog slept peacefully and Eek gnawed contentedly on a metal bowl.

  On the third “morning,” when their guard asked his usual question, Captain Future was able to understand it.

  “Are you able to speak our language?” the guard was saying.

  “Yes, I am,” Curt replied haltingly.

  The guard exclaimed in surprise.

  “You learned very swiftly! I will call Zarn, the prison captain.”

  Presently the deep voice of that official came through the door.

  “So you can speak our tongue already?”

  “Yes, and we demand that your people give us an explanation for this enforced captivity,” Captain Future retorted.

  “You will receive your answer from King Thoryx,” replied Zarn. “But I cannot take you to him, for I have not the authority. I will notify Khinkir, captain of the king’s guard.”

  Later that day the door of the Futuremen’s cell was unexpectedly opened. Two officers of the Cometae and a half-dozen soldiers stood outside.

  All of the shining electric men of this guard wore swords at their belts. And three of them carried alertly the gunlike weapons that had copper electrodes instead of barrels. Zarn, the prison captain, was a massive, stocky, rough-looking individual. Khinkir, captain of the king’s guard, looked younger and his silver-cloth garments were more ornate.

  “Let me advise you,” Khinkir immediately warned Captain Future, “that these weapons project a concentrated electric blast that can destroy you in a split second, should you attempt any rash act. Now come with me.”

  The other three Futuremen moved forward with Curt Newton, but Khinkir hastily warned them back.

  “Not you! Only this man is to come.”

  “Why can’t my comrades come with me?” Curt demanded.

  “They are not human,” replied Khinkir, glancing somewhat nervously at the strange trio of robot and android and Brain. “We do not know what powers they may possess, and the king ordered them to be kept here.”

  OTHO showed the rage he felt at this contretemps. Otho had secretly been nursing a hare-brained plan of attacking the Cometae ruler and holding him as a hostage, though the android had been careful not to tell Curt. Now the plan was ruined, and Otho boiled with anger.

  “You do well to dread our powers!” he told the captain of the guards menacingly. “If you keep us imprisoned here, you will feel the weight of those powers! Why, my metal comrade here could tear down this place if he so desired!”

  Grag, somewhat amazed at this assertion, nevertheless backed it up with an imposing show of ferocity. He beat clangingly on his metal breast.

  “That’s right,” he growled in his deep, booming voice. “I could tear this place up like it was made of paper.”

  “And the Brain yonder,” Otho went on with his threats, “has scientific powers beyond your dreams — powers greater even than those of the Alius.”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” hissed Curt to Otho. “Let me handle this.”

  Zarn, the prison captain, had shrunk back a little from the Futuremen and so had the Cometae soldiers. But Khinkir now answered angrily.

  “No individual has powers comparable to those of the mighty ones from beyond the veil! You utter a blasphemy against the Alius!”

  He turned to the prison captain.

  “Set guards outside this door from now on, Zarn. These creatures are dangerous!”

  Curt Newton inwardly cursed the android’s foolish threats as he was conducted down the corridor. The passage ended in a guard room full of Cometae soldiery. Curt was led out of it into the open air. He blinked, half-blinded by the coma’s brilliant sky. Its electric force tingled through him strongly. Khinkir and the guards kept their weapons trained upon him alertly as they conducted him around the plaza to the looming white palace.

  The high-arched white halls of the palace were magnificent, their alabaster walls decorated by frescoes of silver. They passed into a large, circular throne room whose ceiling was the curving white dome far overhead. Facing Captain Future was a sunburst throne, a wide benchlike chair of solid silver backed by a golden disk.

  Upon it sat a man and a woman of the Cometae, two richly dressed, radiant figures who were listening now to an older man.

  “So that’s King Thoryx and Queen Lulain,” Curt thought, as he was led toward the rulers. He glanced swiftly around. “I don’t see any of the mysterious Alius.”

  Around the big throne room were knots of the Cometae nobility, handsome men and beautiful women, whose glowing electrical radiance of body deepened their strangely angelic look. But their faces were not those of angels! Curt read in many of those faces a shadowy oppression, a dim, haunting dread.

  Then Captain Future stiffened as he noticed one of the Cometae women. In her scanty silver-cloth garment, she was a figure of shining, unearthly beauty, her slim white body brilliant with glowing electric energy. But she was not fair-haired, as all the other Cometae. Her hair was dark.

  Curt Newton felt a staggering shock. He could not believe the terrible thing his eyes told him.

  “It’s impossible!” he muttered hoarsely.

  Then as he came closer to the girl, he saw that it was true. This girl of the Cometae, this weirdly shining electric figure, was none other than Joan Randall!

  Chapter 5: Shadow of the Alius

  IN THE prison cell, after Captain Future had been taken away and the door had been relocked, the Brain faced Otho condemningly.

  Simon Wright never gave way to anger. The cold, intellectual mind of the Brain abhorred useless emotion. But for that very reason, his rebuke was the more stinging.

  “You have committed a rash piece of folly,” he told Otho severely. “Your empty boasts have convinced the Cometae captains that we are dangerous. Now we shall be guarded even more closely.”

  “I lost my temper,” Otho admitted sulkily. “Anyway, what difference does it make? We couldn’t get out, anyway.”

  Presently they heard footsteps reapproaching their cell. But to the amazement of all three Futuremen, the door of the cell was unlocked. Zarn, the prison captain, stepped inside.

  Zarn held one of the electrode-barreled weapons ready for use. But the Cometae captain stood eying his charges for a moment in silence. His stocky, shining figure had an attitude of indecision, and there was an expression of mingled doubt and hope upon his massive face. Finally he spoke to the Brain.

  “Is it true, what your comrade said, that you are master of a science greater than that of the Alius?”

  Simon answered cautiously.

  “My, comrades and I possess certain scientific powers, yes. I do not know whether they are greater than those of the Alius, for I do not know anything about the Alius or their methods.”

  Zarn came a little closer and thrust out his hand. That hand, glowing, as all his body with electric energy, was trembling a little.

  “You see that I am now an electric creature, as are all my people,” Zarn said hoarsely. “It was the science of the Alius that made me like this. Could you undo what they have done?”

  “You mean, could I change you back into a normal, non-electric man?” the Brain asked surprisedly.

  Zarn nodded anxiously, his eyes clinging to the weird face of the Brain.

  “Could you?” he repeated.

  Simon sensed that much might depend upon his answer. He could not yet fathom all that as in the Cometae captain’s mind, but it was evident that his reply was of supreme importance to Zarn.

  The Brain though
t rapidly before he spoke.

  “It should be possible,” he said carefully, “to bring you back to normal by reversing whatever deep alteration has been made in your bodily cells. Our red-haired leader and I would need to study your body first, before we could say definitely.”

  A wild, haggard hope showed in Zarn’s eyes. The electric man trembled with visible emotion. His free fist clenched.

  “If you could do that!” he whispered hoarsely. “If you could free my people and me from this horrible death-in-life and make us real men and women again!”

  “You mean that you Cometae don’t like being electric men?” Otho demanded incredulously.

  “Like it?” repeated Zarn. He laughed bitterly. “Stranger, would you willingly suffer such a joyless mockery of existence? Once we were real men and women. Once we grew up through happy childhood to maturity, loved and had children of our own, grew peacefully old and passed to the quiet rest of death.

  “But now!” His voice was thick with passion. “For us there is no escape, unless we so sicken of this life that we put violent end to ourselves!”

  The somber picture Zarn painted communicated itself to his listeners.

  “I remember now that I noticed no children at all in this city,” the Brain recalled. “I should have known that this electrification of your bodies would make your whole race sterile.”

  OTHO asked Zarn a blunt question. “If your people don’t like this electric existence, why did you let yourselves be changed so?”

  “My people had no voice in the matter!” Zarn answered violently. “It was done to us without our consent. The only ones who wanted this change were the tyrants who rule us — Thoryx and Lulain, and that devil’s wizard, old Querdel. It was they who plotted this thing with the Alius.”

  “Who are the Alius, really?” the Brain asked him.

  Dread crept like a chilling shadow into Zarn’s eyes.

  “None of us Cometae except our rulers know much of the Alius. But we do know that they are in no way human, having unguessably alien forms and powers. And we know that they do not belong to this cosmos at all, but came from outside it.”

  “From outside our cosmos?” gasped Otho.

  “I tell only what I have heard,” Zarn answered. “I have never seen the Alius myself — though it was in their black citadel in the north, that I and all the rest of my people were changed into this terrible electric state.”

  “You’re talking in riddles!” Otho exclaimed. “If you were in the Alius’ citadel, if it was they who changed you, you must have seen them!”

  “No, none of our people saw them or knew how it was that they changed us,” Zarn repeated. “I know it sounds incredible, but it is so.”

  “Let him tell it in his own way, Otho,” ordered the Brain.

  Zarn continued earnestly.

  “We Cometae have lived long upon this comet world, which our pioneering ancestors reached long ago by coming in their ships through a chance rift in the coma. We were then a quite ordinary human race, and lived here as such for many ages.

  “Our government slipped into the hands of a small class of nobles which centered around the hereditary king. Yet in spite of the exploitation by this ruling class, our life was bearable.

  “Then, as though in a bad dream, the shadow of the Alius fell upon us. It came about through Querdel, an elderly noble who is one of King Thoryx’s councillors. Querdel is somewhat of a scientist, though our science may be crude and primitive compared to yours.

  “Somehow, in his devilish researches, old Querdel first got into communication with beings inhabiting a weird, alien universe that lies in the extra-dimensional gulf outside the ordinary cosmos.

  “These beings called themselves the Alius. They had, it seems, been trying for a long time to communicate with someone in our universe. For the Alius desired to enter our cosmos. They wanted to open a door into our world from the black extra-cosmic abysses in which they dwelt. And the door could not be opened from their side alone, but must be unlocked from both sides. Hence their need for someone to cooperate with them on this side.”

  Anger blazed in Zarn’s eyes.

  “They found the one they needed in old Querdel,” he said. “They made alluring promises to that old devil and to Thoryx and Lulain. They told them, We Alius have powers of which you do not dream, and will richly reward you — if you will help us open a way into your cosmos. We will reward you by making you and all your people ageless and undying. You will be like gods.

  “Thoryx and Lulain, and Querdel and our other rulers, seized the bribe the Alius offered. They coveted that promised immortality. And so, obeying the explicit mental commands of the Alius that came through the veil, they prepared to help open the door through which the dark masters could invade our universe.

  “They had us people of the Cometae build a great, ring-shaped citadel at the northern pole of our world. They had us build also certain strange mechanisms and apparatus, the purpose of which was totally unknown to any one of us. Only the Alius, who transmitted their instructions by mental messages through the veil, understood the nature of the instruments we constructed.”

  ZARN’S eyes blazed in reminiscence. “Then, eyes in that northern citadel, Thoryx and old Querdel operated the strange machines at the bidding of the dark masters. They unlocked the door into the extra-dimensional abysses that lie outside our cosmos. And through that door, the Alius somehow came into our universe, and made that citadel their home. And they kept their promise of making Thoryx and old Querdel immortal.

  “For when Thoryx and the old wizard returned to us from the citadel, they had been made into shining electric men, such as you now see. They told us then that the Alius had done that to them, that the Alius would give us all this wonderful gift of electric immortality. Every one of our people of the Cometae was to achieve deathlessness.

  “Some of my people, especially the nobles of the ruling class, were won over by this prospect. But the great majority of us were not. Even though it meant deferring death and age indefinitely, we shrank from becoming inhuman electric men such as Thoryx and Querdel. We did not wish to lose our humanity. And we were afraid of these dark, mysterious Alius from the unguessable outside, and suspicious of their purposes.

  “But we ordinary folks had no choice! Thoryx and the nobles were resolved upon making us deathless. For the Alius had promised our rulers that then they would reap great powers and eventually sway over many peoples. They of the nobles went first, one group after another, to the citadel of the Alius in the north — to return to us as electric men and women.

  “Then we of the soldiery and the people were ordered to go, group by group. We went north to that mysterious citadel which we ourselves had built for the dark masters. But before ever we entered it, a pall came upon our minds. The Alius employed that mental darkness so that none of us might learn their secrets. When the cloud lifted from our minds, we were again outside the citadel and had been made into electric men and women, such as you now see!”

  Otho uttered a low exclamation.

  “They had you all in some kind of anesthesia as they altered you!” he declared.

  “It is more probable,” the Brain said thoughtfully, “that the Alius used an artificially induced amnesia on their subjects. These so-called dark masters must be great wielders of mental force, indeed.”

  Zarn shook his massive head.

  “I do not know how it was done. Perhaps Thoryx and Querdel know. They are the only Cometae who are permitted to go freely to and from the citadel of the Alius.”

  Zarn concluded his story somberly.

  “But we know now that the Alius are alien and evil, that they are planning something dark and wicked,” he summarized. “It was they who directed Thoryx and Querdel and our other rulers to construct the great electromagnet that sucks spaceships into the comet. That electromagnet is operated by some of Querdel’s men, through a special detector apparatus that can spot any ship within millions of miles.”

&n
bsp; “Why do the Alius want ships and men from the outside brought in here as captives?” the Brain asked keenly.

  The Cometae prison captain shook his head.

  “I don’t know. None of us knows just what their unfathomable purposes are. But we are certain some involved and sinister scheme is afoot.”

  THE Futuremen glanced at each other. It was the Brain who spoke the thought that was in all their minds.

  “This is no mere menace within this comet, but a dark, threatening force from outside our cosmos that we’ve run into,” muttered Simon Wright. “I’d give a lot to know what these Alius are like — and what they plan.”

  The Brain thought hard.

  “I feel certain, Zarn, that Curtis Newton and I can devise a way of retransforming you people when we have thoroughly studied the problem,” he told the Cometae captain. “But until then, I cannot promise. We must have a chance to investigate your bodies with certain instruments.”

  “I will bring secretly everything you need, next sleep-period,” Zarn promised excitedly. “And I will contact my friends, also.”

  The Brain quickly named a list of things he would require from the Futuremen’s confiscated spaceship.

  Suddenly the prison captain started as they heard a sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor.

  “Someone is coming!” Zarn exclaimed fearfully. “If I am caught in here with you, our whole plan is ruined!”

  Chapter 6: The Throne Room

  PETRIFIED by a freezing horror, Curt Newton stood amid his guards in the throne room of the Cometae, staring with wild eyes at Joan Randall. He was stunned to his very soul, unable for the moment to believe what he saw. He had found the girl he loved, the girl whose danger had brought him on this perilous quest into the comet world. He had found her — and she was one of the Cometae!

  Joan had never looked so beautiful. Her soft, dark hair and lovely face, her lithe, utterly feminine figure so completely revealed by the scanty silver-cloth garment were brilliantly enhanced by the glow of inherent electric force, scintillating from every inch of her body and investing her with its shining halo.