Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942)

by Edmond Hamilton

  He suddenly remembered a phrase that Zarn had used. “The black Citadel of the Alius.”

  He was in that citadel now! The truth crashed home to Curt’s mind in staggering shock.

  Icy certainty possessed his mind. Thoryx and Querdel and the other Cometae rulers were but pawns of the Alius. The fact that he had been a ringleader of the revolt, added to the strangeness of his three unhuman comrades, had apparently made the Alius think him dangerous. They had therefore had him brought here.

  So Curt Newton reasoned swiftly. And his reaction to the situation was characteristic. A grim, bleak look entered his gray eyes. His tanned face set in a fighting expression.

  “So — I’m up against the real masters now,” he muttered. “At least, I ought to find out what they’re planning.”

  The Alius, the mysterious lords of whom all the Cometae spoke with such shuddering dread — yet whom none could describe! What was the core of truth in the fearful stories that he had heard from Zarn and the others, Curt wondered.

  Was it true that the Alius came from outside the cosmos? Did he, Curt Newton, stand now inside the unimaginable stronghold of beings utterly alien to the universe? He still could not completely believe that. His scientist’s mind rejected the possibility that the matter of one universe could ever exist under the physical laws of a totally strange cosmos.

  Above all, what was the Alius’ purpose? Whoever or whatever they were, why had they made of the Cometae deathless electric slaves? What unimaginable scheme of extra-cosmic or non-human minds was being hatched on this weird world inside Halley’s comet?

  “They can’t plan just to kill me out of hand,” Captain Future reasoned. “They could have had their Cometae underlings do that without delay, once I was senseless. What do they want of me?”

  HE TURNED his attention to the door that led into the brightly lighted hallway. It was not a real door at all, but just an opening. There was no gate or barrier of any kind.

  But Captain Future was not so naive as to believe he had been left completely unguarded. Examining the opening closely before venturing through, his keen eyes detected a faint, dark haze across it.

  “That might be a barrier of some sort,” he muttered. “I’ll soon know.”

  He thrust his hand swiftly in and out of the haze in the doorway. Nothing happened. He felt no new sensation.

  Doubtfully he started to walk through the opening into the hallway. But the moment his figure entered the haze, Curt suddenly changed his mind about leaving the room.

  “No, I don’t want to go out in that hall,” he thought sharply. “I don’t want to, at all!”

  And he stepped quickly back into the room. Then a feeling of bewilderment overcame him.

  “Why the devil didn’t I go on through? Why did I change my mind? Of course I want to get out of here.”

  Again he started through the door. But again the moment he was halfway through he changed his mind and came back.

  He couldn’t understand it. Was it some strange, warning instinct at work?

  Nonsense! Curt uttered a low exclamation.

  “What a fool I am! That’s the barrier! A mental barrier!”

  He understood now. That dark haze was a curtain of hypnotic force across the opening. Incredible mastery of mental science had devised that intangible curtain to affect the minds of anyone who attempted entry. That person would become mesmerized with the powerful conviction that he did not want to go through the door.

  Curt’s respect for the mysterious Alius went up several notches. Creatures who could invent and utilize such subtle powers knew more about mental currents than anyone alive.

  “Why lock up your prisoners, when you can simply make them want to stay in their cells?” he reasoned. “Clever, simple and economical.”

  Calmly Curt went back to his couch and sat down. He was trying, in his clear-minded way, to assemble from his scanty facts about the Alius a working hypothesis concerning them.

  But there was not yet enough data.

  Curt felt that there would be facts in plenty before long, and that they would be highly unpleasant. But he doubted whether he would ever live long enough to make use of them.

  “No doubts!” Captain Future reprimanded himself fiercely. “If you’re dealing with creatures who use mental force as their chief weapon, doubt and fear would be fatal.”

  He sat there, letting his mind rove back to Joan Randall. He remembered her with vivid clearness as she had parted from him in that frantic last minute at the prison, on the eve of the revolt.

  Horror and rage shook Curt again as he remembered the unearthly, terrible beauty of Joan’s altered form. He swore again that he would somehow win clear and find the means to restore the girl to normality.

  Somewhere here in the Alius’ citadel, he knew, was where it had been done — the metamorphosis of Joan into a Cometae. Here, too, all the other Cometae had been changed into electric beings. If he had only a single hope of finding out how the Alius had done it, of correlating his and Simon’s and Tiko Thrin’s researches to undo the process —

  CURT NEWTON suddenly became aware that the dark haze in the doorway had disappeared. He was on his feet in an instant, striding toward the opening. He stepped through the door, half expecting that queer mental compulsion to operate again and force him back.

  But this time, nothing happened. He strode through the opening without hindrance, to find himself in a long, lighted hallway.

  Captain Future smiled grimly.

  “They turned off that barrier of mental force by remote control. Which means they want me to come out.”

  He shrugged coolly.

  “All right, gentlemen — I’ll play.”

  He was near the end of the long hall now. It was a passageway with dead-black synthestone walls and floor, lighted by concealed sources of white brilliance. It stretched away in a broad arc, curving out of sight.

  There was only one way Curt could go — down the hall. He had not the slightest doubt that was where the Alius intended him to go. Without hesitation, he started along the curving passageway.

  He came to a doorway in the side of the hall. It was screened by an opaque curtain of dark haze. From the other side came unfamiliar rustling sounds, and now and then the clank of metal.

  Curt Newton stopped and approached the door. He wanted to see what was beyond and it. But as soon as he started through the dark, opaque haze he halted.

  He didn’t want to go through that doorway! His whole being clamored against such an action, forcing him to step hastily back into the hall. He had he knew, run into another barrier of mental force.

  Curt smiled crookedly.

  “It seems there’s just one way I can go in this rat-trap, and that’s the way they want me to go.”

  He went on along the curving passage. There were other doors in its side, but all of them were curtained by the opaque haze. He did not try to enter them, for he knew now it would be quite useless.

  Captain Future’s nerves were strung to highest pitch. There was something ghastly about these brooding black corridors, with their background of uncanny whisperings and rustlings and their emptiness of all visible life. The most hideous planetary monster he had ever met would have been almost a welcome sight in this forbidding, alien labyrinth.

  He had followed the curving hall for several hundred feet, when he came to a door in its wall which was not curtained by the dark haze. Curt stopped, staring ahead at that innocent opening.

  “So I’m supposed to go in there. But what if I choose to keep right on?”

  Then he perceived that a little further ahead, one of the hazy mental-force barriers extended across the hall. He laughed mirthlessly.

  “They leave nothing to chance, it seems.”

  Deliberately, he approached the open door. His muscles were tense for possible action, though none knew better than he the futility of physical strength against the mental masters of this weird stronghold.

  Sounds came to him from the
room or rooms beyond the door. They were louder and different sounds than the mysterious whisperings that had oppressed him. He sensed in there the presence of more than one individual.

  Captain, Future felt a terrific tension. He knew that he was at last to face the enigmatic masters of the comet world, the dreaded Alius. Well — he was ready for anything. He would not be surprised if the Alius were monsters more fearsomely alien than the weirdest inhabitants of the System’s farthest worlds.

  HE REACHED the door and stepped through it into a great, brilliant room of cruciform shape. He halted and stared frozenly at its occupants.

  “Good God!” Captain Future said huskily. He was completely overwhelmed by surprise, in spite of his expectation.

  The cruciform chamber itself was astonishing. Its four alcoves contained an array of apparatus and machines, of which even Curt Newton’s scientifically trained eyes could tell nothing.

  He did dimly recognize a big black sphere, sheathed by crawling, metallic films. This was the counterpart of the globe he had seen in Querdel’s laboratory — the transmitter-receiver of mental force through which the Alius had intervened to suppress the Cometae revolt.

  But the other apparatus was unguessable. A massive, barrel-like chamber of copper, with a myriad tiny lenses set in its floor and ceiling, proved the central attraction in a quite bewildering mass of electrical equipment. Other mechanisms were as baffling. Yet the most staggering sight of all was the half-dozen individuals at the center of the cruciform laboratory.

  “They can’t be the Alius!” Captain Future told himself numbly. “They can’t be —”

  Yet he knew they were Alius. For some of them were working leisurely over certain of the unfathomable machines, with all the attitude of mastery and authority. And the rest were staring at Curt Newton expectantly.

  These six Alius were — men! Just ordinary, normal-looking young men like himself! They were not even electric, like the Cometae. They were dark-haired, fair-skinned young men who might have come straight from Earth, and who ever wore commonplace zipper-suits very much like his own.

  One of them, a tall, likable young man with clear blue eyes, advanced a few steps toward Curt Newton. He smiled engagingly.

  “Come on in,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you. My name is Ruun, by the way. I’m sort of a leader among us Alius.”

  Curt still couldn’t believe his eyes or ears.

  “But you can’t be the Alius!” he stammered. “Why, you’re only men!”

  Ruun laughed, and the other young men chuckled.

  “That surprises you, doesn’t it? I knew it would. It surprised Querdel, here, when he first found out that we were only human.”

  The Alius leader gestured his dark head as he spoke, toward a shadow; corner. Curt saw now that the old Cometae noble stood there, his radiant electric body shining through the shadows.

  Querdel as standing in an attitude of extreme, almost cringing respect. There was an overpowering awe and fear in the old wizard’s face as he watched the Alius.

  Ruun, the young Alius leader, went on in earnest explanation.

  “You see, if the Cometae populace knew that we Alius are just ordinary men, they would never obey us. So, through Querdel and Thoryx, we put out the legend that we were strange and terrible beings from the unknown. We played on the superstitions of the Cometae in that way.”

  Curt felt a terrific reaction from his previous tension.

  “Then all that talk about your being from an alien universe was just a hoax?”

  Ruun chuckled. “That’s it,” he said. “Do we look as though we came from another universe?”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE grinned shakily. “No, you don’t. You look as though you came from my own world, Earth.”

  “Actually, we’re simply part of the Cometae race ourselves,” Ruun explained. “We’re a scientific sect who have been working in seclusion to help our people.

  We’ve made some great discoveries in electricity and mental force. We even discovered how to make our people electrically immortal — though it seems that now they’re dissatisfied even with immortality.”

  “But why did you have outside ships dragged into the comet?” Curt asked bewilderedly. “Why did you make electric Cometae of your captives?

  Ruun shrugged.

  “It was wrong to drag those ships in here, I admit. But we needed certain materials for our research that we could obtain in no other way. And we thought we were recompensing the crews of those ships, by offering them electric immortality.”

  Curt Newton felt a vast relief. The knowledge that the Alius had worked a beneficent hoax on the Cometae put everything in a new light.

  “Yet you crushed the revolt of Agar and his men —” he said uncertainly.

  “Of course. We didn’t want any more bloodshed,” Ruun told him. “If the Cometae people are dissatisfied with immortality, why, we’ll change them back to normal again. We were only trying to help them.”

  Ruun went on eagerly.

  “We had you brought up here because we think you can help us, stranger. It’s obvious that you possess great scientific knowledge. We think you may know much about things outside the comet, which we have had no chance to learn.”

  “You’ll restore to normal the girl I came here after?” Curt Newton interposed quickly.

  “Why, of course!” Ruun declared. He pointed to the massive barrel-like chamber in the alcove. “It’ll require only a reversal of that converter’s circuits to change her back to normal, if she doesn’t like being immortal.”

  Curt felt his spirits lift immeasurably. For the first time, his deep and agonized worry over Joan disappeared.

  “I’ll help you with any knowledge I have, if you’re really working for the good of the Cometae,” he said.

  “Fine!” exclaimed Ruun. He turned toward Querdel. “You can go back to Mloon, now. Try to quiet down the people there.”

  Querdel, cringing in almost ludicrous respect, bowed tremblingly and squeezed past Ruun.

  The old noble almost ran out of the chamber.

  Ruun turned brightly to Captain Future.

  “Now, stranger —”

  Abruptly Curt’s face had gone dead white. He stared at the young man and the other Alius with dilated eyes. His heart was suddenly pounding.

  He had seen something, when Querdel had brushed past Ruun, that had made him doubt his senses. He had seen Querdel’s elbow seemingly past through the solid body of Ruun!

  A ghastly knowledge dawned slowly upon Captain Future. If the old noble’s elbow had passed through Ruun’s body, it meant but one thing. It meant that Ruun wasn’t really there at all!

  True enough, he saw Ruun and the other Alius; he could hear them. They were a half-dozen ordinary young men, as solid and real as himself — to the eye.

  Ruun was gazing at him puzzledly.

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  Curt suddenly extended his hand toward the young Alius leader. He wanted to touch Ruun, to assure himself that the fellow was real, that his eyes had just played a cruel trick upon him.

  BUT Ruun recoiled swiftly from his touch. And that furnished conclusive evidence for the conviction that had formed in Curt’s shocked mind.

  “You’re not real, then!” Captain Future said thickly. “You’re not real men at all.”

  Ruun’s clean-cut face flared with anger.

  “Are you insane?”

  “Whatever you Alius are, you’re not men!” Curt went on stiffly, staring at them. “You made me think you were. Ah — that’s it! You’re masters of mental science. You hypnotized me into believing that I was talking to men like myself!”

  As that bitter enlightenment burst upon Curt Newton, a sudden and awful metamorphosis took place in Ruun and the other Alius.

  Their human-seeming bodies abruptly vanished. And Curt knew that his sudden enlightenment had broken the hypnotic spell in which they had held him — the spell that had made them seem human.

  But what w
ere these six shapes now poised before him, where Ruun and the others had stood?

  Why, they were six black, opaque shadows! But they were shadows that had a definite form. And that form was a terrible one.

  They emerged as shadows of a horrible travesty on humanity. The upright figure was that of a lithe, snaky body, with serpentine arms and legs, and a blunt, hideously ophidian head from whose face grew a mass of writhing tentacles.

  Yet these ghastly figures were not solid matter, but were living shadows like dreadful silhouettes of madness come to life. As though the darkness of outer space had spawned fearful, nebulous, unhuman children.

  “Gods of space!” choked Captain Future, staring wildly.

  He knew that he was looking at last upon the true aspect of the Alius.

  Chapter 12: Mental Duel

  CAPTAIN FUTURE had faced terrifyingly unhuman creatures on many a world in the past. In the depths of Jupiter’s mighty jungles, upon the floor of Neptune’s planetary ocean, on worlds of far-off suns, he had confronted beings far removed from humanity. Put never had he felt the impact of such horror as he felt now, facing the Alius.

  Had they been solid and real, the terror of it would have been lessened. Even such hideous serpentine creatures as their outline showed them to be, even those ghastly faces of writhing tentacles, would not have been so appalling to look upon.

  But it was the fact that they were living, moving shadows, black and monstrous silhouettes rather than tangible beings, that gave the last turn of the screw to Curt’s horror. He felt every fiber in his body and brain clamoring in frantic revulsion.

  The black silhouette of the nearest Alius, the one who had called himself Ruun, moved glidingly toward Captain Future.

  “No! Stay back!” yelled Curt, hardly aware that he was shouting.

  In an excess of mingled horror and loathing, he struck out frenziedly with his clenched fist. His fist went right through that opaque black serpentine shadow. He felt no contact with real matter.