Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942)

by Edmond Hamilton

  A shuddering horror threatened to dominate Curt Newton’s mind in that moment. He had suddenly realized to the full how ghastly a gulf now separated him from all ordinary humanity.

  Chapter 15: The Door to Outside

  THE distant clamor of Grag’s struggle with the Alius had died completely away by this time.

  “Chief, they must have overpowered Grag!” Otho was exclaiming frantically. “They’ll be back here in a moment!”

  The urgency of his cry penetrated through the sick spasms that still gripped Captain Future. Drunkenly he staggered across the cruciform laboratory. He grasped a heavy-metal bar he had noticed amid other tools in a corner. Then, in an unsteady run, he tottered with Otho out into the corridor.

  His body still felt utterly devoid of strength from the terrific shock he had undergone. He felt at each step that he could not make another, but always his indomitable will forced him: forward.

  His outraged, metamorphosed body clamored for rest. He told himself despairingly that even if he could manage to reach the inner court, he would not have enough strength to do what most be done to close the door. Yet blind purpose kept him stumbling forward through the corridors.

  They emerged, Curt and Otho, into the central court. A few yards in front of them loomed the blinding, crackling cataract of electric flame that walled everything inside the court. With a convulsive effort, Captain Future pitched forward into that raving torrent.

  Stunned, blinded, shocked by impact of inconceivable electric force, he came to a halt in the middle of the roaring barrier. He was standing in a raging inferno of electricity that would have destroyed an ordinary human being in the wink of an eye.

  Yet, weirdly enough, Curt Newton felt suddenly stronger. His tingling electric body was drinking in the energy that was now its food, from the flood of electrical power in which he stood. He could feel that new energy seething through every fiber of his being.

  “Chief, hurry!” Otho’s frantic cry reached his ears.

  Curt lunged on, through the wall of electricity and into the interior of the court. He stumbled straight toward the massive door.

  It was surrounded by the bulky, enigmatic pieces of apparatus which fed it unceasing power from the electric cataract. But the door itself towered up above everything else.

  It was a massive, arched copper frame, ten feet high and eight feet wide. Inset around this frame were sixteen bulging complex coils, linked by baffling complexities of wiring to the mechanisms which fed them power. Curt knew that these were the magnet coils whose intersecting fields set up the constant space-strain that held the door open.

  But it was the door itself at which Captain Future wildly stared, like a man turned to stone.

  “God!” he husked through stiff lips.

  It was not an expletive of astonishment, but a prayer. He, first of all men, was looking through a rent in the fabric of the cosmos into the outer abyss. He was looking Outside!

  The arch of the door framed darkness. But it was no darkness such as Captain Future had ever seen before. It was the murky dusk of a world whose light is too alien for human eyes ever fully to discern.

  That murky twilight shrouded a scene that no human gaze could entirely comprehend. For the world into which Curt Newton gazed was a world of the Outside, where there are four dimensions instead of three. And he, a three-dimensional creature of a tri-dimensioned universe, could not receive clear sense-impressions of such a world.

  THERE seemed to be a city in the murky dusk of that Outside universe, But its buildings were of a fantastic geometry that defied reason. Those black structures rose from slender bases and mushroomed outward like giant, angled black fungi growing upon slender stems.

  The streets of that mad city were all perfectly straight to the eye. Yet each of those streets returned upon itself to form a circle, in insane defiance of three-dimensional geometry. The perspective of the black city was that of a surrealist nightmare, for the most distant of the mushroom buildings bulked far larger to Curt’s eyes than the nearer ones.

  Most ghastly of all were the dark creatures who glided in troops and throngs through the straight-circular streets of the Outside city. Their bodily outlines were vaguely like the silhouetted shadows of the Alius whom curt encountered. There was the same blood-freezing suggestion of serpentine bodies and limbs, of faces that were masses of feelers only. But the forms of those dark citizens of the abysmal city seemed to change in outline with each movement they made. And they walked through the walls of their own city!

  Captain Future, rooted in horrible fascination by this ghastly vision into the Outside, noted then the most hideous detail of all. Through the door, into the murky dusk of the four-dimensioned city, ran the score of shadowy filaments that connected the photon-bodies of the Alius in the citadel with their real bodies in the Outside metropolis!

  “Chief, the Alius are coming!”

  Otho’s distant yell broke the trance of horror that had held Curt Newton petrified.

  He flung himself upon the magnet coils that studded the arch, endeavoring to tear loose their feed-wires. But the tough wiring resisted his stamina.

  Baffled, Captain Future lifted his heavy metal bar and thrust it with all his strength into the complex windings of the lowest magnet coil. He tore and twisted, in frantic haste, until a flash of brilliance showed that he had shorted and destroyed the coil.

  He destroyed a second coil in the same manner. And now the aperture of murky darkness in the door had grown smaller. The space-strain that held the door open was weakening!

  “Hurry, Chief! They —”

  Otho’s warning cry was suddenly cut short, at the moment that Captain Future wrecked the third coil.

  The dark opening of the door was now but a few feet in diameter! With mingled fear and frantic revulsion at the insane world beyond that opening, Curt raised his bar to hack at the fourth magnet coil.

  “Earthman, stop!”

  The mental command rang icily in his brain, and at the same moment he felt his whole mind and body frozen motionless. He made a superhuman mental effort to complete his movement, but could not control a muscle.

  The Alius had come! Their dark, monstrous photon-shapes were all about him, beating down his will and resistance with all the vast mental force they possessed.

  “Earthman, you die at once for this attempt.”

  The most awful thing was that even now, there was no trace of so human an emotion as anger in the Alius’ mental voice — nothing but icy condemnation.

  “You have tried to thwart our great work, to close the door that was so hard to open.”

  CURT knew that he was going to die with the bitter taste of failure in his mouth. If he’d had but a few moments more...

  He stood there, frozen with the heavy bar still upraised in his hands, knowing that the Alius were gathering their mental force to slay him in his tracks.

  “Curt!”

  That scream was in a girl’s voice. The radiant figure of Joan Randall had burst suddenly through the electric wall, running toward him.

  Not until later was Captain Future to know that Querdel and Thoryx had brought Joan to the citadel just as the Alius overpowered Grag. Not until then was he to learn that the sudden alarm, which had brought all the Alius to this court, had left both Grag and Joan temporarily free to act.

  To Curt, the girl’s appearance was startling as a miracle. And it was no less amazing to the Alius. The dark masters whirled toward her shining figure.

  Their startled diversion of attention: left Curt Newton free for an instant of their mental grasp. He felt strength in his body once more. And instantly he completed his arrested movement to bring his bar crashing down upon the door’s fourth magnet coil.

  The coil flashed and burned out. The shrunken, dark opening of the door instantly disappeared. The weakening of one of the intersecting magnetic fields had ended the space-strain that kept open the aperture in space.

  The door to Outside was closed. The filame
nts which connected the real bodies of the Alius with their photon-beings had been severed! The sole link between two cosmic worlds had been cut in twain.

  “Curt, look!” gasped Joan.

  The Alius’ dark, shadowy shapes still stood all around them. But now they had no movement or life. Now they were mere clouds of photons, since the minds that had animated them were forever cut off.

  Their shadow-shapes became rapidly more tenuous, more immaterial. They lost outline, drifted away and dissolved — into free photons, into nothingness.

  “Joan, we did it!” Captain Future said hoarsely. “We closed the door. And they’ll never again get anyone on this side to open it for them. They’re penned back in the Outside forever. They can never loot the power of our universe.

  From outside the flame-walled court came the triumphant, booming shout of Grag.

  “Chief, guess what happened! When the Alius came rushing here and left Joan and me free, Querdel and Thoryx tried to kill me. But they didn’t!”

  “I’ll say they didn’t!” came Otho’s spluttering, excited cry. “Chief, Grag finished off both Thoryx and Querdel!”

  “Then it’s all over,” Captain Future whispered wearily. “The Alius gone, the door closed, and the tyrants of the Cometae dead.”

  But Joan Randall stood looking up at him. There were tears on her strangely shining face as she contemplated his radiant, electric figure.

  But Curt, you are a Cometae now!” she sobbed. “Why did you do it?”

  “For the same reason that you did, Joan.”

  He stepped forward and took her in his arms. He had hungered for her all this time, tortured by the knowledge that he could not even touch her electric form.

  But now that his life and flesh were also electrified, now that he too was one of the radiant Cometae, there was nothing to prevent him. And to Curt Newton, it seemed worth all the agony of that terrible transformation, to be able to hold her close to him again.

  BUT there was deep dread shadowing Joan’s face as she gazed up finally in his arms.

  “Curt, what if you are not able to find a way of undoing the transformation? Then you’ll never be able to leave the comet. You’ll have to live on here as one of the Cometae, never roaming space again.”

  He looked down at her steadily.

  “Joan, I hope I can find the method of reversing the change, for the sake of the Cometae people. But if I can’t, I wouldn’t mind living here the rest of my life with you.”

  She buried her face in his shoulder, and her voice came to him as a muffled whisper. “I’m almost selfish enough to hope that you don’t find the way, Curt!”

  Chapter 16: Lost Paradise

  CURT NEWTON stepped back from the work that had so intently engrossed him. He glanced around at the group that crowded the Alius’ cruciform laboratory. His shining figure stooped slightly from fatigue. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked with some anxiety.

  The Brain, whose strange form had been hovering beside Captain Future and collaborating in the work, answered with his usual deliberation.

  “I don’t know, lad. I think we’ve got the right combination of frequencies, but of course we can’t be entirely sure.”

  There was a pause of oppressive silence in the laboratory. The Alius were gone forever from this citadel, in which they had plotted to steal the power of a cosmos. But the shadowy influence of those alien beings, about whom so little really would ever be known, seemed to haunt the somber hails and corridors where once they had been masters.

  Like unearthly monuments to their colossal ambitions towered the big, unfamiliar mechanisms of the laboratory. And the people in the room felt patently uneasy.

  Beside the Futuremen and Joan, the group included Marshal Ezra Gurney, Tiko Thrin, the Martian scientist, and the shining figures of the Cometae captains, Zarn and Aggar.

  Aggar was now the chosen ruler of the Cometae. His people had acclaimed him as such, in the wild revolution that had swept away the nobles and their guards forever when word of the Alius’ eclipse had reached Mloon.

  Weeks had passed since then. And during all that time, Captain Future and the Futuremen had labored to solve the enigma of the Alius’ alien science. They had disassembled and studied one after another of the dark masters’ strange machines, in the hope of learning a method by which to reverse the circuits of the big converter and use it for re-transformation of the electric people.

  Curt himself was a brilliant scientist and he had the help of the Futuremen and of Tiko Thrin. But even so, he had been baffled. The design and purpose of the Alius’ apparatus had seemed unfathomable. It was only by long, toilsome study and experiment that they had finally made a tentative rewiring of the converter.

  “I believe that it will now project forces of a frequency-pattern to reverse the molecular metamorphosis and make electrified cells normal again,” Captain Future said slowly. “But I can’t be sure!”

  He gazed with a tinge of doubt at the big, barrel-shaped copper chamber and its surrounding apparatus.

  “We had to work so much in, the dark,” he added, frowning. “We had to try to understand the designs and thought-processes of creatures that never even belonged to this cosmos. And if we’ve erred and have got the frequencies wrong, this will destroy a man instead of making him normal.”

  Joan touched his arm reassuringly.

  “It will be all right, Curt. You’ve just worked too hard on it.”

  Captain Future declared his resolution.

  “I’m going to try, it now — on myself. I won’t allow another man to take the first chance with it.”

  “No, Curt — you mustn’t!” Joan cried, her eyes wide with alarm. “If anything happened to you, the rest of us would never be able to solve the problem. Let me be the first!”

  “Heaven forbid!” exclaimed the Brain.

  “Do you think I’d let her?” protested Curt Newton. “Not in a million years!”

  Aggar settled the argument by stepping into the big copper chamber. The new Cometae ruler bellowed in his bluff voice:

  “It’s my duty to take the first risk for my people. Go ahead and turn it on.”

  RELUCTANTLY Captain Future opened the switch that fed power into the redesigned converter. He and the others watched tensely.

  Brilliant red rays streamed from the lenses above and below, to bathe Aggar’s massive figure in a weird aura. They saw the Cometae ruler stagger from the shock, but he remained resolutely upright.

  The red shifted into orange, the orange into yellow, as the changing frequencies of force ran down the spectrum. By the time the hue had reached violet, they could see that the intrinsic electric brilliance of Aggar’s body was rapidly fading. And when he stepped out of the chamber, he was no longer a shining figure but a normal man!

  Weak and swaying, Aggar looked down at himself, held his hands wonderingly before his eyes. A great joy lit his eves.

  “I’m a man again!” he said hoarsely. “I’m an electric travesty no longer. I’ll age and grow hungry and get sick now, and finally I’ll die. But thank the gods, until then I’ll really live!”

  Captain Future was the next to undergo the metamorphosis. And after that grueling ordeal, when he too stepped out as a normal man again, Joan insisted on being next. When she emerged, Curt took her thankfully in his arms.

  “Now for my people!” Aggar roared joyfully. “There’s not one but won’t want to trade back that pitiful electric immortality for real life!”

  It proved so, indeed. The next days saw a great migration of the Cometae people along the road from Mloon to the black citadel. They passed by day and by night through the copper chamber, until at last the last of the Cometae had regained normal humanity.

  There were feastings and rejoicings in Mloon beneath the coma-sky. Infants would be born again, and the cries of children would be heard once more. The comet people were returning to the ancient ways of their race.

  But Ezra Gurney was worried. He confided his fears to Cu
rt and the Futuremen.

  “How in the name of Pluto’s fiends are we fellows from outside the comet goin’ to get back out of it, Cap’n Future? Our ships are still here, but we can’t get ‘em out through that coma!”

  “Don’t worry, Ezra,” Captain Future advised. “There won’t be any difficulty about that.”

  Nor was there. The great magnet which the Cometae had built, under orders of the Alius, was now made the instrument by which their ships were enabled to leave the comet. It was not hard to alter the magnet so that it projected a beam of reversed polarity out through the coma’s shell.

  Into that beam, one by one, rose the spaceships that had been held captive so long. And each ship, as it entered the beam, was flung out with a force as great as that which originally had dragged it in. Each ship was hurled through the opening made by the beam in the coma, to find itself in the familiar void of System space once more.

  The Comet, ship of the Futuremen, was the last of the craft to depart, for the tearful farewells of the grateful Cometae had been long. But at last the Futuremen and Ezra and Joan found themselves in space once more.

  “What a relief!” cried Otho, gazing around with sparkling eyes at the familiar vista of black gloom and bright stars. “I’m cursed if I ever want to go within a hundred light-years of any comet again!”

  “You’d be back there yet if it wasn’t for the help of my little dog Eek,” declared Grag, proudly caressing the moon-pup that was snuggling in his arm.

  “What are you talking about?” cried Otho. “That little pest didn’t do anything but go into one panic after another.”

  “Sure, and it was Eek’s wonderful faculty for getting scared that guided us through the Alius citadel,” boasted Grag. “You didn’t see Oog helping us any. He hasn’t enough brains to get scared like that!”

  Otho began to rave, and the Brain and Ezra Gurney intervened. Chuckling, Captain Future left them in the control room and went back to look for Joan.