Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941)

by Edmond Hamilton

  "With your pitching, he'll run up a score of a million against us!" Otho complained.

  "You tend to your catching, my rubbery friend," Grag ordered majestically. "Watch me this time."

  He set the controls of the rocket-ball and let it go again. It darted away to the left, then came in across the plate at a wide angle. Curt's bat slammed it unmercifully. As the ball shot high in the air, he started racing around the base path. But this time Otho fooled him. The android made an unbelievable leap of forty feet into the air and caught the speeding ball.

  "That puts you out, Chief!" Grag boomed triumphantly. "It's my turn at bat now."

  "Swell catch, Otho," Curt complimented. "I didn't think even you could leap that high."

  "It was nothing," Otho answered in a tone of weary disdain. "You just watch my pitching put Grag out in a hurry."

  Curt grinned as he took up the catcher's position. A game of rocket-ball with these two Futuremen was a perpetual row, he told himself, yet he had to do something to keep from getting bored.

  For weeks he had been getting more and more restless. In the past, when he had felt that way, he had set out on a jaunt in the Comet, to explore the previously unknown south polar ice wastes of Pluto, or to visit his friends, the queer Thought Masters on Neptune's moon, or some similar half-purposeless trip. Now he no longer was satisfied with that. He knew the System's nine worlds, thirty-one moons and countless asteroids so well that there was little new about them to attract him.

  Something new was what he wanted. He had been getting increasingly weary of the old and known, had felt a constant yearning of his adventurous spirit toward new frontiers of the Universe, new and unsuspected worlds. Other men might find a trip to one of the farther planets a wildly thrilling experience, but Curt Newton had been roaming those worlds since boyhood. He had, in fact, never seen Earth until he was almost mature.

  The story of Curt's birth and boyhood was the strangest saga in the System's history. A generation ago, his parents had fled to the Moon to protect their scientific discoveries from an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. With them had come Simon Wright, the brain who lived in a box, but who had once been a living man. They had built their combination laboratory and home under Tycho. Here their experiments had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. And here, soon after Curt Newton's birth, Corvo killed his parents and was in turn killed by the Brain, robot and android.

  The three unhuman, superhuman beings had reared and educated young Curtis. Their combined instruction had made him not only the most skillful planeteer in space, but also the System's greatest scientist. For some time, Curt had devoted his immense abilities to a war against the criminals of the System. In that war against crime he had been given the name of Captain Future.

  NOW Curt's crusade to eradicate completely all interplanetary criminals seemed to have achieved its goal. His epic struggle against Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars, had finished off the last law breaker of major importance. He had no interest in smaller fry that the Planet Police could handle and the weeks of inaction had been making him restless. He had spent those weeks mostly in the deep scientific researches he loved, but now he was tired even of those. His adventure-loving soul felt a blind urge for new worlds to chart.

  "Hang it, the trouble with me is that I don't know when I'm well off!" he told himself impatiently, trying to dismiss the oppressive feeling.

  Otho had been elaborately setting the control of the rocket-ball and now was ready to release it.

  "Here it comes, Grag," he warned. "This is my special double-reverse-bob-and-weave ball."

  "Let it come," offered the big robot. "I'll murder it!"

  Otho released the rocket-ball. It shot forward in bewilderingly erratic flight, but Grag's bat smacked it and knocked it whizzing. The robot started lumbering around the base path, his metal limbs clanking. Otho, however, made another superhuman leap and grabbed the ball.

  "You're out!" he crowed, darting forward to pick up the bat.

  "Wait a minute!" Curt Newton called. "Let me take a look at your gravitation equalizer, Otho."

  Otho started to put up objections, but Curt grabbed him and examined the flat case strapped to his belt — the equalizer whose aura of force made its wearer's weight the same on any world.

  "Just as I thought," Curt said witheringly. "You've set your equalizer to make you weigh only ten pounds. No wonder you could jump high enough to make those catches."

  "Why, that's a dirty foul!" raged Grag. "Let me at that hunk of rubber. I'll wipe up the Moon with him!"

  "Aw, it was only a joke," Otho said sheepishly. "I just did it for a laugh. Go on back to bat and quit your howling."

  But Grag was still furious as he picked up the bat and again faced Otho. The android let the ball go again. Grag, now thoroughly enraged, swung with all the force of his mighty metal arms. A resounding crack followed and the rocket-ball whizzed upward. This time it didn't come down.

  "Devils of space, Grag's knocked the ball clear off the Moon!" Otho exclaimed in dismay.

  Curt laughed. The low surface gravity of the Moon had not been able to retain the ball against the robot's tremendous blow.

  "That gives Grag the game," Curt said. "He can run around the bases a thousand times, if he wants to, but I'll concede it to him."

  "I'll get another ball and we'll see who takes the next game," declared Otho angrily.

  The android started toward the flight of steps that led down through the lunar rock to the airlock entrance of the underground Moon-home. He stopped.

  "Here comes Simon and in a hurry."

  Out of the Moon-home had emerged an astonishing figure. It was the third Futureman, Simon Wright.

  Simon had once been a brilliant, aging scientist of Earth. When he was on the point of death, Curt Newton's father had surgically removed the living brain and installed it in a special serum-case.

  That case was of transparent metal, containing the serum and pumps and purifiers that kept the brain alive. In the front of the case were Simon's glass lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the aperture of his mechanical speech apparatus. From his case the Brain could shoot magnetic beams, which he was able to use as substitute hands to wield tools or instruments, or upon which he could glide swiftly through space in any direction.

  THE Brain rarely showed emotion. His icy, bodiless mentality, so utterly absorbed in scientific research, was ordinarily aloof to all disturbance. But now, as his strange form glided swiftly toward them on his flashing traction beams, his metallic voice came with a sharp, urgent note.

  "Lad, the automatic sura-warning just sounded!" he called to Curt Newton. "A ship is approaching the Moon!"

  Instantly Captain Future's face hardened.

  "It must be someone with an unfriendly purpose," the Brain continued in his rasping, metallic voice. "Only an enemy would try to come here. Everyone in the System knows that this is forbidden territory."

  "We'll wait and see who these visitors are," Curt said quietly. "Get behind those rocks and make no move until I give the order."

  Swiftly, with the efficiency characteristic of the supreme cooperation among the Futuremen in times of emergency, they melted from sight behind a clump of jagged, towering rocks. There Curt waited with them, loosening his proton pistol in its holster.

  They soon glimpsed a flash of rocket-flame up in the starry sky. A ship was coming straight down to Tycho crater, firing its brake-blasts.

  "A five-man Kalber cruiser," muttered Otho. "There can't be many in it. If it's an attack, it's a queer one."

  "Shall I unmask our hidden proton cannon and blast it?" Grag asked.

  "Not yet," Curt said, keenly eying the descending craft.

  It came to a rather unskilful landing near the glassite window of the Moon-home. The ship's door opened and a man in a space-suit climbed out. He was a young Earthman whose thin, brown face showed uncertainty and apprehension in his transparent helmet. He looked doubtfully toward the window.

>   "Looks more scared than anything else," Grag muttered, "but it may be a trap. There may be others in that ship."

  "I'll soon see," Curt said.

  Chapter 3: The Cry from the Past

  FROM his belt, Future took a flat, disklike device. He turned the switch on it. An aura of radiant force enveloped him. He began to disappear. This was one of the scientific wizard's most precious weapons. The little mechanism could make him invisible for a few minutes, by giving his body a charge of force that caused all light to be refracted around it.

  Wholly invisible and in total darkness, Curt silently stepped past the young Earthman and into the youth's ship. Long training enabled him to move as confidently by hearing as by sight. He listened inside the ship. There was no one in it.

  He went back to the newcomer. Standing in front of him for a few moments, Captain Future began to become visible again as the effect wore off. First he was a cloudy shape, then rapidly became completely visible.

  The young Earthman started back with a terrified cry as he saw Curt materialize before him. He shrank even more when Grag, Otho and Simon emerged from their concealment. With awe in his eyes, he faced Curt Newton and the weird trio of Futuremen.

  "Who are you and what are you doing here?" Curt demanded. "Speak quickly! You know that I permit no one to land here without permission."

  "I know!" exclaimed the young Earthman hastily. "But I had to come and ask your help. My name's Brad Melton."

  "If you wanted to ask my help, why didn't you send your request to the System President?"

  "This fellow's a spy of some kind!" Otho hissed ominously.

  "No one would have believed my story," Melton answered. "I don't know whether even you will believe it, but I had to come to you. Captain Future, it's not help for myself that I want. I'm bringing a message from people who do need help and need it terribly, a whole race that's faced with an awful choice between ghastly tragedy or total destruction."

  Curt Newton's gray eyes narrowed unbelievingly.

  "What are you talking about? Where are these people you speak of?"

  Melton gulped. "They're a hundred million years in the past."

  Captain Future stared suspiciously at the young Earthman.

  "Naturally you can't expect me to accept that without some substantiating evidence. How could people a hundred million years in the past communicate with you?"

  Melton's eyes wavered.

  "I don't know how they did it," he confessed.

  "You don't know?" exploded Otho. "Fiends of Pluto, is this a crazy joke? If it is —"

  "Wait, Otho," said Curt Newton. His gray eyes swung back to the excited face of the young Earthman. "We can discuss this more freely down in the laboratory. Come along, Melton."

  Curt's tall figure led the way toward the sunken steps nearby. The Brain glided along beside him and Brad Melton followed, between lithe Otho and clanking Grag. They descended through an airlock into the great main laboratory that lay beneath the window in the crater floor.

  Melton looked around wonderingly. He realized that he was lucky to be one of the few outsiders ever to enter this legendary place.

  This big, bright room carved out of the solid rock was a place to stir wonder. It was a laboratory, the finest in the System. Tail generators, transformers, atomic converters, synthesizers and furnaces loomed around the walls. Squat, massive electro-telescopes bulked big and shining. The rest of the equipment Melton could not identify. That was not remarkable, for no other scientists but the Futuremen had ever seen special instruments such as those Curt and the Brain were always developing.

  CURT NEWTON took off his helmet and tossed it aside. Two tame animals came ambling up and inspected it. One of the pets was a "meteor-mimic," a fat, little, white beast who suddenly changed himself into an exact replica of the helmet, the cells of his body magically taking new shape by the strange camouflage faculty of this species. The other pet was a moon-pup, a sharp-nosed, beady-eyed little gray beast, a non-breathing species that ingested minerals and metals for its nutrition.

  Curt Newton's sharp voice recalled Brad Melton from his fascinated inspection of the place.

  "You said you were bringing a message from a people who needed help — a people of the past. How did you get that message?"

  "We meteor miners had landed on Asteroid Two twenty-one," Brad Melton explained stumblingly. "There were old, ruined stones there. Poking around them, I stepped into what seemed to be an invisible beam. When I stood in that beam, I seemed to hear a voice speaking inside my brain."

  "Oh, so that was it!" snorted Otho skeptically. "Well, the liquor you meteor miners drink would make anybody hear voices."

  "It wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced before," Melton hurried on. "It was a mental voice, speaking the same message over and over. It said that it was the voice of Darmur, scientist of Katain —"

  "Katain?" exclaimed Captain Future, startled.

  "You've heard the name?" Melton asked wonderingly.

  Curt nodded noncommittally, though now there was a gleam in his yes.

  "Yes, I've heard of it. What did the mental voice say?"

  "I can't remember all of it," Melton admitted in confusion. "This Darmur said he was speaking through time along some kind of beam. He was calling future ages for help, he said, because his world was doomed and his people must either perish or meet some unknown tragic fate. He pleaded that if anyone heard him who had solved the secret of crossing time, that that person should come back to aid him.

  "I couldn't help but believe it was a real cry for help. I once heard a scientist say that a world had met doom in that part of the System a hundred million years ago. And that appeal was so agonized, I wanted to do something to answer it. Old Nilga told me that Captain Future was the only man who might know the secret of time-travel, so I came to tell you...."

  Melton's voice trailed off. He was aware now how wildly incredible was the story that he had brought. He half-expected Captain Future to break into laughter at the tale, but the tall, gray-eyed young planeteer was not laughing. Curt Newton's lips were compressed with inner excitement. There was burning interest in his eyes as he looked at the Brain.

  "You heard, Simon? A call from Katain! It could be real. Even though the Katainians hadn't discovered the time-thrust principle, they might have, learned how to send an electro-mental message upon an achronic carrier beam back along their world line!"

  Brad Melton understood nothing of this, but the Brain seemed to comprehend. The glass lens-eyes of Simon Wright met Curt's gaze.

  "Yes, lad, it's possible," came the slow, rasping voice of the Brain. "And yet —"

  OTHO had been growing more and more bewildered.

  "Say, Chief, what's all this about?" he complained brashly. "What is this place, Katain?"

  "Katain," Curt answered, "was the tenth planet of our Solar System, with an orbit between Mars and Jupiter. A hundred million years ago, the world Katain exploded. Its fragments are the materials of the Asteroid Zone."

  "Holy sun-imps!" ejaculated Otho. "You mean that this message Melton heard may have been a real one, coming from the time when Katain still existed?"

  "That's the idea," Curt replied thoughtfully. "A cry from the past, a desperate appeal for help from the people of a doomed world." He turned abruptly. "Simon, I'm going to investigate this. I intend to visit that asteroid with Melton and hear the thing for myself."

  "And if that cry from the past is real?" the Brain asked. "What can we do about it?"

  "You remember our time-thrust experiments of two years ago," Curt replied. "We may not be entirely helpless."

  Otho's green eyes flashed excitedly.

  "The machine you used to project little creatures across time? Jumping imps of Jupiter! Do you mean that maybe we could go back across time to —"

  "To Katain?" Curt finished for him. "I don't know, Otho. If this message is real, a people far back across the time dimension need help. Since we know their world was destroyed, we
know their peril at least was real. The message would merely substantiate it."

  Into his gray eyes had come a glimmer of high excitement, as though he looked beyond them to beckoning, luring horizons of the unknown.

  "If we could take help back to those people, it would be an adventure such as even we have never had! New worlds, a new universe —"

  "You're forgetting something, lad," the Brain's rasping voice cut in. "The experimental time-thruster we built would send only living creatures back along the time dimension. It wouldn't send inanimate matter. If we tried to go back, we'd be stranded without tools or instruments."

  "No, Simon, I figured out how the time-thrust principle could be altered to affect inanimate matter, also."

  "But how could you project yourselves across time?" Brad Melton blurted. "I know time is supposed to be the fourth dimension of matter, but you can't move around in it the way you can in the other three dimensions."

  "That," Curt told him, "is because time is not a static, dimension like the other three, but a dynamic one, a dimension that constantly flows in one direction. The time dimension can remotely be compared with a river. A river has length, breadth and thickness, which remain the same, yet the waters of the river are constantly flowing in one direction.

  "But you could use a powerful pump to force a small part of those waters back up the flowing river. Similarly my time-thruster projects a powerful extra-electromagnetic force that drives matter up the river of the time dimension, back into the past. Come along. We're going out to the asteroid where you heard the time message. I want to hear it for myself."

  Brad Melton dazedly accompanied Curt and Otho into a passage that led through the solid lunar rock to a large chamber. It was the hangar of a small, stubby-looking space ship of unfamiliar design. With a gasp of awe he realized that this was the Comet, super-swift ship of the Futuremen!