Captain Future 16 - Magic Moon (Winter 1944)

by Edmond Hamilton

  The crowd, for a moment, startled, uttered an even louder roar of contemptuous mirth.

  “The Furries’ terrible weapon is nothing but gray dust — nothing but pinches of dust!”

  But even as they shouted with laughter, Curt Newton’s heart seemed to turn to ice. Catastrophe had been unchained.

  “Simon,” he cried to the Brain instantly. “Fly to the Comet! Get away in it with Grag at once, outside of Styx’ atmosphere.”

  THE BRAIN hesitated, poised in mid-air. “But you others —”

  “We can’t make it,” Curt Newton exclaimed hoarsely. “Before we covered the distance to the landing-field, the Destroyer would be ahead of us and you and Grag and the Comet would be annihilated. We four will suffer no harm but you must go. Wait outside Styx’ atmosphere, and warn away all ships. Go!”

  The frantic urgency in his voice drove Simon Wright like a physical thrust. In a flash, the Brain rushed off through the darkness toward the landing-field two miles to the east.

  “Curt, look,” cried Joan Randall, wildly, clutching his arm. “Look!”

  The shouting mirth of the crowd had suddenly given way to a confused, rising babel of stupefied alarm.

  Curt Newton saw what he had expected to see. Wherever the Stygians’ vials of gray dust had fallen, that gray dust had magically spread.

  It spread like gray flame, proliferating itself with incredible swiftness over the surface of every bit of metal it touched. And it ate the metal it touched, feeding upon it as fire would feed on wood.

  With a crash, a metalloy building collapsed as its whole front was consumed by the gray blight. Another structure crumpled, and another. Like lightning the blight leaped along the street.

  The air was full of floating gray dust now, that drifted out in all directions. And wherever it touched metal, it proliferated with that unbelievable rapidity to consume the metal.

  Captain Future heard a thunderous roar from the east, and saw a trail of rocket-fire arc toward the heavens from the distant landing-field.

  “Simon and Grag got the Comet away before the Destroyer reached it,” he cried hoarsely. “Thank Neptune, for that, at least.”

  “Curt, what is it?” Joan Randall cried, stunned. “That gray dust —”

  “It is a blight — a blight that eats almost every kind of metal,” he answered. “A strange secret of the ancient science that the Stygians have kept, a semi-organic, fungoid thing that is spreading now on every wind, and will consume every bit of metal on Styx.”

  She gasped in horror. And from the dazed crowd in the street, horrified cries were rising in wild clamor as they witnessed the awful progress of the Destroyer.

  The metalloy structures of Planet Town were crashing into ruin everywhere! The gray flame of the blight was leaping through the air in floating spores, eating up every thing of metal it encountered.

  Already half the structures of the town were melted into shapeless heaps of seething gray dust. The brilliant lights went out, as the blight reached the power-station. And beneath the dim, eery planet-glow from the heavens, the terrible destruction went on.

  “This building is going,” Curt Newton cried to the others over the uproar. “Quick, get away from it.”

  He dragged Joan Randall out into the street. As the others followed as if in a stupor, the gray blight was already eating into the building front.

  “Chief, my atom-pistol’s crumbling in my hand,” Otho yelled wildly. “Everything’s going.”

  Planet Town had become an inferno of panic and horror as destruction fed upon it and turned it to melting mounds of gray dust.

  And Qu Lur and his Stygians, at the end of the street, sat their steeds and looked solemnly at the catastrophe they had unloosed.

  “The ships are crumbling, too,” screamed a wild-eyed man who came racing into the mob from eastward. “Every space-ship on the landing-field has got the gray dust spreading on it.”

  Joan Randall clutched Curt Newton’s arm convulsively. “Curt, that means —”

  Captain Future’s voice was thick. “Yes, Joan. It means we can’t get away from Styx now. And no ship can now visit this moon, without itself being consumed by the blight.”

  “We’re lost!” screamed Jon Valdane in hysterical panic. “We’re trapped here without hope of escape, marooned here forever!”

  Chapter 16: Marooned

  QUICKLY the awful prospect that awaited them dawned upon the dazed mob as they heard Jon Valdane’s scream.

  “Gods of Mars, we can’t ever get away,” yelled a bulging-eyed Martian.

  “It’s the Stygians’ work,” raged Jos Vakos, foaming. “Kill the Furries.”

  The maddened mob reached for their atom-guns and found them gone. There was only crumbling gray dust where their weapons had been.

  Captain Future felt his pockets lighten as every metal object he carried was consumed likewise. To the tiniest bit of metal on their persons. The same thing was happening to them all.

  Su Thuar’s hissing voice rang out through the raging of the crowd. “Future helped do this,” shouted the murderous Venusian. “He’s been in league with the Stygians from the first!” accused the Venusian. “Get him.”

  “Kill Future and his friends,” roared the crazed mob.

  Curt Newton saw the danger. He shouted to his companions, and to Jeff Lewis and the other horror-stricken members of the telepicture troupe. “We’ve got to fight our way out of Planet Town or this mob will murder us all,” he cried.

  From the dim, misty obscurity northward, the shrill voice of Qu Lur called to him in the Stygian language.

  “Captain Future! This way, and we will help you to get away. But we cannot fight, even to aid you.”

  Curt Newton shouted to his companions. Jon Valdane had deserted them, but Lewis, Jim Willard, Lo Quior and the other men of the telepicture organization ranged themselves beside Newton and Otho and Ezra.

  “Put the women at the center,” cried Captain Future. “We’ll have to charge right through this mob. Now!”

  They rushed forward in a compact mass, straight into the howling crowd that was coming toward them. There were no weapons, no atom-pistols, not even so much as a knife. Bare fists were the only weapons on this world which the sudden destruction of metal had plunged back into the primitive.

  Curt Newton lashed out with hard, smashing blows at the whirl of brutal, raging faces he saw in front of him. He was the apex of the compact formation seeking to cleave a way through the crowd.

  Otho, on his right, was using the super-ju-jitsu of which he was master to break arms and wrists with expert skill. And on his left, old Ezra Gurney was calmly cracking heads with a heavy stone he had picked up. Behind him, Jim Willard and the other telepicture men fought furiously.

  It was a nightmare struggle down that dark, misty street of the dying city. Only the fact that many of the motley mob were still too stunned to follow the leadership of Su Thuar made it possible for Curt Newton and his companions to win their way through to the Stygians.

  Qu Lur and the other Stygians were tensely waiting for them. Governed by their creed of non-violence, the Stygians had refused to strike one blow in the battle, but they had waited at dire risk to themselves.

  “Mount and ride with us,” cried Qu Lur to Newton. “We have kurus ready for you.”

  Some of the Stygian riders had doubled up on their strange steeds so as to leave mounts free for Captain Future and a few companions.

  Other Stygian riders reached down and lifted the telepicture people behind their saddles, while Curt Newton, Otho and Joan Randall were mounting.

  “Future’s getting away with them,” raged Su Thuar’s voice from the darkness. “Stop them.”

  “Ride!” cried Qu Lur.

  Vicious faces flashed into Curt Newton’s vision as hate-maddened men rushed forward to pull them off their steeds.

  But the nervous kurus, frightened by the uproar, were now bolting forward in prodigious leaps. They tore away from Su Thuar and h
is followers, galloping down the crumbling street.

  And then they were out in the dim, mist-shrouded night outside darkened Planet Town, racing northward. The padded hoofs of the gurus drummed loudly on the grassy plain as the chill wind rushed past them.

  “Captain Future, why did not you and your friends leave Styx as we warned you to do?” cried Qu Lur as they rode. “Now you can never depart.”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE grimly pointed behind them.

  “I was trying until the last to induce the people back there to depart,” Newton answered. “Now they must remain forever. You should not have released the blight, Qu Lur.”

  “They mocked our laws too long, bringing ever more violence to our peaceful world,” replied the old Stygian firmly. “So we have destroyed their weapons and machines. No more aliens will ever be able to come here.”

  He added earnestly, “You Futuremen are our friends. Would that you had heeded our warning and left. But since you did not, you must spend the rest of your lives on Styx. And you and your companions are welcome in our city Dzong, whither we ride now.”

  “You’ve been blind, Qu Lur,” said Curt Newton bitterly. “Don’t you see that you’ve only penned up hundreds of brutal, ruthless men on this world with you? Even without metal weapons and machines, they’ll find a way to attack you.”

  Joan Randall, riding beside him, called to him. He saw through the foggy darkness that her face had become deathly pale.

  “Curt, are we doomed to spend the rest of our lives here?” she cried. “Isn’t there any hope of our ever getting away?”

  “Joan, there may be a faint hope — but nothing more. The Destroyer blight won’t leave a scrap of metal on the surface of Styx. No ship can land here. And we can never build a ship, without metal.”

  Suddenly the girl smiled. “Curt, at least we’re together here,” she said. “If we never get away, I won’t mind so much.”

  “Nor would I, Joan. But the danger here is bigger than you realize. This whole moon, cut off from the rest of the System, and nursing a blight that sooner or later might spread to all the other planets of the Solar System.”

  The terrible vision of that possibility that unrolled in his mind struck him to a chill silence.

  Finally, the Stygian city loomed out of the cold mists. Its octagonal towers of stone were vaguely outlined against the dim planet-glow in the sky. Torches were burning along the streets of Dzong, but although the gray dust of the blight was in the air here as everywhere else, nothing in this stone city seemed to have suffered.

  “The wisdom of our forefathers,” muttered old Qu Lur to Curt Newton as they rode in through the gate in the wall. “They warned us never to depend on machines and things of metal, so that if we ever had to loose the Destroyer for defense, we would be unaffected.”

  It was true. The totally non-mechanical, non-metallic civilization of the Stygians had experienced no harm from the world-wide blight.

  In the torchlight, hundreds of wide-eyed Stygians watched the refugees dismount. The Earth people looked around them at the city.

  “And we’re going to spend the rest of our lives here,” murmured Jim Willard.

  “I want to go back to Earth,” wailed Lura Lind. “Jeff, you’ve got to get me back, do you hear? The Perseus will take us.”

  Jeff Lewis shook his head heavily. “All that’s left of the Perseus now is a heap of gray dust. The ship, and all our telepicture equipment, and all the film we worked so hard to make —”

  “The films we made ought to be all right, boss,” Lo Quior put in hopefully. “They’re non-metallic themselves, and were packed in those plastic insulite cases to protect them from heat and cold.”

  The producer smiled bitterly. “What difference does it make now whether they’re safe or not? We can never show ‘The Ace of Space’ to anyone.”

  Qu Lur was designating buildings in which the stricken outer-planet people were to be quartered. “Qu Lur, what will you do if that mob in Planet Town comes here to attack you?” asked Captain Future.

  “We shall use all our powers of illusion and hypnotic defense to repel them,” the old Stygian answered.

  “A mob like that won’t be scared back by illusions,” said Ezra Gurney.

  Qu Lur answered solemnly. “We have always lived by the creed of non-violence. It is our law.”

  WHEN he had gone, Ezra Gurney looked skeptically at Curt Newton and Otho. “Not an encouragin’ prospect,” he drawled.

  “Chief, were you just cheering up Joan or did you mean it when you said there might be a hope of getting away from Styx?” Otho asked.

  Captain Future frowned. “It’s a pretty slim hope, I’m afraid. But I base it on the fact that the ancestors of these Stygians once before released the blight here, ages ago.”

  “So what?” Otho countered.

  “We know they released the blight, long ago,” said Curt Newton slowly. “But the blight hasn’t been present on Styx, in more recent times. That means that the ancient Stygians must have known how to clean up the blight after it did its work of defense. They must have known of a way to destroy the Destroyer.”

  “You’re overlooking the possibility that the blight slowly withered and vanished in those long ages,” pointed out Otho.

  “I don’t think the spores of the stuff would ever completely disappear unless they were destroyed by artificial means,” Captain Future declared. “But I can’t be sure till we’ve examined the stuff.”

  Otho gestured ironically to the flecks of gray dust that floated here in the torchlit chamber, as everywhere else.

  “There’s plenty of it to examine. All you need is an electron-microscope. And we can’t have one, or anything else made of metal.”

  “Turn out your pockets,” Curt Newton ordered. “Let’s see just what we can salvage.”

  They made a little heap of their belongings. It was a discouraging inventory that they took. Everything metallic had vanished. Of some things, only the plastic parts remained while metal parts were gone.

  “We’ve got a plastic knife-handle, the stock of an atom-pistol, a gyro-compass without needle or rotors, a pocket chronometer whose works are all gone, and some other junk,” Otho said in a discouraged voice.

  “Let’s have the lenses of the compass and chronometer,” said Curt Newton.

  He examined them. They were magnifying lenses, so that the two instruments could be made tiny and yet read with ease.

  “By fixing these two lenses apart at the correct focal distance, we’d have a microscope of sorts,” Captain Future declared. His brow knitted. “We’ll have to use these plastic cases as a tube for it.”

  He began work, with the crudest of means. The light plastic cases of the ruined chronometer and compass, he softened into malleable state by skillful application of heat from one of the torches.

  While Otho and Ezra watched skeptically, Newton’s deft fingers shaped the softened plastic into a new form. He drew it out into a short, thick tube, affixing the two lenses at its ends before it hardened.

  Then he tested the crude little microscope. “It amounts to little more than a fairly strong magnifying-glass, but it may help.”

  Newton now captured a fleck of the floating gray dust, and affixed it to a tiny mirror Otho had carried in his make-up kit. They placed the torches around this for the strongest illumination possible.

  Captain Future then intently studied the fleck of dust with his improvised magnifier. He looked long through the tube, and his face wore a frown of doubt when he finally raised his head.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like this blight before,” he said. “It resembles certain fungoid microscopic forms of life, able to drift as dormant spores which proliferate swiftly by fission when it reaches a favorable environment.

  “The amazing thing is that these gray spores seem capable of feeding upon metals by producing from themselves certain combinations of chemical elements which cause an unbelievable electronic alteration of the metallic atoms, into atoms
of organic substances the spores assimilate.”

  “Wait a minute, Cap’n Future,” Ezra Gurney reminded him. “Remember I’m no scientist.”

  “You can think of it this way, Ezra,” Newton simplified. “The gray blight is rust — living rust, that spreads like a swift contagion and feeds upon all metal it touches.”

  “So how are you goin’ to kill off a blight like that?” Gurney wanted to know.

  CURT NEWTON shook his head in despair. “I wish Simon were here. But I do have an idea. Past experiments have shown that hard electric radiation destroys microscopic fungoid forms somewhat similar to this strange new one. I think hard radiation would destroy this blight, too.”

  Otho said bitterly, “That’s fine. All we need to do to kill off the blight is to set up a powerful generator of hard radiation. Only, we can’t ever do that because you can’t have a generator or anything else electrical without metal to build it of.”

  “Cap’n Future, isn’t there any metal at all on this world?” Gurney asked.

  Newton shook his head. “The surface metals of Styx were all destroyed ages ago, when the ancient Stygians released the blight. A few traces of cobalt and titanium survived because their peculiar crystalline compounds insulated them from the spores, but they’d be no help to us.

  “We might dig down and find metals deep beneath the surface, but what good would it do us? As soon as we dug them up and refined them, the blight would destroy them too.”

  “So our problem is this — to build a powerful electric generator and radiation-projector, without using a scrap of metal,” Otho said.

  Ezra Gurney shook his head. “I can see it’s impossible. You got to have metal to conduct electricity.”

  “Not necessarily,” Curt Newton corrected him thoughtfully. “Carbon is a fair conductor. Remember, back in the dim dawn of Earth electrical science, they used it for the filaments and electrodes of their lighting devices.”

  He went on. “We could rig a Sanderson single-fluid chemical battery without using metal. And we might be able to build the coils of our generator from carbon.”