CAPTAIN FUTURE
A Curt Newton Novelet by EDMOND HAMILTON
The Man of Tomorrow clashes in fierce combat with mankind's deadliest enemy - the Linid !
CHAPTER I
In the Moon - laboratory
There were four of them, and only one of them
was a man. One had been a man once, but only
his brain and mind still lived. One looked like a
man, but was born of no woman. And one was
mighty, and metal, and only rudely manlike.
"There were four of them - the man, the brain,
the android and the robot. And that strange
quartet of inseparable comrades blazed a trail that
the System will never forget. They rocked
worlds, in their time. They pioneered the ways to
the stars. And then they went beyond the stars,
they went out into the outer darkness - and
never returned."
The teleview commentator's voice was full of
hard, bright drama that went no deeper than his
lips. To him, it was just another story, to be
exploited and forgotten as soon an it was told.
To Joan Randall, sitting alone in an office of
Planet Patrol Base in New York, the words he
spoke had the icy finality of a Requiem.
With a gesture of denial, her hand moved to
switch off the televiewer. Yet she paused a
moment, as though yearning to hear again the
name that was coming.
"They went out into the extra - galactic
darkness three years ago today - those four
whom the System called Captain future and the
Futuremen. No one knows the purpose of their
quest, unless it be those two members of the
Patrol who alone had their complete confidence.
But it is known that they promised to return in
less than a year.
"They did not return. They have never
returned. Did Curtis Newton and his three strange
comrades, somewhere out there in the infinite,
meet foes or forces too formidable even for
them? Did they, out there, find a tomb in endless
space where - "
"No!" the girl cried, and snapped the switch.
Silence. But the echoes fled across her heart,
asking, Did they? Did they? And her heart could
not answer.
She rose and walked restlessly to the long
windows that opened on a tiny balcony. Presently
she went outside and stood there, looking up into
the dark night sky, not seeing it, seeing only the
blacker eternity of space and a ship that drifted
there forever, lightless and silent an the void
itself.
Her fingers closed hard around the metal railing.
She said again, to the whole universe, "No!"
The universe did not answer. There was no
answer anywhere, and as she watched the silent
Moon arose and mocked her.
The sound of her office door brought her to
herself again. She turned and then called out
"Ezra !"
The man who had just come in said, "Hello,
Joan." He flung himself into a chair and watched
her with bleak eyes, as she came toward him. He
was a stocky man, worn hard and lean and gray
with years of service. He was Marshal Ezra
Gurney of the Planet Patrol, and he was a tired,
beaten man.
"I talked to them, Joan" he said. "I took it right
up to the top brass. I even cussed the President."
"What did they say?"
He told her, brutally, because the words hurt
him. "They said Curt Newton and the Futuremen
are dead. They were nice about it. They
understood how I felt. But they can't run the
Government on sentiment. The vote has been
taken, and they won't change it. They're going to
take over the Moon - laboratory."
His voice was curiously fiat. He would not
meet Joan's eyes.
"I've done all I can, Joan. They won't listen."
The girl said, "I thought they might wait, just a
little longer."
"They've already waited. Two years in the
legal limit for men lost in space. And it's been
three."
"But not Curt!" she flared. "He's not like other
men. And Grag, and Otho, and Simon Wright ?
She bent over the old marshal, forcing him to
look at her. "You do believe that, Ezra? You do
believe they'll come back?"
Gurney's massive shoulders sagged. He
seemed suddenly shrunken, looking all his age,
again avoiding her gaze..
"They went too far, Joan," he muttered. "They
tried to burst barriers no one could get through, in
that attempt to reach Androrneda galaxy. We
ought never to have let 'em go."
"I tried to stop them !" cried the girl. "But you
know yourself how little chance I had!"
Little chance, indeed! Captain Future and
Simon Wright, the Brain, had been too eager to
solve the secret of humanity's galactic past.
They had, for years, been penetrating deeper
and deeper into that past, had uncovered the story
of the old, the great human civilization that ruled
the stars a million years ago. had even learned
dimly of the pre human races before that, the
legendary Linids and the others.
Curt Newton and the Brain had been afire to
learn the rest of the story. They had discovered
that the first humans of the Old Empire had come
from Andromeda galaxy. it had been inevitable
that they would try to go there, to track down that
cosmic secret of human origins.
"But no danger they might meet, even out
there, could be great enough to overwhelm the
Futuremen!" Joan cried.
The old rnarshal spoke heavily. "The
Futuremen were only mortal, Joan."
He looked up at her now, and his face was
gray and sick.
"We might as well face it. We might as well
quit feeding ourselves false hopes. If they were
corning back, they'd have come by now."
The girl stared at him, stricken. The old space
veteran looked at her, and the pity in his eyes was
hard to bear.
"You think so too, Joan. You know you do."
The life seemed t go out of her face. "Yes," she
whispered dully. She turned and pressed her
throbbing forehead against the cold window.
"Yes, I do. The System has lost him. And I've
lost him - "
She felt his rough paw on her shoulder. "You
never had him, Joan. No one ever did - not a
man like Curt Newton, who was raised by a brain
and a robot and android, who never quite be-
longed to us others."
"I know," she whispered. "But I couldn't help
thinking that someday - "
She stopped, and did not speak again for a
time. The Moon rode white and cold in the dark
sky. She watched it, and presently she said:
"So now they're going to take the last of him.
His birthplace, his home - the work he did, the
things that he and the others put all their minds
and hopes into, to help mankind. There won't be
even a memory of him left."
Ezra said awkward]y, "Try not to look at it that
way. They have to do it, Joan. The things in that
Moon - laboratory are too dangerous to take
chances with. Criminals have tried many times to
get through the barriers and steal the Futuremen's
secrets. One of them might do it. And the
knowledge sealed up there should be used, not
lost."
Joan nodded. "I suppose so." She frowned
suddenly. "Secrets? Ezra, there are things there
that Curt wouldn't want anyone, not even the
Government, to have. Things that wouldn't be
safe for even the top scientists to experiment
with. We can't let him down on that much, at
least !"
Ezra looked at her sharply. "You're right, Joan.
I remember some of the things he showed us, and
some that he only hinted at."
He thought hard for a few moments, pondering
the numerous angles involved. Finally he said:
"Yes. We've got enough time. Not much, but
enough if we hurry."
Quite suddenly, Joan and Ezra looked almost
themselves again. There was something to do,
definite action to relieve their minds of the quiet
brooding that was so hard to endure.
"We'll get the things out of the Moon - -
laboratory," Joan said. "We'll hide them, where
they'll be safe. And then, if ever - " She stopped
short and then went on again, lamely, "If ever it's
safe to give those secrets, we'll know where they
are."
"Curt would want us to do that," Gurney said.
He grinned and turned to the door. "We'll be
court - martialed if we're caught, but we're a
brace of old foxes for catching! Let's go."
No questions were asked of Marshal Gurney
and Special Agent Joan Randall. The Patrol
simply cleared the way for them with swift
efficiency, and within an hour, Gurney's small
flyer had blasted off for the Moon.
The two of them did not talk much. Joan
watched the great dark bulk of Earth fall away
from them, and then she looked through the
forward port at their destination. She thought of
all the times Captain Future had come this way,
bound for home.
Home - Curt's home. And his birthplace.
Strange cradle for a child, the awesome, lifeless
Moon! And strange eyes had watched, strange
hands had served, that child.
Child of human parents, yes - of the Earth
scientist and his wife who had gone to die Moon
with their colleague for secret research. With
their colleague, he who had once been Dr. Simon
Wright but who had become the Brain.
In the Moon - laboratory they had built there,
their science had created Grag, the robot, and
Otho, the android. So that, after his parents' tragic
death, it had been Brain and robot and android
who had been this child's guardians!
Joan imagined again, as she had so many times
before, how it must have been for Curt to grow
up there, to have his first view of Earth through
the great glassite ceiling of the laboratory, to hear
speech first from the strange mouths of Grag and
Otho and Simon Wright, to play his childish
games up and down the sunken corridors of the
laboratory under Tycho, with a robot, an android
and a living Brain for playmates.
She pictured a small red - haired boy looking
out at the bitter lunar peaks and pitiless rock
plains, and thought how lonely he must have
been sometimes. And there were tears in her
eyes, not for the boy, but for the man he had be-
come. For loneliness .had been Curt's heritage,
had stamped him with a subtle something that set
him apart from other men.
it was fitting that, if he had to die, Curt
Newton had done that too in a vast loneliness, far
from other men, voyaging out with his three
comrades, to new continents of stars far beyond
the little ken of man.
The surface of the Moon plunged upward
toward them, became a bas - relief in cruel black
and white. The soaring peaks of Tycho crater tore
the airless sky like hungry fangs. The little flyer
passed over them, sank down on blazing keel -
jets to the floor of the crater.
Silently, Joan and Ezra got into space - suits
and went out of the flyer, onto the. surface of the
Moon.
They had been here before. They knew their
way. They found die hidden entrance, and Ezra,
plodding and careful, operated the controls that
opened the guarded door. Death, swift and
terrible, awaited men who did not know the
combination. The Futuremen kept their secrets
well.
A section of lunar rock slid aside, revealing a
dark stairway. They went down, and the rock
closed again over their heads.
They went down some distance, into the
airlock. It's automatic controls worked smoothly.
The two waited until the dials showed that the
lock chamber had filled with air. Then they
removed their space - suits and went toward the
inner doors.
For the first time, Joan faltered.
"I don't think I can," she whispered. "To go in
there, knowing that he isn't there, that he won't
ever be there again - "
His home. The table where he worked, the bed
where he slept, the little things he left behind,
forever.
She clung to Ezra, sobbing, and he stroked her
with his big hands.
"Come now," he murmured. "Curt wouldn't
want you crying."
She took a deep breath. "I wonder !" she said,
with a sudden burst of anger at the whole vast
cruelty of fate that had made her love such a man.
"I wonder if he'd care at all whether I cried or not
!"
She flung her head back and went an through
the inner lock. Ezra came close behind her.
The stairway beyond was dark. They started
down it, conscious that their boots rang loud in
the rocky vault, conscious of the silence, of being
two intruders in a deserted place on a lifeless
world.
Three steps downward. Four. Five.
Joan screamed. The cry burst in jagged echoes
from die rock, and Ezra cried out too, a deep,
harsh yell.
They were prisoned, pinioned, caught. From
nowhere, out of the darkness and the silence, an
iron grasp had reached and trapped them.
Quite suddenly, there was light.
Joan turned her head.
A towering shadow behind her, a monstrous
unhuman shadow with a face of metal,
expressionless and strange. The strength of metal
arms holding her against a mighty metal body, a
chill, imponderable force from which there was
no escape.
Ezra Gurney made a queer sound in his throat.
Joan ceased to struggle. Her body went limp,
and there was a sudden dusk before her eyes. Her
mouth formed a word that was almost no word at
all, it was so full of tears and joyous anguish.
The rocky walls gave back the word again and
again. It was a name, and the name the rock walls
said was Grag! Grag! Grag!
CHAPTER II
Futuremen's Return
GRAG. Grag the robot, the metal giant of the
Futuremen!
Joan felt herself set down, very gently. She
heard voices, Grag's booming metallic tones
saying apologetically:
"Joan! Ezra! I didn't know it was you. The alarm
rang, but there was no way of knowing who was
coming in."
Another voice, silken, sibilant, saying angrily,
"You big cast - iron stupe, you've scared her half
to death! Look out, she's going to faint !"
She did.
Lights, darkness, confusion. A dim sensation of
being carried. Then she was lying somewhere in
a 'vortex of swirling mists.
Shapes hovered above her. They were terribly
indistinct. Ezra. Grag's looming metal bulk. And
another face, whiteskinned, peculiarly slim and
pointed, that looked at her with brilliant eyes and
spoke her name, and she answered,
"Otho!"
The mists closed in again. Anti she was
searching, desperate, sick with the pounding of
her own heart, and she could not see - Another
form came clear. A small, square, transparent
case, hovering man - high above the floor - a
thing utterly strange and yet familiar. The arti-
ficial "body" that housed the living brain of
Simon Wright.
Simon would know. She must ask him. But she
could not -
Somewhere, in another universe, a voice called
her. it was like no other voice.
"Joan! Joan !" it said, and her mind and heart fled
toward it, fighting back the mists.
A spinning blur of light, a sense of all her
being leaping upward, and he was there, bent
over her; his gray eyes anxious, the strong
remembered lines of his face softened now
almost to tenderness.
"Curt," she whispered. "You're alive. You're
safe."
She began to cry. He kissed her, and she clung
blindly to him.
Then suddenly she sat up, thrusting Curt
Newton away. She stared at him, her eyes bright
with tears and fury.
"Why didn't you tell us ?" she cried out. "Why
did you let us think you were dead? Haven't you
any heart at all ?"
She looked around at the others, Grag and Otho
and the Brain. The Futuremen looked away,
embarrassed.
Even Simon, the Brain that long ago had lived
in a man's skull but lived now in a cubical case,
with serum for blood and a serum - pump for
heart - even he shifted uneasily on the unseen
magnetic beams that were his means of motion,
his lens - eyes looking away from her.
Big Grag, ordinarily capable of unhuman
immobility, fidgeted clankingly. Anti the
android, most manlike of the three, human in all
but origin, dropped his bright ironic gaze.
"You must have known how we felt," she
accused. "You came back - how long ago?
Weeks, months? You came back safely, and you
didn't tell us !"
She was trembling, now. She turned on Curt
Newton almost as though she wanted to strike
him.
"I'm sorry, Joan." Captain Future stepped back,
not looking at her. "I - we knew how you'd feel.
But we couldn't tell anybody. Not just yet."
In the harsh light from the ceiling dome, his
face showed lined and tired. It had hardened
somehow, and changed. It was the face of a man
driven by some iron purpose, and the eyes had a
shadow in them something dark and strange.
Ezra Gurney looked at him intently. "You
must have had a reason. A good reason." Being
older, he was willing to reserve his hurt and
anger. His voice shook with eagerness as he went
on.
"Did you reach Andromeda galaxy, Curt?"
Captain Future said briefly, "We reached it."
Even Joan forgot her emotions in the sweeping
wonder of those three words.
"You reached it," she whispered
Then she sat quite still in awe. Andromeda
galaxy. An alien continent of suns, washed by the
farthest tides of space. An incredible, magnificent
journey.
Curt Newton had dreamed his dream, and made it
come true.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
Ezra demanded. "The secret of the human race's
origin ?"
Curt shook his head. He said indirectly, "A lot
happened. Trouble, near - wreck, the usual
hazards. We were lucky to get back."
He smiled abruptly, a smile that pretended to be
easy and was not.
"Will you two trust me? There's something I
have to do, and I want you both to go back to
Earth now. I'll be along, and then I'll tell you all
you want to know."
Joan got up. She took hold of Curt and looked
into his eyes.
"You're afraid," she said. "Afraid for me, for
us, if we stay here. Why?"
"Nonsense." His scoffing retort had an
unconvincing heartiness. "Go along now, Joan."
He looked at Ezra over her shoulder, a glance full
of hard meaning. "Take her back, will you, Ezra
?"
The Brain spoke, in his dry, mechanical voice.
"Curt is right, Joan. We have much to do, with
the specimens we brought back with us. You'd
only be in the way."
"Sure," boomed Grag loudly to her. "No fun
for you, looking at a lot of old rocks and things."
"Stop lying to me, all of you !" cried Joan
angrily. She looked around at them, Captain
Future and the incredible trio of his comrades.
She saw that even in Otho's bright mocking eyes,
the dark shadow lurked.
"You are afraid. Every one of you. You're
afraid for Ezra and me, or you wouldn't want us
to go. You brought something back with you,
that's it! You brought something back, and you're
afraid of it. So afraid that you didn't dare let
anyone know you had returned."
No one answered her. And in the brooding
silence of the laboratory under Tycho, a breath of
fear touched Joan and Ezra Gurney - a black and
freezing breath of terror from beyond the inter-
galactic abysses.
Ezra spoke, asking of them all, "What did you
find out there?"
Curt Newton answered slowly. "Some of the
history of the Old Race, the ancient humans. We
hoped to find them, but didn't. They'd gone on
long ago, to some farther part of the universe.
The Old Empire, ebbing back toward its un-
known centre as Rome ebbed back when it fell.
"But we did find worlds where they had lived.
Worlds of deserted, silent cities, worlds of death,
worlds of mystery."
The Brain said in his precise, emotionless way,
"We found many records and inscriptions, in the
language of the Old Empire - the so - called
Denebian tongue we could already read. They
were halfruined, half - effaced, by time. But even
those broken records told a strange, grand story."
Like a man haunted by a dream far greater
than himself, Curt Newton began to tell that
story. Red head bent forward, eyes seeming to
look beyond time and space, he spoke.
"Some of this you know already. You helped
us track down the mystery of mankind across the
star - worlds of our own galaxy, until we found
that the answer lay still farther on, beyond die
gulfs of outer space. Well, we know now that
answer lies even beyond Andromeda. But we
have learned a great deal
"We know how the human race, the Old Race,
came from same unknown birthplace and spread
out across die universe. The OId Empire, that
held whole galaxies as we hold worlds. Even
some of the details we know - how the Old Race
battled for supremacy against the pre - human
alien empires, such as the Linids."
The muscles drew tight around his mouth. He
said that name again, very softly.
"The Linids. The wise and dreadful creatures
who were before man, and who came so near to
stopping his march of empire - so near to
destroying the whole human adventure. They
were great and proud, the Linids. They held
whole galaxies for ages before the little creeping
bipeds came. They did not like the intrusion."
"Out there on Andromeda galaxy, long ages
ago, the last battle between Linids and men was
fought. And our remote ancestors won it. That's
what we found, the half - effaced records, the
broken memorials, of that eon - old struggle.
That, and the cryptic clues that merely deepened
the mystery of our racial origins."
Curt Newton was silent for a time, caught up
in the passion of his dream. His three strange
comrades looked at him in silence too.
Ezra Gurney felt again the strength of the bond
between the Futuremen. He and Joan could
never, even by the greatness of their love, quite
penetrate that inner bond of the four. Always, a
little, he and she would be outsiders.
Joan said quietly, "You found more out there
than knowledge. You might as well tell me, Curt.
Because I will not go away."
"NO" said Ezra. "Nor I. We've never backed
out on danger yet."
Captain Future's haggard eyes sought Simon
Wright. "What shall I do, Simon ?"
The Brain answered, "They have made their
decision. It is what they want."
"Very well," said Curt. His hands fell on their
shoulders, gave each of them a strong grip. He
smiled, and this time the smile was very weary,
but not forced.
"I should have known."
He led the way, then, across the great central
room of the laboratory, a vast circular space cut
from die lunar rock, crammed with apparatus of
all kind. Smaller rooms and corridors opened off
the main room. Living quarters, chambers that
held supplies, the corridor that led to the hangar
of their ship, the Comet.
Two small, queer beasts, completely dissimilar
to each other, came rushing up to Joan and Ezra
and leaped frantically around their legs.
On Ezra's strained face flickered a brief smile.
"I see you and Grag still have your pets, Otho."
Joan could not stop for them. Eek, the gray,
snouted, metal - eating moon-pup, and Oog, the
fat little white mimic - beast, had been dear to
her. But even their garnbolling welcome could
not break her spell of dread.
And the two little beasts drew back from her
when they saw the door to which Curt Newton
was heading, the door of one of the smaller
chambers. They backed away, as though in fear,
when he opened that door.
"In here" said Captain Future.
Joan and Ezra stood quite still, looking in.
There was a machine in the center of that rock
- walled room. A cage - like thing of crystal rods
and shining wires. It seemed very frail, to hold
what was in it. It pulsed with a steady rhythmic
beat of force throughout its rods and coils, so that
the crystal flickered with diamond points of light.
"The machine," said the Brain, "creates a
complete stasis within itself. Within that cage
that appears so simple, time, entropy, motion,
cannot exist."
OAN had shrunk back against Curt. Her eyes
were fixed on what lay there, so still within its
cage of force.
The thing had a central core of denser
darkness, cowled by looped dark capes and veils.
And core and capes and veils seemed solid,
tangible - but not like flesh.
The design and function of this creature were so
completely alien to the known evolutionary scale
that their eyes could not comprehend its form.
Yet something in the frozen immobility of the
cowled thing and its folded and floating veils
hinted a protean impermanence of form.
Even now, lifeless and insentient as it was, a
feeling of power lay in that cryptic cowled form.
Joan felt her flesh draw in upon itself with
instinctive recoil, and it seemed that in her heart
she could feel a black and icy tide that flowed
from the thing, a sense of horror at beholding
something so completely divorced from all life as
she knew it.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"One of the first lords of the galaxies," Newton
answered. "A Linid."
Somehow, just to know it had a name made it
less shocking. Joan forced herself to look again.
"We found it," said Otho slowly, "in one of the
dead cities of the old human race, out there."
"I found it," Grag corrected him. "I was the
one who broke open that crypt under the Hall of
Ninety Suns. And if it hadn't been for me, you
couldn't have moved it."
"Strong back," said Otho, "weak mind." But
his heart was not in his gibing. The dark sleeper
held them all in a mood of awe.
"And millions of years ago, things like that
were the lords of creation ?" Ezra said,
incredulously.
Curt nodded broodingly. "Yes. They held the
galaxies before man. They warred with man, with
the Old Race. Yet it was not man alone who
doomed them. A species has its day, and theirs
was done.
"They passed, like many another great species,
largely because of a change in natural conditions.
We think, from what we learned, that in the
Linids' case the fatal change was that of entropy,
the increase of cosmic radiation somehow
adversely affecting their alien form of life."
"That thing," Joan breathed, "dead and
perfectly preserved for all these ages !'
Captain Future's eyes had a queer look.
"That's just it, Joan. it isn't dead."
The words echoed in the rocky vault like the
living voice of danger.
As though by common instinct, they drew
away from the door. For a time no one spoke.
Then Simon Wright supplied the explanation.
"The records tell us that the Old Race won the
galactic war with the Linids - but that even they
could not destroy them. The Linids were a form
of life too different for human science to destroy.
They could only prison them, using a stasis of
force like this one."
"There were warnings. If the stasis were lifted,
the Linid would regain life and consciousness. It
would be as though all these eons had not passed.
It would regain its full power - and the records
caution all who read that the Linid had a terrible
power. ' - a power of utter possession, against
J
which only the jewels of force are protection.' "
"If the stasis were lifted - " Joan said. "No!
Curt, you're not going to - "
Her voice trailed away. Curt's face was a thing
cut from granite.
"We're going to lift it - a little. Enough to
revive the thing, but still keep it prisoned. We're
sure we can communicate with it telepathically."
He was drawn and sweating with strain, with
worry, with a fierce excitement.
"We know the risk we're taking. But we've got
to do it! This survivor of a vanished eon can tell
us things about the past that we'd never know."
"But you shouldn't take that risk, Joan. You
and Ezra must go."
They answered as with one voice, "No." And
Ezra added, "From the look of that thing, you
may need an extra hand."
Curt sighed. "All right. We're not going into
this completely without defense. There were
jewels of force also in the Hall of the Ninety
Suns. The Old Race must have used it as some
sort of meeting ground with the Linids, where
they parleyed for the rule of Andromeda. We
brought them back, too."
He produced them, from a guarded locker.
They were like no normal jewel. They were
round and large, and black with the utter
depthless blackness of the Linid itself. Each
jewel formed the center boss of a light metal
headband.
In a vast and crushing silence, the six armed
themselves, donning the headbands. The Brain
made his secure by binding it around his case.
"We don't know how these jewels work,"
muttered Otho. "It's to be presumed that they're
effective.'
Simon Wright said dryly, "II think we can trust
the Old Race. Are you ready. Curtis ?"
"Yes."
"Then let us go."
They went back into the room where the
cowled shape of darkness slept. Now Joan and
Ezra saw beside the stasis - machine a tall and
boxlike apparatus with an ordinary loudspeaker
set in its face.
"That's the telepatho - mechanical interpreter
that we've constructed," Otho told them.
Simon Wright explained. "The jewels protect
against mental attack by shutting out all foreign
telepathic impulses. We could project thoughts
but could not hear the telepathic answers. But
that apparatus will take the thought - impulses of
the Linid and translate them electronically into
audible speech, so we can communicate with it
without danger."
He looked at Captain Future. And Curt, after
opening the switch of the interpreter, stepped past
it to the glimmering cage.
His hand reached out. Carefully, with infinite
caution, he moved a rheostat, one notch. ... Two.
The pulsing flicker of light faded just a bit in
the crystal. The rods and wires dimmed their
brilliance.
And the cowled shape of darkness stirred.
Curt stepped back from the machine.
Otherwise, there was no sound, no motion among
them.
The Linid's capes and veils coiled and
unfolded languidly about its central core. And
there was a subtle chill that struck Curt's mind
even through the barrier of the jewel, a faint dusk
of horror.
The Linid had awakened.
CHAPTER III
Alien Enemy
CURT NEWTON was distantly aware of the
rocklike stillness of his own body, the muscles
drawn tight to the cracking point. Somewhere
deep within him there was fear such as he had
never known in all his adventurous life, an
atavistic horror that comes usually only in
nightmare. His heart pounded with such vaulting
excitement that he found it difficult to breathe.
The dark veils shifted and swirled within the
crystal cage. Slowly, fighting against the partial
stasis that still held it, the cowled thing put forth
its shifting members, unfolding, probing, testing.
The capes and veils touched the shining rods.
They recoiled, and presently were still, but not as
they had been before. They were alive now. They
rippled with a terrible bridled strength. They
were crouched and waiting.
Curt knew that the Linid was watching him.
He could see it watch. The central core of
darkness beneath the veils had taken on a somber
gleaming, and he thought of the hearts of dark
nebulae seen from space, the clusters of brooding
suns. He looked into that sentient core, and
sensed intelligence, wisdom - a force primal and
resistless as death.
A force that reached out subtle fingers to his
mind, and then recoiled, even as the physical
body had done. The jewels had reacted to their
proper stimulus. Captain Future saw that he and
the others were enveloped now in dusky auras
that shrouded them from head to foot. He guessed
then that the "jewels" were intricate receivers and
transformers, gathering the telepathic thrust of
the Linid mind, amplifying it, using as a shield of
defense. Advanced application of the old, crude
principle of fighting an adversary with his own
strength!
Curt was suddenly, passionately grateful for
the jewels of force. That faint touch of the Linid's
against his had been enough. It was like the touch
of withering cold that lies in the great deeps
where no life has ever been.
Curt spoke, forming his thought clearly into
words so that the others should hear and
understand. This was the test. If the Linid was
truly telepathic, as they were convinced, the
shrouds of time could be ripped aside from the
face of cosmic history.
Think strongly. Think clearly. Project the
thought outward through the dusky aura of the
jewel. There must have been communication
once between man and Linid, in the Hall of
Ninety Suns!
"Can you hear my thought? Can you hear me?"
He waited, and there was no answer. The
creature watched, and brooded.
Curt's heart sank. Could they have
misunderstood the records of the Old Race? No,
he should not believe that.
"Answer me! Can you hear my thought ?"
Silence. The dark cowls stirred, and beneath
them the black core gloomed, and there was no
sound from the telepathic interpreter.
Without knowing how he knew, Captain
Future sensed that the creature's silence mocked
him.
He strode forward, and there was a towering
anger in him now, partly born of fear.
"So you cannot hear me," he said savagely.
"You cannot speak. Very weIl. You shall sleep
again."
He reached out his hand to the rheostat.
The veils rippled strongly, and the dark core
gave out a bitter gleam. Abruptly, startlingly loud
on the tense air, the toneless metallic voice of the
mechanical interpreter spoke out.
"I hear you, human!"
A small gasping whisper ran among the five
who waited. Sweat broke chill on Curt's body.
The thing was done.
But he did not take his hand away. He held the
rheostat, looking straight into the heart of the
alien being, and he made his thought masterful
and harsh.
"You know that you cannot escape! You know
that I have but to move my hand, and you will
sink again into helpless unconsciousness."
Again, no answer. Curt's voice, matching the
thought he projected, suddenly crackled.
"You know that, do you not?"
This time the toneless mechanical voice
answered with sullen slowness.
"I know it."
Captain Future's forehead was damp. He was
trying to win psychological authority over a mind
so vast and strange he could not even
comprehend it.
Yet that mind could understand his power to
chain it again in frozen, unconscious stasis! He
was counting on that as his lever to force from
the Linid what he wanted to know.
And what he wanted to know was the secret of
the galaxies' history, of humanity's origin - no
less! A superhuman tension grew in Curt Newton
as he saw himself on the last threshold of the
mystery that he and the Futuremen had tracked
across space and time.
He spoke in a hard voice. "Linid, there is
something I can give you. And there is something
you can give to me - knowledge !"
"Knowledge ?" jeered the metallic voice.
"Give the knowledge of the galactic lords to
humans, so that they may use it against us
"Not that kind of knowledge", Curt said
swiftly. "Not knowledge of weapons or forces.
But knowledge of the galaxies' past, of your
race's past, of my people's past."
"Shall I tell the wisdom of the Linids to the
crawling, verminous new hordes of man? Human
- no I"
URT had expected that answer. He said
steadily, "Remember, there is something that I
can give you in return."
"What can you give me, human ?"
"Freedom! Release from the stasis that prisons
you !"
He caught the Linid with that. He knew it,
from the sudden swirl of its capes and veils, from
the pulse of movement that ran through all the
cowled thing's strange body.
Joan's voice cut in. Her face was pallid,
horrified. "Curt, even for knowledge you
wouldn't release that thing?"
"It'd be crazy, suicidal !" exclaimed Ezra,
aghast.
Curt did not turn, as he answered them. His
thought spoke as much to the Linid, as his words
did to them.
"I'd not release it here, never fear. A small
robot ship would carry it, still in its stasis - cage,
far across the galactic abysses. And far across the
universe, automatic controls would lift the stasis.
it would take very long - but time is little to this
creature.
"Freedom!" he repeated again to the cowled
thing. "Not immediate, but eventual. That is what
I can give you."
"My brothers will give me that when they
come at last and destroy you humans" retorted
the toneless voice.
Curt felt a surprise. Then the Linid did not
guess how long had been the ages it had lain
unconscious - how much had happened in those
ages? Yet after all, the creature had no way to
guess.
He would not tell it. it would not believe him.
he was sure. And there was no way to convince
it.
"Have your brothers come yet?" Curt taunted.C
"Did they come while you lay frozen under the
Hall of Ninety Suns?"
There was a hesitation of silence on the part of
die Linid. Then, finally, came a counter -
question.
"What guarantee have I that you would fulfil
your bargain, human?"
Captain Future's mind lit to a soaring
exultation. He was winning.
"No guarantee, except my promise," he
answered flatly. "There is no alternative."
"All the universe knows that man is the one
creature who lies," came the Linid's bitter words.
"But - I would be free again. I must trust a
human. I will give you what knowledge I can, for
freedom."
Otho uttered a. hissing sigh. "We've got him !"
"Then answer this," Curt Newton said.
"Whence, in the beginning, came our race?"
The question seemed to startle the Linid. "Do
not you know?"
"If I knew, would I ask you?" Curt retorted
savagely. "Answer, Linid !"
"Truly the sons of man are crawling vermin of
an hour only, who know not their own fathers !"
spoke the mechanical voice.
Curt disregarded the jeer. " Who were the
fathers of man? From where did he spring?"
The cowled thing brooded, its capes and veils
folding, unfolding. Finally the toneless voice of
the interpreter came again.
"Humans, you are new upstarts in the universe.
Ignorant of all its mighty past, even your own
past. Yet how could you petty spawn of flesh,
that die almost as soon as born, know the
grandeur of dead cycles?"
"We Linids know. We are not of flesh like
your flesh, we do not live with your life. For we
are not children of the transient light but of the
eternal darkness. Yes, children of the dark
nebulae and not of the bright galaxies! So that we
are not chained to rigid bone and flesh that must
soon crumble and die, but are in body like the
ever - changing yet changeless dark clouds where
we evolved."
Captain Future felt a shock of memory. He
remembered how the first sight of the Linid had
made him think irresistibly of the coiling gleam
of the extra - galactic dark nebulae.
The toneless metallic voice seemed to grow
louder, prouder - an illusion lent it by the words
it spoke.
"Forth from our dark home, we Linids went
long ago, we who can fly space bodily and need
no crude mechanical ships! Forth we went to
many galaxies, to conquer and hold them for our
race."
"The glory of the Linids! The wisdom and the
power that have brought great realms of stars
beneath our sway! The wars that we fought
across the abysses with other mighty races who
challenged us and whom we met and defeated
and destroyed !"
"All except the race of man !" Curt Newton
reminded tensely. "Whence carne he ?"
"Yes - man." The interpreting voice spoke the
words flatly yet they seemed to throb a bitter
hatred. "The creature lower than the dust, that
was raised up by the First - Born as a final
challenge to us !"
NEWTON was as rigid as though the very portals
of an eon - old, lost cosmic past were opening
tangibly before him.
"The First - Born? Who were they, Linid?
Who?"
"They were before the Linids," came the
sullenly slow reply. "They were not like us, nor
like any of the other races, nor like you humans,
say the legends."
"They were mighty in wisdom - all the
universe knew it. But they were mad dreamers.
They dreamed of a universe utterly and
completely ruled by justice. And they set out to
accomplish that dream."
"They could not do it ! They, the First - Born,
whom all the universe had whispered of for eons,
could not subdue us Linids, nor even all our rival
- races! They went back to their secret worlds, In
defeat!"
"They said, did the First - Born - 'We failed
to bring the universe under one law because,
great as was our wisdom, we are not physically
or psychically adaptable to all the varying worlds
of the universe. Our dream is dead, and with it
passes our reason for life, so we too shall pass.
But, before we depart, let us raise up a new race
that will be supple and adaptable enough to
succeed someday where we failed.' "
"And for such an heir, the First - Born raised
up - man! The crawling apes, the unclean,
chattering hords of the far worlds, the liars, the
cheats, the cunning ones! They said, 'Though he
is all these things, in him is the seed of power, of
power someday to unite the universe under the
law of justice as we dreamed of doing.' "
"So, from the noisy apes, the First - Born
developed your race, human! A race that had no
attribute of the great galactic races, that had
nothing but curiosity - curiosity that unlocked
powers for it that it could ill use. So your race
was first loosed upon the universe far away in
lost ages, by the First - Born before they passed
!"
As the mechanical voice paused, Captain
Future stood with a wild thrilling in his nerves.
Cosmic mystery dispelled at last - even though
beyond it loomed deeper and older mysteries!
"So that is the secret of man's cosmic origin !"
breathed Joan.
"Yet apes evolved to man on Earth too, the
scientists say," muttered Ezra bewilderedly.
The Linid answered him mockingly. "Always
and on many worlds, the humans whom the First-
Born raised from apehood slip back quickly to
the ape, and must toilsomely climb again."
"But where did the First-Born do this ?" Curt
Newton pressed. "Where, amid the galaxies, was
their home?"
"Not even the Linids know that," was the
answer. "Though there are traditions -"
The creature's toneless, translated speech
halted. A queer tense immobility had come over
the coiling capes and veils.
"What traditions ?" pressed Captain Future
harshly. "Speak, it you wish eventual freedom !"
He was unaware, as he himself spoke, of a
small gray shape that had crept silently into the
room.
The Linid's translated voice spoke, suddenly
rapid. "I shall tell you what I know. Perhaps it
answers your question. Listen closely -"
They strained forward, hungering for every
word. And then, out of the corner of his eye, Curt
Newton saw motion - looked, and saw Eek the
moon-pup, going with a strangely swift and
stealthy rush toward Joan.
Realization came to him with a sickening shock.
He leaped forward, crying out a warning, and
knew as he did, that it was too late, that he had
made a fatal blonder. He had forgotten Eek. He
had forgotten the moon-pup's highly telepathic
mind. And the Linid had reached out and found
the one unshielded, receptive tool. All this rapid
talk, this promise of a final piece of knowledge,
had been to distract their attention.
There was an alarmed uproar, triggered by
Captain Future's cry. Joan turned. Curt's hand
brushed the small hurtling body, but it was going
fast, too fast. Feb sprang, unerringly, straight for
Joan's face.
His jaws caught the jewel of force, and ripped
it from the girl's head.
Eek fell to the floor, taking the jewel with him,
and was instantly docile. And Curt Newton made
a desperate lunge for Joan.
For she had whirled around, the instant the
protective aura left her. She was leaping toward
the rheostat of the stasis - cage.
The Linid had no use for Eek now, it had a
better tool.
Joan was closer to the machine than Curt. He
might have shot her - that alone would have
stopped her in time.
Her hand opened the rheostat wide, in an
instant.
And, with supernal swiftness, the Linid was
out of the broken stasis and had grasped her.
Cowled dark veils and capes swirled and
enveloped Joan as she stood blankeyed.
With a hoarse cry, Curt sprang forward. Grag
leaped with him, uttering a booming roar, and
Otho and Ezra and Simon.
They recoiled. They shrank back from what
was happening to Joan. Ezra covered his face
with his hands.
The Linid was melting into her body! The dark
capes and veils, even the darker, denser core of
the thing, ware sinking into Joan's flesh!
" - a power of utter possession, against which
only the jewels of force are protection."
Utter possession. Curt knew now, with
agonizing clarity, what the inscription had meant.
Not just mental possession but physical
possession also - the solid body of the Linid
entering and interpenetrating the solid body of its
victim, due to an unearthly power of
rnanipulating its bodily atoms that only so alien a
creature could have.
Joan stood before them, face dark, masklike
and strange, eyes pits of swirling shadows that
looked at the stricken Futuremen and Ezra.
Words that were not her own came mockingly
from her stiff lips.
"Now, humans, shall we speak of freedom for
me?"
CHAPTER IV
Last Weapon
To Curt Newton, as they stood petrified, came
the dreadful realization that he had at last
overreached himself. The Futurmen, in the
years they had blazed their adventurous trail
across space, had faced many dangerous
antagonists. Had faced, and ultimately
defeated them. He knew now it had bred
overconfidence. It had made him dare pit
himself against man's most dangerous foe in
all history, against a monstrous survival of
elder eons to whom he was but a child.
"It's got Joan," whispered Ezra, his face
deathly. "it's got Joan, and there's nothing we can
do."
Joan? Not Joan, the dark-faced, shadow-eyed
puppet that stood and confronted them. Not
Joan's, the taunting words they heard.
"Shall I give you more knowledge, oh man?
Shall I tell you more - before I speed back to
rejoin my brothers in their war against the human
spawn ?"
The Linid meant to destroy them, Curt knew.
Not from personal malice. But because they ware
its racial enemies. It meant to destroy them, be-
fore it left
And 'it could do it using Joan as its tool. There
was only one way to stop it and that was to break
the tool it held.
To kill Joan.
Grag's booming voice came falteringly, as the
robot stood rigid with uncertainty. "Chief - what
can we do?"
They all recognised the terrible im-passe, Curt
knew. They knew that only one thing would stop
the Linid, and that that was a thing that not even
imminent death could make them do.
Raging self-accusation swept Curt. His
foolhardiness, his too-great passion to solve
cosmic mystery, had brought this end to the
Futuremen, and Ezra, and Joan.
He would not let it happen. He would not. The
old, cold anger, the emotion that was not human
fury but a relentless thing learned of his strange
tutors long ago, took hold of him.
"Hasten, human !" came the mockery again
from Joan's stiff lips. "Speak your questions! For
my brothers await me, in the great struggle!"
Two things flashed simultaneously across
Curt's mind. One, that the Linid was again
speaking to distract them, that in Joan's body it
was moving stealthily forward so that it might
snatch away their protective jewels and have
them completely in its power.
The other thing was a thought that crossed his
brain like a thin lightning flash of wild hope. He
had one tiny advantage over the Linid -.one only.
But he might use it as a weapon.
Not as a physical weapon. No such weapon
could harm the Linid without slaying Joan. No,
his last weapon was a psychological one.
The Linid meant to destroy them. It could use
Joan to do it. His only hope was to divert the
Linid from its intention, by psychological attack.
Curt spoke, to that which had been Joan. He
said harshly, "Go back then to your brothers, if
you can find them! Go back to Andromeda - and
rejoice with them at their great victory over man
I"
The Linid halted its subtly stealthy movement.
It had caught a disturbing something in Captain
Future's thought.
"How long do you think you lay frozen
beneath the Hall of Ninety Suns?" Curt
demanded. "Years? Centuries? No - for ages!
And how fared the Linid race in those ages? To
victory?"
"No, to death I Your brothers perished long
and long ago, and are not known in the universal
Not known except for you, the last - the last I"
Contempt and rage flared in the words that
came from Joan.
"A lie! You humans could never have won and
destroyed my race!"
"Not we humans alone did so - the radiation
that was increasingly deadly to them withered
them !" Curt retorted swiftly. "The fatal clock of
entropy has run far down while you lay frozen!"
"Not in this galaxy, nor in Andromeda, nor
the galaxies beyond, lives any Linid now but
you! I have seen it - the ancient inscriptions of
man that told of the passing of the Linids, the
worlds that belonged to your race but are no more
theirs. The memorials of man's final victory I"
"Tricks! Lies!" flashed from Joan's lips. "I
hold this girl - I hold her brain - her mind, her
memories, and in them I can sec no such things
as you tell."
It was what Captain Future had hoped for, and
he instantly pressed his attack.
"She has never seen those things! She has seen
but this little System, no more. But I have seen -
and I can prove all to you."
"The sons of the ape dealt always in
falsehood! You cannot prove."
"I can !" Curt's face was marble pale. "You can
leave the girl and possess me - my mind, my
memories of what I've seen. You can prove the
truth, by that !"
He hung tensely on the answer. It was his only
chance, he knew. His only chance to save the girl
his own rashness had doomed.
The shadows in Joan's blank eyes swirled -
uneasily, disturbedly. He knew he had implanted
a terrible doubt in the Linid's mind.
WOULD the creature dismiss that doubt,
reject him? He could not believe it. The being
who had spoken with such passion and pride of
his race could bear to remain long doubtful of
such a dreadful possibility as Curt had affirmed.
Curt laughed, a jarring sound on the bitter
silence. Reaching up, he caught the jewel from
his head and flung it away standing forth
unarmed. He laughed again, facing the dank
peering shadows in Joan's eyes.
"I offer you a stronger weapon against my
comrades than the one you hold, and still you are
afraid to take it. You are afraid, Linid - to learn
the truth!"
"No," whispered the alien voice from Joan's
lips. "My people knew not fear."
The subtly distorted outlines of the girl's body
began to blur, to flow with the shifting of that
strange and awful duality. The veiled and hooded
shadow took form around it, swirling yet solid. it
lifted - and Joan was free.
She fell, then, with only a small moaning
sound to mark her plunge into unconsciousness.
The Linid hovered, and began to move.
Grag's raging bellow shook the rock. The robot
took one ponderous forward step and Otho, his
lithe, incredibly agile body bent like a bow for
action, leaped beside him. But Simon Wright's
incisive voice said sharply,
"Stop! Curtis must do this thing, in his own
way."
With a terrible reluctance, Grag and Otho
obeyed. They would have given their lives, but in
this struggle of two minds for supremacy they
could not help.
Captain Future watched the coming of that
shape of darkness. And in that moment he knew
fear, such as no man had known since the ancient
ages when this same battle had been fought
across half a universe.
The black veils rippled and widened. The solid
shadow covered him, shutting out the light. The
heart-core of the Linid gleamed and brooded a
cluster of dark little suns, pulsing, close, very
close. The shadowy solidity whipped around him,
a cloak, a pall -
It was in him, in his flesh, forcing apart the very
atoms of his substance, interlacing them with its
own, so that he would have screamed from the
un-human pain of it, only that he had no voice.
Their two minds shocked together and to Curt it
was like the bursting of an icy nova in his brain.
The cosmos reeled and darkened -
They ware one, Curt Newton and the creature
out of the gulfs of time.
His mind was open to the Linid - his whole
life, everything he had thought anti done and
seen, forgotten and remembered. And the mind of
the Linid, because of that uncanny oneness, was
open to him.
Not all the way. Much of it was
incomprehensible to any human. It was a tre-
mendously older, stronger mind, so much so that
Curt felt a sort of shrinking awe in its presence. It
was not an evil mind. Only - different.
Some of its memories he now shared. The
swift free flights along the shores of the dark
nebulae, the plunges into ebony vastness beyond
the ken of man. The homeplace, the cloudy
worlds of mist and cold fire, striding dim and ma-
jestic across the universe, dank strangers even in
their own cosmos.
The delights of thought, the unfettered
strength, the ability to cross the intergalactic
spaces naked and alone, learning a chill and
vaulting glory from that kinship with the stars.
Above all, the pride and power that carried that
race to dominance over all that lived in a hundred
far-flung continents of alien suns.
Only glimpses, these. But enough to make
Curt's human heart almost stop in wonder.
Anti now he saw his own memories, coming
back to him through the mind of the Linid, as it
searched and searched him for the truth.
The dead and empty worlds, the cities without
light an sound, the deserted stars. The Hall of
Ninety Suns, forgotten shrine of vanished glory,
with its inscriptions that spoke solemnly of a war
and a species that had ended long ago. Record of
death, of defeat, Epitaph of pre-human empire.
The Linid saw, and read.
CURT felt the awfulness of that reading. The
pride, the assurance of power, shaken more and
more by every scrap of knowledge gleaned from
the mind of this small human creature it held so
in contempt. The cruel, inexorable coming of
realization - the agonized shifting of truth from a
concept held through numberless ages to one
sprung new-born out of this last hour. The Linids
rule and are great. Not that, now. The Linids are
gone, and even their name is not remembered.
Curt felt the moment when the creature ceased
to hope.
I am the last. My race is dead, and I am the
last!
The terrible, urgent grip on Curt's mind fell
away. The crushing alien presence sagged within
his flesh, borne down by the weight of truth. It
was as though the creature had died.
Curt knew the loneliness of utter desolation.
It seemed an endless period before the Linid
stirred again. Slowly, very slowly, like one
touched already by the hand of death, the creature
withdrew its substance from the body and mind
of the man.
It left him, floating free, and now its dusky
veils were like funerary cloaks folded sadly
around its heart.
With a last flash of ancient pride, the Linid
spoke, the words coming strong from the
mechanical throat of the interpreter.
"Time, not man, overcame us!"
Curt's limbs were weak. Oddly, now, he no
longer felt fear or hatred for the Linid.
There was only a strange pity.
"The battle is over," said the toneless voice. It
had now a curious illusion of distance, of
withdrawal. "It is over and done. And I am the
last of all my race."
The dark veils quivered and swirled, shrouding
the creature's core. It seemed to look about it, not
at Curt, not at Joan and Ezra and the Futuremen,
but at something far beyond. Captain Future
sensed that they, with all the human race, had
utterly ceased to be important to it.
"I will go back to the birthplace of my people,
back to the dark nebula that gave us life. It is
fitting that the last of us should there find death."
The cowled shape glided past them, it moved
with the somber sureness of fate, unswerving,
unhurried, out at the chamber.
Curt and the others watched it go. It crossed
the great central room of the laboratory and
passed out of sight, into the passage that led
upward to the surface of the Moon.
They listened, but they heard no sound of
doors.
Joan, who was held now in Grag's arms, still
white-faced and dazed, suddenly pointed upward.
"Look," she whispered. "Up there, against the
stars -"
They looked, out through the glassite ceiling-
dome. And Curt saw it, the proud creature that had
watched the birth of empires and had shared the
rule of a thousand suns.
Slowly, majestically, spreading its veils like
wings to the windless vault of space, the Linid
rose, going outward no man knew where, a dark
and lonely shape against infinity.
Curt said somberly, "Somewhere out there,
beyond where ever it is going, is the world of the
First-Born that we know now was the birthplace
of man - the world that we will never see. Bet we
know."
They stood, the six of them, too full of thought
for any speech, watching.
Dark unto dark. And presently the vault of space
was empty.