Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) Read Free Page A

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 the lunar rock, crammed with apparatus of all kinds. 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 gamboling 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.”
     
    JOAN 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