Carey’s power to understand, wrapped in his own thoughts, his own researches. Knowledge was Simon’s thirst and his existence and it seemed to Carey that, although Simon Wright had been a man of Earth before his brain was taken from his dying body and preserved by the magic of a future science, Simon had become the least human of them all.
Grag and Otho were easier. The android was so nearly human that only now and again did a flicker of something otherworldly in his green eyes remind Carey that Otho was not as other men. Even then it was impossible to feel any horror of him. Carey had known a lot of mothers’ sons but seldom one that he liked as much as the sharp-tongued ironic Otho, whose most pointed barbs were tempered with pity. As for Grag, once Carey had got used to his seven-foot clanking bulk and enormous strength, he became fond of the great robot, whose only faults were over-enthusiasm and a certain lack of judgment. It was, however, constantly upsetting to Carey to realize that this lumbering metal giant had quite as much intelligence as he and a good deal more knowledge.
The man Curt Newton, the man many called Captain Future, remained paradoxically the most difficult to understand of all the four. It was only bit by bit from the others that Carey picked up Newton’s story — his strange birth and stranger upbringing in a lonely laboratory hidden under the surface of the Moon, an orphan with no other companions than the three who were called the Futuremen.
NO wonder, Carey thought, that with such a background Newton was withdrawn and guarded in his approach to the ordinary relationships of men. He, like his companions — and like Carey too in this new incarnation of his — was set apart forever from the normal world. Carey sensed that the easy casual manner of the red-haired man had been painfully acquired, that beneath it lay a dark and solitary creature, much better not aroused.
Carey soon discovered something else about Curt Newton. He was angry and it was no mere passing rage. It was a cold black fury that rode him all across the spatial gulf that plunged between Saturn, whence he had come, and Earth, where he was going. And the cause of it was a message he had received from a man named Ezra Gurney about another man named Lowther.
There was something about a monopoly on a certain kind of fuel, which was going to put Lowther in control of all shipping to and from the distant star-colonies which were not much at present but would grow. It seemed that the star-ships took on their high-potential fuel for the long jump at Pluto, where the radioactive ore was mined and refined.
And now, by devious manipulations of hidden stock, Lowther had got control of the refining companies and raised the price out of reach. There were ships stranded at Pluto and men in an ugly mood and Newton was heading fast for Earth to see what he could do about it.
It sounded a dirty enough deal and Carey hoped that Newton would bring Lowther to time. But this talk of star-colonies and star-ships was beyond him. His mind was still thinking of Jupiter as the unattained and well-nigh unattainable. Any problems of star-ships or the men who flew them were distant and unreal. Furthermore he was too deeply immured in his own fears and loneliness, in the strangeness of being alive.
He began to think more and more of Earth. He was hungry to see it, to feel it under his feet again, to look up into a blue sky at the familiar Sun. He had been long away from Earth when he fell asleep — an eternity, it had seemed, shut up in an iron coffin outbound for Jupiter.
He remembered now how they had talked about Earth, crouching within the narrow walls that hid them from the black negation of space. The voices still rang in his ears, the faces were as clear as though he had only turned his head away for a moment or two.
Craddock and Szandor, Miles and Delaporte, Gaines, Coletti, Fenner — the red-headed, the black and the fair — the
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath