Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation (May 1951) Read Free Page B

him now, Ezra. The Comet might. We’ll have to make certain preparations and they’ll take time. But even so we may catch him.”
    He turned, moving swiftly toward the door as though physical action were a relief from overpowering tension. Ezra stopped him. “Curt, wait! Let me go with you. I should, you know, if it’s a case of catching a lawbreaker.”
    Newton looked at him. “No, Ezra. You’re only trapped by the lure of this thing as I was. As I was... No.”
    Simon’s metallic voice intervened. “Let him go with us, Curtis. I think we might need him — that you might need him.”
    A look passed between them. Then, silently, Curt nodded.
    Back to the Moon, with five instead of four, went the Comet on wings of flame. In the hours that followed, the closed hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint of the desperate rushed activity beneath.
    But less than twenty-four hours after its return from Uranus the ship left the Moon a second time. It went out through the planetary orbits like a flying prisoner breaking out through bars, poised for a moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new kind of motion, then was gone into the outer darkness.
     

     
    Chapter 3: The Birthplace
     
    THE Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny gleam of man-made light falling into infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to the eye seemed crowded thick with burning Suns and nebulae.
    The five within the ship where silent. Four were busy with the memories they had of the time they had come this way before, with the knowledge of what was still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney, could find no words to speak. He was a veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran when Curt Newton was born. He knew the Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and back again and he knew how the naked undimmed stars could shine.
    But this was different — this voyaging of deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets and navies of the stars to their own harbor, this going in among them. In a way Ezra Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt Newton, could look at that flaming sky ahead and not be a little afraid.
    The Comet had come into the region of the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across space and time, carrying after them sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between and beyond the clusters and their trailing star-streams shone the glowing clouds of nebulae, banners of light flung out for a million miles across the firmament, ablaze with the glow of drowned and captured Suns. And beyond them all — the nebulae, the clusters and the stars — there showed the black brooding lightless immensity of a cloud of cosmic dust.
    The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within him. Men had no business here in this battleground of angry gods. Men? But was he here with men?
    “One-point-four degrees zenith,” came the metallic voice of Simon Wright from where he hovered above a bulky instrument.
    “Check,” Curt Newton said and moved controls slightly. Then he asked, “Dust?”
    “Definitely higher than average interstellar density now,” Otho reported, from his own place at the wide instrument panel. “It’ll thicken fast as we approach the main cloud.”
    Ezra looked at them — at the square, hovering metal case of the living brain, at the lithe eager android peering forward into the abyss with burning green eyes, at the giant imperturbable metal bulk of the robot.
    Not men, no! He was out here in the great deeps, rushing toward the mightiest secret of infinity, with creatures unhuman, with —
    Curt turned, and smiled briefly and wearily at him. And the clamoring panic in Ezra was suddenly gone. Why, these were his oldest staunchest friends, unshakably loyal and true.
    He drew a long breath. “I don’t mind telling you that it’s nearly got me down.”
    “You’ve got worse