Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (19 page)

The great robot pointed his metal arm excitedly. Curt glimpsed the swarm of metal specks ahead, moving swiftly toward green Mars, They were flying in a wedge formation.

"The proton guns!" he ordered. "If Zikal won't stop at our challenge, we're attacking."

Otho's green eyes were flaring as he sprang to the breech of a big proton cannon.

"I've got my own score to settle with Zikal," he said venomously. "I just hope he fights!"

THE
Comet
rushed up on the tail of the poison fleet, sped over the wedge of flying tankers and overhauled the ship at the apex. That craft, Zikal's flagship, was a space cruiser. From its sides projected the snouts of heavy neutron guns.

Curt leaned forward and switched on the televisor to an all-wave beam.

"Captain Future speaking!
Zikal,
order your fleet to return at once to Katain. There's no necessity whatever for this plan of yours!"

From the instrument came the harsh, startled voice of the Katainian.

"Captain Future? You've returned and have secured the uranium Darmur needed? Very well. In that case I'll abandon the expedition to Mars."

Zikal's flagship began to bank around, preparatory to turning back toward Katain with the tanker fleet.

"I thought he'd at least protest," muttered Curt suspiciously. "I —"

"It's a trick!" yelled Grag.

Zikal's ship, banking around, had suddenly opened fire with half its heavy battery of neutron guns. Deadly, brilliant beams lanced across space toward the Futuremen's ship.

Captain Future had not been caught napping. Wary of Zikal's ready submission, he had been on the alert. He had flung the space-stick over sharply the moment he glimpsed the beams. The
Comet
skidded in a lightning space spin, the neutron beams stabbing above it. Curt whirled up in a hairpin loop toward the keel of Zikal's cruiser.

"Get their rocket-tubes — disable them!" he shouted to Grag and Otho.

Zikal's craft was looping desperately, trying to bring its heavy batteries to bear on the little
Comet.
But the Katainians were meeting the finest space fighter of a hundred million years from their own time. Curt Newton's lightning shift sent the
Comet
racing after the enemy, clinging to its tail. Next moment the pale rays of the proton cannon lanced at the Katainian ship as Grag and Otho fired.

"Got their rocket-tubes!" yelled Otho. "They're disabled!"

The unerring aim had fused the rocket-tubes of Zikal's ship into a molten mass of metal. Almost instantly an explosion shattered the rear of the Katainian ship as the back-blasting tubes blew up the cyclotrons.

"We're boarding her," Curt said. "Stand ready, you two!"

The
Comet
drove up level with the rent hull of the drifting wreck. In their space-suits, Captain Future, Otho and Grag leaped across the gap into the wreck, their proton pistols ready in their grasp. A scattered fire of neutron beams met them. Some of Zikal's men had escaped the explosion. But the three Futuremen waded forward, the guns kicking in their hands. They blasted continuous beams that sent space-suited men tumbling in scorched heaps. The survivors raised their hands in panicky surrender.

Beyond them appeared Zikal's tall, space-suited figure, aiming a neutron gun. The Katainian's face was distorted with fury inside his helmet. His gun was leveled with deadly purpose at Curt. But before Captain Future could move, Otho had sprung forward with a yell of hate.

Brilliant neutron beam and pale proton ray crisscrossed in the wrecked ship as Otho and Zikal stood and fired. But it was the Katainian who fell, clutching the breast of his suit and slumping dead to the floor.

Otho looked down at him, eyes still burning with hatred.

"That was for Ahla," he grated harshly.

CURT led his two comrades back to the
Comet
after disarming the survivors in the flagship. Then he broadcast an all-wave command to the fleet of poison tankers that were clustered bewilderedly in space nearby.

"The expedition to Mars is countermanded. Release your cargoes of gas, pick up the flagship survivors and return to Katain."

There was no move by the tankers to obey.

"Unless you do so in two minutes, we'll open fire on you!" Curt warned.

The threat was sufficient this time. The unarmed tankers could make no effective resistance and their crews were stunned by the fate of the flagship. Curt Newton saw the valves of the tankers being opened. The compressed clouds of green gas that had been intended to destroy the life of the Martian people puffed harmlessly into space.

The
Comet
led the way back to Katain.

When they landed on the great spaceport at Vavona, Darmur and the Chief Councilor met Curt. Captain Future told them of Zikal's treachery.

"But that's ended now," he concluded. "Darmur's ships should be bringing the uranium from the other planets to Yugra, The migration to Sirius can be carried out successfully."

The Chief Councilor's aged face was pale.

"It's got to succeed! The whole existence of our people is staked upon Darmur's plan, without recourse, and Katain is drawing near its end."

Katain was indeed approaching the solemn hour when its existence as a planet would be terminated forever. That thought spurred Captain Future to superhuman exertion in the tumultuous, terrible days that followed.

With Darmur and Jhulun, the Futuremen flew out to the little moon, Yugra. It was a barren, arid sphere of rock with scant vegetation. Curt inspected the multitudinous underground crypts, airtight chambers fitted with special apparatus, in which the mass of the Katainian people would lie in frozen sleep during the twenty years of the voyage to Sirius.

Then they hastened to the device that was the heart of Darmur's great plan — the colossal rocket-tube that was to propel the little moon. It was like a giant well sunk deep in the rock of the moon, lined with tremendous thickness of the most refractory metals.

"There are vast fuel chambers in the ground all around this firing-tube," Darmur explained as they stood at the lip of the shaft. "The uranium will be stored in those chambers in macerated form. It can be fed from them into the bottom of the tube, to be exploded as atomic energy."

He pointed to a domelike glassite structure that rose on massive metal supports several miles from the firing tube.

"The controls are in that place. The crew who will guide Yugra on its flight to Sirius will dwell constantly in that airtight shelter. It has food, air and water supplies for the long years the journey will take. The rest of our people, all those millions, will be sleeping in the crypts."

Curt Newton and the Futuremen went to the control house with him and ascended in its swift elevator to the topmost level. Up here in the dome of the glassite structure was the massive panel of switches that would control the flight of the moon.

"Everything was prepared long ago, has been ready for months," Darmur said, twisting his hands. "Everything except the uranium."

"It will come, Father," Jhulun encouraged gravely. "Our ships at the other planets must already have collected the mineral the Futuremen forced across time. They will arrive any day now."

Quietly, yet dramatically, Curt Newton pointed into the starry heavens outside the glassite dome.

"I think the first uranium ships are coming now."

THE space ships that began dropping from the heavens proved in fact to be those that had collected the uranium from nearby Jupiter.

"We couldn't believe our eyes!" babbled the leader of the party. "We waited near the main uranium deposits on that world and the amount of uranium in them suddenly almost doubled. It was magical!"

"Magic of the Futuremen's time engineering!" Darmur exclaimed, his eyes shining. "Hurry and unload the mineral into the fuel chambers."

The uranium compounds were fed through automatic macerators into the buried storage chambers around the great firing tube. Some hours later, other ships with similar cargo arrived from Earth.

During the following days, one after another of the parties of ships laden with the precious element came in from the more distant planets. The buried chambers began to fill with the mineral.

"But we've hardly two weeks left!" Darmur said when the uranium was all stored. "Two weeks before the final conjunction and cataclysm. And we've got to get all the people of Katain here and into the sleep crypts."

"The space fleet we built in preparation is ready," Jhulun reminded him. "We'll get it done in time, if the Sacred Star favors us."

Captain Future looked curiously at them.

"Do you Katainians know why Deneb is your sacred star?" he asked.

As he told them Darmur's face became awed.

"So long ago our remote ancestors came to this System from Deneb. Now we Katainians are going to leave the System, are returning to the stars from which our ancestors came. There is poetic justice in it."

A VOICELESS dread hung over Katain like a pall. Jupiter's ominous disk was growing constantly more enormous in the heavens. Ground-quakes shuddered through the mass of Katain every few minutes. The seas were running against the lands in wild, high tides.

The night the Futuremen returned with Darmur, a tremendous electric storm swept the city, Vavona, with mad bursts of rain and sheets of lightning.

"The end is near," Darmur said resignedly. "It may be that Katain's crust will shatter and let the seas pour into the molten interior, even before we reach conjunction with Jupiter. We must speed up the transfer of the people to Yugra."

"Chief, I can't understand how all these Katainians are going to stand it on Yugra," Grag complained to Curt. "Darmur said they couldn't stand a different gravitation for very long and Yugra's gravity is far weaker than that of this world."

"You forget that all these millions of Katainians will spend their twenty years on Yugra in suspended animation," reminded Curt. "With the vital activities of their bodies frozen, the lesser gravitation won't harm them. Darmur and Jhulun and the others of the control crew who guide the moon to Sirius will have to wear a form of gravitation equalizer."

The tremendous storm was succeeded the next morning by an even fiercer electrical tempest. The day was dark as night. Sheets of rain and masses of hail fell from the savage sky. The ground quakes were stronger than ever.

Curt Newton and the Futuremen labored in the night-black tempest at the big spaceport of Vavona, helping to shepherd the Katainians into the ships for the short flight to Yugra. The plan of transfer had been long prepared. The people were being taken in prearranged numbers.

Captain Future flew out to Yugra, where Jhulun was superintending the reception of the crowds of Katainians who were constantly arriving. Here, too, the plan had been long ready.

Each group of five hundred Katainians trooped down into its allotted subterranean crypt and lay down in the tiers of metal bunks. From disks in the ceiling radiated a blue force that froze their organs in suspended animation by absolutely balancing anabolism and catabolism of their cells. Then, as they slept, the crypt door was hermetically closed.

"They will not awake until we reach Sirius safely and open the chambers," Jhulun told Curt. "They will be the same age as now, though we of the control crew will be twenty years older."

More Katainians were arriving and entering the crypts. There was no panic as the people did so, but all of them looked back with silent yearning at Katain.

Other ships were bringing prearranged cargoes of seeds, animals, tools, books and everything else that would be required for life in the new home.

"We're going back to Katain," Curt told the Futuremen as the last million Katainians began arriving. "I told Darmur I'd bring him to Yugra myself."

They landed on Katain in what should have been day, but was instead a storm-swept, terrifying darkness. Bolts of lightning revealed the spaceport surface, heaving perilously underfoot, and the Katainians thronging to the ships.

Darmur was haggard, his eyes bloodshot from strain, but still stubbornly directing the final phases of the evacuation.

"The last of us leave Katain tonight," he told Curt. "We shall have a last dinner in my home before we leave it forever."

IT WAS a silent, bitterly nostalgic meal in the lovely bubble mansion, shared by the four Futuremen and Darmur and Lureen. The girl, with true Katainian courage, served the others as calmly as though it were no unusual night.

"There will be dancing tonight in the pleasure palace by the spaceport," she said to Curt. "We wish to leave our world gayly, gallantly, not with tears."

Vavona was a deserted city as they made their way to the spaceport through the shrieking storm. Jupiter was hidden from sight by the swirling tempest, but the ground rolled uneasily beneath their feet.

On the lightning-washed spaceport, loaded ships were roaring away and empty ones landing. The last thousands of the Katainians were being taken to Yugra, but those who had a few hours to wait were dancing in the big pleasure palace nearby. Curt Newton felt his heart go out to these people who were abandoning their world for a stupendous migration, yet making this courageous gesture.