Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (20 page)

The silvery, beautiful interior of the great pleasure hall was crowded with Katainian men and girls, dancing to the lilting strings of the orchestra. They were all young, for the older people and children had been evacuated first.

"Will you dance with me?" Lureen asked Curt, looking up at him with sober violet eyes.

Curt felt a lump in his throat as he danced to the music with the slim Katainian girl in his arms. Louder sang the music of the strings, trying bravely to drown the crash of thunder and the roar of departing ships.

Outside, a trumpet blast blew sharply in a signal. Some of the dancers quietly moved out of the hall, unobtrusively leaving to take their allotted places in the ships.

"Katain, Katain!" Lureen was whispering, her eyes glimmering as they danced. "Will the System of your future day contain a world as beautiful?"

"I think not," Curt said gravely. "I think the beauty of lost Katain will be a legend forever."

Trumpet blasts blared across the lilting music again and more of the dancers left. And again and again came the summons, until but a few dozen of the dancers were left.

There rang a louder trumpet signal.

"The final call," murmured Lureen. "We go now, the last ones to leave Katain."

The music had stopped. The Futuremen were waiting outside, Grag towering grim and mighty in the lightning flares, Otho and the Brain waiting. Darmur came up to them, his face deadly pale. The other ships were taking off.

The time had come to abandon this world forever.

Storm buffeted them as they struggled across the spaceport toward the
Comet.
Continuous sheets of lightning revealed the last ships rising into the tempest. The tarmac rolled wildly to new quakes, almost throwing them from their feet. Even over the booming of thunder could be heard the frightening grind of the shifting ground beneath.

Hail and rain smashed Captain Future's face as he helped Lureen into the ship, but old Darmur hung back.

"Let me be the last to leave my world," he begged.

Curt understood and respected the wish. He got into the ship with the Futuremen and held the airlock door open, waiting. Darmur stood out there in the flaring lightning, motionless. They could not see his face. Through the storm came the crash of falling buildings.

"Better get out of here!" Otho cried. "This world's starting to break up already."

"Take the space-stick, Grag!" Curt shouted.

Darmur at last came inside, his face ghastly in the lightning. Captain Future slammed the airlock door.

"Blast off, Grag!"

THE
Comet
arrowed up on a steep slant through the inferno of night and storm that now shrouded the doomed planet. They burst out of the wildly boiling atmosphere of Katain into the clear vault of space.

Lureen cried out in horror at what they now saw. Jupiter was now a giant cloudy moon in the heavens, bulking ominously huge and near with its ten circling satellites. Katain and its moon were rushing headlong toward fatal conjunction with the monarch planet.

The
Comet
raced at tremendous speed toward the little, yellow moon. When they landed on the great spaceport near the control house, they saw that the last Katainians were being marched hastily toward the entrance of the labyrinthine underground fleet crypts.

Jhulun came running up to them, the pallor of excitement and exhaustion on his face.

"The last of our people have been checked," he said. "They'll all be in the sleep crypts in a few minutes."

"Look at Katain!" exclaimed Otho, staring up into the sky.

The planet whose great shield hung over them was now an appalling sight. It was wrapped in a seething envelope of clouds that parted now and then to give a glimpse of shifting land masses, of unleashed oceans running wildly over the entire world.

As they looked, there came a shuddering of the rock surface of Yugra under their feet. The control house in the distance swayed slightly on its massive metal piers.

"Jupiter's exerting its pull on Yugra, — too," said Captain Future. "But since this moon has a smaller, more compact mass, it shouldn't be so badly affected."

"If it was my moon, though, I'd get it out of here on the jump!" Grag declared earnestly.

Darmur shook his head. "We can't, start for some hours yet. We have to hurl Yugra out of its orbit at the exact point at which a tangential course will propel it in the direction of Sirius. The course has long been plotted. We must adhere to it, or face disaster when we pass Saturn on the way out of the System."

They ascended into the big control house. Its lower levels were thronged with an excited group of Katainian men and women. These were the Councilors, technicians and other experts who had been selected to act as control crew during the long flight to Sirius.

They met Darmur with excited babble of half fearful exclamations, pointing out the slight, shuddering quakes that were beginning to be felt on Yugra. Darmur reassured them in a firm voice.

"All these tremors were foreseen. They will not be strong enough to harm our firing tube, or the sleep crypts. We shall be leaving before Jupiter can cause too great a disturbance on this moon."

The Futuremen followed the old scientist, Jhulun and Lureen up into the glassite dome of the control room. Here pale, anxious technicians were watching over the massive panel that was the heart of Darmur's plan.

As they waited, Curt and Darmur checked again the calculations on which all depended. The disturbances on Katain's sphere were clearly increasing. Lands were sinking into the wild seas, new lands rising from them.

"That's the danger point, the planetary crust under the oceans," rasped the Brain unemotionally. "When it splits wide open and the seas pour down into the planet's molten interior —"

"I wish it was time to go," complained Otho uneasily.

NEVER had individual hours seemed so endless to those waiting in the control room. The shocks that quivered through Yugra were becoming dangerously stronger.

"Almost time," Curt warned finally, eying the dials. "The first blast must be fired precisely at seven-forty-three-eighteen."

"Recoil chairs, everyone!" called Jhulun warningly into the amplifiers. "The shock of the first blast will be heavy."

Curt helped strap Lureen into her chair before he took his own. Darmur's seat was in front of the center of the control board. Here, amid the rheostats and switches, was a small, red button. A blinker blazed suddenly in front of him.

"Time!" Future cried.

Darmur pushed the button. The springs of their recoil chairs creaked torturedly as a shock rocked the whole control house madly on its piers. Curt Newton, shaken, peered out. Far around the surface of the little moon, a gigantic column of white fire was shooting into space. The uranium that the Futuremen's time engineering had procured was being exploded into pure atomic energy in the great firing tube.

"We've started!" Otho yelped. "We're being torn away from Katain!"

YUGRA was moving ever more rapidly out of its orbit around Katain, flying out at a tangent toward the outer edge of the Solar System plane. That tremendous push of atomic energy had made a rocket of the little moon.

They moved on and on, hour following hour as Darmur fired the great rocket-tube at precalculated intervals. Jupiter and Katain, now almost in conjunction, dropped behind, but Saturn and its twelve moons bulked ahead.

"Are we going to collide with Saturn, Chief?" Grag asked anxiously.

"No, though we'll go pretty close," reassured Captain Future. "The whole course has been carefully calculated. The only thing that couldn't be calculated is the exact way in which the fragments of Katain will fly when the planet explodes. If a fragment should rush out after us and hit this moon —"

He did not finish, but he knew that that danger was what weighed on Darmur's mind as the old scientist looked constantly back toward Katain. Saturn's huge gravitational pull drew them closer and closer. A collision with the outlying moons seemed inevitable, but Darmur steadily fired the great blasts at the proper times. They began finally to draw past the spinning moons of the great planet.

"Look at Katain!" yelled Jhulun hoarsely.

They stared back. The small golden sphere of Katain and the mighty globe of Jupiter had almost reached full conjunction. The telescopes showed that Katain's surface had become a playground of crazy forces. Molten lava broke up through splits in the crust. They saw great cracks appear around the planet's surface. The seas appeared to sink. "There it goes!" came a shriek.

Katain suddenly exploded in bursting steam. The white vapor swirled away quickly, but the planet was gone. Thousands of large and small fragments of its mass were flying out in every direction.

"Katain — Katain the golden!" whispered Jhulun. "Katain no more!"

Lureen was sobbing wildly. Curt's eyes were riveted through the telescope upon those great fragments of the exploded planet.

"One of the bigger fragments is hurtling almost straight after us," he reported, controlling his voice with iron discipline. "It may miss us. Can't tell yet, but it'll be close."

"Holy sun-imps — look at that chunk hitting Jupiter!" Otho yapped.

One of the great fragments of the lost world had been flung straight toward equatorial Jupiter. They saw it strike that world, saw a great up-rush of red, molten lava where it collided.

"The fragment drove through Jupiter's crust into the molten interior and released the lava inside," declared the Brain. "Lad, we've seen the origin of Jupiter's Fire Sea, its Great Red Spot."

Yugra was moving on and on toward the orbit of Uranus, on its way out of the System. For hours Curt, Darmur and the other technicians watched the progress of the threatening mass that was hurtling after them.

"If it passes Saturn, it'll collide with us," Curt said. "There's a chance that Saturn's gravitation may pull it in —"

The Solar System was in wild chaos from the effects of the exploded planet. During the following hours, one incredible astronomical phenomenon succeeded another. They saw the greater number of the fragments of Katain spreading out in a broad, shapeless band between Jupiter and Mars.

"The beginning of the Asteroid Zone of our own time," the Brain commented. "But look at that piece flying toward Earth!"

One of the bigger masses of Katain had hurtled past the orbit of Mars. They thought it would strike Earth, but as hours dragged on, it became apparent that the fragment would pass somewhere close to Earth, within the orbit of its two Moons.

"It's going to hit the smaller Moon!" Otho chattered. "See that?"

THE fragment was rushing toward the smaller, nearer one of Earth's two Moons. They collided squarely. Both the fragment and the little Moon burst into a shower of blazing meteoric debris.

The meteor masses hurtled, from the momentum of the original impact, toward the silvery, blank sphere of the farther Moon of Earth — the Moon of the Futuremen's own time. They saw the meteors raining upon it in a cosmic hail of fire, each plunging into the lunar plain and throwing up a great ring of splashed matter around it.

"The origin of the lunar craters!" marveled Otho. "So that's what became of Earth's second Moon!"

"The fragment that's flying after us," Jhulun was appealing anxiously to Curt, "will it pass Saturn and hit us?"

"It's going to be close," muttered Captain Future, peering through the telescope.

"There's nothing we can do but wait and see."

Hours of superhuman tensity dragged on. Everyone in the control house knew that their fate depended upon the course of that flying fragment of Katain, which was coming after them with far greater speed than Yugra had yet been able to attain. The hour approached when the fragment neared the orbit of Saturn. Would it be deflected by that planet, or would it pass safely and bring destruction to fleeing rocket moon?

"It's not going to hit Saturn," Curt called tensely from his post of observation.

"Then — then we're fated to be destroyed?" Jhulun stammered. "All our tremendous labors is to go for nothing?"

"Wait, there's still a chance!" Captain Future exclaimed. "The fragment's going very close to Saturn. If it hits one of those moons —"

They crowded to watch, knowing their lives hung upon the event. With the naked eye they could clearly perceive the tiny, gleaming point of the cosmic fragment, closely approaching the twelve-mooned planet, Saturn.

From the shadow of Saturn came one of its inner moons, closely followed by another. The first moon and the gleaming fragment rushed toward each other.

"They're colliding!" yelled Jhulun exultantly.

The fragment of Katain had met the moon almost squarely. In a fusing, flaring mass, they rocked close to Saturn, moving toward the oncoming inner moon. Then the blazing mass struck in and this second collision resulted in an explosion of flaming fragments. They could see the innumerable pieces spreading out in all directions around Saturn, drawn in conflicting courses by the pull of the planet and the ten remaining moons.