Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942) (18 page)

Joan touched his arm reassuringly.

“It will be all right, Curt. You’ve just worked too hard on it.”

Captain Future declared his resolution.

“I’m going to try, it now — on myself. I won’t allow another man to take the first chance with it.”

“No, Curt — you mustn’t!” Joan cried, her eyes wide with alarm. “If anything happened to you, the rest of us would never be able to solve the problem. Let me be the first!”

“Heaven forbid!” exclaimed the Brain.

“Do you think I’d let her?” protested Curt Newton. “Not in a million years!”

Aggar settled the argument by stepping into the big copper chamber. The new Cometae ruler bellowed in his bluff voice:

“It’s my duty to take the first risk for my people. Go ahead and turn it on.”

RELUCTANTLY Captain Future opened the switch that fed power into the redesigned converter. He and the others watched tensely.

Brilliant red rays streamed from the lenses above and below, to bathe Aggar’s massive figure in a weird aura. They saw the Cometae ruler stagger from the shock, but he remained resolutely upright.

The red shifted into orange, the orange into yellow, as the changing frequencies of force ran down the spectrum. By the time the hue had reached violet, they could see that the intrinsic electric brilliance of Aggar’s body was rapidly fading. And when he stepped out of the chamber, he was no longer a shining figure but a normal man!

Weak and swaying, Aggar looked down at himself, held his hands wonderingly before his eyes. A great joy lit his eves.

“I’m a man again!” he said hoarsely. “I’m an electric travesty no longer. I’ll age and grow hungry and get sick now, and finally I’ll die. But thank the gods, until then I’ll really live!”

Captain Future was the next to undergo the metamorphosis. And after that grueling ordeal, when he too stepped out as a normal man again, Joan insisted on being next. When she emerged, Curt took her thankfully in his arms.

“Now for my people!” Aggar roared joyfully. “There’s not one but won’t want to trade back that pitiful electric immortality for real life!”

It proved so, indeed. The next days saw a great migration of the Cometae people along the road from Mloon to the black citadel. They passed by day and by night through the copper chamber, until at last the last of the Cometae had regained normal humanity.

There were feastings and rejoicings in Mloon beneath the coma-sky. Infants would be born again, and the cries of children would be heard once more. The comet people were returning to the ancient ways of their race.

But Ezra Gurney was worried. He confided his fears to Curt and the Futuremen.

“How in the name of Pluto’s fiends are we fellows from outside the comet goin’ to get back out of it, Cap’n Future? Our ships are still here, but we can’t get ‘em out through that coma!”

“Don’t worry, Ezra,” Captain Future advised. “There won’t be any difficulty about that.”

Nor was there. The great magnet which the Cometae had built, under orders of the Alius, was now made the instrument by which their ships were enabled to leave the comet. It was not hard to alter the magnet so that it projected a beam of reversed polarity out through the coma’s shell.

Into that beam, one by one, rose the spaceships that had been held captive so long. And each ship, as it entered the beam, was flung out with a force as great as that which originally had dragged it in. Each ship was hurled through the opening made by the beam in the coma, to find itself in the familiar void of System space once more.

The
Comet
, ship of the Futuremen, was the last of the craft to depart, for the tearful farewells of the grateful Cometae had been long. But at last the Futuremen and Ezra and Joan found themselves in space once more.

“What a relief!” cried Otho, gazing around with sparkling eyes at the familiar vista of black gloom and bright stars. “I’m cursed if I ever want to go within a hundred light-years of any comet again!”

“You’d be back there yet if it wasn’t for the help of my little dog Eek,” declared Grag, proudly caressing the moon-pup that was snuggling in his arm.

“What are you talking about?” cried Otho. “That little pest didn’t do anything but go into one panic after another.”

“Sure, and it was Eek’s wonderful faculty for getting scared that guided us through the Alius citadel,” boasted Grag. “You didn’t see Oog helping us any. He hasn’t enough brains to get scared like that!”

Otho began to rave, and the Brain and Ezra Gurney intervened. Chuckling, Captain Future left them in the control room and went back to look for Joan.

HE FOUND her in the cabin, gazing intently backward through a window at the brilliant flare of Halley’s Comet. It was growing rapidly smaller as their ship throbbed toward Earth.

To Curt’s surprise, he found a glimmer of tears in her eyes when he turned her around.

“Why, Joan, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing — I’m just foolish,” she murmured. “But I can’t help feeling a little sorry to leave the comet.”

He did not understand. Joan looked up at him with deep emotion in her fine eyes.

“Out here, Curt, you belong to the whole System. I know you love me, but duty comes first — your obligation to use your scientific powers to help the System peoples.

“But if we’d been forced to remain on the comet world, cut off forever from the outside, nothing else would have come first for us. It could have been a paradise for us. But it’s lost now.”

Curt Newton bent and kissed her.

“Joan, don’t feel like that. Some day when our work is done, we’ll find our own paradise. I know a little asteroid that’s waiting for us. It’s just like a garden. Some day.

THE END