Captain Future 25 - Moon of the Unforgotten (January 1951) (3 page)

Beyond the arches there were no more buildings but only the straight road that ran into the hills between two rows of ancient stelae, stark and rigid under the glow of the great planet. Beyond the stelae there was nothing, only the gaunt slopes and the sighing in the stiff dry grass.

There had been no alarm behind them and there was no pursuit. The warning night was blank and still. Captain Future led the way at random until he found a place that suited him. Then he stopped and motioned Otho to dismount.

The young man was conscious. Curt thought he had been conscious for some time but he had made no move. He was breathless now from the jolting of the beast. He crouched where Curt had set him, shaking his head, gasping.

Presently Curt asked, “Why did you open the paddock gate?”

The young man answered, “Because I did not wish for you to die.”

“Do you know why we were supposed to die?”

“I know.” He looked at them and his eyes were hot and angry. “Yes, I know!”

“Ah,” said Curt Newton. “Then you do not worship the Second Life.”

Otho laughed. “He doesn’t need rejuvenation.”

“It is not rejuvenation,” said the young man bitterly. “It is death, the death of my world and my people. Almost before our beards are grown the Second Life takes hold of us and we forget the first life that we have not yet lived. Our walls fall about us stone by stone and we have not cloth to wrap our bodies in and the great change in other worlds does not touch us — but all that is nothing so long as we live the glorious life, the Second Life!”

He sprang up, glaring at Curt and Otho as though he hated them, but it was not their faces he saw. It was the sere and sterile faces of men grown old before their time, dead men on a dying moon.

“You of the other worlds are not like us. Life goes forward for you. Men learn and grow and the fields are rich and the cities are bright and tall. Even your oldest worlds have young minds — is that not so?”

Captain Future nodded. “It is so.”

“Yes. But on Europa what is there for a young man? Dust and dreams! There is a wall against us and after a while we learn that we cannot break it down. Then we too grow old.”

He turned away. “Go back to your own world. You have life. Keep it.”

Curt caught him by the arms. “What is the Second Life?”

“Death,” said the young man, “to those who live it — and to those who would destroy it. We know. We have tried.”

A sharp light came suddenly into Curt Newton’s eyes. “Then there are others in the city who feel as you do?”

“Oh, yes — all of us who are still young.” He laughed. It was not pleasant laughter. “We banded together once. We went up to the valley, angry, full of hate — we were going to make our world free. And they shot us down in the pass — the old men shot us down!”

He shook himself free of the Earthman’s grasp. “I have told you. Go back to your own while you still live.”

“No,” said Captain Future softly. “We are going to the valley. And you will guide us.”

The eyes of the young man widened. He stepped back and Otho caught him from behind, holding him helpless. He turned his head from side to side and cried out, “Three men, where a hundred of us failed? You don’t know Konnur, the Guardian of the Second Life. You don’t know the punishment. I am a proscribed man! I am forbidden in the valley!”

“Proscription, punishment!” Curt Newton’s voice was heavy with contempt. “You don’t deserve your youth. Your bones are already crumbling.” He reached out and slapped the young man’s face, lightly, deliberately, one cheek and then the other.

“You will guide us to the valley. After that, you’re free to tuck your tail and run. We can end the Second Life without such help as yours.”

Captain Future saw the flame of anger leap in the young man’s eyes, the dark flush in his cheeks. He strained against the android’s grip and Curt laughed.

“So there’s still a bit of pride left if a man can find it! Set him up here, Otho.” He swung up onto the scaly back of his mount and received the Europan between his arms, where Otho lifted him as though he had been a child.

“Now,” said Curt, “which way?”

The young man pointed.

They rode on through the dark hills, and after awhile the dawn came and found them before the shadowy throat of a pass — the dawn of a pale far Sun that was only a little lighter than the night.

Curt dismounted and stood holding the bridle. He said to the Europan. “Go back to the spaceport, to the Patrol base. Tell those who wait there for us where we are.”

A gleam that was almost a light of hope began to show in the young man’s eyes. “And you?” he asked.

Curt nodded toward the blind notch of the pass. “We are going in.”

“Perhaps,” whispered the young man softly, “perhaps it is true that you can end the Second Life — you and those who wait for you. We know of you even here, where we know so little. I will go. And after I have said your message I will go into the city to gather those who fought once and who can fight again!”

CAPTAIN FUTURE let go the rein. The young man wheeled the squealing beast around and sent it flying back toward the city. Otho’s mount ran with it.

“Let us hope,” said the android dryly, “that our boy doesn’t come to grief along the way.”

He turned and walked with Curt up into the darkness of the pass.

“If the Second Life isn’t rejuvenation, what is it?” Otho asked. “Some kind of pleasure-dream by artificial sensory stimuli? No, Ezra wouldn’t stoop to that.”

“No, it isn’t that,” Curt said. “I’m beginning to think that it’s something more pitiful and terrible than that.”

It was quiet in the pass. The screes of broken rock rose up on either side, with here and there a stunted tree. An army might have hidden there and been unseen but even Curt’s keen ears could detect no sound of life.

And yet he was not surprised when, as they reached the end of the pass, he looked back and saw men closing in behind them.

He waited for them. They were youngish men and strong but in their eyes already was the shadow of decay. He could see why the young Europan had called these “the old men” too.

“I have come to speak to Konnur,” Captain Future said to them.

The one who seemed to be the leader nodded. “He is waiting for you. You will give us your weapons, please.”

They had weapons of their own and there was not much point in arguing. Curt and Otho handed them over. Then they walked on and the men with the old eyes came close behind them.

The valley was deep and there were forests in it and a thin stream. Not far from the pass was a massive house of stone, very long and wide, that looked as though it might have been a place of learning in the days when the moon was young.

“There,” said the leader, and pointed to a gateway of which the valves were fine-worked gold, bright as the day they were hung there. Captain Future passed between them with Otho at his side.

Inside there was the soft gloom of vaulted chambers, cool and dim, with old flagged floors that rang hollow under their striding boots. The great house was only a shell of stone, stripped of all but its enduring bones. It was empty and very still.

They waited and presently a man came walking toward them down a long passage, a tall man, erect and very proud. An aging man but not dusty, not decayed. His eyes were bright and clear, the eyes of a fanatic or a saint.

Looking at him, Curt knew that he was faced with the most dangerous kind of an enemy — a man with a belief.

“You are Konnur?” he asked.

“I am. And you are Curt Newton and — ah, yes, the one who is called Otho.” Konnur made a slight inclination of his head. “I have expected you. The man Gurney was afraid the girl would send for you in spite of his message.”

“And where is Gurney?”

“I will take you to him,” said Konnur. “Come.”

He led the way down the long dim corridor and Curt and Otho followed. Behind them still came the grim-faced men.

Konnur paused beside a massive door of some tarnished metal and pushed it open.

“Enter,” he said.

Captain Future stepped through into a long low hall that might have held a regiment. And he stopped with a queer chill shiver running through him. Beside him he heard Otho catch his breath.

There was a stillness on that place. Above it and below it and through it was a sound, a deep and gentle humming that only made the silence greater.

Spaced along the hall were many slabs of marble, mortuary couches hollowed deep by the pressure of uncounted bodies. Above each slab there stood a cowled machine as ancient as the marble, of a manufacture utterly foreign to any prosaic mechanism of Earth. They had been kept bright with loving care but even so a number of them seemed worn out and useless. It was the machines that made the humming, the whirring song of sleep.

Men and women lay upon the slabs. Curt lost count of their numbers in the uncertain shadows. They lay as though in slumber, their limbs relaxed, their faces peaceful. Around each sleeper’s head was bound a strap of some unfamiliar metal, having round electrodes fitted to the temples. The electrodes were connected, not by wires but by tendrils of glowing force, to the hooded mechanism above, from which a somber light poured down.

Otho whispered, “There they are — all the old ones who have disappeared from other worlds.”

Old men, old women — the sad, the burdened, the careworn. They slept here on the ancient slabs and Curt saw that in their faces there was more than peace. There was happiness, the joy of young days when the sun was bright and the body strong and tomorrow was only a vague mist on the horizon.

There were many Europans also and they too had found happiness under the humming machines. But in their faces was reflected a different joy — a lofty pride as though behind their closed eyelids passed visions of magnificence and strength.

KONNUR beckoned. “Here your friend lies sleeping.” Curt stood beside the slab, looking down into the face of Ezra Gurney. The familiar face that to Curt was almost that of a father — and yet it was not the bleak face he remembered. The grimness was gone, the scars of time and pain had softened. The mouth smiled and it was the smile of a young man, a boy who has not yet lost the laughter from his heart.

“Waken him!”
cried Curt.

And Konnur said, “Not yet.”

Otho asked, “But — is it all illusion? Is he drugged or dreaming?”

“No,” said Konnur. “He is remembering — returning —
reliving.
Everyone has times within his life that he would like to live again. The man Gurney has recaptured the period of his youth. He is young. He walks and speaks and feels, reliving every action as he lived it then. That is what we call the Second Life.”

“But how?” said Curt. “
How?”

“These instruments of the ancients,” said Konnur, “enable man to remember — not just as a vague flitting vision but to recall with every one of his senses so that he completely relives the remembered experience.”

Curt began to understand. Each experience left a new neural path in the synaptic labyrinth of the brain and the brief re-traveling of that path roused a partial passing re-experience that was called “memory.”

The Twentieth Century psychologists had speculated long ago that what they called “redintegration” might seize upon one single remembered impression and evoke from it all the many sensory impressions of which it had formed a part. The subtle probing rays of these machines accomplished “redintegration” in the fullest sense.

“And the memories of the fathers lie buried in the brains of the sons,” Konnur was continuing. “Those parts of the brain formerly thought purposeless are a great storehouse of ancestral memories, inherited through some unimaginably subtle change in the chromosomes that even the ancients could not understand.”

“So that you can reach back through those layers of buried inherited memory?” exclaimed Curt. “How far back?”

“Far and far,” Konnur replied. “Back to the days of our world’s glory, indeed — and is it wonderful that we prefer to live in the great past of Europa and not in its sad present?”

Captain Future said soberly, “But that is a rejection of the only real life. It is a retreat, a dying.”

“Yet it is glory and triumph and joy,” said Konnur.

His hand reached out to touch the humming mechanism. There was something reverent in the gesture.

“We do not understand these machines that give us the Second Life. The ancients had the knowledge and it is lost. But we can duplicate them bit by bit. You will see that many of them are worn out, beyond repair. We needed rare metals, the radioactive substances that are the core of the machine.

“They are found no longer on Europa and so we needed money to buy from other worlds, to build new machines. That is why we brought these people here.” He nodded to the aging folk of Earth and the other planets who had come to Europa to live the past again.

Captain Future faced Konnur. He spoke almost in the words of the young Europan.

“This is not life but death! Your cities are crumbling, your people are wasting away. This poison of the Second Life is destroying your world and must be stopped!”

“And,” asked Konnur softly, “will you stop it?”

“Yes! I have sent for the other Futuremen and behind them are the Patrol — and some hundreds of your own people, Konnur, the young men who prefer to live one life rather than to die in two.”

“It may be so,” said Konnur. “And yet who knows? The man Gurney came here to stop it. He changed his mind. Perhaps you will change yours!”

Curt gave him a look of contempt. “You can’t bribe me with memories of my youth. They’re too close behind me — and most of them were not pleasant.”

Konnur nodded. “I would not attempt anything so childish. There are other memories. The whole System knows of your long struggle to delve into the ancient past, the lost cosmic history of mankind.
You, yourself, can live in that past. Through ancestral memory, you can live again in the days of the Old Empire — perhaps even before it.”

He smiled and added slowly, “You have a thirst for knowledge. And there are no limits to the learning you might acquire in the Second Life!”