Captain Future #8: The Lost World of Time E-Book

Edmond Hamilton

• Herausgeber: Thrilling
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Futuremen race into the past to answer a cry for help that has traveled across a hundred million years! Follow Captain Future as the greatest enigma of all time transports him into the forgotten ages. The Captain Future saga follows the super-science pulp hero Curt Newton, along with his companions, The Futuremen: Grag the giant robot, Otho the android, and Simon Wright the living brain in a box. Together, they travel the solar system in series of classic pulp adventures, many of which written by the author of The Legion of Super-Heroes, Edmond Hamilton.

Leseprobe

The Lost World of Time

Captain Future book #8

by

Edmond Hamilton

The Futuremen race into the past to answer a cry for help that has traveled across a hundred million years! Follow Captain Future as the greatest enigma of all time transports him into the forgotten ages.

Thrilling

Copyright Information

“The Lost World of Time” was originally published in 1941. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Chapter I

Mystery Asteroid

THE asteroid swung dark and lonely on its predestined path through space, a tiny world of brooding mystery and silence. It was but one of the countless asteroids, meteor swarms and other interplanetary debris that form a great band between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A dense little world with a thin envelope of air, it was clad with a thick jungle of flat, fronded green trees and shrubs.

Many-legged asteroid rats scurried to and fro in the jungle and flame-birds cut soaring, phosphorescent trails amid the fronds. Now and again a tentative breeze stirred the fronds to leathery rustling. Then resumed the long, heavy silences of an unpeopled world….

But tonight there was a new, alien sound, coming from the meteor-blazoned sky. It was the high, droning hum of rocket-tubes.

The drone grew louder. Out of the sky sank a battered Kalber space ship, its keel-tubes flaming as it dropped to a landing in a rocky clearing of the jungle. After it came another rusty Kalber. The doors of the two ships opened. Men emerged, their voices echoing thinly through the night of the miniature world. The rodents and creepers of the jungle shrank away. The flame-birds fled in fright. There were eleven men, a roughly dressed, hardy-looking crew. Among them were red Martians, a tall, stringy, blue Saturnian, a gray-skinned, peak-headed Neptunian, a tanned, eager boy of Earth, and a couple of squat, green Jovians. They were meteor miners, prospectors who scoured the countless asteroids and meteor swarms of the Zone in search of rare and valuable metals. That their expedition had gone well so far was evidenced by their cheerfulness.

“This is it—Asteroid two-twenty-one,” declared the brawny Jovian who was the leader of the party. “It’s never been prospected yet, as far as I know. We may find a rich bed of titanium or tellurium here.”

“We already got enough for a year’s spree on any planet,” the tall, cadaverous Saturnian snickered. “It’s the best trip we’ve made yet.”

“Break out an atomic glower and get it going,” ordered the Jovian captain. “We’ll camp in the open tonight. I’m sick of ship’s air.”

The men brought out the flat, disklike machine and set it up on the rocks near their ships. It gave off a steady flame of atomic fire that beat back the gathering chill of night.

THE warm light flickered off the grotesque fronded trees around the clearing, glinted off the battered hulls of the two Kalbers and set flame-birds flying farther away with startled squawks. It glowed cheerily on the faces of the motley group of adventurers as they sprawled in its radiance, eating flat cakes of Jovian bread and chunks of thawed Saturnian beef, washed down by flasks of strong Venusian wine.

“Pretty good going for your first space trip, eh, Melton?” the Neptunian asked the eager, brown-faced Earth youth beside him. “You’ve already got a small fortune in your share of the metals in those holds.”

Brad Melton nodded.

“It isn’t the money as much as the adventure of it. All my life I wanted to be a spaceman. I was afraid I’d never get off Earth, never see other planets.”

When he had finished eating, Melton strolled around the clearing. He stared wonderingly at the dark, brooding jungle, the flame-birds and the incredible meteor-blazing sky. Then he noticed something about the black rocks underfoot that made him bend down and examine it closely.

“Look at this rock!” he cried. “Part of it was carved by someone. It must be the wreck of a wall or building, maybe a city!”

“Sure, kid, there’s ancient carved rocks and queer bits of metal on lots of these asteroids,” answered the Jovian casually. He turned to the old Martian who was planetologist and assayer for the party. “You scientists think there was people on them once, don’t you?”

“Yes, in a way,” answered the Martian. “But it must have been very long ago. Nobody’s ever found any really worthwhile remains.”

Brad Melton continued to poke curiously around the crumbling rocks at the edge of the clearing.

After a moment he shouted excitedly again.

“Say, there’s something queer here. It felt as if I stepped into an invisible beam of some kind. It made me feel as though I were hearing someone talk to me.”

The Jovian leader laughed deprecatingly.

“You get all kinds of weird feelings on these little worlds, Melton. Some of ’em are plenty weird, like the one they call Circe. I’ll never forget how a bunch of us landed on it and found the crew of a freighter that had been wrecked there. They weren’t even men any more. The chemical in the air of that cursed asteroid had transformed ’em into beasts such as you never saw—”

His deep voice continued relating the tale, while the motley group around the flaring atomic glower listened with great interest. None of them noticed that Brad Melton was acting queerly out in the shadows. Too busy to pay attention to the story, the young Earthman was moving about experimentally, trying to rediscover a certain spot. Suddenly he stopped.

Had they been watching, they would have seen a strange, listening expression upon his face. For a long time he stood there in a queerly rigid, listening attitude.

“So we left the poor devils on Circe and reported ’em as dead when we got back to Mars,” the Jovian captain finished. “I guess it would have been better for them if they’d been dead. They sure couldn’t have enjoyed being alive.”

There was a brief silence and then the gray Neptunian shivered.

“That’s a nice bedtime story,” he muttered. “These little worlds give me the creeps.”

They looked up as Brad Melton came back to the light. The youth’s tanned face was pale and he seemed laboring under intense excitement. He sat down and stared into the atomic flame, his lean fingers twisting and untwisting, his blue eyes wide and strange. He seemed inwardly debating something that had enormously upset him.

The others glanced away and talked on, matching tales of faraway worlds and moons, of adventure on the shoreless sea of Neptune, prospecting the lightless caves of Uranus, mining on the terrible Hot Side of Mercury, or hazardous searches amid the jagged planetoids of Saturn’s Rings.

BRAD MELTON abruptly turned to the old Martian scientist.

“Nilga, you know a lot about science. Tell me this. Is there anybody living who’s ever found the secret of crossing time?”

The Martian turned and stared at him in surprise.

“You mean time-traveling? Whatever put that in your head, Melton?”

“I just got to wondering,” Melton evaded. His whole bearing was anxious and taut as he insisted; “Has anybody ever discovered the secret?”

The old red scientist shook his head.

“Why, no. There’s no one who’s solved that problem, though plenty of scientists have worked on it in the last hundred years. You see, Melton, the scientists of the System have known for a long time that time-traveling is theoretically possible. Time, you know, is simply the fourth dimension of matter, the four being length, breadth, thickness and duration. Theoretically we should be able to find a way to move along the time dimension, but actually nobody’s ever succeeded in doing it. That is, unless—”

“Unless what?” Brad Melton asked quickly. “Do you mean that maybe somebody has done it?”

“Well, there are people who say that Captain Future knows the secret of time-traveling, but perhaps that’s just a story. After all, they tell so many stories about Captain Future that the truth is bound to get stretched now and then.”

“Captain Future?” the young Earthman repeated, his eyes alight with awe. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of him? If anybody alive would know that secret, he, the greatest scientist in the System, would be that one.”

“I doubt it,” the old Martian said skeptically. “Oh, I know all the wonderful things that Future and those strange comrades of his, the Futuremen, have done. They’ve achieved plenty of scientific miracles, but time-traveling? No, I can’t believe that even Future has solved that.”

“But he might have,” persisted Brad Melton hopefully. “Maybe he solved the problem without telling the System about it.”

“It’s possible,” granted the old scientist. “Nobody does know half the things he’s done in that laboratory-home of his on Earth’s Moon. But time-traveling, I’m afraid, would stump even Captain Future.”

The Jovian captain threw away his rial cigarette and yawned.

“I’m turning in, boys. We’ll get up early tomorrow and start prospecting.”

Soon the whole group, with one exception, lay around the glowing heater. Swathed in their synthewool blankets, they were sleeping the carefree slumber of interplanetary adventurers who take no thought for the morrow.

Brad Melton was the exception. He sat gazing into the atomic flame, his eyes wide and absorbed, his face intense with concentration. His inner excitement seemed to come finally to a crescendo. He rose to his feet with nervous resolution.

“I’m going to do it!” he whispered. “I may be crazy. I ought to ignore it all, but I can’t. That faraway voice, pleading—the life or death of all those people—I’ve got to do it!”

With silent, quick steps he moved toward one of the space ships and began his stealthy preparations.

THE sleeping meteor miners were awakened by a sudden staccato roar. They sat up bewilderedly, rubbing their eyes. A trail of rocket-fire curved toward the sky. One of the ships was gone.

“What in the name of all the devils of Jupiter!” swore their leader angrily. “Who took that ship?”

“Young Melton,” was the answer. “He must have gone crazy.”

“Maybe he’s gone off with all our metal!”

“If he has, I’ll never trust my judgment of human nature again,” bellowed the Jovian. “No, he didn’t take the metal. See?”

The small, heavy sacks of tantalum, tellurium and other metals lay on the ground. Pinned to one sack was a note.

I’m leaving half my share of metal to pay for the ship I’m taking. If you had heard it, you wouldn’t have ignored that cry for help, either. I’m going to the one man in the System who can answer it.

“Why, he must be space-struck to run away like this!” exclaimed the Jovian.

“He was acting queerly last night,” commented the old Martian. “He kept talking about hearing voices and then about time-traveling.”

The men looked uneasily around the dark, brooding jungle.

“Something here drove him off his orbit,” muttered the Neptunian superstitiously. “This is another of those bad asteroids you talked about.”

“Let’s get out of here before we begin to hear voices and go crazy, too!” demanded the Saturnian excitedly.

There was a general chorus of approval. These men were not easily frightened, but they sensed something alien and possibly menacing about this brooding, lonely planetoid, something that might drive them to madness.

“All right, we’ll go,” growled the Jovian. “Don’t see any trace of metals here, anyway. Load up, boys. We’ll have to carry on in one ship now. I doubt if we’ll ever see young Melton again.” He shook his head. “All the same, I’d like to know what it was on this cursed little world that drove him out of his mind.”

Chapter II

Citadel of Science

EARTH bulked in the sky like a huge green disk, filling half the heavens. It cast a strange, soft-green radiance upon the wild and rugged surface of the Moon.

Savage, hostile and unutterably forbidding stretched the lunar landscape. Here was no air or sound, no wind or water. Eternally changeless plains of barren rock stretched toward mighty mountain ranges whose uneroded peaks menaced the sky like bared fangs. Giant craters ringed by circular walls of immense altitude frowned like blind eyes.

Upon the floor of the crater Tycho was a spot where there was movement and life. Three highly different individuals were engaged upon an engrossing activity. One of them, a tall young Earthman in a light space-suit and helmet, held a heavy metal bat in his hands and was facing one of his two companions.

“Thought I’d miss that last one, did you?” he jeered. “If that’s the best you can do, you’re sunk.”

His space-suit embodied an audio-phone of short radius through which they were able to hear him. He swung the metal bat on his shoulder, waiting.

“Come on!” he invited. “This time I’ll knock that ball clear to the wall of the crater.”

Curtis Newton, the young Earthman planeteer famous the length and breadth of the System as Captain Future grinned to himself as he waited. He made a striking picture, tall, lithe and broad-shouldered even in his space-suit. Through his transparent glassite helmet, the green Earthglow lighted his mop of tousled red hair, his space-tanned, handsome face and clear, keen gray eyes.

He and his two comrades were playing rocket-ball, a game that was popular throughout the nine worlds, yet this was perhaps the strangest place in which it had ever been played. To Curt, though, it did not seem strange. The Moon was home to him. Near them in the crater floor was a big glassite window, beneath which lay the cavern chambers of his comfortable dwelling and marvelous scientific laboratories.

“Come on, Grag!” he challenged. “Let’s have the pitch.”

Grag had been fingering the controls of the rocket-ball. Now he prepared to let it go.

“This one’ll get you sure, Chief,” he boomed. “Here goes!”

Grag made an outlandish figure as he prepared to pitch the ball, for Grag was not a man. He was a metal robot. His massive metal body towered seven feet high. His great, jointed arms and legs hinted the strength that was unmatched in the whole System. His bulbous metal head swiveled on a neck-joint and from it shone his bright photo-electric eyes.

Grag did not throw the ball. He simply released it and it shot toward Captain Future of its own accord. The ball was powered by a tiny rocket-motor which enabled it to maintain a swift, free flight.

But it did not fly straight toward Curt. Its controls could be set by the pitcher for any desired course of flight. The only requisite was that the ball must actually cross the batter’s plate. It sped toward Curt in a spiral, cork-screw path. It performed bewildering involutions, dipped almost to the ground and then zoomed like a streak of light across the plate.

Crack!

Curt’s keen eyes had not erred in judgment. His bat met the rocket-ball and knocked it far off through the airless void. Laughing triumphantly, Curt started running around the circular base path. Six times he circled it before the catcher caught up with the ball and Sung it to Grag.

“Six more points for me,” said Curt. “That puts me even with Otho. You’re way behind, Grag.”

The catcher advanced.

“Let me pitch, Grag,” he proposed. “I’ll send a ball over that the Chief won’t even be able to see.”

“No, I’m doing the pitching,” Grag boomed angrily. “You get back to your place, Otho.”

OTHO, the catcher, wore a space-suit like Curt’s, but he was a much different figure, for Otho, like Grag, was not human either. He was a synthetic man, an android. His body, though human in appearance, had been constructed of artificial tissues. His head was hairless, the skin pure-white, with no brows or lashes. Slanted and green, sparkling with reckless deviltry, were Otho’s eyes. He was the swiftest and most deft of all beings in the System and had the greatest propensity for getting into trouble. Even from his position as catcher, he was able to field and tag out the runner.

“With your pitching, he’ll run up a score of a million against us!” Otho complained.

“You tend to your catching, my rubbery friend,” Grag ordered majestically. “Watch me this time.”

He set the controls of the rocket-ball and let it go again. It darted away to the left, then came in across the plate at a wide angle. Curt’s bat slammed it unmercifully. As the ball shot high in the air, he started racing around the base path. But this time Otho fooled him. The android made an unbelievable leap of forty feet into the air and caught the speeding ball.

“That puts you out, Chief!” Grag boomed triumphantly. “It’s my turn at bat now.”

“Swell catch, Otho,” Curt complimented. “I didn’t think even you could leap that high.”

“It was nothing,” Otho answered in a tone of weary disdain. “You just watch my pitching put Grag out in a hurry.”

Curt grinned as he took up the catcher’s position. A game of rocket-ball with these two Futuremen was a perpetual row, he told himself, yet he had to do something to keep from getting bored.

For weeks he had been getting more and more restless. In the past, when he had felt that way, he had set out on a jaunt in the Comet, to explore the previously unknown south polar ice wastes of Pluto, or to visit his friends, the queer Thought Masters on Neptune’s moon, or some similar half-purposeless trip. Now he no longer was satisfied with that. He knew the System’s nine worlds, thirty-one moons and countless asteroids so well that there was little new about them to attract him.

Something new was what he wanted. He had been getting increasingly weary of the old and known, had felt a constant yearning of his adventurous spirit toward new frontiers of the Universe, new and unsuspected worlds. Other men might find a trip to one of the farther planets a wildly thrilling experience, but Curt Newton had been roaming those worlds since boyhood. He had, in fact, never seen Earth until he was almost mature.

The story of Curt’s birth and boyhood was the strangest saga in the System’s history. A generation ago, his parents had fled to the Moon to protect their scientific discoveries from an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. With them had come Simon Wright, the brain who lived in a box, but who had once been a living man. They had built their combination laboratory and home under Tycho. Here their experiments had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. And here, soon after Curt Newton’s birth, Corvo killed his parents and was in turn killed by the Brain, robot and android.

The three unhuman, superhuman beings had reared and educated young Curtis. Their combined instruction had made him not only the most skillful planeteer in space, but also the System’s greatest scientist. For some time, Curt had devoted his immense abilities to a war against the criminals of the System. In that war against crime he had been given the name of Captain Future.

NOW Curt’s crusade to eradicate completely all interplanetary criminals seemed to have achieved its goal. His epic struggle against Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars, had finished off the last law breaker of major importance. He had no interest in smaller fry that the Planet Police could handle and the weeks of inaction had been making him restless. He had spent those weeks mostly in the deep scientific researches he loved, but now he was tired even of those. His adventure-loving soul felt a blind urge for new worlds to chart.

“Hang it, the trouble with me is that I don’t know when I’m well off!” he told himself impatiently, trying to dismiss the oppressive feeling.

Otho had been elaborately setting the control of the rocket-ball and now was ready to release it.

“Here it comes, Grag,” he warned. “This is my special double-reverse-bob-and-weave ball.”

“Let it come,” offered the big robot. “I’ll murder it!”

Otho released the rocket-ball. It shot forward in bewilderingly erratic flight, but Grag’s bat smacked it and knocked it whizzing. The robot started lumbering around the base path, his metal limbs clanking. Otho, however, made another superhuman leap and grabbed the ball.

“You’re out!” he crowed, darting forward to pick up the bat.

“Wait a minute!” Curt Newton called. “Let me take a look at your gravitation equalizer, Otho.”

Otho started to put up objections, but Curt grabbed him and examined the flat case strapped to his belt—the equalizer whose aura of force made its wearer’s weight the same on any world.

“Just as I thought,” Curt said witheringly. “You’ve set your equalizer to make you weigh only ten pounds. No wonder you could jump high enough to make those catches.”

“Why, that’s a dirty foul!” raged Grag. “Let me at that hunk of rubber. I’ll wipe up the Moon with him!”

“Aw, it was only a joke,” Otho said sheepishly. “I just did it for a laugh. Go on back to bat and quit your howling.”

But Grag was still furious as he picked up the bat and again faced Otho. The android let the ball go again. Grag, now thoroughly enraged, swung with all the force of his mighty metal arms. A resounding crack followed and the rocket-ball whizzed upward. This time it didn’t come down.

“Devils of space, Grag’s knocked the ball clear off the Moon!” Otho exclaimed in dismay.

Curt laughed. The low surface gravity of the Moon had not been able to retain the ball against the robot’s tremendous blow.

“That gives Grag the game,” Curt said. “He can run around the bases a thousand times, if he wants to, but I’ll concede it to him.”

“I’ll get another ball and we’ll see who takes the next game,” declared Otho angrily.

The android started toward the flight of steps that led down through the lunar rock to the airlock entrance of the underground Moon-home. He stopped.

“Here comes Simon and in a hurry.”

Out of the Moon-home had emerged an astonishing figure. It was the third Futureman, Simon Wright.

Simon had once been a brilliant, aging scientist of Earth. When he was on the point of death, Curt Newton’s father had surgically removed the living brain and installed it in a special serum-case.

That case was of transparent metal, containing the serum and pumps and purifiers that kept the brain alive. In the front of the case were Simon’s glass lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the aperture of his mechanical speech apparatus. From his case the Brain could shoot magnetic beams, which he was able to use as substitute hands to wield tools or instruments, or upon which he could glide swiftly through space in any direction.

THE Brain rarely showed emotion. His icy, bodiless mentality, so utterly absorbed in scientific research, was ordinarily aloof to all disturbance. But now, as his strange form glided swiftly toward them on his flashing traction beams, his metallic voice came with a sharp, urgent note.

“Lad, the automatic sura-warning just sounded!” he called to Curt Newton. “A ship is approaching the Moon!”

Instantly Captain Future’s face hardened.

“It must be someone with an unfriendly purpose,” the Brain continued in his rasping, metallic voice. “Only an enemy would try to come here. Everyone in the System knows that this is forbidden territory.”

“We’ll wait and see who these visitors are,” Curt said quietly. “Get behind those rocks and make no move until I give the order.”

Swiftly, with the efficiency characteristic of the supreme cooperation among the Futuremen in times of emergency, they melted from sight behind a clump of jagged, towering rocks. There Curt waited with them, loosening his proton pistol in its holster.

They soon glimpsed a flash of rocket-flame up in the starry sky. A ship was coming straight down to Tycho crater, firing its brake-blasts.

“A five-man Kalber cruiser,” muttered Otho. “There can’t be many in it. If it’s an attack, it’s a queer one.”