Captain Future #9: Quest Beyond the Stars E-Book

Edmond Hamilton

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

Beschreibung

Ride With Curt Newton, the world’s greatest space-farer, and the Futuremen as they leave the known star trails to penetrate the source of cosmic rays, the very core of the universe! 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

Quest Beyond the Stars

Captain Future book #9

by

Edmond Hamilton

Ride With Curt Newton, the world’s greatest space-farer, and the Futuremen as they leave the known star trails to penetrate the source of cosmic rays, the very core of the universe!

Thrilling

Copyright Information

“Quest Beyond the Stars” was originally published in 1942. 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

Waning World

THE unchanging dusk of a dying planet reigned over the somberly silent city. The huge red orb of the Sun hung perpetually at the horizon, peering like a giant eye at the tragedy that was being enacted in this ancient metropolis of the little planet Mercury. Thin and cold was the air. It was so thin, indeed, that the lungs had to gulp it feverishly to secure enough oxygen to maintain life. And it was so dry that its touch seemed to wither the skin. Year by year, the air and water of the little world had failed, until now—

A pathetic parade was winding through the gleaming chromaloy towers of this city of the Twilight Zone. Mercurian men and women and children, swarthy small-statured people, clutched bundles of their most precious possessions as they dully shuffled toward the spaceport.

“Move along, please,” came the constant quiet urging of uniformed officers of the Planet Police.

The tragic-eyed marchers made no answer. And the throngs of their fellow Mercurians who lined the streets and watched them pass also maintained a dead silence in which an aching agony was implicit.

“Move along!”

The shuffling throng wound on to the edge of the big spaceport on which a score of mammoth, cigar-shaped space-liners lay waiting.

Then the heavy silence of tragedy was abruptly broken. A pallid Mercurian man in the forefront of the marchers, who had been leading his wife and two small children, suddenly stopped and turned.

“Why should we go?” he cried, his voice raw with desperation. “Why should we be the ones who have to leave our home world?”

A sad-eyed old man answered.

“We were chosen in the great lottery, Than Thabar. We must be the ones to migrate to Ganymede this time.”

“But why should any of us have to leave Mercury?” Than Thabar cried rebelliously. “Our ancestors have lived here for ages. We know no other world. Yet each few months, the System Government holds the accursed lottery that condemns thousands of us to migrate to distant Ganymede, to leave our native planet forever.”

An officer of the Planet Police, a handsome Venusian, hurried up. His face showed sympathy as he cautioned the desperate Mercurian.

“You can’t help feeling like that, I know,” the officer admitted. “But there’s no help for it. You know as well as I do that these migrations must continue, that the air and water of the planet are waning so constantly that it can support fewer and fewer people.”

Than Thabar was unappeased. He pointed agitatedly toward a group of massive cubical structures near the spaceport. They were immense buildings from which giant nozzles speared into the dusky sky.

“The artificial atmosphere-plants are still operating!” he declared. “They have for many generations kept our people from perishing, and they have not failed. There’s no reason for these forced migrations!”

HIS words were a spark in tinder, to the throng behind him. The Mercurian emigrants grasped at a last straw of hope that might save them from leaving their world. They took up Than Thabar’s cry, desperate for any chance to avoid the sundering of ancient ties.

“Than Thabar is right! The atmosphere plants are still operating and there’s no reason for forcing us to leave Mercury!”

“It’s all a scheme of the System Government—they want to have Ganymede colonized, so they—force us Mercurians to emigrate there by this excuse!”

Younger, wilder spirits raised a new cry.

“Let’s refuse to go! Let’s wreck those ships to show them we mean to stay here!”

A chorus of shouts roared approval. Not only the desperate migrants, but also their fellow Mercurians, who had gathered to watch the tragic exodus, now flamed into rebellion.

“No more migrants for Ganymede! Mercurians, hold together and do not let them force us from our world! Wreck the ships!”

The migrants dropped their bundles. Clubs and stones were snatched up and brandished as weapons. A few atom-guns appeared in the crowd. They began surging in a menacing tide of humanity toward the big spaceships parked out on the tarmac.

A thin line of Planet Police tried in vain to hold them back. The Venusian commander of the officers looked badly worried. He could not order his men to use their atom-guns on these people. Such an action would set Mercury aflame with revolt. Yet if he did not quell this mutiny, the orders of the System Government would be henceforth ignored.

“Mercurians, listen to me!” he cried to the shouting crowd. “You can’t do this. The decision of the Government—”

He was swept aside like a straw. The Mercurian crowd poured out onto the tarmac, bent on destroying the ships.

A single man was running toward the ships from a different direction, from the big atmosphere-plants west of the spaceport. He reached the ships first, and, with a bound, sprang up onto the stern of one of the craft and faced the coming crowd.

He was a striking figure, his tall, stalwart young form clad in a drab zipper-suit, his red hair bathed in the fierce brilliance of the brooding sun. That red hair marked him as an Earthman.

He cried out in a clear, ringing voice.

“Mercurians, do you want your wives and children to die?”

That question caught the crowd. These rebellious men were husbands and fathers. They stopped, looking up at the tall dauntless Earthman.

They saw a young man, whose bronzed, handsome face bore the Stamp of powerful intelligence, whose clear gray eyes possessed an earnest sincerity, whose magnetic quality held them.

“Do you want your families to die of asphyxiation and thirst?” the red-haired young Earthman repeated forcibly. “It’s what will happen if you halt the migrations ordered by the Government. There won’t be enough air or water on Mercury for all your people. Your weakest, the old and the very young, will be the first to die.”

The man Than Thabar, whose action had precipitated the mutiny, made answer.

“Why should that happen? The artificial atmosphere-plants are operating the same as they have always done in the past!”

The tall young Earthman shook his head vigorously.

“The plants are failing. They are failing for lack of sufficient raw materials.”

The red-head’s voice rang out.

“You all know the peculiar problem of Mercury. You know that this little planet has such small mass and such consequent low velocity of escape for molecules of air that its atmosphere tends constantly to dissipate into space. That process has been counterbalanced by the atmosphere-plants that produce air and water synthetically from mineral oxides. But now the supply of available oxides on this planet is becoming exhausted.

“It is impractical to bring oxides from other planets. All the spaceships in the System could not bring enough. Therefore the only course possible at present is to remove part of your population to Ganymede until some way of increasing the artificial supply of air and water can be found. Then you can all return to Mercury.”

“How do we know that the System Government will ever find such a way?” demanded one still mutinous Mercurian.

“It is marshaling all its powers to solve that problem,” assured the Earthman earnestly. “We will find a way. I promise you that I will not rest until I have discovered the means of replenishing the exhausted atmosphere and hydrosphere of Mercury.”

“And who are you that your promise should mean anything to us?” skeptically cried one doubtful mutineer.

The tall young Earthman answered simply.

“My name is Curtis Newton. Some of you may have heard of me under another name, that of Captain Future.”

“Captain Future!”

It was a low cry of wonder that broke from the lips of the Mercurian throng. They stared up at the man whose tall figure stood outlined in the red blaze of the enormous Sun.

This man was one of the great mysteries of the Solar System. Everyone had heard of him, but few had seen him. Everyone had repeated tales of Captain Future’s incredible exploits as a scientist, as a space-farer, as the most audacious of all planeteers.

Everyone knew his name and that of the three strange Futuremen who were his comrades.

But probably never before had so large a throng heard him announce his identity. Wonder replaced their desperation for the moment. And Curt Newton took quick advantage of the opportunity.

“I came here to Mercury at the Government’s request, to try to find a way to revive its wasted atmosphere,” he told them earnestly. “Somehow, somewhere, I will find that way! And when I do, Mercury will live again, and you will all be able to return here.

“Until then,” he went on rapidly, “You must obey the orders of the Government. Those of you chosen for migration must go to Ganymede. You and your families will be safe there till you can return to Mercury.”

A doubtful silence reigned. The crowd looked up at the man who had just made that promise. And something in Captain Future’s strong face, something in his quiet gray eyes, convinced them.

“We will go, Captain Future.” It was Than Thabar who spoke. “We have heard of the great feats you have accomplished on other worlds and we know that you will keep your promise to revive Mercury.”

He turned to his companions.

“Come, men—we had better get aboard the ships.”

IN A half hour, all the migrants had embarked. The space-ships lifted one by one into the dusky heavens, and arrowed out into the void toward Jupiter’s moon to the echo of thundering rockets.

Curt Newton watched them depart from the side of the spaceport. He had been joined by a curious-looking individual who seemed a man of no known planetary race.

He was a lithe, rubbery-looking, white-skinned man with oddly slanted green eyes in a keen, mobile face. His head was quite hairless, and his voice made a curious hissing as he spoke anxiously to Curt.

“Chief, you were crazy to make that promise! Oh, it got them quieted down to promise them that you’d revive Mercury’s atmosphere, but how in the name of ten thousand sun-imps are you going to do it?”

“I wish I knew, Otho,” Curt answered ruefully. There was a quirk of humor in his gray eyes as he added, “It’s going to make a nice little problem.”

“A nice little problem!” groaned Otho. “Devil take such problems. Now we’ll have to sweat in laboratories and workshops when I had a jaunt to Pluto all planned.”

Otho was one of the Futuremen. He was almost the strangest of that strange group, for he was a synthetic man or android. Otho’s body had been created in the laboratory, long ago. He had mental genius of high type, he had physical skill and agility and swiftness beyond any human in the System, but he was different from other men.

He was different, and deep down in his mind he brooded over that basic difference. The gay, mocking humor, the devil-may-care recklessness of Otho, were a psychic shield for that brooding.

“How can you restore Mercury’s atmosphere?” he was expostulating. “You agreed with me that those atmosphere-plants can’t solve the problem—can’t produce enough synthetic air or water for lack of oxides.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Curt Newton admitted, gazing thoughtfully across the dusky spaceport. “There aren’t enough oxides in the System to provide Mercury with synthetic air and water for an indefinite time.”

“Then where are you going to get your air and water for this world?” Otho demanded exasperatedly. “You can’t make matter out of nothing!”

Curt’s gray eyes suddenly gleamed.

“No, you can’t make matter out of nothing,” he muttered slowly. “Or—can you?”

He turned, pulling the bewildered android with him across the tarmac to a small space-ship parked at its farthest edge.

“Otho, you’ve given me an idea. We’re going home at once to consult Simon and Grag. I think I have a glimmer of the answer.”

“Where is that answer, then?” Otho demanded puzzledly.

Curt pointed into the dusky sky.

“Out there, Otho—out beyond everything we know, if I’m right. Out where even we have never ventured before! Come on—we’re rocketing home in a hurry!”

Chapter II

Cosmic Secret

IN THEIR unique home beneath the surface of the Moon, the four greatest scientific adventurers of the age held a conference. Curt Newton lounged back in his chair, his space-bronzed face bathed in the flood of softened sunlight from the glassite ceiling window overhead. He spoke with almost casual calm.

“There you have it, boys,” he finished quietly. “Mercury’s atmosphere must be replenished, or that agony of enforced migrations will go on to a bitter end. I’ve given my word that we would find a way to do it.”

“But you still haven’t told us how you expect to accomplish that!” exclaimed Otho.

The android, always restless, had been pacing up and down the room as he listened. It was a big room, biggest of all the chambers hollowed out of the solid rock here beneath the surface of Tycho’s crater. Telescopes, generators, transformers, scientific equipment of bewildering complexity of design, crowded this room. It was the main laboratory of the Futuremen. The other two of Captain Future’s famous three comrades had listened intently. They were even stranger looking than Otho. One of them was Grag, the metal robot, and the other was Simon Wright, the living Brain. Grag’s great figure would have caught the eye first. He was a metal giant, seven feet tall, with ponderous limbs hinting unmatchable strength. His bulbous metal head, with its gleaming photo-electric eyes and lipless speech-resonator, masked a spongelike metal brain whose powers of reason and initiative equalled the human.

The Brain was different. He had no real body at all. Once he had had a human body, once he had been Doctor Simon Wright, famed Earth scientist. But his living brain had been taken surgically from his aging, dying body, and had been implanted in the square case of transparent metal that he now inhabited. Inside that case circulated the serums that kept him living, and on its face were his glass lens-eyes, his microphone-ears and artificial voice, and the orifices from which he could jet traction-beams so that he could poise or move at will.

“Otho is right,” the Brain said in his rasping, metallic monotone. His lens-eyes held Curt’s face. “You must have some plan in mind for reviving Mercury, lad.”

Captain Future hesitated.

“I have a plan. You may think it fantastic—”

“Let’s hear it,” rumbled Grag. The giant metal robot’s booming voice shook delicate instruments around the room.

Curt’s gray eyes were deep with earnestness. For Curt was a dreamer, at bottom. Beneath his love of danger and excitement, beneath his gay humor, throbbed an aching earnestness of purpose—to use the powers given him by his unique birth and education to help the struggling System peoples.

“It’s not only Mercury we must think of. Mercury faces today the grim prospect of planetary death from failing atmosphere. But other worlds will face it tomorrow. And no makeshift expedients such as have been unsuccessfully tried on Mercury will solve this problem. No attempt to manufacture oxygen from mineral sources by chemical conversion can meet this situation.

“What is needed,”—his brilliant eyes swept them—“What is needed is a way of making limitless supplies of oxygen and nitrogen out of nothing. And I think there is a possibility that we can find an expedient way of doing that.”

Simon Wright, the Brain, listened to Curt with a strange feeling of pride. For to the Brain, as to the other two Futuremen, Curt was not only a leader but a son. The three unhuman beings had reared him from helpless babyhood to brilliant manhood.

Years ago, Roger Newton, young Earth scientist, had come to the Moon to establish a hidden laboratory. With him had—come his youthful bride and his scientific colleague, the Brain. They had built this laboratory-home beneath Tycho crater. Here they had labored at their great experiment of creating artificial life. Here they had created Grag, the intelligent metal robot, and Otho, the synthetic man. And here, too, Curtis Newton had been born.

It was in this very laboratory, soon afterward, that Curtis Newton’s young parents had been slain by enemies. And in this citadel on the barren, airless satellite, the Brain and the robot and the android had reared the orphaned infant. They had given him an education of unparalleled depth and scope. That education and his inherited genius made Curt Newton the audacious, brilliant scientific adventurer and crusader whom the whole Solar System knew as Captain Future.

“Make unlimited supplies of matter out of nothing?” Otho was echoing incredulously to Curt. “How in the sun’s name is that possible?”

“All matter,” Curt reminded, “is electrical in nature. Electrons are really particles of immaterial electricity. Why couldn’t matter be synthesized out of units of immaterial electric force?”

“It might be theoretically possible,” Grag rumbled unbelievingly to Captain Future. “But actually, it has never been done.”

“It has never been done by any scientist,” Curt corrected quietly. “But is has been done, and is being done right now, by the forces of nature.”

He pointed upward at the big glassite window in the ceiling, which framed a circle of burning stars and space in which swam the great green bulk of Earth and the dazzling Sun.

“Far in the central depths of our galaxy of stars, thousands of light-years away, matter is constantly being created out of electrical energy upon a gigantic scale.”

“You refer to the Birthplace of Matter?” rasped the Brain, startled.

Curt nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking of, Simon. If we could learn the secret of the Birthplace—”

“The Birthplace? What are you talking about, chief?” rumbled big Grag puzzledly.

Curt countered with a question.

“You know the theory that Millikan first proposed away back in the 20th century, that was later proved—the theory of the cyclic change of radiation and matter?”

“Sure, even a dumb robot like Grag knows that,” Otho cut in impatiently. “The matter of the galaxy’s suns tends constantly to melt away into radiation, into heat, light and other electromagnetic energy. It was thought for a while that the process would go on until all matter disappeared. Then Millikan guessed the truth, that somewhere in the galaxy is a point where radiation is somehow retransformed into matter, and that the so-called cosmic rays are the ‘birth-cry’ of newborn matter.”

“That’s right,” Captain Future nodded. “And it was found that that Birthplace of Matter is somewhere at the center of our galaxy, in the region of thick star-clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius. From that point stream out the tides of cosmic dust which are the new-born matter, and from that point emanate the cosmic rays, their ‘birth-cry’.

“We have no idea of how radiation is built into matter at the Birthplace,” Curt went on, as calmly as though he were not about to make the most audacious proposal in the history of the System. “But there is a chance that if we went to the Birthplace we could learn how. With that secret, we could create unlimited matter from radiation, could solve the problem of reviving Mercury’s wasted atmosphere.”

“IS THAT your idea?” Otho yelped unbelievingly. The android’s slitted green eyes were wide with amazement. “You must be spacestruck, chief. That point in the galaxy where the Birthplace is located is thousands of light-years away!”

“How would we ever get there?” Grag chimed in. “Our Comet may be the fastest ship in the System, but its rockets would never take us across all those millions of millions of miles. Even at the fastest speed it would take centuries!”

“Not if we used the vibration-drive we experimented with last year,” Curt retorted. “You remember—Simon and I designed it to propel the Comet by the reactive push of high-frequency electromagnetic vibrations projected from a drive-ring at the stem of the ship. We calculated it would build up velocities many times the speed of light.”

“You calculated, yes,” replied Otho significantly. “But you didn’t dare try the vibration drive once you had it built, lest living creatures couldn’t stand such acceleration.”

“Otho is right, lad,” rasped the Brain. “We had to give up the vibration-drive because our first tests showed that the acceleration necessary to build up to velocities faster than light would first ‘black out’ brains, then crush vital organs and finally pulp bodies.”