Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (3 page)

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" Curt demanded. "Speak quickly! You know that I permit no one to land here without permission."

"I know!" exclaimed the young Earthman hastily. "But I had to come and ask your help. My name's Brad Melton."

"If you wanted to ask my help, why didn't you send your request to the System President?"

"This fellow's a spy of some kind!" Otho hissed ominously.

"No one would have believed my story," Melton answered. "I don't know whether even you will believe it, but I had to come to you. Captain Future, it's not help for myself that I want. I'm bringing a message from people who do need help and need it terribly, a whole race that's faced with an awful choice between ghastly tragedy or total destruction."

Curt Newton's gray eyes narrowed unbelievingly.

"What are you talking about? Where are these people you speak of?"

Melton gulped. "They're a hundred million years in the past."

Captain Future stared suspiciously at the young Earthman.

"Naturally you can't expect me to accept that without some substantiating evidence. How could people a hundred million years in the past communicate with you?"

Melton's eyes wavered.

"I don't know how they did it," he confessed.

"You don't know?" exploded Otho. "Fiends of Pluto, is this a crazy joke? If it is —"

"Wait, Otho," said Curt Newton. His gray eyes swung back to the excited face of the young Earthman. "We can discuss this more freely down in the laboratory. Come along, Melton."

Curt's tall figure led the way toward the sunken steps nearby. The Brain glided along beside him and Brad Melton followed, between lithe Otho and clanking Grag. They descended through an airlock into the great main laboratory that lay beneath the window in the crater floor.

Melton looked around wonderingly. He realized that he was lucky to be one of the few outsiders ever to enter this legendary place.

This big, bright room carved out of the solid rock was a place to stir wonder. It was a laboratory, the finest in the System. Tail generators, transformers, atomic converters, synthesizers and furnaces loomed around the walls. Squat, massive electro-telescopes bulked big and shining. The rest of the equipment Melton could not identify. That was not remarkable, for no other scientists but the Futuremen had ever seen special instruments such as those Curt and the Brain were always developing.

CURT NEWTON took off his helmet and tossed it aside. Two tame animals came ambling up and inspected it. One of the pets was a "meteor-mimic," a fat, little, white beast who suddenly changed himself into an exact replica of the helmet, the cells of his body magically taking new shape by the strange camouflage faculty of this species. The other pet was a moon-pup, a sharp-nosed, beady-eyed little gray beast, a non-breathing species that ingested minerals and metals for its nutrition.

Curt Newton's sharp voice recalled Brad Melton from his fascinated inspection of the place.

"You said you were bringing a message from a people who needed help — a people of the past. How did you get that message?"

"We meteor miners had landed on Asteroid Two twenty-one," Brad Melton explained stumblingly. "There were old, ruined stones there. Poking around them, I stepped into what seemed to be an invisible beam. When I stood in that beam, I seemed to hear a voice speaking inside my brain."

"Oh, so that was it!" snorted Otho skeptically. "Well, the liquor you meteor miners drink would make anybody hear voices."

"It wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced before," Melton hurried on. "It was a mental voice, speaking the same message over and over. It said that it was the voice of Darmur, scientist of Katain —"

"Katain?" exclaimed Captain Future, startled.

"You've heard the name?" Melton asked wonderingly.

Curt nodded noncommittally, though now there was a gleam in his yes.

"Yes, I've heard of it. What did the mental voice say?"

"I can't remember all of it," Melton admitted in confusion. "This Darmur said he was speaking through time along some kind of beam. He was calling future ages for help, he said, because his world was doomed and his people must either perish or meet some unknown tragic fate. He pleaded that if anyone heard him who had solved the secret of crossing time, that that person should come back to aid him.

"I couldn't help but believe it was a real cry for help. I once heard a scientist say that a world had met doom in that part of the System a hundred million years ago. And that appeal was so agonized, I wanted to do something to answer it. Old Nilga told me that Captain Future was the only man who might know the secret of time-travel, so I came to tell you...."

Melton's voice trailed off. He was aware now how wildly incredible was the story that he had brought. He half-expected Captain Future to break into laughter at the tale, but the tall, gray-eyed young planeteer was not laughing. Curt Newton's lips were compressed with inner excitement. There was burning interest in his eyes as he looked at the Brain.

"You heard, Simon? A call from Katain! It could be real. Even though the Katainians hadn't discovered the time-thrust principle, they might have, learned how to send an electro-mental message upon an achronic carrier beam back along their world line!"

Brad Melton understood nothing of this, but the Brain seemed to comprehend. The glass lens-eyes of Simon Wright met Curt's gaze.

"Yes, lad, it's possible," came the slow, rasping voice of the Brain. "And yet —"

OTHO had been growing more and more bewildered.

"Say, Chief, what's all this about?" he complained brashly. "What is this place, Katain?"

"Katain," Curt answered, "was the tenth planet of our Solar System, with an orbit between Mars and Jupiter. A hundred million years ago, the world Katain exploded. Its fragments are the materials of the Asteroid
Zone."

"Holy sun-imps!" ejaculated Otho. "You mean that this message Melton heard may have been a real one, coming from the time when Katain still existed?"

"That's the idea," Curt replied thoughtfully. "A cry from the past, a desperate appeal for help from the people of a doomed world." He turned abruptly. "Simon, I'm going to investigate this. I intend to visit that asteroid with Melton and hear the thing for myself."

"And if that cry from the past is real?" the Brain asked. "What can we do about it?"

"You remember our time-thrust experiments of two years ago," Curt replied. "We may not be entirely helpless."

Otho's green eyes flashed excitedly.

"The machine you used to project little creatures across time? Jumping imps of Jupiter! Do you mean that maybe we could go back across time to —"

"To Katain?" Curt finished for him. "I don't know, Otho. If this message is real, a people far back across the time dimension need help. Since we know their world was destroyed, we know their peril at least was real. The message would merely substantiate it."

Into his gray eyes had come a glimmer of high excitement, as though he looked beyond them to beckoning, luring horizons of the unknown.

"If we could take help back to those people, it would be an adventure such as even we have never had! New worlds, a new universe —"

"You're forgetting something, lad," the Brain's rasping voice cut in. "The experimental time-thruster we built would send only living creatures back along the time dimension. It wouldn't send inanimate matter. If we tried to go back, we'd be stranded without tools or instruments."

"No, Simon, I figured out how the time-thrust principle could be altered to affect inanimate matter, also."

"But how could you project yourselves across time?" Brad Melton blurted. "I know time is supposed to be the fourth dimension of matter, but you can't move around in it the way you can in the other three dimensions."

"That," Curt told him, "is because time is not a static, dimension like the other three, but a dynamic one, a dimension that constantly flows in one direction. The time dimension can remotely be compared with a river. A river has length, breadth and thickness, which remain the same, yet the waters of the river are constantly flowing in one direction.

"But you could use a powerful pump to force a small part of those waters back up the flowing river. Similarly my time-thruster projects a powerful extra-electromagnetic force that drives matter up the river of the time dimension, back into the past. Come along. We're going out to the asteroid where you heard the time message. I want to hear it for myself."

Brad Melton dazedly accompanied Curt and Otho into a passage that led through the solid lunar rock to a large chamber. It was the hangar of a small, stubby-looking space ship of unfamiliar design. With a gasp of awe he realized that this was the
Comet,
super-swift ship of the Futuremen!

Otho took the controls. The doors overhead slid automatically aside and the little craft screamed up into the starry heavens.

IN WHAT seemed to Melton an unbelievably short time, they were threading the meteor swarms of the Asteroid Zone.

When Asteroid 221 came into sight, the young Earthman nervously directed their landing.

The rocky clearing was sunlit now and empty of life. Melton led the way across it. Curt's gray eyes were keenly inspecting the rocks underfoot.

"This is the place," whispered Melton, stopping and pointing. "I heard it when I stepped on that flat rock."

Curt unhesitatingly stepped forward, the other two following. They saw nothing unusual, but Curt felt the shock of invisible, tingling force. He knew that he had entered the path of a powerful, unseen beam. Then, strong in his mind came the alien mental sound of a voice he had never heard before.

"I, Darmur, scientist of the world Katain, speak this message across the ages to come. My thought is being transmitted as an electrical vibration upon an achronic carrier beam which I am projecting forward along the time dimension. Thus, in every age to come, whoever steps into the path of the carrier beam will hear me.

"You who hear me, listen to my plea! Our world, Katain, the fifth planet from the Sun, is approaching its doom. Within a few months it will be shattered to fragments. Nothing can stop that. It must and will happen. And when it happens, all my people of Katain will either be destroyed — or a
worse
tragedy will happen to them.

"Our science is not great enough to enable us to escape the dreadful dilemma that confronts us. But it may be that in future ages there will be a science greater than ours, one able even to solve the secret of physical time-travel, which we have never been able to accomplish. If you who hear me possess such scientific knowledge and power, I beg you to come back across time to doomed Katain. Use your greater science to rescue us from the awful choice of disasters that confront us! The eternal gratitude of an entire race will be yours, if you can succor us in this terrible hour."

The mental voice came to an end. Captain Future stepped out of the beam and so did Otho and young Brad Melton. Melton stared earnestly at the wizard of science.

"You heard?" he whispered. "It was no illusion of mine, was it?"

"It's real," Curt Newton replied soberly. "A cry from time, from the remote past of the System, for help. A plea transmitted into the only place where there might be the help they needed — into the future."

Curt had been powerfully affected by that tragic, desperate cry from a doomed world, cast out into the un-guessable night of time!

Time, as Curt well knew, was but a dimension. That doomed world of a hundred million years ago had as much reality as any world of today and it was calling — across time for help against cosmic disaster.

"But what did that Katainian mean when he said his people were faced with destruction or
worse?"
Otho asked puzzledly.

"I don't know," Curt admitted. "There's a lot that's mysterious about it. But one thing is sure. Far back across the time dimension, those people faced a ghastly dilemma."

CAPTAIN FUTURE was silent and thoughtful as the
Comet
roared back across the solar spaces toward the Moon. Melton watched him wonderingly.

When they entered the Moon-laboratory, they found Simon Wright and Grag working with a complicated machine that consisted of a truncated metal cone, mounted on quartz disks and connected to cyc-generators.

"Thought I'd try out that new principle of yours on our experimental time-thruster model, lad," explained the Brain. "What did you learn on that asteroid?"

"The message is real, Simon," Curt answered.

He repeated, word for word, the cry across time of Darmur, the long-dead scientist of ancient Katain. There was a pregnant silence when he finished. "Well, lad?" Simon asked at last. Curt's gray eyes were earnest. "Simon, a great race is facing supreme disaster, back there across the time dimension. Their world is doomed. Nothing can save it. We know that, for we know Katain did explode. But its people may be saved from the peril confronting them. We have the scientific ability to go back there, Perhaps we even possess enough powers to help them. Our duty is to answer that frantic cry from the past."