Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (5 page)

AS THE unexpected monster loomed across the whole sky before them, rushing upon their floating ship, Captain Future felt a stab of agonized self-reproach. He had been too sure of himself. He had not stopped to think that in this remote time Earth might have had two moons.

Otho, in the pilot chair, had seen that onrushing monster at the moment that Curt shouted. No human pilot — not even Curt himself, the greatest of all spacemen — could have been quick enough to save them in that instant. Only the android, whose reflexes and reactions were swifter than any human beings, could have flung over the space-stick and jammed in the cyc-pedal as swiftly as Otho did.

A bursting roar from the cyclotrons, a scream of tortured lateral and stern rocket-tubes, and the
Comet
executed a mad hairpin loop in the very face of the revolving, onrushing satellite.

Crash!

The shock hurled them about like dolls, as jagged rock pinnacles grazed and tore the metal of the ship like paper. Air puffed out.

Curt found himself staggering up after a moment. There was a dead silence. The cyclotrons had stopped.

The whole rear part of the
Comet's
keel had been ripped out by the grazing contact with a pinnacle of that whirling second satellite. The cycs were smashed and useless. The second moon itself had boomed, on into space, following its orbit.

But the ship of the Futuremen, a helpless wreck, was gliding in a long, ominous spiral toward the great sphere of Earth. They were falling. Here in the wild, remote past, they were doomed to crash in destruction on Earth...

No panic reigned in the wrecked
Comet.
Sudden and crushing as had been the disaster, the intrepid adventurers remained unappalled. The Futuremen had seen the face of danger before this and had learned not to flinch at the sight.

Curt Newton first assured himself that the others were unhurt. The pilot chair had cushioned the shock for Otho. Simon Wright, poised in midair, had been unaffected. Grag had been flung against the wall, but the massive metal body of the robot had not suffered harm.

Curt's voice seemed loud in the abrupt silence, though he spoke calmly.

"I think the cyclotrons are wrecked. Help me check them, Otho. Simon, you might figure out how long we have before we'll crash on Earth."

His cool, indomitable courage was no more than his undismayed comrades expected from their leader.

Otho followed him back to the cyc-room. A great hole had been torn in its floor. Two of the nine cyclotrons had been ripped completely away and three others were badly damaged. The fuel feed-lines were snapped, as were the power-lines. Worst of all, the greater part of the stern rocket-tubes had been crumpled.

Curt's heart sank as he surveyed the damage; but his face was calm as he clambered back into the cabin with Otho. Though the wrecked ship seemed to be floating silently in space, he knew it was falling ever more rapidly.

The Brain was finishing his mental calculations. Grag, who had been searching frantically through the cabin, uttered a cry of relief as he found Eek and Oog, snuggled terrifiedly together in a corner.

"It's all right, everyone!" Grag called out loudly. "Eek is safe."

Otho uttered a snort of disgust.

"Listen to that buckethead! Here we are, a hundred million years in the past, our ship wrecked, plunging toward Earth, but everything's all right. Eek is safe!"

"It's my fault that we're in this mess," Curt said bitterly. "I should have taken the possibility of a second satellite into account."

"Devils of space, how were you to know that Earth had
two
Moons back in this time?" Otho cried. "No one could have guessed that."

SIMON looked up, his glass lens-eyes inscrutable.

"We have some six hours, lad, before we fall to Earth. We'll strike with a speed that will obliterate us, unless we can somehow break our fall."

"The stern rocket-tubes are hopeless," Curt stated. "It'll take days to repair them. Our only chance is to repair the power-lines to the bow rockets and use those jets to make a nose-on landing."

"A nose-on landing at the velocity we'll have will be something," muttered Otho, "Oh, well, it'll be a great stunt — if we are able to do it."

They flung themselves into the laborious work of repairing the snapped fuel feed and power-lines. With spare sections of tubing and small atomic welders, the Futuremen toiled in taut silence as their ship fell.

Curt had no time to think of the ominous consequences of this unforeseen disaster. Their urgent expedition to Katain was likely to be ended by the coming crash. Even if they landed safely on Earth, they would be hopelessly marooned until they could secure metals and materials to repair their wrecked ship. They would be marooned in time, as well as in space, for the time-thruster could not operate without the power of all nine cycs.

Panting, Curt finally straightened.

"That's all we can do now," he said. "It'll at least give us the use of the bow rockets."

They went forward with him to the control room. He took the pilot chair and tested the remaining cycs. Their throbbing was almost inaudible.

"Landing on those weakened cycs will be safe as smacking a Jovian moon-bear in the teeth," declared Otho. "If they blow —"

"We won't use them until we're actually about to crash," Curt interrupted. "That ought to be in a little more than an hour."

Now that they had a chance to look out into space, awe possessed the Futuremen. "A different Solar System," muttered Simon Wright, "The System of time's dawn."

Curt Newton felt as though they had been transported to a strange universe, so changed was almost every feature of the worlds they had known. The little second Moon, which was now far above and beyond them, was not the only different celestial feature. The familiar, farther Moon of their own time was equally strange. It had none of the giant craters they were used to seeing, but was a smooth, blank, shining sphere.

Sweeping space with the electro-telescopes, the Futuremen perceived that Mars shone in the sky a brilliant green, instead of its usual somber red. Jupiter had eleven moons, not of the ten they knew, and the vast red spot of its Fire Sea was missing. Most startling of all, the great Rings of Saturn had not been formed and there were twelve moons around that planet, instead of ten.

Curt fixed the telescope upon a blob of white light that lay inside the orbit of Jupiter, not far across the sky from that mighty world. The white blob was accompanied by a smaller speck.

"That's Katain, the world whose people we came back to help!" he exclaimed. "It has a moon. It's a small world, no larger than Mars!"

A thrill touched the Futuremen as they looked upon the legendary tenth planet, following its course between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. Curt's emotions were strongly stirred.

"In this time, that world is near its doom. Somewhere on it is the scientist Darmur, who called to us across time for help, and his whole people, facing disaster."

"We'll be lucky if we ever reach it," Otho predicted gloomily. "Look down below us."

EARTH was a gigantic convex bowl beneath them now. The brilliant light of the two Moons illuminated most of it, for they were gliding down toward its night-shadowed half. Clear in the silvery light showed the outlines of its continents, but they were bafflingly unfamiliar.

There was a great, sprawling continent where North America should have been. Asia was an enormous island. And South America, Africa and Australia were all connected, a giant crescent of land whose tips touched the Antarctic continent. No ice-fields were visible anywhere.

"Of all ages, this is the last in which I'd choose to be cast away on Earth," muttered Curt. "The age of the giant reptiles, the Mesozoic."

A faint screaming began as the falling
Comet
entered the thin outer atmosphere. Grag and Otho strapped hastily into recoil chairs beside Curt, holding their scared pets tightly in their laps.

"You could leave the ship and glide down safely on your own beams, Simon," Curt suggested. "There's no use in your sharing the chance with us."

The Brain's glass lens-eyes almost showed his disdain.

"I shall remain with the ship," he rasped coldly. "Kindly stop talking nonsense."

Curt tensely estimated the distance and speed as the
Comet
screamed lower toward the moonlit Earth. They were going to crash in the western part of the great northern continent, he perceived.

The cyclotrons started throbbing weakly as he closed the switch. He grasped the throttles of the bow rockets, his foot poised on the cyc-pedal. Now he could clearly descry a wild, forbidding landscape of reedy marshes and lagoons, stretching toward rolling country that was blanketed by thick jungle. Active volcanoes there flung up a red, smoky glare.

The crippled ship screamed lower and lower. It was a moment to daunt the most fearless of spacemen, Curt's tanned face wore a mirthless grin as his fingers gripped the throttles.

They flashed down over the watery marshes. The jungle rushed up at them with nightmare speed. The blasting roar of atomic flame shook the ship as Curt fired all the bow rockets together. The battered
Comet
bucked and spun wildly in mid-air from the impact, its strained metal beams creaking ominously.

Tumbling over and over, hurtling toward the moonlit jungle, the ship seemed utterly out of control. But Captain Future was firing the bow tubes at precisely the right moment in the ship's spin, each time checking their fall by a new smashing impact of power.

Suddenly he sensed the roar and flash of an explosion somewhere in the rear of the ship. He heard Otho yell shrilly:

"Another cyc has blown!"

Towering trees seemed to leap up at them in the moonlight. Curt jammed down the cyc-pedal and yanked open all the bow tube throttles. The impact smashed them deep in the recoil chairs, then was followed by a splintering
crash
and finally a heavier shock.

The
Comet
had landed in the jungle and now lay tilted on its side.

BRUISED and shaken, Curt looked around. The others were unhurt.

"We made it!" Grag boomed triumphantly.

"By the Sun, that was the greatest piloting you ever did, Chief!" cried Otho warmly.

Reaction made Curt tremble involuntarily as he got out of the pilot chair and looked back through the interior of the ship.

"More than half our cycs wrecked, the tubes almost torn away, the time-thruster temporarily useless," he said unhappily. "Somewhere on this wild world we've got to find metal for repairs, before we can go on to Katain."

He and Otho removed their space-suits. Grag pried open the jammed airlock door by main strength. They stepped out of the ship breathing air that was hot, steamy and rank with the smell of rotting vegetation.

The
Comet
lay at the end of a long, moonlit lane it had gouged for itself from the Mesozoic jungle. Around them towered stiff, grotesque palms and conifers and more familiar hardwood trees, a great mass of ferns, club-mosses and trailing vines. The ground underfoot was deep with cushioning mold. Had the Futuremen ever expected to visit the Earth of a hundred million years ago. They would not have anticipated crashing in a steaming jungle that was illuminated by two Moons.

A buzzing, droning sound came from winged insects like big dragon-flies, flitting through the silver-barred jungle. From the great marshes to the west they heard the distant sound of sucking footsteps. And from the north a blood-chilling, hissing scream suddenly tore through the night.

"Sounds as if there'd be good hunting here," commented Otho.

"There will be," Curt answered grimly, "and we'll be the hunted ones, if we're not careful. We're in the time of the mightiest animals that ever walked this planet — the giant saurians of the reptile age. When day comes, we'll start prospecting for metal. We must get tungsten and chromium and a half-dozen other metals to synthesize inertron for new tubes and cyc parts. It'll take days, at the best, to do all that, but it mustn't take us an hour longer than necessary. We've got to get on to Katain."

"Eek will help us find metals," Grag put in proudly. "He can sense them a long way off. See, he's looking for some now."

Eek had cautiously emerged from the ship. Finding nothing alarming in sight, he was sauntering along the raw furrow in the jungle, searching with his queer senses for some edible bit of metal or mineral.

A black shape suddenly obscured the two Moons. There was a
swish
of flapping wings. Down from the night sky flashed a great, batlike creature. A horny beak seized Eek and started to rise with him.

"Pterosaur!" yelled Curt, his proton pistol flashing out.

GRAG, with a booming roar of rage, had leaped forward as the pterosaur started to rise with its prey. The robot's upreaching metal hand grasped the tip of the reptile's wing and dragged it down. The creature dropped Eek and, with red eyes glittering and a furious hissing, its snaky head struck at Grag. The beak made no impression on Grag's metal body. The big robot murderously seized the monster, heedless of its threshing wings, wrung its neck and tossed it aside.