Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (7 page)

They stared in the deepest awe at Curt and the three Futuremen. Ahla was explaining at a great rate, her dark eyes flashing with excitement. Curt heard her repeat the word "Koom" and point toward the starry sky. A sigh of emotion went up from the crowd. The awe in their faces increased.

A massive-faced warrior who appeared to be leader of the tribe stepped toward Curt. He, too, pointed into the northern sky, making a quick, reverent gesture such as they had seen Ahla use.
"Rata di Koom?"
he asked. "Sure, we came from the sky," Curt answered, pointing at the sky and nodding vigorously, "if that's what you mean."

A shout of excitement came from the crowd before him.

"What are they all so excited about?" Otho demanded puzzledly. "They seem to have a tremendous superstitious interest in the stars."

"Do you notice," rasped the Brain, "that when they make that gesture at the sky, they always point to the star, Deneb? I wonder why."

"I can't understand it myself," Curt admitted. "Some primitive star-worship, I guess, centering on that particular one." He looked around. "We'll have to stay here until we can learn their language and find out where the nearest metal ores are. Then we can repair the
Comet
and go on to Katain."

The chief, whose name they learned was Kor, ceremoniously allotted a big hut to Captain Future and his companions. Presently Ahla and other girls brought wooden platters of smoking food, meat and boiled wild grain.

Grag never ate. His mechanical body required only an occasional charge of fuel to maintain its atomic energy. Nor did Simon need nutrition, though sometimes the Brain used stimulating vibrations as refreshment. But Curt was hungry and so was Otho. The android, who could eat ordinary food, though he preferred synthetic chemical nutrition, looking dubiously at the slabs of roasted meat.

"I suppose this is brontosaur steak," he said experimentally, biting into it. "Say, it isn't bad at that! Hope they didn't kill a whole brontosaur for us, though."

"Not likely," replied Curt, grinning. "I imagine they need to butcher only one of the brontosaurs a month to keep this whole village in meat."

He and Otho slept that night on grass pallets in the dark hut. Grag, who did not need sleep, stood watch. The Brain, who required but short rest periods, brooded in one of his trance-like reveries the problems that were certain to face them.

Next morning they found a crowd of the primitives waiting outside to greet them. Breakfast of the same food was brought them. As he ate, Curt heard the brontosaurs in the nearby corral being herded out to the marshes for the day's grazing. He sat in the sunlight with Kor and Ahla after the meal, working hard to learn the language of these strange people. Captain Future's long experience with strange races had given him a knack with languages. His task was made more easy by the fact that the tongue of these primitives used many forms and words that approximated those of far later ages. By evening, he and the Futuremen could speak it in halting fashion, using gestures when they lacked the words.

HIS first question to Kor was about metal-bearing ores. When the chief finally understood, he nodded.

"There are many such rocks as you describe, back in the jungle near the Place of the Old Ones."

"The Place of the Old Ones?" Curt asked keenly.

"It is where we go to worship the sacred star, Koom," explained the chief, making that reverent gesture toward the star, Deneb.

"Kor, why do your people worship that star?"

The chief looked blank. "Because it is sacred. We have always worshiped Koom, as our fathers did."

"Mystery here," Curt said in English to the three Futuremen. "Why should they worship the star, Deneb? They don't even know themselves."

"But I thought that you four came from Koom, the sacred star," Kor was asking. "Ahla said that you did."

"Ahla misunderstood us," Captain Future replied quickly. "We came from the sky in our ship, but not from Koom. We came from the future."

Kor could not comprehend the idea of time-traveling, nor could Ahla. They still seemed to think the Futuremen must be from the sacred star.

"You are not like the other men we have seen come from the sky in roaring ships," Kor insisted, glancing at Grag, Otho and Simon.

"What other ships?" Curt demanded quickly. "Where did they come from?"

Kor waved vaguely toward the sky.

"From up there. They are men like ourselves, though they have roaring ships and strange weapons. Several times we have seen them land and go away. We kept hidden, lest they attack us."

"Hear that?" Curt exclaimed. "Other space ships have touched Earth in the mesozoic! Maybe they came from Katain. We know from Darmur's time message that the Katainians must have a well developed science."

Curt was burning with eagerness to get on to that doomed world whose people had called desperately across time for help.

"The shattering of Katain might occur before we can even get there," he said anxiously. "Our leap back across time, accurately as we tried to gage it, might still be in error by weeks or months. Theoretically we should be right in the period when Darmur sent out his plea for help, but we may be much later than that."

Kor promised to lead them the next morning to the place of metal-bearing rocks. The tribesmen were apparently too well acquainted with the dinosaurs' habits to go that far from the protected village by night.

The dawn of the next day saw Kor and Ahla and a dozen stout warriors leading the Futuremen through the jungle eastward. They followed well beaten game trails through the dense primeval forest. Twice they glimpsed or heard great brutes crashing through the palms and vines. Once it was a herd of stegosaurs, the next a single specimen of the dreaded tyrannosaurs.

The procession wound toward the low hills eastward and finally debouched from the jungle into a large, clear space. It was a vast ruin of white stone. Shattered alabaster pillars and arches lay strewn about cracked white paving that had been gouged and split by immense forces.

"Holy sun-imps!" yelped Otho. "There was a city here once, but these primitives never built it!"

Curt was amazed.

"This place has been a ruin for ages, but its builders had a high order of science. Look, Simon, that isn't natural stone. It's a synthetic marble."

"Aye, lad," agreed the Brain, his lens-eyes surveying the scene with intense scientific curiosity. "This place has been wrecked by glacial action. You can see the gouge-marks and striations clearly."

"I get it now!" Curt exclaimed. "This place was destroyed by the great glaciation that swept across most of Earth in the late Paleozoic age. And I'm betting that these primitive people are the descendants of a few survivors, retrograded to savagery from their former civilized state."

"It looks like it," the Brain admitted. "But that means there was a human race — an intelligent, civilized one — on Earth still farther back, in the Paleozoic!"

"This is the Place of the Old Ones," the chief Kor stated, solemnly gazing across the ruin. "It is here that we come to worship the sacred star. The rocks you wish are not far from this place."

Kor and Ahla led the way past the brooding ruin, up and over the grassy slopes of the low hills. They came upon a great, deep rock declivity, partly filled by silt and glacial detritus. One glance around its shelving rock walls told Captain Future its story.

"This was a quarry in the far past," he said. "The people of that dead city once got metal ores from here." He made a quick examination of the outcrops of rock. "There's ore of almost every kind we need here — tungsten, chromium, magnesium, as well as veins of uranium-bearing minerals. We'll rig up a little atomic smelter here and work out the metal we need to repair the
Comet.
Before long we'll be able to go on to Katain."

The Futuremen immediately began the urgent task. From the crippled
Comet
they brought equipment, which they set up at the ancient quarry, constructing a small, improvised, but highly efficient atomic smelter.

Then the real labor began. Kor's tribesmen, eager to help the strange beings they still stoutly believed were from the sacred star, toiled to quarry out masses of the metal-bearing rock. Otho and Grag ran the smelter, pouring from it a constant flow of pure molten metal.

The ingots, when cool, were carried by other tribesmen to the
Comet
. There Curt Newton and the Brain worked tirelessly at the job of repairing the riven hull, casting new cyc parts, assembling new cyclotrons to replace those damaged by their disastrous collision with the second Moon. Curt drove them and himself almost feverishly, day and night, for his mind was far out in the System, on the doomed world he had resolved to help.

By the sixth morning, the repairs to the
Comet
were almost finished. Curt and Grag were fitting the last new rocket-tubes, while Kor's tribesmen watched.

"Otho, go back to the quarry and bring the last of those smelter parts," Curt told the android. "We'll soon be ready to take off."

Otho departed and with him went Ahla. The girl of the past seemed to have developed a strong admiration for Otho and had been his constant companion.

Less than an hour had passed when Curt heard a familiar, yet utterly startling distant sound — the roar of a space ships' rocket-tubes! He, Grag and Simon hastily emerged from the
Comet
. Kor's tribesmen were shouting and pointing excitedly toward the east, in apparent fear. A long, pencil-like craft was sinking toward the low hills there.

"One of the space ships Kor told us about that visit Earth occasionally!" Grag boomed. "Chief, maybe they're Katainians!"

"And maybe they're enemies," Curt warned, staring eastward. "They're landing up near the quarry, where Otho and Ahla are. I don't like it. Come on and finish the
Comet.
We've got to get up there at once!"

They worked with furious haste to install the last rocket-tubes. Before they had finished, however, they heard a distant roar and saw the strange pencil-like black craft take off again and vanish quickly in the sky.

"Hurry!" Curt cried, his apprehension growing. "There's something queer about their leaving so soon."

The last big rocket-tube was hastily fused on. Curt fairly leaped to the control room and started the massive cycs throbbing loudly. The
Comet
bounded upward on the flame-blast of its keel tubes, then screamed low across the jungle toward the hills. Gigantic dinosaurs bolted in mad panic through the forest underneath them as they passed.

Curt landed deftly in the ancient quarry. As they raced out and peered frantically around, his heart sank. Neither Otho nor the girl was here-Ahla's spear lay on the ground, broken, and there were other signs of struggle.

"Whoever was in that space ship has killed or captured Otho and Ahla!" shouted Grag furiously.

OTHO gayly hummed an old future space song as he and the girl Ahla made their way through the jungle to the ancient quarry. The adventuresome android was always most cheerful when he had new scenes about him, and this Earth of the Mesozoic age was certainly a strange new world. Dense towered the jungle about them, a mass of mixed palms, conifers, giant club-mosses, lianas and big ferns. Swarms of weird insects hummed in the shade, and featherless birds hopped amid the higher branches.

He and Ahla were following one of the broad game trails toward the hills. Ahla's dark, pretty face suddenly expressed alarm as they heard a faint thudding sound ahead. She drew Otho off the trail into a fern-clump.

"Make no sound or movement!" she whispered. "The Horned Ones come."

"What are they?" breathed Otho. "I don't — Demons of Mercury!"

The oath was wrung from him by a group of triceratops corning along the trail. They were huge beasts, like the rhinoceros of later ages, but larger and equipped with three great horns and a ruff of neck-armor. Not until long after they had lumbered by, shaking the ground, did Ahla and Otho again start on.

"Some playmates you have around here!" Otho told the girl. "Wish I could take one back to our own time. What a sensation that would make! Otho, the time-hunter — he brings 'em back alive from the Mesozoic!"

Ahla looked at him admiringly.

"Could you really capture a Horned One single-handed?"

"Sure, it'd be easy," boasted Otho. "First I'd pull their horns out, so they couldn't hurt me, and then I'd choke 'em to insensibility."

"I'd like to see you do that," declared Ahla soberly.

"Aw, it would be too easy," deprecated Otho. "What I'd really like to meet on this trail is a tyrannosaur."

"Why do you cross your fingers?" Ahla asked curiously.

"That's just an old custom in my time," Otho rejoined, flushing.

Otho had developed a strong liking for this lovely primitive girl. To her, he wasn't the freak that people in his own age usually thought him because he was an artificial man. She considered him something of a superman. Underneath all his scoffing and reckless deviltry, there were depths of loneliness in Otho's strange soul. Far more than simple-minded Grag, he brooded on the difference between himself and other men. Ahla's frank admiration had struck a chord of eager response from him.