Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More (March 1951) (2 page)

Grag’s booming voice, the thunderous voice of the robot. “I didn’t know, when I fished him out of that wreckage, that he had been floating there so long!”

The harsh inflexible voice of the metal box, of the brain who had once been Simon Wright, a scientist of Earth. “A long time indeed,” said Simon Wright and added slowly, “He is old, this man — almost as old as space-flight.”

The soft sibilance of the android, at once cruel and compassionate. “It was no kindness to bring this one back, Curt. He’s as much alone in the world as we are.”

There was something in the attitude of these three unhuman strangers that struck Carey suddenly. It was a strange thing, for one who had for all his life been merely a man named John Carey, of no particular importance to anyone but himself. It was awe. And that realization brought another with it — that John Carey was a creature as queer and unreal to these beings of the future as they were to him.

Curt Newton said to the android, “I think you’re wrong, Otho. I think any man with guts enough to buck the Belt in those old tin skyrockets would rather live, even in an unknown time, than sleep eternity away.”

Carey did not answer that. He did not know the answer.

“He creates a problem for us, Curtis,” said Simon Wright. “And at a time when we have a grave problem of our own. You understand that.”

“Yes.” Curt Newton went and stood in front of Carey and spoke his name. Carey looked up.

“I want you to know one thing,” said Newton. “You’re not alone, not without friends. You’ll stay with us until you’re oriented. After that — well, we have a certain amount of influence and we’ll see that you get a start on whatever sort of life you may choose.”

Still Carey did not answer.

“Listen,” said Newton. “You were a pioneer. Why you were or what you wanted out of it I don’t know. But whatever it was you were trying to push the frontiers back so you could get it. Well, you succeeded, you and others like you. Even in failure, you succeeded.

“There are colonies on the farthest moons. Men have even begun to reach out to the worlds of other stars. You helped to make all that possible, Carey, and you’re alive to see it. Isn’t that enough to make you want to live? Aren’t you curious to see the civilization you helped to build?”

Carey smiled faintly. “Psychotherapy,” he said. “We had it in my day and it wasn’t any more subtle. All right, Newton. I’ll be curious as hell when I have time to think about it. Meanwhile I’m alive — so I don’t really have any choice, do I?”

He got up. Deliberately he forced himself to look at Grag and Otho and Simon Wright.

“All right,” he said to them all, to no one. “I’ll get used to it in time. A man can get used to anything if he has time.”

“Quite,” said the voice of Simon Wright. “All of us have learned the truth of that — even Curtis.”

Carey tried, in the period that followed. But it was a hard thing to do. To his own time-sense the great gap between yesterday and today was only an instant of sleep. He caught himself often thinking of Earth as he knew it, of the men and women who would be there just as he had left them, of the songs and the streets and the faces of buildings, the uncountable small details that make up the sum of an epoch.

It was hard to teach himself that they were there no more. But one or another of his shipmates was always near him and never let things get too bad. So gradually, from constant association, Grag and Otho and Simon Wright became familiar to Carey and he no longer felt that uncanny twinge when he was near them.

Simon remained enigmatic and remote, an intelligence keen and brilliant far beyond Carey’s power to understand, wrapped in his own thoughts, his own researches. Knowledge was Simon’s thirst and his existence and it seemed to Carey that, although Simon Wright had been a man of Earth before his brain was taken from his dying body and preserved by the magic of a future science, Simon had become the least human of them all.

Grag and Otho were easier. The android was so nearly human that only now and again did a flicker of something otherworldly in his green eyes remind Carey that Otho was not as other men. Even then it was impossible to feel any horror of him. Carey had known a lot of mothers’ sons but seldom one that he liked as much as the sharp-tongued ironic Otho, whose most pointed barbs were tempered with pity. As for Grag, once Carey had got used to his seven-foot clanking bulk and enormous strength, he became fond of the great robot, whose only faults were over-enthusiasm and a certain lack of judgment. It was, however, constantly upsetting to Carey to realize that this lumbering metal giant had quite as much intelligence as he and a good deal more knowledge.

The man Curt Newton, the man many called Captain Future, remained paradoxically the most difficult to understand of all the four. It was only bit by bit from the others that Carey picked up Newton’s story — his strange birth and stranger upbringing in a lonely laboratory hidden under the surface of the Moon, an orphan with no other companions than the three who were called the Futuremen.

NO wonder, Carey thought, that with such a background Newton was withdrawn and guarded in his approach to the ordinary relationships of men. He, like his companions — and like Carey too in this new incarnation of his — was set apart forever from the normal world. Carey sensed that the easy casual manner of the red-haired man had been painfully acquired, that beneath it lay a dark and solitary creature, much better not aroused.

Carey soon discovered something else about Curt Newton. He was angry and it was no mere passing rage. It was a cold black fury that rode him all across the spatial gulf that plunged between Saturn, whence he had come, and Earth, where he was going. And the cause of it was a message he had received from a man named Ezra Gurney about another man named Lowther.

There was something about a monopoly on a certain kind of fuel, which was going to put Lowther in control of all shipping to and from the distant star-colonies which were not much at present but would grow. It seemed that the star-ships took on their high-potential fuel for the long jump at Pluto, where the radioactive ore was mined and refined.

And now, by devious manipulations of hidden stock, Lowther had got control of the refining companies and raised the price out of reach. There were ships stranded at Pluto and men in an ugly mood and Newton was heading fast for Earth to see what he could do about it.

It sounded a dirty enough deal and Carey hoped that Newton would bring Lowther to time. But this talk of star-colonies and star-ships was beyond him. His mind was still thinking of Jupiter as the unattained and well-nigh unattainable. Any problems of star-ships or the men who flew them were distant and unreal. Furthermore he was too deeply immured in his own fears and loneliness, in the strangeness of being alive.

He began to think more and more of Earth. He was hungry to see it, to feel it under his feet again, to look up into a blue sky at the familiar Sun. He had been long away from Earth when he fell asleep — an eternity, it had seemed, shut up in an iron coffin outbound for Jupiter.

He remembered now how they had talked about Earth, crouching within the narrow walls that hid them from the black negation of space. The voices still rang in his ears, the faces were as clear as though he had only turned his head away for a moment or two.

Craddock and Szandor, Miles and Delaporte, Gaines, Coletti, Fenner — the red-headed, the black and the fair — the different particular tricks of phrase and expression, the kindness and cruelty and courage and fear — the wisdom and the folly, moulded together into the separate forms of men. And they had talked of Earth.

They had planned what they would do when they got back, with the wealth of a new world in their hands. They had talked of the women who would be waiting for them, of the parades and the speeches, the fame that would be theirs around the globe. They had talked and all the time the darkness that was just beyond the hull had been listening with a silent mirth and John Carey was the only one who would ever come back again.

As the ship rushed nearer to the orbit of Earth, Carey’s eagerness increased until it was like a fever in him. He talked of home as those other men had talked and Curt Newton listened with a kind of pity in his eyes.

“Don’t expect too much,” he said. “It’s changed — but it’s still Earth, not Paradise.”

The forward jets were cut in and the ship quivered to the brake-blasts — not the anguished uncertain shuddering of the ships Carey had known but a controlled lessening of speed. The green remembered world came gleaming across the forward port and Carey stared at it, sitting motionless and absorbed, urging the misty continents into shape, watching the oceans spread into blueness and the mountains rise and become real.

Suddenly he was afraid. He covered his face with his hands, and said, “I can’t. I can’t walk like a ghost through streets I never saw, looking for people who have been dead for generations.”

“It won’t be easy,” said Curt Newton. “But you’ll have to. Until you do you’ll be living and thinking in the past.” He looked at Carey, half smiling. “After all, you came into this world a stranger once before.”

“What will they say to me?” whispered Carey. “How do people talk to a dead man?”

“As rudely as they do to everyone else. And how will they know unless you tell them? Come on, Carey, stiffen up. Forget the past. Start thinking about the future.”

“Future!” said Carey and the word had a strange hollow sound to him. “Give me time. I haven’t caught up with the present yet.”

He was silent after that. Newton asked for and got clearance for a landing. The ship picked up her pattern and spiraled in.

Nothing was clear to Carey. Confused vistas reeled and spun beneath him, a huge monster of a city, the many-colored patchwork of a spaceport, strange and unknown, yet with a haunting familiarity, like a language learned in childhood and long forgotten. His heart pounded fiercely. It was hard to breathe.

The ship touched ground. And John Carey had come home from space.

He remained as he was, sitting still, his fingers sunk deep into the padded arms of the recoil-chair. Curt Newton’s voice was faint and far away. “Simon and I are going to Government Center. Grag will stay with the ship. But Otho can go along with you if you like.”

“No,” said Carey. “No thanks — I...” There was more he wanted to say but he could not form the words. He got up and went past the others, seeing them only as shadows. The airlock was open. He went out.

THE blaze of a summer sun smote hard upon him. He looked up at white clouds piling slowly in the sky and thought out of some dim coign of memory,
Later there will be a storm.
He began to walk across the concrete apron, scarred with many flames.

This was the same spaceport. It had to be for there was the city before him and behind him was the sea. Here, from a little field that had looked so big and grand, the
Victrix
had taken flight for Jupiter. Here a girl had said goodbye and kissed him with the bitterness of tears.

But it was not the same. The little field was swallowed up and gone, drowned in the mighty rows of docks. Where the administration building had stood a white pylon towered up into the clouds. The air was filled with the thunderous roar of ships, landing, taking off, jets flaming, lean hulls flashing in the sun.

Great cranes clanked and rumbled. Strings of lorries snorted back and forth between the freight docks and the warehouses and from beyond them spoke the anvil voices of the foundries. Atomic welders blazed like little suns and the huge red tenders rolled ponderously among the ships with their loads of fuel.

Carey walked slowly. He was listening to the music, the titan song of the ships and the men who served them. Good music to one who had first helped to write it long ago. He listened and was proud — not just for himself but for Gaines and Coletti, Fenner and Miles and Szandor, the men of his crew and all the other crews who had christened this port in their blood and flame.

And suddenly the song was drowned in the chattering voices of women. People surged around him, caught him up and carried him on toward a great sleek craft of silvery metal, with a name and an unknown flag on her bow —
Empress of Mars.
Trim young men in natty uniforms stood by her gangplank. High heels clicked against the curving metal with a sound as brittle as the voices.

“Such a
wretched
cruise the last time! I was simply bored to tears...”

“Well, Mars isn’t what it used to be, so overrun with tourists. I went last to Ganymede for a change and you have
no
idea...”

A young girl, giggling. “It’s my first trip and I’m just thrilled to death. Janet said they have a simply heavenly orchestra on this ship!”

Under the shrill incessant chatter lay the heavier intermittent voices of men. Rich men, stuffed with the tallow of good living, men with big sweating bellies sheathed in silk, comparing the food and service on the
Empress
with the
Morning Star,
that flew the luxury run to Venus, and the
Royal Jove.
And here and there among them an anxious younger man with a red-mouthed woman on his arm, underlings stripped to their last nickel for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the elite on a trip across space.

A sickness came over Carey. He felt smothered in perfume and smug sophistication. He looked at the trim young officers and hated them.

Over the chatter and the cries an annunciator spoke with firm politeness. “Last warning for
Empress of Mars
passengers! The gangways close in six minutes. Last warning...”

Carey stood, a silent unnoticed figure in the crowd, thinking of other ships and other men who had left Earth long ago, and the sickness in him deepened. Caught in the press of soft comfortable flesh he heard gongs clanging and a surge of voices and then the sibilant roar that became a purring thunder as a glistening fabric of shining metal lifted skyward. Then he was swept away in the backwash of people from the empty dock.

“She really earned a nice vacation...”