Captain Future 05 - Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones (Winter 1941) (19 page)

Ezra and Joan Randall watched, silent and a little awed. They had seen the Futuremen work together before, but even they had never seen such swiftness, such machinelike cooperation and sureness, as Curt Newton and his three companions now displayed.

The disklike generator took shape on the laboratory table. Grag and Otho brought separate parts of it for assembly. The keen lens-eye of the Brain watched each detail of the process, and his rasping voice spoke in terse monosyllables, as Simon examined the work of Curt’s flying hands.

“Now the test,” the Brain muttered at last. “Hook it to the gages, lad. The carrier wave first. Good, it checks.”

“How about the force charge?” Curt asked. “Negative, Otho.”

“Not truly undimensional,” rasped the Brain. “Tune it again.”

Curt touched a screw lightly.

“Now?” he asked tautly.

“Checks,” rasped the Brain succinctly. “It’s finished, lad.”

Curt straightened wearily, his eyes swimming blearily from the hours of labor with the machine’s tiny parts.

“I’m going at once,” he rapped out. “Get me a space suit and an impeller, Grag.”

“Why the space suit?” asked Ezra puzzledly.

“There’s no air between the worlds of any universe, Ezra.”

THE space suit was brought, and Curt donned it. He attached the disk-shaped generator to his belt. Before putting on the helmet, he spoke to the Brain.

“If I fail to come back, Simon, don’t let Quorn emerge from the sand grain.”

“We won’t, lad,” promised the Brain. “But be careful.”

“I have an idea how to beat Quorn, if I can get to those atomic people,” Curt said. “I can offer them a chance for life, without the necessity of their crowding our own System.”

The others looked curious, but Curt did not explain. He had put on the helmet hurriedly, and was swiftly turning on the generator at his belt.

He felt the terrific shock of the negative force as the golden aura of carrier waves enveloped his body. The shock passed quickly. Curt looked around. The cabin and the people in it were all growing vastly larger. Then he realized that it was he who was shrinking.

Outward expanded the cabin walls. Huger grew his friends. They were like giants now, bending over him.

He guessed he was only a foot high when he motioned Grag to put him up on the table, which seemed a vast metal plain. He was only inches high. He ran toward the black space stone. By the time he reached it, it was like a huge, polished black mound as high as his head. Curt knew then that he was less than an inch in height.

He clambered up on top of the smooth jewel. It was like crouching on a low, rounded, black hill. At the center of its summit was what seemed to be a big, jagged rock. It was the sand grain! Curt climbed up and stood on the jagged rock. He could barely make out the misty, colossal figures of his friends. They were shadowy giants, growing larger and more indistinct. The rock below him was expanding outward into a craggy plain. He knew he must be completely invisible to the others.

As he grew still smaller, the rock plain under him was expanding further, becoming rougher and rougher. He tumbled down into a small gully, which, a few moments later, was a deep abyss. The abyss deepened until he was falling. The rock walls had become tenuous, had changed into a swarm of widely separated, spinning globes. The whirling globes were the atoms of the sand grain, he knew. He was floating in space — interatomic space.

No, interstellar space! For he saw now that each atom was truly a star system, with worlds revolving around a central sun. A universe of suns and worlds swarmed in the sand grain. But it was a dead universe. The suns were black and burned-out cinders, the worlds barren, airless, lifeless, a universe that had long ago entered its last, dying phase. Then, far away across the galaxy of dead suns, Curt Newton saw a spark of somber red. One red sun still burned with faint life!

“That’s it.” he breathed. “The sun of the atomic people that Thuro Thuun described. And Quorn is
there!”

He checked his shrinking, turning off the generator. With his impeller, Captain Future started projecting himself like a giant through the interstellar spaces, toward that distant red sun.

MINUTE as he was, Curt was still colossal in size, compared with the sub-universe into which he had come. But he meant to refrain from dwindling down to comparatively normal size until he was near the red sun whose worlds must hold the atomic people Quorn was seeking. It gave Captain Future an uncanny sensation to float past dead suns that seemed hardly larger than his own head.

Then Curt stiffened as he perceived a great black mass approaching him from the red sun. At first he thought it was some vagrant dead star roaming the interstellar spaces. Then he realized that it was man-shaped — that it was a man wearing a space suit! As colossal as himself, in comparison to the universe around them, the vast human body, as it came on through space, was
growing!

“Ul Quorn,” Curt gritted inside his helmet. “I might have known he’d see me.”

He understood everything in a flash. Ul Quorn, on the worlds of the red sun, would inevitably see the vast form of Captain Future shrinking down into this sub-universe, and would realize he had been followed. Now the mixed-breed was advancing. “Means to get me right here!” Curt mused swiftly. “That’s why he’s using his mechanism to grow larger. But he mustn’t get any bigger!”

Turning his impeller on to full power, Captain Future hurled himself through the interstellar spaces toward the oncoming figure. Two giants, rushing between the dead suns, were about to meet in deadly combat! That, Curt knew, was how it must look to any awe-stricken beholders on the tiny atomic worlds.

Then there was no more time for thought. Quorn loomed just ahead, his anger-contorted face clearly visible through his glassite space-helmet. The mixed-breed was letting go of his impeller, snatching an atom pistol from his belt. The streak of white fire blasted toward Captain Future.

But Curt had already sent himself lunging to one side by a blast from his impeller. The fire streak grazed past him, struck a dead little star system behind him. It sent the dark, cindery, lifeless worlds blazing up in leaping flame.

Curt Newton had his own proton pistol in his belt, but he dared not use it to fire at Quorn. If he missed the mixed-breed, he might hit the tiny red sun and the worlds that lay beyond his ruthless enemy. And so huge was their comparative size, the pistol blast might well destroy the sun and worlds of the atomic people.

“Must stop him from getting bigger,” Curt reflected.

He swung the tubelike impeller fastened to his belt, sent himself curving upward and then down again. The rocket blast of the impeller hurled him in a looping lunge toward the mixed-breed. Quorn fired hastily again, but Curt’s unexpected curve upward had upset his calculations. He missed.

Next moment, Captain Future hit the mixed-breed’s floating figure. They grappled there, two men floating in space between the tiny star systems of the sub-atomic universe. Two unthinkably colossal giants, measured by standards of the universe around them.

QUORN hammered at Curt’s helmet with his pistol, seeking to crack the glassite and let the air escape from the suit. Yet Captain Future, for a moment, made no attempt to resist that assault. He was fumbling at the disk-shaped size-changing mechanism which the mixed-breed wore at his belt. Quorn was already larger than Captain Future. He must not continue to grow! Curt’s hand found the switch and turned it. The golden aura of force that had enveloped Quorn vanished. The Martian ceased to grow.

“Always knew I’d kill you some day!” Quorn was panting.

His voice reached Curt by conduction through their contacting suits. Quorn had desperately turned his pistol against Curt’s breast, intending to fire and risk the danger that the atomic flash would scorch himself at these close quarters.

“No you don’t!” Captain Future cried.

By a convulsive twist of his body, he raised his arm in time to knock Quorn’s gun-hand away. The glaring bolt from the pistol flared off into space between the tiny suns. Curt twisted the gun from Quorn’s hand by a cunning trick of super-ju-jutsu Otho had taught him long ago. He hurled the pistol off into space, saw it attract a dead sun that was hardly as large as itself.

Quorn seemed to have gone mad with hate and fury. He tore at Curt’s helmet, trying to unfasten it. Grappling as they floated in space, they were drifting toward a small, dead system that revolved around a tiny dark star. They blundered into that system — and shattered it! The worlds and their dead sun flew in all directions, smashed apart by the battling giants.

Curt knew he must end this quickly or they would blunder likewise into the system of the tiny red sun, and destroy the atomic people. He got his hand behind Quorn’s neck, feeling through the flexible fabric for the right spot. Quorn was unscrewing Curt’s helmet, but Future continued to press through the fabric, locating the exact spot at the base of Quorn’s skull. Then he pressed hard through the heavy material.

It was the old Venusian nerve-stunning trick, a pressure upon a vital nerve-center that paralyzed all nervous activity and made the body absolutely helpless. Curt felt Quorn stiffen suddenly in his grasp. The furious attack of the mixed-breed instantly ceased.

“Devils of space, it was time I got him!” Captain Future panted.

His helmet was almost completely unscrewed. His first act was to screw it tightly again. Then he looked about. He and the unconscious Quorn were still floating in space between the tiny, dead sun systems of the sand-grain universe. The one glowing sun was still near.

Curt impelled himself toward the red star, keeping a grip on Quorn. As he approached, Captain Future turned on the size-changing generators of both Quorn and himself, to make both of them shrink in size.

Six planets revolved around that last dying sun of the dead universe. Each world, Curt saw, was completely covered by a transparent roof or shield. He impelled himself and Quorn toward the biggest world. By the time he and the unconscious mixed-breed fell toward it, they were both normal in size, by the standards of the world on which they were landing.

“Maybe should have gone back to our System without risking coming here,” Curt muttered. “But I couldn’t leave these people without hope.”

HE AND Quorn landed on the transparent world-roof, the blasts of the impeller braking their fall. Curt dropped the senseless mixed-breed, and looked down through the roof. He saw that, even though shielded by the transparent ceiling, this was a frigid, dying world.

Bleak, barren tundras of drab grass stretched in the ominous bloodlike glow of the dying sun. Here and there were tiny frozen lakes. Far away, he glimpsed an ancient, towering black city of grotesque architecture.

“Dying, all right,” Captain Future thought. “The last sun of a waning universe — so far gone toward death that its rays, even through this shield, can’t keep this world or the others warm.”

He glimpsed a door in the transparent roof opening, miles away. Small, swift rocket fliers zoomed up and rushed toward him.

“Now I’m in for it,” Curt thought. “I may have got myself into a devil of a fix by trying to help these people.”

The fliers rushed down on him, and landed on the roof a short distance away. From the enclosed craft emerged a score of men who wore thick, wadded garments against the bitter cold of the surface.

“A human race!” Curt exclaimed in surprise. “Long ago, some forgotten people of our own System must have come down and colonized this sub-universe.”

The men were tall, fine-looking individuals, with thick, dark hair and large-pupiled eyes, and the whitest skins Curt had ever seen. They carried rods that he guessed were weapons. The eldest among them, a massive-faced man whose hair was gray and whose face was deeply lined with the years, spoke bewilderedly to Curt.

“You are another Giant from the Stars. We saw you fight and overcome the other one. Yet he said that he was the true Giant. He spoke this tongue the first Giant taught us.”

Captain Future realized that this man was speaking to him in an ancient, queer-sounding form of the Martian tongue.

“We should slay this new Giant!” one of the other men was arguing. “Has he not slain the true Giant who promised us new worlds?”

“Wait!” ordered Captain Future in Martian. “This man who lies at my feet... Did he promise to lead you up into a greater, younger system?”

“Aye, that he did,” answered the old leader. “He said, when we asked him, that he was the Giant from the Stars, whose coming the ancient prophecy predicted.”

“The prophecy?” Curt repeated. “You have remembered for so many centuries?”

“There was no other hope for us. Ages on ages ago, when the Giant visited our universe, we were dying out, for our universe was almost dead. He went back to his universe, but he had promised to return and lead us to new worlds. Most of us have hoped inwardly, though outwardly scoffing at the legend, for our savior did not return. We thought it the superstitious wishful-thinking of the ancients, but we hoped in our hearts. All we have done to save our race has served only to prolong its miserable existence, without correcting the fundamental cause — the death of our stars.”