Captain Future 12 - Planets in Peril (Fall 1942) (4 page)

"Sure, every race has old legends like that. But what about it?"

Shiri's great violet eyes flashed.

"If you, with your flame-red hair, appeared in our universe, you could tell my people that you were Kaffr himself, come back from death to help them. They'd believe you! And they would believe and do everything that you told them."

"Holy space-imps!" exclaimed Grag, astonished. "They want you to palm yourself off as their national hero, Chief!"

CURT NEWTON was stunned also by the proposal.

"It's a crazy idea," he told the two Tarasts vehemently. "How could I impersonate this fellow Kaffr? I don't know your language or your customs. I may not look in the least like the man, aside from my hair."

"That would not matter, for nobody now knows what Kaffr really looked like," Gerdek assured him. "It has been ages since he died, remember. All that we have are just dim traditions — his superhuman powers, his intrepidity, his wisdom. The flame-red hair is the only definite point."

"And we could teach you everything you would need to know before you appeared to our people," Shiri added eagerly to Curt.

Captain Future hesitated. The adventure that offered itself seemed a mad one. To enter a completely alien universe — to pass himself off as the revered, half-deified racial hero of a whole people!

But a picture leaped into his mind. A somber mental vision of an unthinkably distant universe of dark, dead stars and frozen worlds; of a cold, unhuman menace that crept like a slow tide of horror toward the last, flickering stars and worlds that were the final refuge of a despairing human race.

He turned and looked at the Brain and the other Futuremen.

"I'm in favor of trying to help these people, even though this plan seems hopelessly risky," Curt stated. "But I can't take you into a venture like this against your judgment. Are you willing to go?"

Otho's slant-green eyes glittered with excitement.

"Go? Of course we go! Who'd miss a chance to visit a whole new universe? Why, it's the greatest opportunity for adventure we ever had!"

Grag agreed, in his rumbling voice. The giant robot never cared where he went, as long as Captain Future was leading the way.

The Brain spoke more deliberately.

"You do not underestimate the riskiness of this proposal, lad. If those people discover that you're only an impostor impersonating their racial hero, they'll tear you to bits."

Shiri looked troubled when that was translated.

"It
is
true, they would do that. But it will not be discovered. It
must
not be discovered!”

"Despite the risk," the Brain concluded, "I am in favor of trying it. In that distant, alien universe, opportunity for scientific research would be almost unlimited. And also, I want very much to investigate this puzzling fourth-dimensional beam-travel that Tiko Thrin has somehow devised."

"I am afraid you will not learn much about that," Gerdek warned him. "The journey from our own universe to this one seemed little more than a mad confusion of indescribable sensations."

Captain Future's gray eyes gleamed with that eager light that only great purpose and the lure of far cosmic frontiers could summon forth.

"Good, it's settled! Gerdek, we'll come to your universe. I'll do my utmost to carry through this impersonation, if you think that's the only way in which we can succeed in helping your people. We'll bring our own ship, the
Comet.
We may need its resources before we're through."

Otho objected, pointing to the barrel-shaped chamber of Tiko Thrin's matter-transmitter.

"We can't get the
Comet
into that little chamber."

"Which means that we'll have to build a much bigger matter-transmitter of the same design," Curt declared. "Gerdek and Shiri will have to build a similar receiver of large size, at their end. It will simply be a matter of duplicating in a larger scale the mechanism that Tiko Thrin has already taught them to construct."

When the details of that were settled, the Tarast man and his sister prepared to return to their own universe. Gerdek wrung Curt's hand, and the platinum-tressed girl's violet eyes were wet and shining with emotion as she parted from Captain Future.

"You have given us new hope," she told him through Tiko Thrin. "We shall be able to predict that soon Kaffr will return to his people and save them. They'll be afire with hope."

"I only hope it won't end in tragic disappointment for them," Curt murmured uneasily. "I don't like impostors, even when they have as great a purpose as this one."

GERDEK and Shiri entered the transparent chamber, and Tiko Thrin closed it upon them. The little Martian scientist sweated at the switchboard. A haze of shining force enwrapped the two Tarasts as power was turned on. When it was shut off and the haze faded, the two had vanished.

"Just think — they're already back in their own universe, billions of light-years away!" marveled Tiko.

"I didn't like the way that girl eyed you," Joan told Captain Future half seriously. "I'm going to watch you when we reach her universe."

"When
we
reach it?" echoed Curt, startled. "Listen, Joan — you don't by any remote chance think I'm crazy enough to take you along on as dangerous a venture as this?"

Joan's brown eyes grew stormy.

"Do you think I'd let you go off without me to a universe where all the women are platinum blondes?"

Curt chuckled, but then grew sober.

"Joan, listen — it's not just the danger you'd run that I'm thinking of. Someone ought to be here to help Tiko guard the matter-transmitter. If anything happened to it, we'd never be able to get back here."

"That's just an excuse to leave me behind," Joan declared indignantly. Then her face softened. "Oh, all right, Curt — I don't want to make it difficult for you. I'll stay here."

The following few weeks marked intense labor and preparation by the Futuremen. Out in the grounds of Tiko Thrin's little estate they constructed the larger matter-transmitter that was required. It was of the same basic design as the laboratory model, but its huge transparent chamber was ovoid in shape, the more easily to accommodate the
Comet.

During intervals snatched from their work, Curt Newton and the Futuremen learned the Tarast language as best they could from Tiko Thrin. The big new transmitter rapidly took shape. But frequently the work was delayed when the Brain went into one of his reveries of abstract scientific speculation, from which it was hard to arouse him.

"I'm trying to fathom the theoretical basis of these transmitters," Simon Wright replied when Captain Future protested. "You know, lad, I still can't believe that the fourth dimension is really spatial in nature."

Joan asked a puzzled question.

"But, Simon, when we were fighting those Alius on the comet-world, you and Curt always referred to the fourth dimension of space."

"We meant the fourth
spatial
dimension," the Brain corrected. "That is really the fifth dimension, for according to the theory of relativity, the true fourth should be non-spatial."

Curt was impatient.

"Simon, in spite of the tenets of relativity, we
know
the fourth must be spatial, for we've seen that Tiko's power-beam can traverse it. We've no time now for theoretical considerations. We can investigate the theory of it later."

"Oh, very well," muttered the Brain. "But I still can't understand it. Neither can Tiko, for he simply adapted the apparatus of the alien Alius without investigation of its underlying principles."

The big transmitter finally was completed. Its huge ovoid chamber glittered like a great jewel on the green breast of the Garden Moon, crowned by the towering antenna of copper planes in curious arrangement.

The night of the Futuremen's start was at hand. At this prearranged time, Gerdek and Shiri would be expecting them at the big receiver they had been building in their faraway universe. The
Comet
had already been eased into the ovoid chamber.

Joan clung to Captain Future.

"I'm afraid, Curt. I never felt this way before. A remote, alien universe — and you're going there to carry out an impersonation that means death if you're discovered. It frightens me."

"And I thought you were a real planeteer," he reproached her with pretended severity.

But he held her close, before he strode away.

JOAN stood in the planet-glow, rigid with emotion as she watched Curt's tall, lean figure enter the sleek little ship in the chamber. She caught the final wave of his hand from the control room, as Tiko Thrin closed the chamber and hastened to the switchboard.

A bursting blaze of shining force suddenly enwrapped the interior of the chamber and hid the
Comet.
Thousands of threads of lightning seemed to stream out of the haze toward the tiny copper electrodes that lined the chamber. Then they faded, and the haze died away.

Joan felt a strange chill as she saw that the big chamber now was empty. The little ship was dematerialized, gone.

The
Comet
and its four dauntless occupants had been hurled across the unthinkable abysses of an untraveled dimension to that distant, dying universe.

CURT NEWTON had found the three Futuremen awaiting him in the crowded control room of the
Comet,
when he made his way into the ovoid chamber and entered the ship. Oog and Eek were wrestling playfully on the floor.

"All ready?" Curt had asked. "In five minutes well be hurtling out of this universe."

"Say, what would happen if Gerdek and Shiri didn't have their apparatus turned on to receive us?" Grag asked.

"What are you trying to do — ruin my morale before we start?" Otho demanded of the robot.

Curt had leaned forward at the window and waved to Joan, whom he could see standing outside the transparent ovoid chamber. He also descried Tiko Thrin at the big switchboard nearby. The little Martian was closing the last switches.

Then everything seemed to explode in a blaze of force. Captain Future felt the stunning shock of unprecedented energies in every fiber of his body. He had a sensation of falling into a bottomless abyss. Yet even though the powerful beam was hurling the
Comet
and its occupants across vast dimensions, Curt retained a measure of consciousness and was able to peer drunkenly out.

He had a nightmare vision of unreal spaces, through which the ship was hurtling at velocity inconceivable. It was not the void of ordinary space. This was the extra-dimensional abyss, whose super-geometrical tangle of complex coordinates baffled human perceptions. The perspective of this super-space was all wrong, impossibly curved and distorted.

Brilliant bubbles of shimmering, unreal appearance floated and streamed in this vast abyss. Each bubble was a separate three-dimension universe like his own, Future knew. Universes upon universes, dancing in the cosmic gulf like bubbles of shining foam! The
Comet
seemed hurtling amid those foaming universes in an impossible complicated corkscrew curve, yet at the same time it seemed somehow to be flying in a straight line!

Captain Future had dared many alien realms in the past. But never had his mind felt so crushed and puny and helpless as now, in the unplumbed abyss of extra-dimensional spaces outside his own universe. His intelligence recoiled from the effort to comprehend this insane welter of curved spaces and the streaming rush of countless spherical universes.

Curt became aware that they were now somehow
inside
one of the bubble-universes. He vaguely sensed it as a distorted sphere of space which enclosed a brooding darkness. No glitter of brilliant young stars dispelled its night — nothing but cold, black cinders of burned-out suns, icy specks of frozen planets, and far away a cluster of smoldering red stars not yet quite dead.