Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) (17 page)

“Somebody has to take it,” said Captain Future. “And not only will I not ask somebody else to take it; I won’t allow it. Thai Thar tries to insist that it’s his chore, as a Dimension X native, but he’s needed to reorganize the government of his system. My explosion will give that government light to flourish by. It will breach the dimmed, cooling outer surface of the sun. The inner core, which my tests indicate is still full of incandescent life, will burst through. The initial atom-explosion of the ship will start other atoms to blasting. Days will pass before the difference is appreciably felt on your worlds, Thai Thar. Years will pass before the sun is truly bright and blazing as in its youth. That, too, is an advantage. Your people, small and great, can spend the time adapting themselves.”

Captain Future turned to his Futuremen, drawn together in a melancholy knot.

“Simon,” he said to the Brain. “In case I’ve stupidly-overlooked something that will blot me out, you take command of the expedition and the
Comet.”
He offered his right hand to Otho, his left to Grag. “Don’t say goodbye, friends, because I don’t mean this as a goodbye. Chances aren’t as slim as Ezra here keeps insisting.” He looked long at Joan. “I’m not going to crowd my luck any more by discussing it. Get going.”

He turned on his heel and strode away through the empty corridors that had resounded with battle.

The time it took him to reach the central chamber would be enough, and more than enough, for his friends to get into their ships and clear. Now he felt alone, alone in the very heart of this mile-sized egg. He sat down in the throne of the Overlord.

Within reach of him were banks of controls, all of which he had carefully studied, tested, and in some cases altered so that he could fly the great structure solo. A telaudio screen, with dials to show speeds and distances, gave him a view of the dim disk of the sun he meant to attack.

His hands, touched the controls appraisingly. Yes, it was lonely, here on the threshold of what was in many respects his mightiest and most perilous attempt —

Not all alone! Up on his knee scrambled a little figure of Thai Thar, which shook itself down to the doughy proportions of Oog.

“You little stowaway!” scolded Captain Future. “If something happens, what will Otho say?”

“Otho won’t say anything,” said the android, appearing in the entry. “Because Otho will be there, saying the same thing happen to him.”

“Grag, too,” boomed the robot, clanking behind. “Do you think I’d stay away from anything Otho dares face?”

Captain Future was on his feet. “You’ll be left behind when the
Comet
clears,” he warned.

“The
Comet
has cleared,” drily announced the Brain, drifting into view. “You relegated authority to me, I relegated it to Ezra Gurney. Told him to go with Joan.”

“But Joan came with you.” The girl’s lithe figure joined the group. “Go one, go all. Curt, did you truly think we’d leave you?”

“You’re rebels and mutineers,” Captain Future rebuked them.

BUT his voice trembled. His tameless gray eyes, that had looked unawed on every danger that the uttermost spaces could spawn, suddenly were bright with tears. His friends crowded around, and he lifted one hand in a gesture of acceptance.

“We couldn’t do otherwise, lad,” said Simon Wright for them all. “I know that you thought some of us should be kept in reserve for future service to the universe — but without Captain Future, what would the universe be for us? We go with you, live or die. Give us something to do.”

Captain Future divided the work among them. Grag turned his great strength to the final tightening of massive joints in the fuel governing apparatus. Otho’s delicate fingers checked micrometric accuracies in the connections, whereby the whole enterprise might succeed or fail. Joan took the observer’s post by the vision screen. Simon Wright hovered near Curt Newton’s shoulder as, under impulsions of the control starters, the mighty mass began to quiver, then to slide through space.

“What speed can we achieve?” asked the Brain.

“Up to fifteen miles a second,” replied Captain Future. “We’ll have to taper off as we approach, though. I don’t want more than a mile a second, because I don’t want to pancake us. You see,” and he indicated a special row of controls, “here’s what I’ll use at the last instant. A pull on the lever yonder begins to disintegrate the atoms — first the armor, then the inner layers, like stripping down an artichoke. But, a second before the initial blast, this little chamber is whipped away into space along a sort of gun-barrel corridor.

“As we approach the sun, I’ll face this ship so that the corridor points backward. We want to be going away. Even with all the special cushioning devices — anti-inertia blocks, the space-warp modifications I’ve fitted in, everything — to reverse our direction at too great a speed might crush us.”

“How much will this chamber withstand?” asked the Brain.

“I don’t know. I’m trusting the luck of the Futuremen.”

Grag clumped forward to peer over Joan’s shoulder into the screen, where the sun loomed larger by moments.

“Coolness is relative, like anything else,” he boomed. “How would my metal body heat up in the central core yonder?”

Curt smiled up at him.

“I’m not sure, but it would be several million degrees at the center. If you were heated to that degree, you’d shrivel everything within a thousand-mile radius.”

“Including Otho,” said Grag.

Captain Future set his helm. Then, with Simon’s help, he began attaching timing devices here and there.

“I want to delay at one point and another,” he said. “For instance, this will make the first atom-explosion hang fire awhile. And here’s something that will speed up the ship, seconds after we touch the accelerator. That would give us a chance to clear out before the final speedup. Getting warm in here.”

“We’re approaching the sun,” reported Joan.

“The outer armor, and this inner chamber, blocks out some heat, but it can’t block it all out,” added Simon Wright.

“Nothing’s perfect,” said Otho. “Except Grag’s self-importance.”

The sun grew in the vision screen, filling it. They could make out the details of the dim-glowing outer envelope, churning and tossing like a steam cloud. Closer they came. The view of the sun became a view of only a portion of its surface. Joan sighed and closed her eyes wearily. Captain Future mopped his own damp brow.

“How close are we?” he asked.

“If we read these Dimension X gauges rightly, we’re within two hundred thousand miles of the Sun’s surface,” said Joan. “How close are we going to be?”

“Thirty miles or so,” replied Captain Future, turning his attention back to the controls.

Peeling off his space-jacket, he threw it down. Oog toddled upon it, as if he found the floor hot.

Silence. They flew an hour, another. Joan and Curt Newton drank copiously from a thermos canteen. Otho checked a thermometer, decided not to comment on how high it was, and begged water to sprinkle on the languishing Oog. Simon Wright soared out on a tour of the ship, and came back with solemnity in the sound of his resonator.

THE BRAIN paused close to Captain Future’s shoulder.

“Those outer plates, that took so much blasting, are beginning to warp and start like plywood,” he said. “The closer we get, the bigger the chance that this ship bursts open like a blooming blossom.”

“That’s the part of the ship facing sunward, of course?” prompted Captain Future. “What about the part turned away?”

“Cooler, comparatively speaking. Not warped, anyway.”

“I’ve been saving it to act as nose for the final rush,” said the red-head. “And I’ve set the machinery in advance for the feat of spinning us around as we go in, without changing general direction or losing speed. Grag, take over the super-charging for the atom-blasts. Otho, stand by the side-table where the lock-rays are governed. Seal up that entry, because we’ll not dare venture out again. Now, everybody hold on.”

He pressed new controls. There was a ponderous swaying heave as the big ship slowly reversed herself in space. At the same time, Captain Future cut in new blasts. On a slightly different course, the ship drove with all speed toward the sun.

“We’re eating miles fast,” said Joan. “Closer — the sun’s bigger, hotter, I can’t bear to watch it.”

“Grag, you’re strongest,” called Captain Future. “Stand by the lever that starts the explosions. When I say ‘Now, slam it hard down, clear into the clamps, and hold it there. Joan, switch off the vision screen. That sun, at this close quarters, will blind you. We’ll have to trust our distance gauges. How fast are we going?”

“Fifteen miles a second, I make it,” said Joan, her tongue touching lips as dry as parchment.

“I’ll cut speed. We want to slow to a mile a second.” He did so, gradually and smoothly. “We’re close in?”

“Within the outer gas-spurtings of the sun’s surface,” guessed Simon Wright.

Silence, while Captain Future and Joan studied the gauges.

“Joan,” said Captain Future at last, “sing out when we’re at forty-five miles distance.”

She nodded, saving her breath. The heat seemed unbearable to her. Sinking on one knee, she kept her eyes fastened on the gauges.

“Everybody grab something solid,” was Future’s next command. “Grag, both hands on the lever.”

“Almost there,” murmured Joan. “Stand by. ready. Forty-five.”

“Now!” called Captain Future, and as Grag threw in the lever with all his metal-based strength, Captain Future pressed the key that would free the central chamber from the ship.

He could not hold his consciousness during the moments that followed. He felt that he was roasting — floating — sinking —

Then he felt that he was waking up.

He heard the resonator of Simon Wright.

“I didn’t black out. I turned on the vision again in time to see the ship drive home. The first blast — the outer armor blowing up — occurred just as it came to the surface of the sun. Then it plunged in, blasting as it went.”

Captain Future opened his eyes, and found himself strangely light. The chamber in which they whizzed outward from the sun was divorced from all gravity, and the Futuremen floated as in liquid. Joan, serenely unconscious, drifted close to Captain Future. He caught her wrist and drew her toward him. She awakened and smiled.

“What does the vision screen show now?” Captain Future demanded.

“I advise nobody to look at the sun,” replied Simon Wright. “Its cloudy envelope is gashed open, and the fire-stuff inside is showing through a wound that gets bigger and brighter and hotter all the time. What I’ve done is swirl our viewpoint the opposite way, the way we’re heading on the impetus of the blast that carried us clear.”

The Brain’s eyes, squirming on their snake-joined antennae, studied the scene.

“I see a space-ship, lighted up by the new radiance, coming this way,” he said. “Yes, it’s the
Comet.
Old Ezra has been standing by to take us aboard.”

YET the Moon had not changed so much. The green dimness that had shrouded the skies was less green and dim, and the toadstool jungles showed less vigor as the light strengthened. Even between dimensions, the growing radiance of Dimension X’s slashed open sun made itself felt.

At home, that sun’s planets experienced similar languishing in their fauna, conditioned to flourish in the dark; but the Pale People, adaptive as the human race has been forever and everywhere, ventured forth to look at phenomenon through dark goggles, and to feel the start of new strength in blanched, misshapen limbs.

Years would pass, as Captain Future had said, before the atomic blasts started in the sun’s interior would complete the work of making that sun a blazing life-giving center of a newly invigorated system. Those years would see the development of the Pale People into a people no longer pale and groping.

In the largest room of the subterranean lair that had been first the laboratory-home of the Futuremen, then the headquarters of Ul Quorn and the first would-be invaders, sat the strange handful that had made the initial step in opening the night-blinded eyes of Dimension X to other things than tyranny and gloom.

Thai Thar and two of his comrades held chairs of honor. Captain Future sat beside Thai Thar, and grouped behind him were the other Futuremen. Oog perched on Otho’s knee, pretending to be a gay handkerchief like the one lying in Joan’s lap.

Before the group stood N’Rala, under the guard of a Dimension X soldier. She looked more beautiful and more humble than any of them had ever seen her — more so, perhaps, than ever in her life.

“Give him to me,” she said in a miserable, pleading voice. “Give me Ul Quorn. He’s sick in his prison cell, nervously exhausted and at the end of his endurance. You have taken away all possible power from him and from me. Be generous to conquered enemies. That will be the best way of showing yourselves great, and fit to rule.”

“You surprise us all once again, N’Rala,” ventured the dry voice of Simon Wright. “You sneered at Ul Quorn. You seemed to align yourself with the Overlord.”