Captain Future 25 - Moon of the Unforgotten (January 1951) (4 page)

Curt stood silent and there was a strange look in his eyes.

Otho laughed, a peculiarly jarring sound. “There is nothing in this for me, Konnur. I had no ancestors!”

“I know. The guards will care for you.” Konnur turned to Newton. “Well?”

“No,” said Curt, with a curious harshness. “No! I won’t have anything to do with it.”

He turned and there was a solid phalanx of men against him, barring his way. Konnur’s voice came to him softly.

“I’m afraid you have no choice.”

Irresolute, with a whiteness around his mouth, Curt Newton looked from Konnur to the guards and back again and a tremor ran through his muscles that was more of excitement than fear.

Otho sighed.

The guards moved forward one short step. Curt shrugged. He lifted his head and glanced at Konnur, challenging him, and Konnur pointed to an empty slab.

Captain Future lay down, in the hollowed place. The marble was cold beneath him.

Another man had come, an old man in a threadbare gown who stood ready at the controls of the machine. Konnur set the metal band on the Earthman’s head, fitting the chill plates of metal over his temples. He smiled and raised his hand.

The machine came humming into life. A somber glow illumined Curt’s face and then two shining tendrils of force sprang out and spun themselves swiftly downward.

They touched the twin electrodes. Curt Newton felt a flash of fire inside his skull and then there was the darkness.

Chapter 4: The Unforgotten

ONE by one disjointed far-separated slices of his past suddenly came real and living again to Curt Newton. Each one was farther back in the past. And he did not just remember them. He
lived
each one with every one of his five senses, with almost all his conscious being.

Almost all — but not quite. Some inner corner of his mind remained aloof from this overpoweringly vivid playback of memory, and watched.

He was striding with Otho and Grag and the gliding Simon upon a night-shrouded world. In the heavens flamed the vast stunning star-stream of Andromeda galaxy and out of the darkness ahead of them loomed the mighty Hall of Ninety Suns...

He was in the bridge of the
Red Hope,
Bork King’s ship. That towering Martian pirate stood beside him and the brake-rockets were crashing frantically as they came in fast, fast, toward the red sullen sphere of Outlaw World...

He was running, running toward the ships. The whole world beneath him was rocking and shaking, the sky wreathed in lightnings and great winds moaning. He was back on Katain, that lost world of time that was rocking now toward its final cataclysmic doom...

“Back farther
—
farther —”
whispered the faraway voice, and the humming note of the machines seemed to deepen.

“You will do as I say, Curtis!”

Curt stood, rebelliously facing the implacable gaze of Simon Wright, in the corridor of the Moon-laboratory under Tycho. He was only a fourteen-year-old boy and he felt all a boy’s resentment of restrictions, of fancied injustice.

“All I’ve ever seen is this place and you and Otho and Grag,” he muttered. “I want to go to Earth and Mars and all the other worlds.”

“You will someday,” said Simon. “But not until you are ready. Grag and Otho and I have reared you here, in preparation for what is to come. And when the time arrives you will go...”

He could not see very clearly nor could he understand. He had only an infant’s eyes and an infant’s mind.

It was the big main room of the Moon-laboratory. A man and woman lay sprawled on the floor and other men with weapons stood over them.

Simon Wright, his lens-eyes facing those men, was saying tonelessly, “You will pay for this very quickly. Death is coming now.”

There was a rush of feet. Grag and Otho burst into the room. A terrible booming cry came from the metal giant and he leaped forward.

To Curt’s infant eyes it was a whirl of staggering figures, a spurt and flash of light — and then Grag standing with Otho over the broken bodies of the men.

The scene darkened — but the aloof untouched corner of Curt’s adult mind knew that he had seen the death of his own parents and their avenging by the Futuremen...

“Back beyond his own memories!”
whispered the voice. “
His father’s and his father’s father’s...”

He was in an ancient 20th Century airplane. Curt felt —
felt,
even though he knew it was a 20th Century ancestor who had really felt it — the pressure as he swung the plane around to dive toward its target...

He was on the sun-parched deck of an old sailing-ship, becalmed, its sails hanging limp and dead. He started toward the stern...

He was one of many men, men clad in bronze and leather, carrying long spears. They were running into a rude village of huts and somewhere there was a shrieking...

Under a somber sky on a sere brown hillside he stood as a skin-garmented savage. The chill wind ruffled the dead grass but he saw the movement down on the slope that was not of the wind and he raised his heavy stone axe more alertly...

“Farther —”

Thunder shook the night sky and reverberated across the city of glittering pylons in the nearer distance as one by one the great liners came swinging majestically down.

Curt Newton — or the faraway ancestor whose memories he now relived — spoke with casual interest to the grave robed man who was walking with him toward the starport terminal.

“We’ll see what kind of officials Deneb is sending us this time! I must admit these bored sophisticates from the capital, with their patronizing attitude toward our Earth and its System, get on my nerves!”

“But after all we’re only a tiny part of the Empire,” the other reminded. “Administrators who have to think of worlds across the whole galaxy can’t consider our little System as too important.”

“It is important! Even though it has only nine little worlds it’s as important as any part of the Empire!”

“Perhaps it will be someday. The Empire will last forever and someday —”

EVEN as the scene changed the watching corner of Curt’s mind knew that for a moment he had actually
lived in
the legendary Old Empire...

“Back farther still — farther —”

He could hear them singing the song through all the ship. The old song that was like a banner streaming, the song that they had sung for generations in the mighty ships that went on and on through the intergalactic void.

“How many, many centuries since the last of the First Born died — the First Born who raised us from the dust! How many centuries since we men went forth!”

He heard and he looked ahead through the port and there was nothing but the same eternal scene — the vast maw of oceanic deep space with the hosts of the far-flung galaxies mere drowned points of light.

All except the one galaxy ahead, the mighty wheel-shaped continent of stars that slowly, slowly, kept growing into a universe of fire and splendor.

“By the arts that the First Born taught us, by the sacred behest that they laid upon us, we go forth to create the cosmic dream they dreamed!”

The blinding revelation came only to that little part of his mind that was still Curt Newton — the revelation of that first epic coming of men to found the Empire of old, to fulfill the command of the mysterious First Born.

If he could hear that song a little longer, that marching-song of the elder human race as it followed its destiny from far beginnings! If he could hear but a little more —

“Now!”
spoke the voice and light crashed destroyingly upon the whole scene — and he was Curt Newton wholly and lying upon a cold slab and waking — waking —

It was cruel, that awakening, unendurably cruel — to have gone so far and yet not far enough! He heard himself cry out, an incoherent fury of demand for the machine to hum again, to send his memories plunging back along the endless track of time.

Then his sight cleared and he saw Otho watching him, his green eyes calculating and ironic. He saw Konnur, smiling.

Curt stripped off the metal band and stood erect. His hands were unsteady and somehow he could not meet Otho’s gaze. He tried to speak but the words did not come and in his mind, already fading, was still the burden of that song and the blinding light of galaxies untouched and new, ready for the conqueror.

He shivered and Konnur said as though he knew quite well what was passing in the Earthman’s thoughts, “Remain here then. You can order the others away and remain here and follow your own dream. There are no limits to the memory of man.”

“Yes,” said Curt to himself and not to Konnur. “One limit — the beginning, the time before ever there were men, before the First Born. Who — and where and how?”

“Learn,” said the quiet voice of Konnur. “Send the others away when they come and remain and learn.”

From a great distance then there came to Curt the sudden sound of fighting in the pass.

For a moment he stood motionless, caught between that song of lost eons and the pitiless present. Then, savagely, like a creature driven against his will, he moved. He tore the metal band from Ezra Gurney’s head and shook him and shouted, “Wake up, Ezra!
Wake!”

The guards had started forward. Otho said sharply, “Wait! If you touch him now, it will only mean complete destruction for you all.”

Konnur listened to the sound of fighting in the valley. He sighed and motioned the guards to halt.

“Yes,” said Konnur, “let us wait. There is always time to die.”

Ezra Gurney was looking up at Curt, his eyes bewildered and full of uncomprehending pain.

Captain Future turned away. He said heavily, “Konnur, go and tell your people to lay down their weapons. There is no need for bloodshed.”

“Perhaps,” said Konnur, “it would be better for us to die fighting for the Second Life.”

Curt shook his head. “The Second Life must be ended for Europa. By bringing in these folk from other worlds you have given the Planet Police and the Government power to act and they will act very swiftly. But... it...”

Konnur’s eyes blazed. “But?”

“It need not be destroyed. Go now and speak to your people.”

Konnur hesitated. His gaze was fixed on Curt’s. Then, abruptly, he turned and went away. Curt took Ezra Gurney’s hand. He said gently, “Get up, Ezra. It’s time to go.”

The old man got slowly to his feet and then sank back, sitting on the edge of the slab, his face between his hands.

PRESENTLY he said, “I couldn’t help it, Curt. It was a chance to go back to the time when I was young, to the time when we were together and all that had not yet happened...”

Curt did not need to ask whom he meant by “we”. He was one of the few who knew Ezra’s tragedy, the loved brother whom he had long ago been forced to slay as an outlaw in space.

He took hold of Ezra’s shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I understand.”

Ezra looked up at him. “Yes,” he muttered. “I think you do. Well...” He stood up, groping for something to say, something normal and expected. “Well, I guess there’s nothing else to do but go and face Joan. Is she angry?”

“Not now,” said Otho, grinning, “but she will be.”

Ezra smiled back gratefully but his heart was not in it.

They went out of the place of the sleepers, down the long passage to the outer chambers. The noise of strife had ceased. They heard a tumult of many voices shouting and then Grag came striding mightily through the tall gates.

He bellowed, “Are you all right, Curt? I knew Otho would get you into a jam!”

Simon Wright glided beside him and behind them a press of eager dusty young Europans crowding like wolves.

“Shall we destroy them now?” they shouted. “Shall we break the machines?”

“No!” Curt told them. “Hold your tempers! And listen. Konnur! Where is Konnur?”

They thrust him inward through the crowd. They had handled him roughly but even so he had not lost his dignity nor his pride. He stood waiting.

Curt Newton spoke slowly, so that everyone should hear and understand. “This, is my proposal. There are many of the old ones who have lived so long in the Second Life of memory that without it they would die — and the secret itself is too valuable to be lost.

“Therefore I offer this solution — that the machines shall be removed to one of the small uninhabited moons of this system and that those who wish to shall go with them. It would be a sort of quarantine, under the authority of the Planet Police, and the Second Life would be gone forever from Europa. Does that meet with your approval?”

He looked at Konnur, who had no choice and knew it, but who did not care as long as his beloved dream was safe.

“It is well,” he said. “Better than I had hoped.”

“And you,” demanded Curt of the young Europans, “what is your word?”

They had many words among themselves. They shook their fists and argued, hungry for destruction, but at the last the young man who had come with Curt and Otho from the city stepped forward and said, “As long as the Second Life goes forever from this world we will not oppose you.” He paused, then added, “We owe you that much. If it had not been for you we would never have broken free.”