Read Online Captain Future 09 - Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942) by Edmond Hamilton - Free Book Online Page B

Newton. “I made them a promise. If we gain the secret of matter-mastery from the Birthplace, we could keep that promise by reviving their frozen world. And we will.”
    They flew back to the dead sun, landing the Comet again at their camp by the wrecked ship. And at once they plunged into the task of repairing the ship. Most important was the repair of the broken drive-ring. The terbium they had secured from the sleepers beneath the ice was melted and cast into a section of ring to replace that lost in the cloud. Also they repaired the warped stern-plates and straightened the bent girders of the stern.
    “All set to go,” reported Otho at the end of their third “day” of work. “When do we start, chief?”
    “In the ‘morning’,” Curt decided. “We need a few hours real rest after all this toil.”
    Strange dreams came to Curt in his slumber, dreams of the Birthplace as a mighty heart, ceaselessly throbbing, and of cowled figures that watched it and warned him threateningly away.
    He woke to a yell ringing in his ears. Two of the gray mineral-men had ventured to approach the camp, and Hol Jor, whose watch it was, was charging the creatures with his poison-tipped spear. The gray horrors who were the remote descendants of a once dauntless band of scientists, scuttled off into the dusk.
    “The cursed creatures are getting bolder,” Hol Jor declared angrily as he returned.
    Disturbed by his uncanny dream, Curt Newton looked around. “We’ve had enough rest. Let’s get started at once.”
    An hour later, the Comet rose from the dusk-shrouded surface of the dead sun and arrowed skyward toward the vast black blot of the cosmic cloud.
    Curt’s five new allies crowded the interior of the ship cabin and control-room. Old Ber Del had taken the space-chair next to Captain Future’s pilot chair, and the veteran Vegan star-voyager peered anxiously toward the cloud as they again approached its limits.
    “The currents seem strongest where that bay of clear space indents the cloud,” Ber Del commented. “I suggest that we attempt to enter at some other point.”
    They cruised along the edge of the vast, rolling mass of cosmic dust. It was the keen lens-eyes of the Brain that finally picked a spot where the dust seemed less intense.
    “Try it there, lad,” proposed Simon Wright. “There where a slight back-tide of the dust seems to flow inward.”
    Curt assented.
    “I suggest that before we try it, we all get on our space-suits. We hope the ship will take the battering of the currents, but we can’t be sure.”
    His five new allies had brought their space-suits. They climbed into the protective garments — all except the Brain and Grag, who did not breathe and needed no such precaution.
     
    WITH increasing tenseness, Captain Future sent the little space-ship flying directly toward the brooding cloud. They plunged through the millrace currents of dust into the denser dust of the cloud itself and were at once engulfed in utter darkness. As before, the fluoroscopic searchlights were almost useless. And as before, the Comet was tossed and batted about by the violent currents streaming out from the mysterious center of the cloud.
    Curt Newton’s hands flew over the controls with miraculous speed and deftness, striving to keep the ship out of the more violent currents. He knew very well that these stronger currents could rip the ship apart, that their only hope was to creep deviously inward through less stormy areas of the cloud. It was nightmare flight and battle, this — battle against blind forces of nature that seemed malignantly intent upon crushing the puny humans who sought to attain nature’s greatest secret! The hearts of ordinary men would have quailed with dread before this appalling manifestation of brute power. But Captain Future and the Futuremen and their new star-captain allies were not ordinary men. They were, all of them, men accustomed to braving the perils of outer space. And in all their minds