Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More (March 1951) Read online

  It was hard to teach himself that they were there no more. But one or another of his shipmates was always near him and never let things get too bad. So gradually, from constant association, Grag and Otho and Simon Wright became familiar to Carey and he no longer felt that uncanny twinge when he was near them.

  Simon remained enigmatic and remote, an intelligence keen and brilliant far beyond Carey’s power to understand, wrapped in his own thoughts, his own researches. Knowledge was Simon’s thirst and his existence and it seemed to Carey that, although Simon Wright had been a man of Earth before his brain was taken from his dying body and preserved by the magic of a future science, Simon had become the least human of them all.

  Grag and Otho were easier. The android was so nearly human that only now and again did a flicker of something otherworldly in his green eyes remind Carey that Otho was not as other men. Even then it was impossible to feel any horror of him. Carey had known a lot of mothers’ sons but seldom one that he liked as much as the sharp-tongued ironic Otho, whose most pointed barbs were tempered with pity. As for Grag, once Carey had got used to his seven-foot clanking bulk and enormous strength, he became fond of the great robot, whose only faults were over-enthusiasm and a certain lack of judgment. It was, however, constantly upsetting to Carey to realize that this lumbering metal giant had quite as much intelligence as he and a good deal more knowledge.

  The man Curt Newton, the man many called Captain Future, remained paradoxically the most difficult to understand of all the four. It was only bit by bit from the others that Carey picked up Newton’s story — his strange birth and stranger upbringing in a lonely laboratory hidden under the surface of the Moon, an orphan with no other companions than the three who were called the Futuremen.

  NO wonder, Carey thought, that with such a background Newton was withdrawn and guarded in his approach to the ordinary relationships of men. He, like his companions — and like Carey too in this new incarnation of his — was set apart forever from the normal world. Carey sensed that the easy casual manner of the red-haired man had been painfully acquired, that beneath it lay a dark and solitary creature, much better not aroused.

  Carey soon discovered something else about Curt Newton. He was angry and it was no mere passing rage. It was a cold black fury that rode him all across the spatial gulf that plunged between Saturn, whence he had come, and Earth, where he was going. And the cause of it was a message he had received from a man named Ezra Gurney about another man named Lowther.

  There was something about a monopoly on a certain kind of fuel, which was going to put Lowther in control of all shipping to and from the distant star-colonies which were not much at present but would grow. It seemed that the star-ships took on their high-potential fuel for the long jump at Pluto, where the radioactive ore was mined and refined.

  And now, by devious manipulations of hidden stock, Lowther had got control of the refining companies and raised the price out of reach. There were ships stranded at Pluto and men in an ugly mood and Newton was heading fast for Earth to see what he could do about it.

  It sounded a dirty enough deal and Carey hoped that Newton would bring Lowther to time. But this talk of star-colonies and star-ships was beyond him. His mind was still thinking of Jupiter as the unattained and well-nigh unattainable. Any problems of star-ships or the men who flew them were distant and unreal. Furthermore he was too deeply immured in his own fears and loneliness, in the strangeness of being alive.

  He began to think more and more of Earth. He was hungry to see it, to feel it under his feet again, to look up into a blue sky at the familiar Sun. He had been long away from Earth when he fell asleep — an eternity, it had seemed, shut up in an iron coffin outbound for Jupiter.

  He remembered now how they had talked about Earth, crouching within the narrow walls that hid them from the black negation of space. The voices still rang in his ears, the faces were as clear as though he had only turned his head away for a moment or two.

  Craddock and Szandor, Miles and Delaporte, Gaines, Coletti, Fenner — the red-headed, the black and the fair — the different particular tricks of phrase and expression, the kindness and cruelty and courage and fear — the wisdom and the folly, moulded together into the separate forms of men. And they had talked of Earth.

  They had planned what they would do when they got back, with the wealth of a new world in their hands. They had talked of the women who would be waiting for them, of the parades and the speeches, the fame that would be theirs around the globe. They had talked and all the time the darkness that was just beyond the hull had been listening with a silent mirth and John Carey was the only one who would ever come back again.

  As the ship rushed nearer to the orbit of Earth, Carey’s eagerness increased until it was like a fever in him. He talked of home as those other men had talked and Curt Newton listened with a kind of pity in his eyes.

  “Don’t expect too much,” he said. “It’s changed — but it’s still Earth, not Paradise.”

  The forward jets were cut in and the ship quivered to the brake-blasts — not the anguished uncertain shuddering of the ships Carey had known but a controlled lessening of speed. The green remembered world came gleaming across the forward port and Carey stared at it, sitting motionless and absorbed, urging the misty continents into shape, watching the oceans spread into blueness and the mountains rise and become real.

  Suddenly he was afraid. He covered his face with his hands, and said, “I can’t. I can’t walk like a ghost through streets I never saw, looking for people who have been dead for generations.”

  “It won’t be easy,” said Curt Newton. “But you’ll have to. Until you do you’ll be living and thinking in the past.” He looked at Carey, half smiling. “After all, you came into this world a stranger once before.”

  “What will they say to me?” whispered Carey. “How do people talk to a dead man?”

  “As rudely as they do to everyone else. And how will they know unless you tell them? Come on, Carey, stiffen up. Forget the past. Start thinking about the future.”

  “Future!” said Carey and the word had a strange hollow sound to him. “Give me time. I haven’t caught up with the present yet.”

  He was silent after that. Newton asked for and got clearance for a landing. The ship picked up her pattern and spiraled in.

  Nothing was clear to Carey. Confused vistas reeled and spun beneath him, a huge monster of a city, the many-colored patchwork of a spaceport, strange and unknown, yet with a haunting familiarity, like a language learned in childhood and long forgotten. His heart pounded fiercely. It was hard to breathe.

  The ship touched ground. And John Carey had come home from space.

  He remained as he was, sitting still, his fingers sunk deep into the padded arms of the recoil-chair. Curt Newton’s voice was faint and far away. “Simon and I are going to Government Center. Grag will stay with the ship. But Otho can go along with you if you like.”

  “No,” said Carey. “No thanks — I...” There was more he wanted to say but he could not form the words. He got up and went past the others, seeing them only as shadows. The airlock was open. He went out.

  THE blaze of a summer sun smote hard upon him. He looked up at white clouds piling slowly in the sky and thought out of some dim coign of memory, Later there will be a storm. He began to walk across the concrete apron, scarred with many flames.

  This was the same spaceport. It had to be for there was the city before him and behind him was the sea. Here, from a little field that had looked so big and grand, the Victrix had taken flight for Jupiter. Here a girl had said goodbye and kissed him with the bitterness of tears.

  But it was not the same. The little field was swallowed up and gone, drowned in the mighty rows of docks. Where the administration building had stood a white pylon towered up into the clouds. The air was filled with the thunderous roar of ships, landing, taking off, jets flaming, lean hulls flashing in the sun.

  Great cranes clanked and rumbled.
Strings of lorries snorted back and forth between the freight docks and the warehouses and from beyond them spoke the anvil voices of the foundries. Atomic welders blazed like little suns and the huge red tenders rolled ponderously among the ships with their loads of fuel.

  Carey walked slowly. He was listening to the music, the titan song of the ships and the men who served them. Good music to one who had first helped to write it long ago. He listened and was proud — not just for himself but for Gaines and Coletti, Fenner and Miles and Szandor, the men of his crew and all the other crews who had christened this port in their blood and flame.

  And suddenly the song was drowned in the chattering voices of women. People surged around him, caught him up and carried him on toward a great sleek craft of silvery metal, with a name and an unknown flag on her bow — Empress of Mars. Trim young men in natty uniforms stood by her gangplank. High heels clicked against the curving metal with a sound as brittle as the voices.

  “Such a wretched cruise the last time! I was simply bored to tears...”

  “Well, Mars isn’t what it used to be, so overrun with tourists. I went last to Ganymede for a change and you have no idea...”

  A young girl, giggling. “It’s my first trip and I’m just thrilled to death. Janet said they have a simply heavenly orchestra on this ship!”

  Under the shrill incessant chatter lay the heavier intermittent voices of men. Rich men, stuffed with the tallow of good living, men with big sweating bellies sheathed in silk, comparing the food and service on the Empress with the Morning Star, that flew the luxury run to Venus, and the Royal Jove. And here and there among them an anxious younger man with a red-mouthed woman on his arm, underlings stripped to their last nickel for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the elite on a trip across space.

  A sickness came over Carey. He felt smothered in perfume and smug sophistication. He looked at the trim young officers and hated them.

  Over the chatter and the cries an annunciator spoke with firm politeness. “Last warning for Empress of Mars passengers! The gangways close in six minutes. Last warning...”

  Carey stood, a silent unnoticed figure in the crowd, thinking of other ships and other men who had left Earth long ago, and the sickness in him deepened. Caught in the press of soft comfortable flesh he heard gongs clanging and a surge of voices and then the sibilant roar that became a purring thunder as a glistening fabric of shining metal lifted skyward. Then he was swept away in the backwash of people from the empty dock.

  “She really earned a nice vacation...”

  “... and those cruise-ships are so much more fun than ordinary space-trips. They have hostesses and games and always something to do!”

  Carey stumbled out of the stream at last into a little deserted backwater around a tall pillar that stood at the edge of the spaceport.

  There was gold lettering on it, only a little dingy from the back-blast of many ships. Carey saw a name he knew.

  He looked closer. It was a tall pillar and he had to look high to see the legend that read, TO THE PIONEERS OF SPACE.

  Now he saw. Underneath that legend were names, and dates. First the names of the great trail-blazers.

  Gorham Johnson — Mark Carew — Jan Wenzi —

  Wenzi... Once a small boy had watched with worshipping eyes as a grizzled one-armed man stumped toward a ridiculous rocket-ship.

  A little farther down, not much. Lane Eenner — Etienne Delaporte — William Gaines — yes, all the Victrix crew including John Carey, all with the golden stars beside them that meant Lost in Space.

  Names — names and men, his friends, his shipmates, his rivals. Jim Hardee, the kid who had sat drinking with him the night before he hit for Jupiter. While he had lain dead in space young Hardee had gone on, doing the big things he dreamed of. And now, like the others, he was only a dingy gold-letter name on a forgotten monument.

  The voice of the annunciator pleaded monotonously, “Will Pallas passengers please report at once to Dock Forty-four? Will Pallas passengers...”

  Old Wenzi and Jim Hardee and young Szandor and Red Miles — yes, and he himself, bucking the black emptiness and the cold death to push the frontiers out...

  “Attention, please,” said the mechanical voice. “The liner Star of Venus will land at Dock Fourteen at exactly six-ten. Those wishing to greet incoming passengers...”

  Carey sat down on the steps of the monument. Otho found him there, staring at the bright crowds going back and forth, listening to the voices and the laughter, the swift proud thunder of the ships.

  Otho touched his shoulder and after a while Carey asked him tonelessly, “Did we die for this?”

  Chapter 3: Men of Earth

  FOR the better part of two days Curt Newton was busy carrying his fight against Lowther into one Government office after another. And during that time, with Otho determinedly sticking to him to keep him out of trouble, Carey wandered about in the city.

  It was very large. It had always been so — the largest city on the world of Earth. Now it was no longer merely large but monstrous, bloated, towering, spreading, gorged with humanity and wealth. Yet it seemed less crowded than Carey remembered.

  The buildings were taller now, frighteningly tall, and there were covered walks of chrome and glassite spanning the dizzy canyons in between, so that a man might go across the city and never touch the ground. Traffic ran on many levels underneath. The streets were quiet and clean and Carey missed the brawling taxicabs, the surge and hum of crowds.

  He watched the people who passed him. The tempo had slowed since the days he knew. Men and women strolled now, where before they had almost run. Their faces were a little different too, more relaxed and satisfied. He did not think that they were much happier or wiser, certainly no more kind.

  Men and women, well fed, well dressed, making money, spending it. Palaces of entertainment, offering elaborate amusements to suit every taste. Travel bureaus displaying their three-dimensional living posters, urging people no longer to visit Quaint Brittany or the Romantic Caribbean but luring them instead with the ancient Martian cities and the pleasure-domes of tropical Venus.

  Shop windows, full of marvels. Tenuous spider-silks from Venus, necklaces of Martian rubies like drops of blood to glow against white flesh, jugs of curious wines from the moons of Jupiter, the splendid furs of beasts that hunt across the frozen polar seas of Neptune.

  We opened the way, Carey thought. We died and they grow fat.

  Stone and steel and plastic and rare metals to make the giant towers splendid. Soft colors, soft sounds of music from garden terraces far above, where the sea wind tempered the heat and set the fronds of other-worldly shrubs to rustling.

  Terraces where people sat feeding on delicacies brought across space in fleets of special ships, watching languidly the musicians and the dancers who were as alien as the exotic plants. Everywhere was the pervading softness, the silk-wrapped cushioned luxury, the certain ease of men who have never had to fight.

  “You might as well see it all,” said Otho. And so Carey visited the places of amusement, the parks and the pleasure gardens, and sat upon the perfumed terraces, a dark and sombre shadow among the butterfly crowds. And often the women turned and looked at him as though perhaps they saw in his face a thing that was lost out of the men they knew.

  Every landmark was gone, every place he knew was changed. There was no single street that he remembered. And the names were gone too and the faces, gone and utterly forgotten.

  Suddenly Carey glanced up at the overtopping spires that leaned against the sky and said, “I hate this place. I’m going back to the ship.”

  Otho smiled a little wryly and they returned to the port.

  Curt Newton came back almost as soon as they. Simon was with him and a grizzled leathery-faced man in uniform who was introduced to Carey as Ezra Gurney.

  Otho studied Newton’s face. “I was going to ask you how it went,” he said, “but I see — it didn’t go at all.”

  Newton
shook his head. “No.” He flung himself down, retreating into a brooding silence. Carey saw his hard dangerous anger.

  “What happened?” demanded Grag, “You don’t mean to say they’re going to let Lowther get away with it?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any way they can stop him,” said Ezra Gurney. He had a hard honest space-worn look about him that Carey liked. He too was angry.

  “The trouble is,” he explained, “that Curt has no proof against Lowther. There’s a half dozen refining companies on Pluto and they’ve all raised their fuel-prices together. Lowther only owns one of them outright and in the open.

  “He says and they all say that mining and refinery costs have gone up so that they have to charge more for the fuel, which is legal enough. All right. Now we know that Lowther has used dummy corporations and juggled stock and so on until he actually controls the other five companies. But we can’t prove it!

  “Curt went to everybody at Government Center. They all said the same thing. Such a charge would require hearings, committees, investigation, all that rubbish — weeks, months, maybe years, because Lowther is smart enough and rich enough to stall indefinitely and the chances of nailing him are mighty slim.”

  “And in the meantime,” said Curt Newton slowly, “the starmen are forced either to sell out to Lowther for fuel or to stay here in the System while their wives and families and the communities they’ve worked so hard to build go without the supplies they need.

  “They’ll give in, of course, because they have to go back — and Lowther will gain a stranglehold on all the trade between the System and the colonies. In twenty years he’ll be rich enough to buy and sell the Sun.”

  Grag held out his two great metal hands and looked at them, flexing the fingers with an ominous small clanking of the joints. “I vote,” he said, “that we pay this Lowther a visit.”