Leigh Brackett's Captain Future, page 20
How long he crouched there while the great lights flared in the sky and the cosmic hammers beat he never knew. But there came a time when everything was still and he looked up and saw Curt standing there with his hands motionless on the keys and his head strained back so that he could search the farthest reaches of the sky.
He spoke and Curt did not answer. He touched him and spoke again, and it was like speaking to a statue except that under his fingers he could feel the subtle tremors of Curt’s hard flesh, the taut quivering.
“Curt!” he cried out. And Curt very slowly lowered his head and looked at him with a kind of amazement in his eyes, as though he had forgotten Ezra Gurney.
“Is it finished, Curt?”
“Yes. It’s finished.”
“Then come away.”
Newton’s gaze, the unfamiliar gaze that did not see small things like men but looked on larger distances, slipped away to the banks of keys and upward to the sky again.
“In a moment,” he said. “In just a moment.”
Two red bars burned across the bones of his cheeks and the rest of his face was like marble. Ezra saw in it the beginning of the exaltation, the terrible beauty that had marked the face of Garrand. Curt smiled and the sinews of his hands moved delicately as he stroked his fingers across the keys.
“The worlds that I could make,” he whispered. “Garrand was only a little man. I could create things he never dreamed of.”
“Curt!” cried Ezra in a panic. “Come away!” But his voice was swallowed up in dreams and Curt whispered very softly, “I wouldn’t keep them. I would dissolve them afterward. But I could create...”
His fingers were forming a pattern on the keys. Ezra looked down at his gnarled old hands and knew that they were not strong enough. He looked at his gun and knew that he could not use it in any way. Searching desperately for a way to pierce through the dreams he cried, “Could you create another Earth?”
For awhile he was not sure that Curt had heard him, not sure but that he was beyond hearing. Then a vaguely startled look came into Curt’s eyes and he said, “What?”
“Could you create another Earth, Curt? Could you put the mountains and the seas together and build the cities and fill them with men and women and the voices of children? Could you create another Otho or Grag or Simon?”
Curt slowly looked down at his fingers, curved and hungry on the waiting keys, and a kind of horror flashed across his face. He snatched his hands away and spun around, turning his back to the altar. He looked sick, and shamed, but the dreams were no longer shadowing his face, and Ezra began to breathe again.
“Thanks, Ezra,” he said hoarsely. “Now let’s go. Let’s go, while I can.”
THE black cloud lay behind them and the Comet fled away from it like a frightened thing, back through the great blazing clusters of Suns that had now no terrors for them. Curt Newton sat silently at the controls and his face was so brooding that Ezra Gurney did not venture to speak.
Ezra looked ahead because he did not want to look back into the main cabin. He knew that what Simon was doing there was perfectly harmless and utterly necessary but there was something so uncanny about it that he did not want to see it being done.
He had looked in once and seen Simon hovering over the strange projector that Grag and Otho had rigged above the heads of the drugged unconscious Garrand and Herrick. He had come away from there quickly.
He sat unspeaking beside Curt, watching the great clusters wheel slowly past them until at last Simon Wright came gliding into the control-room.
“It is done,” said Simon. “Garrand and Herrick will not wake for many hours. When they do they won’t remember.”
Curt looked at him. “You’re sure that you expunged every memory of the Birthplace?”
“Absolutely sure. I used the scanner to block every memory-path on that subject — and checked by questioning them hypnotically. They know nothing of the Birthplace. You’ll have to have a story ready for them.”
Curt nodded. “We picked them up out here in deep space when their ship cracked up in cosmic ray research. That fits the circumstances — they’ll never doubt it.”
Ezra shivered a little. Even now the blocking of part of a man’s memories, the taking away forever of a bit of his experience, seemed an eerie thing to do.
Curt Newton saw his shiver and understood it. He said, “It doesn’t harm them, Ezra — and it’s necessary.”
“Very necessary, if the secret of the Birthplace is not to get out again,” said Simon.
There was a little silence among them and the ship crawled on and on through the cosmic glare and gloom. Ezra saw that the somber shadow on Newton’s face deepened as he looked out through the wilderness of Suns and nebulae toward the far, far spark of Sol.
“But someday,” Curt said slowly, “someday not too far in the future, many men will be pushing out through these spaces. They’ll find the Birthplace sooner or later. And then what?”
Simon said, “We will not be here when that happens.”
“But they’ll do it. And what will happen when they do?”
Simon had no answer for that nor had Ezra Gurney. And Curt spoke again, his voice heavy with foreboding.
“I have sometimes thought that life, human life, intelligent life, is merely a deadly agent by which a stellar system achieves its own doom in a cosmic cycle far vaster and stranger than anyone has dreamed. For see — stars and planets are born from primal nothingness and they cool and the cooling worlds spawn life and life grows to ever higher levels of intelligence and power until...”
There was an ironical twist to Curt’s lips as he paused and then went on “... until the life of that world becomes intelligent enough to tap the energies of the cosmos! When that happens is it inevitable that fallible mortals should use those energies so disastrously that they finally destroy their own worlds and stars? Are life and intelligence merely a lethal seed planted in each universe, a seed that must inevitably destroy that universe?”
Simon said slowly, “That is a terrible thought, Curtis. But I deny its inevitability. Long ago the Watchers found the Birthplace, yet they did not try to use its powers.”
“We are not like the Watchers, we men,” Curt said bitterly. “You saw what it did to Garrand and to me.”
“I know,” said Simon. “But perhaps men will be as wise as the Watchers were by the time they find the Birthplace. Perhaps they too will then be powerful enough to renounce power. We can only hope.”
Magazine artwork by Orban
Leigh Brackett, Leigh Brackett's Captain Future
