Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation

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Birthplace

of Creation

A Captain Future Novelet by EDMOND HAMILTON

In their final adventure the Futuremen are called on to

save the Universe itself from a madman's destructive whim!

CHAPTER I

Citadel of the Futuremen

ARRAND watched the face of the

Moon grow larger in the forward

port of his small cruiser. A white and

terrible face, he thought. A death's-head

with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping

crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very

silent, watching him come and thinking

secret boding thoughts about him. A

feeling of sickness grew in him.

"I am a fool and soon I will probably be

a dead fool," he said to himself.

He was not a brave man. He was very

fond of living and he did not think of death

at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at.

The knowledge that he was likely to die

there on the Moon gave him qualms of

physical anguish that made him look as

white and hollow as the stony face that

watched him through the port. And yet he

did not turn back. There was something in

Garrand that was stronger than his fear.

His hands trembled, but they held the

cruiser grimly on its course.

The stark plains and mountain ranges

took size and shape, the lonely mountains

of the Moon that looked on nothing and the

plains where nothing stirred, not even the

smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had

gone out to other worlds and other stars.

They had ranged far across space, founding

colonies on asteroids and cities on the

shores of alien seas. But they left the

deathly airless Moon alone. They had

looked at it once and gone away. There

were only four who made the Moon their

home--and not all of those four where

men.

Tycho Crater widened out below the

little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with

the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map,

drawn carefully to scale and showing in

that desolation one intricate diagram of a

man-made structure. There were ominous

gaps in that diagram and Garrand was

painfully aware of them. He made his

calculations and set his ship down well

beyond the outer periphery of defenses

marked on the chart.

His landing was a clumsy nervous one.

White pumice-dust burst upward around

the hull and settled slowly back again.

Garrand cut his jets and sat for a moment

looking out across Tycho, all ringed

around in the distance with cliffs and spires

and pinnacles of blasted rock that glittered

in the light. There was no sign of the

structure indicated on the chart. It was all

below ground. Even its observatory dome

was set flush, reflecting the Sun's

unsoftened glare no more than the

surrounding plain.

RESENTLY Garrand rose, moving

with the stiff reluctance of a man

going to the gallows. He checked over the

bulky shapes of a considerable mass of

equipment. His examination was minute

and he made one or two readjustments.

Then he struggled into a pressure-suit and

opened the airlock. The air went out with a

whistling rush and after that there was no

sound, only the utter silence of a world that

has heard nothing since it was made.

Working in that vacuum Garrand

carried out a light hand-sledge and set it in

the dust. Then he brought out the bulky

pieces of equipment and loaded them onto

it. He was able to do this alone because of

the weak gravitation and when he was

through he was able for the same reason to

tow the sledge behind him.

He set off across the crater. The glare

was intense. Sweat gathered on him and

ran in slow trickles down his face. He

suffered in the heavy armor, setting one

weighted boot before the other, with the

little puffs of dust rising and falling back at

every step, hauling the sledge behind him.

And fear grew steadily in him as he went

on.

He knew--all the System knew--that

the four who lived here were not here now,

that they were far away on a distant

troubled world. But their formidable name

and presence seemed to haunt this lifeless

sphere and he was walking now into the

teeth of the deadly defenses they had left

behind them.

"They can be beaten," he told himself,

sweating. "I've got to beat them."

He studied his map again. He knew

exactly how far he had come from the ship.

Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he

activated the detector-mechanism on the

sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was

fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices

that had nothing to do with sonic waves

but translated sub-electronic impulses from

the detector into audible sound-signals.

He stood still, listening intently. But the

detector said nothing and he went on, very

slowly now and cautiously, across the dead

waste until his footsteps in the dust

approached the line of that outer circle on

the map. Then the detector spoke with a

faint small clicking.

Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel

of the mechanism, a jumble of dials,

sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-

indicators. Above them a red pip burned in

a ground-glass field. His heart hammered

hard and he reached hastily for a black

oblong bulk beside the detector.

He thought, "I'm still far enough away

so that the blast won't be lethal if this

doesn't work."

The thought was comforting but

unconvincing. He forced his hand to

steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs

and insert them, one by one in the proper

order, into the side of the detector. Then he

dropped behind the sledge and waited.

The black oblong hummed. He could

feel it humming where his shoulder

touched the metal of the sledge. It was

designed to pick up its readings from the

detector, to formulate them, adjust itself

automatically to the indicated pattern and

frequency, to broadcast an electronic

barrier that would blank out the impulse-

receptivity of the hidden trap's sensor-unit.

That was its purpose. It should work. But if

it did not . . .

He waited, the muscles of his belly

knotted tight. There was no flash or tremor

of a blast. After he had counted slowly to a

hundred he got up again and looked. The

red pip had faded from the ground-glass

screen. There was a white one in place of

it.

Garrand watched that white pip as

though it were the face of his patron saint,

hauling the sledge on slowly through that

outer circle and through the ones beyond it

that were only guessed at. Three times

more the urgent clicking sounded in his

ears and the dials and pointers changed--

and three times the pip faded from red to

white and Garrand was still alive when he

reached the metal valve door set into the

floor of the crater.

The controls of that door were plainly in

sight but he did not touch them. Instead he

hauled a portable scanner off the sledge

and used it to examine the intimate

molecular structure of the metal and all its

control connections. By this means he

found the particular bolt-head that was a

switch and turned it, immobilizing a

certain device set to catch an unknowing

intruder as soon as he opened the valve.

Within minutes after that Garrand had

the door open and was standing at the head

of a steep flight of steps, going down. His

heart was still thudding away and he felt

weak in the knees--but he was filled with

exultation and a great pride. Few other

men, he thought, perhaps none, could have

penetrated safely to the very threshold of

this most impregnable of all places in the

Solar System.

He did not relax his caution. A large

mass of equipment went with him down

the dark stairway, including the scanner.

The valve closed automatically behind him

and below in a small chamber he waited

until pressure had build up and another

door automatically opened. He found

nothing more of menace except a system of

alarm bells, which he put out of

commission--not because there was

anyone to hear them but because he knew

there would be recorders and he wanted no

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Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation

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