Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) Read Online Free PDF

Otho. "It's simple enough, you buckethead. There's a double inverse equation involved —"
    "Get the devil into the ship and stop showing off what you don't know about mathematics," Captain Future ordered. "Start up the eyes for the take-off."
     
    SIMON WRIGHT glided, calmly into the Comet after the other two Futuremen. Curt lingered to give a sober last warning to Brad Melton.
    "We expect to return safely, but we're going back into unfamiliar worlds, unguessable dangers. We may not come back. If we don't return in three months, call Earth and notify the System President. There are powers and secrets in this laboratory that would be a menace to the nine worlds in the hands of anyone but the System Government."
    A few minutes later the Comet rose sharply from its underground hangar and darted steeply upward from the wild, Earthlit lunar surface.
    Otho had the space-stick. Grag had checked the massive eyes. He now came clanking forward to the main cabin, where Curt and Simon were giving the bulky time-thruster a final inspection.
    Curt, glancing out a window at the huge green sphere of Earth, laughed softly.
    "I was just thinking how mad Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall are going to be when they learn that we went off on this jaunt without them."
    "Aye, lad," the Brain rasped. "But we're already too crowded in here, with this machine, to accommodate any more."
    "And it would be too dangerous a trip for Joan," Curt added soberly. "I feel better, knowing she's safely out of it."
    "We're a third of the way from the Moon to Earth," called Otho a little later. "Is that far enough?"
    "Plenty," said Curt! "Hold her steady."
    The Comet came to a halt in space, hanging in the black vacuum between the silvery moon and the great globe of Earth.
    "Why did we have to come way out here before starting back across the time dimension?" Grag asked puzzledly.
    "You ought to know that," Curt reproved. "When we come to rest a hundred million years in the past, we want to do so at a point where no matter exists. If we appeared where there was already matter, there'd be an explosion of jammed atoms that would annihilate us. So we'll reappear in empty space between Moon and Earth."
    As he bent toward the complicated switchboard of the time-thruster, he added over his shoulder:
    "This thruster projects us back across the time dimension along the world lines of the Moon and Earth, so we'll be sure to appear between the two worlds as we are now. Then, having reached the past, we'll speed to Katain by ordinary space-flight."
    For long minutes, Curt Newton manipulated the rheostats and dials of the time-thruster. The guide-beams that would keep the ship following the world lines of Moon and Earth as it forced its way back up the time dimension must be accurately set. The gage that measured their progress along the time dimension in years must be rechecked.
    Curt finally straightened, mopping his brow.
    "All ready," he declared. "We'll turn off the time-thruster when it has driven us 100,014, 336 years into the past. That should bring us almost exactly to the time when Darmur sent out his time message from Katain."
    Otho looked skeptical. "How do you know when he sent it out?"
    "His message said Katain would be destroyed in a few months," Curt said. "Well, modern astronomers know the date when Katain was shattered. They've calculated it back to the year by the effect of the planet's explosion upon the movements of the other planets. Just to be certain, we're going a little before that date, You and I had better get our space-suits on, Otho. The thruster force might just chance to blow out a plate of the ship by a freak of unequal pressure on its atoms."
    They donned the suits. Neither Grag nor the Brain required such protection, since neither of them needed to breathe.
    "All right," Curt said finally. "Here we go. Lord knows how a force like this will affect us physically. Hold tight, all of you."
     
    HE OPENED the burnished handle that sent the power of the