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

throbbing cyclotrons and motor generators into the time-thruster. The quartz disks beneath the great metal cone began to glow rosily, then luridly and finally with white brilliance. A shimmering, unreal radiance gathered on the metal cone and sprayed out through the whole ship. Curt felt a shuddering shock of force through his whole body, accompanied by a queer dizziness.
    "Why, this isn't as bad as I'd feared!" he exclaimed.
    He spoke too soon, as he discovered a moment later. The sensation of forces rending apart his bodily atoms increased by the second. His dizziness deepened to a staggering vertigo that made him reel with nausea. Through blurring eyes he saw that the others, too, were affected. This tremendous extra-electromagnetic force that was pressing every atom in them and in the ship, forcing those atoms faster and faster back along the time dimension flow, was now asserting its full effects.
    "Demons of space!" choked Otho from the pilot chair. "Look out —"
    Curt raised his head and peered drunkenly through a window. Space had gone crazy! The Moon was now hurtling around Earth like a racing ship, in reverse direction. Earth and the other distant planets were racing backward on their orbits around the Sun, almost as fast. Looking out into the Solar System as they sped back into its past, Curt saw comets that screamed in backward from space and cut around the Sun like bolts of lightning. And the mad backward race of the planets in their orbits was becoming ever more swift.
    "Hang on!" he muttered thickly to the others, shaking his head in a vain effort to clear it. "This is liable to become even worse."
    The cone had become a thing of blinding light that dazzled their eyes. Their legs could not support them and they slumped to the floor. Now the whole of outside space was a mere blur, a featureless gray immensity, so quickly were they speeding back across the centuries.
    Curt Newton wondered sickly if their living bodies would not be burst asunder by the awful pressure on every atom. Had he, in the confidence of scientific mastery, at last made too audacious a challenge to the blind, colossal forces of nature?
    Living flesh could not stand this ordeal indefinitely, he knew. Every atom in them was being buffeted by such forces as men had never felt before. He felt his brain darkening beneath the crushing force. He mustn't give way to it, he told himself. He must remain conscious to turn off the time-drive when they had reached the past age they desired. His blurring eyes clung to the dial. One needle was crawling back across figures that represented millions of years.
    "We're nearly there!" he called hoarsely to the others. "I'm going to slow down."
    His hand unsteadily moved the burnished control of the thruster. Streaks of light — racing planets — began to appear again in dim space. They were slowing down more and more. The needle of the time gage moved more slowly across the figures. Captain Future watched it tautly, fighting against the crushing pressure inside his brain.
    "We're there!" he muttered and shut off the time-thruster completely. He felt the pressure upon his body relaxing and he began to recover his balance. He stumbled to a window. "We've made it! We've come more than a hundred million years into the past, to the time when Katain — Otho!"
    Out there in space, a massive sphere of rock fully five hundred miles in diameter was rushing straight toward the Comet. It was turning slowly as it boomed down on them. And it was here, partway between Earth and Moon, where there should have been nothing at all. It was Earth's second Moon!
     

     
Chapter 5: Futuremen in the Past
     
    AS THE unexpected monster loomed across the whole sky before them, rushing upon their floating ship, Captain Future felt a stab of agonized self-reproach. He had been too sure of himself. He had not stopped to think that in this remote time Earth might have had two moons.
    Otho, in the pilot chair, had seen that onrushing