Captain Future 09 - Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942) Read Online Free PDF Page A

forces.”
    He steered the Comet forward along the course indicated by the quivering needle of the cosmic ray compass. They skirted the flaming coast of the gigantic nebula for some hours, flying at a steady velocity of more than a hundred light-speeds.
     

     
Chapter 4: Dark Mystery
     
    NERVOUS tension gripped Curt, such as he had never felt before. It was not alone the numbing majesty of the great stars and glooms about him which caused his feeling. It was his knowledge that they were fast approaching the mysterious place of their search, the so-called Birthplace of Matter that was the very core of the whole universe.
    What would it be like, that unknown wellspring of creation in which new matter for the universe was somehow ceaselessly built up from radiation? What was the secret of that miraculous natural creation? And could they hope to snatch the innermost riddle of the cosmos? For many hours, they flew through apparently empty space toward the vast black cosmic cloud. The cosmic ray compass pointed always toward it. It bulked here amid the thronging suns and nebulae like a great, brooding presence of awesome ebon majesty, extending for at least twenty billion miles across space in front of them. Surprisingly, the friction-alarms began sounding again. A rapid check of instruments disclosed to Curt and the Brain that, as they flew onward, space was becoming ever thicker with streaming cosmic dust.
    “It’s what we might have expected, lad,” the Brain rasped thoughtfully.
    “We knew that matter is born in the Birthplace as tiny particles of cosmic dust, which are carried out in streams to all parts of the galaxy by light-pressure. As we near the Birthplace, the streams of outflowing dust will become ever denser and stronger.”
    Captain Future nodded agreement.
    “It means that we’re very near the Birthplace, comparatively speaking. It may be on the other side of that black cloud.”
    He was forced to throttle down their velocity further, to avoid heating the hull. The cosmic cloud now blotted out half the starry universe ahead.
    “Time we started detouring around the cloud,” Captain Future remarked, veering the flying ship onto a new course.
    “Why don’t we just go through it?” Grag inquired.
    “Listen to Grag, the genius, talking!” jeered Otho. “A dark cloud like that might have anything in it from a dark-star to a meteor swarm, you bucket-head. It’d be suicide to go blundering in there.”
    As the Comet crawled around the edge of the gigantic area of blackness, it was tossed by increasingly stronger dust-streams. The vast black mass to their right was an even more awe-inspiring spectacle than the gaseous nebula. Its darkness was impenetrable. Scattered along its borders were a few bright suns, whose rays luridly illuminated the coiling fringes of dust and an occasional dark star, a burned-out ember of the universe.
    “It’s strange,” came the uneasy voice of the Brain, “but according to my observation, these dust-streams seem to come from the cloud itself.”
    “There’s something a lot stranger than that,” Curt Newton rapped. “We’re halfway around the cloud, but the cosmic ray compass still points right toward the center of the cloud itself.”
     
    HE HAD been watching the quivering needle, closely, and had felt an increasing astonishment as it crept steadily to one side of its card. It was Otho who blurted out the suspicion that had come to all of them. “Is it possible that the Birthplace of Matter is somewhere inside that cosmic cloud?”
    “It couldn’t be!” Grag declared. “Or could it? Jumping moon-demons, I don’t know what to think!”
    “It’s logical,” muttered the Brain. “That unprecedentedly huge black cloud is composed of cosmic dust. If the Birthplace is somewhere inside it, that would account for the existence of the dust — it is born in the Birthplace itself and streams out from it, but great masses of it remain clustered around the