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

exclaimed Grag. “Here’s where poor old Grag gets blacked out for good.”
    Next moment, the flying ship had plunged into the dust of the cloud. At once, they were surrounded by an impenetrable blackness. Curt hastily switched on the fluoroscopic searchlights, whose beams were designed to penetrate fog or dust. But the beams made only a thin red glow for a few hundred yards ahead. Even they could not penetrate far through the choking area of swirling particles.
    The Futuremen could barely make each other out in the control-room. The currents of streaming dust hurled the Comet about like a chip in a maelstrom as Curt fought to keep it on its course. They seemed to have penetrated the bellowing, violent, primal forces of the cosmos. The hull and struts of the ship creaked, boomed, shuddered and screeched beneath the impact of currents. A strut snapped with a crash back in the cabin.
    “This is worse than bucking a blizzard over Pluto!” called Otho over the uproar. “If it’s this bad near the Birthplace, what’ll it be like when we actually find it?”
    “It’ll be like catching a Jovian moonwolf — but if you find one, it tears you to bits,” Grag boomed.
    Captain Future paid them little attention for he was definitely worried by the pounding the Comet was taking. The ship was the staunchest, strongest craft in the Solar System — but even it could not challenge with impunity the blind fury of interstellar forces.
    The stubbornness of purpose that was Curt’s dominant trait rose to meet the intensified challenge. He held the ship grimly on its course, bringing it back each time it was hurled spinning away by the roaring dust-streams. The throbbing vibration-drive continued to push it forward, but it was like breasting the tide of a super-Niagara to force a way against these appalling currents.
     
    HE SOUGHT to find an easier path between the more violent dust-currents, but each time was sucked back into the raging stronger tides. The cosmic ray compass needle was shuddering spasmodically, for its mechanism was bearing the full terrific impact of the cosmic radiation whose unimaginable source they were fighting to approach.
    Crack-crash! A scream of tortured metal told of a slight warping of the Comet’s stern hull plates. An instant later, the controls went dead under Captain Future’s hands, and the ship was batted helplessly this way and that like a powerless derelict.
    “What’s the matter?” Grag yelled, clinging to his space-chair as the ship rolled and spun madly in the current’s grip.
    “The drive ring around the hull must have snapped!” Curt cried. “The vibration drive’s useless. Now the currents have got us.”
    “Could we put on our space-suits and go out and repair it?” Otho called.
    “Not a chance. The currents would tear you off the hull in a minute!” Curt shouted back. “I’ll try to use the rocket-drive. It won’t buck these currents, but it may get us out of this devil’s storm to where we can repair the drive-ring.”
    The roar of the rocket-tubes sounded thin and ineffectual when he threw them on. Their comparatively low power was puny against the raging dust-currents, but they helped to keep the ship from being tossed about too violently as the currents carried it outward.
    Captain Future allowed the millrace tides of dust to sweep them out of the cloud. Further attempts to penetrate to the Birthplace were useless until the vibration drive ring was repaired. They were swept finally out of the vast black cloud into the clear vault of space again. Neighboring star-clusters and nebulae blazed brightly to their eyes after their sojourn in the roaring darkness.
    “Never saw a sun look so good to me as those do!” Grag vowed fervently. “Where’ll we go to repair the ship, chief?”
    “All those suns are too far for us to reach with the rocket-drive,” Curt estimated. He pointed toward the dark star they had passed on their inward journey. “We’d better land there