Captain Future 12 - Planets in Peril (Fall 1942) Read Online Free PDF Page B

faded, and the haze died away.
    Joan felt a strange chill as she saw that the big chamber now was empty. The little ship was dematerialized, gone.
    The Comet and its four dauntless occupants had been hurled across the unthinkable abysses of an untraveled dimension to that distant, dying universe.
     

     
Chapter 5: Dusk of Empire
     
    CURT NEWTON had found the three Futuremen awaiting him in the crowded control room of the Comet, when he made his way into the ovoid chamber and entered the ship. Oog and Eek were wrestling playfully on the floor.
    "All ready?" Curt had asked. "In five minutes well be hurtling out of this universe."
    "Say, what would happen if Gerdek and Shiri didn't have their apparatus turned on to receive us?" Grag asked.
    "What are you trying to do — ruin my morale before we start?" Otho demanded of the robot.
    Curt had leaned forward at the window and waved to Joan, whom he could see standing outside the transparent ovoid chamber. He also descried Tiko Thrin at the big switchboard nearby. The little Martian was closing the last switches.
    Then everything seemed to explode in a blaze of force. Captain Future felt the stunning shock of unprecedented energies in every fiber of his body. He had a sensation of falling into a bottomless abyss. Yet even though the powerful beam was hurling the Comet and its occupants across vast dimensions, Curt retained a measure of consciousness and was able to peer drunkenly out.
    He had a nightmare vision of unreal spaces, through which the ship was hurtling at velocity inconceivable. It was not the void of ordinary space. This was the extra-dimensional abyss, whose super-geometrical tangle of complex coordinates baffled human perceptions. The perspective of this super-space was all wrong, impossibly curved and distorted.
    Brilliant bubbles of shimmering, unreal appearance floated and streamed in this vast abyss. Each bubble was a separate three-dimension universe like his own, Future knew. Universes upon universes, dancing in the cosmic gulf like bubbles of shining foam! The Comet seemed hurtling amid those foaming universes in an impossible complicated corkscrew curve, yet at the same time it seemed somehow to be flying in a straight line!
    Captain Future had dared many alien realms in the past. But never had his mind felt so crushed and puny and helpless as now, in the unplumbed abyss of extra-dimensional spaces outside his own universe. His intelligence recoiled from the effort to comprehend this insane welter of curved spaces and the streaming rush of countless spherical universes.
    Curt became aware that they were now somehow inside one of the bubble-universes. He vaguely sensed it as a distorted sphere of space which enclosed a brooding darkness. No glitter of brilliant young stars dispelled its night — nothing but cold, black cinders of burned-out suns, icy specks of frozen planets, and far away a cluster of smoldering red stars not yet quite dead.
    The Comet seemed hurtling toward that cluster of dying suns, rushing deep into it toward a lurid crimson star around which circled five worlds. The innermost of those worlds loomed up —
    There came again a sharp, wrenching shock that Captain Future felt through every fiber. He struggled against dizzy nausea, and realized that now his sensations were again those of his physical body. As his vision cleared, he found himself slumped in the pilot's chair. The Futuremen were staggering dazedly beside him, peering excitedly out of the window.
    "Jumping sun-imps, we're not on Deimos now!” stuttered Otho. "Look out there!"
    "I don't see anything much," Grag complained. "And I still feel awful dizzy."
    The Comet was resting inside another transparent ovoid chamber exactly like the one they had left. But this chamber and its auxiliary apparatus stood on the paved floor of a dusky, open court inside some big building.
    The building itself was a massive, ancient-looking structure of synthetic white marble. Its sheer walls rose