Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the words that came from Joan.
    “A lie! You humans could never have won and destroyed my race!”
    “Not we humans alone did so — the radiation that was increasingly deadly to them withered them!” Curt retorted swiftly. “The fatal clock of entropy has run far down while you lay frozen!
    “Not in this galaxy, nor in Andromeda, nor the galaxies beyond, lives any Linid now but you! I have seen it — the ancient inscriptions of man that told of the passing of the Linids, the worlds that belonged to your race but are no more theirs. The memorials of man’s final victory!”
    “Tricks! Lies!” flashed from Joan’s lips. “I hold this girl — I hold her brain, her mind, her memories, and in them I can see no such things as you tell.”
    It was what Captain Future had hoped for, and he instantly pressed his attack.
    “She has never seen those things! She has seen but this little System, no more. But I have seen — and I can prove all to you.”
    “The sons of the ape dealt always in falsehood! You cannot prove.”
    “I can!” Curt’s face was marble pale. “You can leave the girl and possess me — my mind, my memories of what I’ve seen. You can prove the truth, by that!”
    He hung tensely on the answer. It was his only chance, he knew. His only chance to save the girl his own rashness had doomed.
    The shadows in Joan’s blank eyes swirled — uneasily, disturbedly. He knew he had implanted a terrible doubt in the Linid’s mind.
     
    WOULD the creature dismiss that doubt, reject him? He could not believe it. The being who had spoken with such passion and pride of his race could bear to remain long doubtful of such a dreadful possibility as Curt had affirmed.
    Curt laughed, a jarring sound on the bitter silence. Reaching up, he caught the jewel from his head and flung it away standing forth unarmed. He laughed again, facing the dank peering shadows in Joan’s eyes.
    “I offer you a stronger weapon against my comrades than the one you hold, and still you are afraid to take it. You are afraid, Linid — to learn the truth!”
    “No,” whispered the alien voice from Joan’s lips. “My people knew not fear.”
    The subtly distorted outlines of the girl’s body began to blur, to flow with the shifting of that strange and awful duality. The veiled and hooded shadow took form around it, swirling yet solid. It lifted — and Joan was free.
    She fell, then, with only a small moaning sound to mark her plunge into unconsciousness.
    The Linid hovered, and began to move.
    Grag’s raging bellow shook the rock. The robot took one ponderous forward step and Otho, his lithe, incredibly agile body bent like a bow for action, leaped beside him. But Simon Wright’s incisive voice said sharply, “Stop! Curtis must do this thing in his own way.”
    With a terrible reluctance, Grag and Otho obeyed. They would have given their lives, but in this struggle of two minds for supremacy they could not help.
    Captain Future watched the coming of that shape of darkness. And in that moment he knew fear, such as no man had known since the ancient ages when this same battle had been fought across half a universe.
    The black veils rippled and widened. The solid shadow covered him, shutting out the light. The heart-core of the Linid gleamed and brooded a cluster of dark little suns, pulsing, close, very close. The shadowy solidity whipped around him, a cloak, a pall —
    It was in him, in his flesh, forcing apart the very atoms of his substance, interlacing them with its own, so that he would have screamed from the un-human pain of it, only that he had no voice. Their two minds locked together and to Curt it was like the bursting of an icy nova in his brain. The cosmos reeled and darkened —
    They were one, Curt Newton and the creature out of the gulfs of time.
    His mind was open to the Linid — his whole life, everything he had thought and done and seen, forgotten and remembered. And the mind of the Linid, because of that