Captain Future 25 - Moon of the Unforgotten (January 1951) Read Online Free PDF

was a rush of feet. Grag and Otho burst into the room. A terrible booming cry came from the metal giant and he leaped forward.
    To Curt’s infant eyes it was a whirl of staggering figures, a spurt and flash of light — and then Grag standing with Otho over the broken bodies of the men.
    The scene darkened — but the aloof untouched corner of Curt’s adult mind knew that he had seen the death of his own parents and their avenging by the Futuremen...
    “Back beyond his own memories!” whispered the voice. “ His father’s and his father’s father’s...”
    He was in an ancient 20th Century airplane. Curt felt — felt, even though he knew it was a 20th Century ancestor who had really felt it — the pressure as he swung the plane around to dive toward its target...
    He was on the sun-parched deck of an old sailing-ship, becalmed, its sails hanging limp and dead. He started toward the stern...
    He was one of many men, men clad in bronze and leather, carrying long spears. They were running into a rude village of huts and somewhere there was a shrieking...
    Under a somber sky on a sere brown hillside he stood as a skin-garmented savage. The chill wind ruffled the dead grass but he saw the movement down on the slope that was not of the wind and he raised his heavy stone axe more alertly...
    “Farther —”
    Thunder shook the night sky and reverberated across the city of glittering pylons in the nearer distance as one by one the great liners came swinging majestically down.
    Curt Newton — or the faraway ancestor whose memories he now relived — spoke with casual interest to the grave robed man who was walking with him toward the starport terminal.
    “We’ll see what kind of officials Deneb is sending us this time! I must admit these bored sophisticates from the capital, with their patronizing attitude toward our Earth and its System, get on my nerves!”
    “But after all we’re only a tiny part of the Empire,” the other reminded. “Administrators who have to think of worlds across the whole galaxy can’t consider our little System as too important.”
    “It is important! Even though it has only nine little worlds it’s as important as any part of the Empire!”
    “Perhaps it will be someday. The Empire will last forever and someday —”
     
    EVEN as the scene changed the watching corner of Curt’s mind knew that for a moment he had actually lived in the legendary Old Empire...
    “Back farther still — farther —”
    He could hear them singing the song through all the ship. The old song that was like a banner streaming, the song that they had sung for generations in the mighty ships that went on and on through the intergalactic void.
    “How many, many centuries since the last of the First Born died — the First Born who raised us from the dust! How many centuries since we men went forth!”
    He heard and he looked ahead through the port and there was nothing but the same eternal scene — the vast maw of oceanic deep space with the hosts of the far-flung galaxies mere drowned points of light.
    All except the one galaxy ahead, the mighty wheel-shaped continent of stars that slowly, slowly, kept growing into a universe of fire and splendor.
    “By the arts that the First Born taught us, by the sacred behest that they laid upon us, we go forth to create the cosmic dream they dreamed!”
    The blinding revelation came only to that little part of his mind that was still Curt Newton — the revelation of that first epic coming of men to found the Empire of old, to fulfill the command of the mysterious First Born.
    If he could hear that song a little longer, that marching-song of the elder human race as it followed its destiny from far beginnings! If he could hear but a little more —
    “Now!” spoke the voice and light crashed destroyingly upon the whole scene — and he was Curt Newton wholly and lying upon a cold slab and waking — waking —
    It was cruel, that awakening, unendurably cruel — to have