Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More (March 1951) Read Online Free PDF

to it,” he said.
    Newton moodily watched the distant ship. Carey felt the unfamiliar liquor explode in him like liquid fire. Otho signaled and presently there was another glass in Carey’s hand.
    He was in no mood to refuse it. He had been a long, long time in space, his awakening had been hard, his homecoming bitter. The future was a cold and formless presence, crouched behind a dark curtain.
    Carey drank.
    There was an interval wherein he knew that he talked but was not sure what he said. Then he found himself in cool night air and Otho’s arm was helping him into a ship.
    Even through his haze, Carey knew Simon Wright’s toneless voice by now. “Where is Curtis?” it demanded.
    “He’ll be along,” Otho said easily. “This way, Carey — you need sleep.”
    It was later — how much later he could not guess — when Carey half-roused to voices. Simon’s inflectionless voice and Curt’s.
    “— and you won’t tell me what you’ve been up to?” Simon was saying.
    “There’s nothing to tell, Simon. We got nowhere with Lowther so we came back. Now we’ve got to go out to Pluto and see if we can stop him there.”
    “Curtis, I know you and I know that you have done something. Well, we shall see. But one thing I am sure of and that is that someday your anger will outrun your wisdom and bring you to disaster.”
    Carey drifted into sleep again. He did not even rouse to the shock of take-off. When he woke, the ship was on its way to Pluto.
     

     
    Chapter 4: Earthmen No More
     
    THEY made the long sweeping curve to escape the pull of Neptune and ranged in toward the dim speck that was Pluto. The jumping-off place of the Solar System, with nothing beyond it but interstellar space, riding its dark cold orbit around a Sun so distant that it seemed no greater than the other stars.
    Yet even here, if wealth was hidden away, man would find it. Carey thought that undoubtedly a few shrewd souls would have set up concessions for mining coal in Hell.
    He had watched all the way out from Earth but with only a flicker of the excitement he would once have known. He was interested, of course, because it was his first trip beyond the orbit of Jupiter. But the thrill was gone. People talked of going out to Saturn or Uranus now as they had once talked of going out to California. It gave Carey, somehow, a feeling of having been cheated. In his day going to Mars had been a big thing and fraught with danger.
    From a featureless fleck of reflected light almost too faint to be seen Pluto grew into a recognizable world — a dark world with black wild mountains shooting up against the stars and eerie seas of ice. There was something so cruel and ghostlike in the look of it that Carey could not repress a shudder.
    It seemed rather like an invader from outer space than a member of the familiar System, the more so since in bulk and mass and composition it bore a ghastly resemblance to Earth as though alien demons might have made it as a joke.
    They were a little ahead of Lowther. They had not had much start on him but they had a faster ship.
    “We’ll have a little time,” said Curt. “Even a few hours might be enough to talk some sense into Burke and the others.”
    Burke, Carey gathered, was captain of one of the two star-ships fighting the battle over fuel, was more or less the leader of both crews.
    “They counted on help from the Government,” said Otho. “When they find out what’s happened they’re going to be hard to hold.”
    “We’ve got to hold them,” Curt answered grimly. “They’ll blow their only chance if they start fighting.”
    Simon said nothing but his lens-like eyes followed Curt intently. The forward jets began to thunder and the Comet, still curving, entered its long arc of deceleration.
    As they swept closer Carey saw that the frozen plains were pocked with craters, and that some of the mountain-peaks had been shattered by caroming meteors. The lunar desolation of the world was hideous. Carey