Free Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) by Edmond Hamilton Page B

courtmartialed if we’re caught, but we’re a brace of old foxes for catching! Let’s go.”
    No questions were asked of Marshal Gurney and Special Agent Joan Randall. The Patrol simply cleared the way for them with swift efficiency, and within an hour, Gurney’s small flyer had blasted off for the Moon.
    The two of them did not talk much. Joan watched the great dark bulk of Earth fall away from them, and then she looked through the forward port at their destination. She thought of all the times Captain Future had come this way, bound for home.
    Home — Curt’s home. And his birthplace. Strange cradle for a child, the awesome, lifeless Moon! And strange eyes had watched, strange hands had served, that child.
    Child of human parents, yes — of the Earth scientist and his wife who had gone to the Moon with their colleague for secret research. With their colleague, he who had once been Dr. Simon Wright but who had become the Brain.
    In the Moon-laboratory they had built there, their science had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. So that, after his parents’ tragic death, it had been Brain and robot and android who had been this child’s guardians!
    Joan imagined again, as she had so many times before, how it must have been for Curt to grow up there, to have his first view of Earth through the great glassite ceiling of the laboratory, to hear speech first from the strange mouths of Grag and Otho and Simon Wright, to play his childish games up and down the sunken corridors of the laboratory under Tycho, with a robot, an android and a living Brain for playmates.
    She pictured a small red-haired boy looking out at the bitter lunar peaks and pitiless rock plains, and thought how lonely he must have been sometimes. And there were tears in her eyes, not for the boy, but for the man he had become. For loneliness had been Curt’s heritage, had stamped him with a subtle something that set him apart from other men.
    It was fitting that, if he had to die, Curt Newton had done that too in a vast loneliness, far from other men, voyaging out with his three comrades, to new continents of stars far beyond the little ken of man.
    The surface of the Moon plunged upward toward them, became a bas-relief in cruel black and white. The soaring peaks of Tycho crater tore the airless sky like hungry fangs. The little flyer passed over them, sank down on blazing keel-jets to the floor of the crater.
    Silently, Joan and Ezra got into space-suits and went out of the flyer, onto the surface of the Moon.
    They had been here before. They knew their way. They found the hidden entrance, and Ezra, plodding and careful, operated the controls that opened the guarded door. Death, swift and terrible, awaited men who did not know the combination. The Futuremen kept their secrets well.
    A section of lunar rock slid aside, revealing a dark stairway. They went down, and the rock closed again over their heads.
    They went down some distance into the airlock. Its automatic controls worked smoothly. The two waited until the dials showed that the lock chamber had filled with air. Then they removed their space-suits and went toward the inner doors.
    For the first time, Joan faltered.
    “I don’t think I can,” she whispered. “To go in there, knowing that he isn’t there, that he won’t ever be there again —”
    His home. The table where he worked, the bed where he slept, the little things he left behind, forever. She clung to Ezra, sobbing, and he stroked her with his big hands.
    “Come now,” he murmured. “Curt wouldn’t want you crying.”
    She took a deep breath. “I wonder!” she said, with a sudden burst of anger at the whole vast cruelty of fate that had made her love such a man. “I wonder if he’d care at all whether I cried or not!”
    She flung her head back and went on through the inner lock. Ezra came close behind her.
    The stairway beyond was dark. They started down it, conscious that their boots rang loud in the rocky