Free Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More (March 1951) by Edmond Hamilton Page B

and clanking, as though someone enormously heavy walked in metal boots. Curt Newton turned his head sharply.
    “Grag!” he called. “Hold on there. Wait!”
    The footsteps hesitated and a voice from beyond the door said mockingly, “I told you so. What do you want to do, frighten the poor chap out of his wits?” The voice had a peculiar soft sibilance of tone.
    It was answered by a rumbling metallic growl, an utterly unhuman sound, that seemed to have words in it. Carey got up. He clung to the edge of the surgeon’s table, fighting the weakness that was on him, his eyes fixed on the bulkhead door.
    “Carey,” said Curt Newton, “things have changed and science has come a long way. There are three others aboard this ship besides myself. They’re not — well, not quite human, as men of your day understood the term. Even now, in our time, they’re unique, created by techniques far beyond the general knowledge. But you must not be afraid of them. They’re my friends and will be yours.”
    A chill came over Carey, creeping into his bones. He continued to stare at the door. What waited behind it, what monstrous things — not quite human, not quite human. The words repeated themselves in his brain, scuttling across it like spiders spinning icy webs, tightening until he could barely hear Newton’s voice talking on.
    “Robot...” Faintly the voice came and Carey stared at the door. The drops of sweat ran slowly down his face. “Robot, human in intelligence, created by scientific genius...”
    There were sounds behind the door. There were presences not of the flesh. Carey’s mouth was dry with the taste of fear.
    “... android, human in all respects but created also in the laboratory...”
    Carey began to move toward the door. What dreadful facet of the future had he been cast into? What uncanny children of this undreamed-of age were lurking there behind that panel? He could not bear to know but somehow not knowing was worse. Not knowing and wondering and thinking...
    “... the brain of a great scientist, a human, kept alive for many years in a special case...”
    Robot, android, living brain. A red-haired man and a date on a calendar. A ship where there are no ships, a life where there is no living. A dream, Carey — a dream you’re dreaming, drifting along w ith the endless tides, the dark night tides beyond the Belt. Open the door, Carey. What difference in a dream?
    A human figure, lithe and graceful, whose face had the unhappy beauty of a faun, green-eyed and mocking. And beside it a shape, a towering gigantic manlike form built all of gleaming metal. A shape that bent toward him, reaching out its dreadful arms, glaring at him with two round, flashing eyes.
    A harsh, toneless voice spoke close behind Carey, saying, “Catch him, Curtis.”
    Carey looked for the source of the strange voice. The cubical box that he had taken for a communicator had risen from its shelf, hovering upon tenuous beams. And he saw that the surface with the twin lenses and the disc was indeed a face.
    “No,” said Carey. “Don’t touch me. Don’t any of you touch me.”
    He made his way back into the little laboratory. The room had closed in on him. The darkening air pressed against him like water. He was conscious that his hands were cold, that his feet were very heavy, treading on a surface he could no longer feel.
    “I tried to soften the shock for him,” Curt Newton was saying somewhere across the universe.
    And the harsh voice of the cubical metal case replied without inflection, “Poor fellow, he has many shocks in store.”
    Carey sat down. He put his face between his cold palms, and the knowledge came to him, the truth that he had not quite believed before but from which now there was no escape.
    He had bridged the gulf of time. He had left his own past in the dust of centuries behind him and he stood face to face with a future that was beyond his knowing. He was brother to Lazarus, come forth into an alien