Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation (May 1951) Read Online Free Page A

raging eddies of dust-currents and hurled it forward again. Now the whole hull was creaking and groaning from constantly changing stresses and the hiss of dust against its plates became a rising and falling roar.
    Ezra Gurney felt a quaking dread. He had already seen too much, had come too far. Now he felt that a universe become sentient and hostile was wrathfully repelling them from its hidden heart, from its supreme secret.
    The Comet fought forward, relentlessly impelled by its own mechanical brains, until the dust began to thin. It tore onward, still buffeted by swirling currents and drenched by radiation. And now, ahead, Ezra saw a vast hazy space inside the denser blackness of the cloud. And far away in this inner space, looming in vague gigantic splendor...
    “Good God!” said Ezra Gurney and it was a prayer. “Then that — that...”
    Curt Newton’s eyes were alight with a strange glow. “Yes — the Birthplace.”
    The hazy space within the denser cloud was vast. And at its center bulked and gleamed and shifted an enigmatic glory — a colossal spinning spiral of white radiance. Its whirling arms spanned millions of miles and it uttered cosmic lightnings of radiation that lanced out through the haze.
    Beating heart of the universe, fiery womb that spawned the stuff of worlds, awesome epicenter of cosmos! Cloaked and shrouded by the dense black cloud of its own making, safe behind its ramparts of terrible whirlpools and the wild tide-runs of untamed matter fresh from creation, it flamed across its millions of miles of space, shaped like a spiral nebula, spinning, whirling, sending forth its seed to the farthest corners of the galaxy.
    And to Ezra Gurney, cowering in his seat and staring at that far-off misty glory, it seemed that the eyes of men were not meant to see nor their minds to comprehend this shining Birthplace. “Surely,” he whispered, “surely we’re not going into that!”
    Curt Newton nodded. He had still that strange look in his eyes, a look almost mystic, as though he could see beyond the wonder and the glory of the Birthplace to its innermost secret heart and glimpse there the hidden laws by which it worked and carried out its destiny.
    “Yes,” said Curt, “we’re going in.” He leaned forward over the controls, his face bathed in the misty radiance so that it seemed not his familiar face at all but the countenance of a being half godlike with the strange light flickering in his eyes.
    “You see how it is, Ezra?” he asked. “How it spins like a great centrifuge, sucking in the spent energy of Suns and whirling it in currents of incalculable strength until, in some utterly undreamable way, the energy coagulates into electrons and protons which are thrown off in never-ending streams from the rim of the vortex.
    “They form the shining haze that fills this hollow around the Birthplace. Then, farther out, they unite to form the atoms of cosmic dust. The pressure of radiation forces them on across the galaxy. And out of them new worlds are made.”
    Ezra Gurney shivered. He did not speak.
    “Curtis!” Simon’s voice was loud with a kind of warning and Curt Newton started, leaning back in his seat and turning again to the controls of the Comet. His face had tightened and his eyes were veiled.
     
    AND the ship sped on across that vast hollow in the heart of the dark cloud. And swift as its flight was it seemed only to creep slowly, slowly, toward the misty wheel of radiance. Pale witch-fires danced along its hull, growing brighter until the metal was enwrapped in veils of flame, tenuous, cold and having about them an eerie quality of life. The Comet was double-shielded against the radiation but even so Ezra Gurney could feel the echoes of that terrible force in his own flesh.
    The flaming arms of the Birthplace reached wider and wider across space. The radiance deepened, became a supernal brilliance that seared the flinching eyeballs. The ship began to be shaken now and again by