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

subtle tremors as the farthest edges of out-thrown currents touched it and passed by.
    Ezra shut his teeth hard to keep from screaming. He had been driven once too close to the Sun and he had looked hard into the depths of the atomic furnace that was about to swallow him. He had not then known one tenth of the fear that he knew now.
    Slitting his eyes against the glare he could make out the central sphere from which the spiral arms curved out, a gigantic vortex of flaming force, the wheel-hub of the galaxy. The Comet was plunging straight toward it and there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing...
    Curt sent the ship driving in between two of the sweeping arms. Tidal-waves, torrents of energy picked them up and flung them, a leaf in the cosmic millrace, toward the grip of a curving arm that burned and seethed with all the ultimate fires of hell. And Curt fought the controls and tore away again, heading in, heading in...
    The central sphere of force loomed up like a wall of flame higher than all the skies of space, and then they were in it.
    It was as though a million Suns had exploded. The force and fire took the Comet and whirled it tumbling away through a blind and terrible violence. Ezra sagged half-conscious in his seat and he thought that he had come a long, long way to die. No ship, no body, could live for long in this.
    The forces of the cosmic centrifuge would tear their substance, powder it to atoms and then sift down into the fine raw stuff of atoms, send it out to join with the black dust, to begin the timeless pilgrimage across the empty spaces, to be built at last into the foundations of some new world to circle an alien Sun. Human, robot and android, they would all be one in the end.
    The Comet crashed suddenly clear of that hellish tempest of light and force into quiet space. Into a space enclosed by the spinning central sphere of the Birthplace itself, a calm at the very center of cosmic storm.
    Dazzled, half-stunned, Ezra heard Simon saying, “In here at the center is only one world — the world of the Watchers, where —”
    Curt Newton, leaning forward, interrupted with a strange low cry.
    “Simon, look! Look! There are other worlds here now — worlds and Suns and —” His voice seemed strangled by a surprise and terror too great for utterance.
    Ezra strained desperately to regain use of his dazzled eyes. As they began to clear he too peered tautly forward. At first what he saw did not seem so terrifying. Here, in the wide calm space at the heart of the Birthplace, there was a cluster of Suns and planets.
    Ruby Suns, flaring like new blood, green and white and somber smoky-gold Suns! Planets and moons that circled the changing Suns in sweeping trains, themselves ever changing! Comets that shot in living light between the worlds, meteor swarms rushing and wheeling, an astronomical phantasmagoria enclosed within this comparatively little space!
    “You said there were no worlds but one here,” Ezra began, bewildered.
    “There were none.” Curt’s face was deathly, and something in it struck at Ezra’s heart. “There were none but that little blue world — that alone.”
    Ezra glimpsed it at the center of the strange, close-packed cluster — a little blue planet that was a geometrically perfect sphere.
    “The powers of the Watchers are there — the instruments by which they could tap the Birthplace itself,” Curt was saying hoarsely. “And Garrand has been there with those instruments for days.”
    A comprehension so monstrous that his mind recoiled from it came to Ezra Gurney. “You mean that Garrand...”
    He could not finish, could not say it. It was not a thing that could be said in any sane universe.
    Curt Newton said it. “Garrand by tapping the Birthplace, has created the Suns and worlds and comets and meteors of that cluster. He has fallen victim to the old allurement, the strongest in the universe.”
    “As you almost fell victim once!” Simon Wright warned.
    “Can a man