Read Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942) for Free Online Page B

fathom all that as in the Cometae captain’s mind, but it was evident that his reply was of supreme importance to Zarn.
    The Brain thought rapidly before he spoke.
    “It should be possible,” he said carefully, “to bring you back to normal by reversing whatever deep alteration has been made in your bodily cells. Our red-haired leader and I would need to study your body first, before we could say definitely.”
    A wild, haggard hope showed in Zarn’s eyes. The electric man trembled with visible emotion. His free fist clenched.
    “If you could do that!” he whispered hoarsely. “If you could free my people and me from this horrible death-in-life and make us real men and women again!”
    “You mean that you Cometae don’t like being electric men?” Otho demanded incredulously.
    “Like it?” repeated Zarn. He laughed bitterly. “Stranger, would you willingly suffer such a joyless mockery of existence? Once we were real men and women. Once we grew up through happy childhood to maturity, loved and had children of our own, grew peacefully old and passed to the quiet rest of death.
    “But now!” His voice was thick with passion. “For us there is no escape, unless we so sicken of this life that we put violent end to ourselves!”
    The somber picture Zarn painted communicated itself to his listeners.
    “I remember now that I noticed no children at all in this city,” the Brain recalled. “I should have known that this electrification of your bodies would make your whole race sterile.”
     
    OTHO asked Zarn a blunt question. “If your people don’t like this electric existence, why did you let yourselves be changed so?”
    “My people had no voice in the matter!” Zarn answered violently. “It was done to us without our consent. The only ones who wanted this change were the tyrants who rule us — Thoryx and Lulain, and that devil’s wizard, old Querdel. It was they who plotted this thing with the Alius.”
    “Who are the Alius, really?” the Brain asked him.
    Dread crept like a chilling shadow into Zarn’s eyes.
    “None of us Cometae except our rulers know much of the Alius. But we do know that they are in no way human, having unguessably alien forms and powers. And we know that they do not belong to this cosmos at all, but came from outside it.”
    “From outside our cosmos?” gasped Otho.
    “I tell only what I have heard,” Zarn answered. “I have never seen the Alius myself — though it was in their black citadel in the north, that I and all the rest of my people were changed into this terrible electric state.”
    “You’re talking in riddles!” Otho exclaimed. “If you were in the Alius’ citadel, if it was they who changed you, you must have seen them!”
    “No, none of our people saw them or knew how it was that they changed us,” Zarn repeated. “I know it sounds incredible, but it is so.”
    “Let him tell it in his own way, Otho,” ordered the Brain.
    Zarn continued earnestly.
    “We Cometae have lived long upon this comet world, which our pioneering ancestors reached long ago by coming in their ships through a chance rift in the coma. We were then a quite ordinary human race, and lived here as such for many ages.
    “Our government slipped into the hands of a small class of nobles which centered around the hereditary king. Yet in spite of the exploitation by this ruling class, our life was bearable.
    “Then, as though in a bad dream, the shadow of the Alius fell upon us. It came about through Querdel, an elderly noble who is one of King Thoryx’s councillors. Querdel is somewhat of a scientist, though our science may be crude and primitive compared to yours.
    “Somehow, in his devilish researches, old Querdel first got into communication with beings inhabiting a weird, alien universe that lies in the extra-dimensional gulf outside the ordinary cosmos.
    “These beings called themselves the Alius. They had, it seems, been trying for a long time to communicate with someone in