Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) (11 page)

At high speed, the little flier zoomed north across nighted Pluto, beneath the weird shifting radiance of the three big moons. The bubblelike dome of Tartarus disappeared from sight behind them. They flew on above endless fields of glittering ice. Through the icefields, a swift, wide river flowed almost due north.

“That is the salt river, Phlegethon,” said Tharb. “We follow it straight to the icy sea.”

CURT nodded. He was peering toward the towering white masses that loomed up vaguely ahead. “Those are the Marching Mountains, Grag,” he told the robot. “Remember them?”

Grag nodded uneasily. “Yes, I don’t like them.”

“My people too are afraid of them,” Tharb confessed. “They have often times destroyed the towns of my tribe.”

The Marching Mountains of Pluto, one of the greatest natural wonders of the System, were soon almost below them.

This particular range was a vast wall of ice, a thousand feet high, that advanced with a shifting, flowing movement over the ice-fields in a southwestward direction. The crackling, crashing roar of its progress reached their ears as a deafening cannonade.

Mountains of ice, marching! The Marching Mountains were really vast glaciers, that moved at a speed many times faster than any glacier of Earth. Around and around this frigid planet eternally, their mighty ranges moved like ponderous, walking white giants.

“Master, above us!” Grag yelled suddenly.

A dark space cruiser, with the black disk of the Legion of Doom on its bows, was diving down on them.

“Ambush!” Curt cried, his gray eyes suddenly blazing. “I might have known —”

He swept their flier aside with a lightning movement. It was too late. The guns of the cruiser blasted atomic fire.

The whole flier rocked sickeningly as its tail and rocket-tubes were blasted away. Then it plunged toward the ice hundreds of feet below, while the Legion cruiser zoomed up and away.

“We’re going to fall in front of the Marching Mountains!” cried Tharb wildly. “It is certain death!”

AFTER Simon Wright had watched Captain Future and his two companions depart, he turned his lens-eyes toward the others who remained in the
Comet.

“Fly the
Comet
over to that Observatory, Otho,” ordered the Brain. “I want to begin my studies of the dark star with their equipment.”

“I’ll go along and act as your assistant, if you wish,” offered Kansu Kane.

“Ha, Kansu Kane,” the Brain rasped, “that is spoken like a true scientist able to sink his pride where Truth is involved.”

A strange brooding quality crept into the Brain’s metallic voice.

“Yes, it is the search for truth that has occupied me all my long life, long ago when I was a human like yourselves with a body, and through all the years that I have dwelled bodiless in this serum-case. For a real scientist must never ask where his truth is taking him — he must only ask that he find it.”

“Captain Future is a real scientist — the greatest in the System’s history,” Joan replied loyally. “And yet he can consider the welfare of the System’s peoples, too.”

“That is true,” agreed the Brain. “But Curtis is an exception. Reared as he was by us three unhuman guardians, he has an unhuman capacity for concentration and research. Yet he has remained human enough to appreciate human needs and desires and hopes.”

The Brain looked impatiently at Otho.

“To the Observatory, Otho! I asked you minutes ago to start there.”

Otho picked up the handle of Simon Wright’s serum-case, and they all emerged from the little tear-drop ship and approached the Observatory. They passed through a heat-lock into its shadowy interior, whose warmth was grateful after the outside cold.

A hesitant-looking young Earthman astronomer approached them, looking a little awedly into the lens-eyes of the Brain, the legende.d unhuman master of science.

“The Observatory is at your disposal,” he told them. “A call from Marshal Gurney asked us to turn over to you.”

“Very well, you can go,” rasped the Brain. “Otho, take me up to the eyepiece of the big reflector.”

Once his case had been securely attached so that he could peer into the eyepiece of the great instrument, the Brain spoke to Kansu Kane.

“I’m going to check the size and mass of the dark star again. Will you stand by to assist?”

Otho and Joan watched from the floor of the great room, peering up at the two astronomers, human and unhuman, as they began their study high at the eyepiece platform of the great telescope.

With a soft throbbing of atomic motors, the shutter in the observatory dome rolled back, giving vision of a strip of brilliant, starry sky. The whole dome revolved until the constellation Sagittarius was in the telescope’s field of view.

Out there in the Milky Way in that constellation, a small disk of blackness was very clearly visible. It was ominously bigger than it had been, obscuring more than one star in that crowded area.

THE Brain rasped monosyllabic orders, and Kansu Kane obeyed, touching verniers and screws with expert skill. And as the Brain peered into the eyepiece, the dark thing out there in the starry void leaped into his vision, enormously magnified.

It appeared to the Brain as a vast, spinning black sphere, looming portentously against the star-strewn heavens as it thundered on toward the System. A dark star, a dead sun that had once flamed with blazing life, but that was now only a great cinder of the cosmos, hurled by fate toward the nine worlds.

Simon looked without fear at the awesome and terrifying spectacle. To the Brain, almost all human emotions such as fear and hatred had ceased to exist long ago, when he had been transferred out of his pain-racked human body into his new strange form. Only his deep loyalty to and protective love for the helpless baby he had reared to brilliant manhood remained of the Brain’s emotions.

The Brain checked the apparent diameter of the dark star, using Kansu Kane to take down the readings.

“It is nearer — much nearer,” the Brain rasped when the result had been computed. “Within very few days it will be an alarming spectacle, even to the unaided eye.”

“What about the actual dimensions?” Kansu Kane inquired keenly.

“We’ll check that now,” Simon answered, “and see if it agrees with my former determination.”

When the new readings had been made, and the computing done, the Brain’s voice held a quality of surprise.

“The same as before — that dark star is at least fifty thousand miles in diameter! It’s unbelievable that it should have so little mass. Something must be distorting our mass-measurements.”

“That problem has baffled me, too,” confessed Kansu Kane. “I am beginning to believe now that my mass-measurements have been in error.”

“Prepare the magnetoscopes and we’ll make new measurements,” directed Simon.

The Brain brooded over the problem as Kansu Kane bustled around the instruments. It was the greatest scientific mystery he had ever encountered. That colossal dark star thundering toward the System should, in the natural course of things, have enormous mass, but all astronomical measurements had indicated that its mass was negligible.

But if those measurements were really in error, if the dark star really was as massive as it might naturally be expected to be, Doctor Zarro’s prophecy of solar disaster was not unfounded! Such a huge and massive body, if it struck the System would rip through the planetary orbits and suck worlds into it as it moved. And if it collided with the Sun, half or more of the System’s worlds might well perish in the titanic catastrophe!

The Brain became suddenly aware that Kansu Kane’s bustling movements had ceased. The waspish little astronomer had sunk down and lay prostrate, his eyes staring up emptily.

“Kansu! What is the matter?” rasped the Brain.

THERE was no answer. Simon turned his lens-eyes down to Joan and Otho. They too lay prone, stiff, unmoving.

Then the Brain’s keen microphone ears caught a hissing sound, as of flowing gas.

“Overpowering gas of some kind!” flashed the thought of the Brain. “It’s being pumped into the building —”

That, he knew, could be the only explanation. But why, he wondered, had Otho been overcome by the gas? The android was impervious to almost any poison and could breathe air that would kill a human, but that did not harm his lungs.

Then the Brain understood. This gas being pumped in was one which affected, not the lungs, but every cell in the body, paralyzing cellular chemical activity and thus “freezing” the whole body. Otho and Joan and Kansu Kane must still be conscious like himself, but their bodies were utterly paralyzed.

And the Brain could do nothing! His only powers of movement were his ability to move his flexible eye-stalks. He could only wait.

The hissing of gas ceased. Simon heard the sound of a door opening. Twisting his eyes downward, he saw a half dozen men in space suits enter the building.

They wore the black disk of the Legion of Doom on their shoulders. They were led by a tall, space-suited man, whose transparent helmet allowed his enormous, bulging forehead and skull, and gaunt face and burning eyes, to be seen.

“Doctor Zarro himself!” muttered the Brain. “I might have known.”

Doctor Zarro looked down contemptuously at the stiff, helpless forms of Joan and Otho and Kansu Kane. Then, while his men guarded the doors, the tall, burning-eyed prophet climbed the metal ladder to the eyepiece-platform of the great reflector.

Doctor Zarro and the Brain stared at each other, the burning black orbs of the black prophet and the cold, glittering lens-eyes of Simon Wright meeting and clashing in tangible shock.

“So this is the famous Brain,” mocked Doctor Zarro in a deep, harsh voice muffled by his helmet. “So this is the greatest scientist in the System, except for Captain Future — this miserable brain in a box!”

The Brain, completely unmoved, asked a question.

“Have you killed my friends?”

Doctor Zarro laughed mirthlessly.

“They are not dead — they are not even unconscious! But they cannot move, while the freezing-gas holds them.”

The dark prophet bent closer.

“I heard you were coming here, Brain — and so I came too. You are going to tell me just how much you and Captain Future have learned about me and my Legion. If you tell, I will grant you the gift of quick death. If you refuse —”

“I will tell you nothing,” replied the unfrightened Brain coldly.

“You had better think twice!” warned the tall prophet. “You are utterly helpless in my hands. I can make you long for death.”

SIMON WRIGHT was calm. “A great many men in the past,” he said, “have threatened me. They thought themselves safe to do so because I have no body and cannot resist. But all those men regretted their threats.”

“You think your Captain Future will avenge you?” Doctor Zarro’s harsh voice was ugly. “Get rid of the idea, Brain! He is already destroyed — before ever I came here, I gave orders that have by now been carried out.”

The Brain uttered a rasping laugh.

“You’re not the first who has thought he had eliminated Curtis. You’ll find you are mistaken.”

Yet inwardly, the Brain was wondering. The quickness with which Doctor Zarro had learned that Captain Future was on Pluto was highly suspicious. It might be that the black prophet had in fact laid a deadly trap for Curt.

Doctor Zarro was speaking menacingly.

“I know that you and your red-headed captain trailed me here through the dead body of one of my Legionaries. What else have you found out?”

The Brain remained coolly silent.

“I’ll make you talk!” the dark doctor cried.

He reached out to a little switch on the side of the Brain’s transparent case. It was the switch of the compact perfusion pump which circulated serum through Simon’s living brain, constantly purifying and stimulating it.

The switch clicked off. The perfusion-pump stopped instantly. And at once the Brain felt the effects.

A dull ache was his first sensation. Then the aching became stronger, became an increasing agony that seemed to spread fiery pain through every fiber of his brain.

The Brain’s vision and hearing blurred as that torturing agony increased, as his starved cerebrum-cells cried for the serum whose flow had been stopped.

“Are you ready to be helpful now?” questioned Doctor Zarro mockingly.

The Brain could hardly see the dark figure hovering over him. But he answered, his rasping voice thick, slow.

“The answer is the same,” he mumbled, indomitably.

He dimly heard Doctor Zarro’s fierce exclamation of impatience. Then the rending, torturing agony became so intense that Simon could neither see nor hear.