Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) (19 page)

The korlat’s great head stiffened as its big, pupil-less eyes glimpsed the man and robot. With an appalling roar that shook the building, the beast charged them.

Curt’s proton-gun spat a thin, pale beam of highest power. He saw the ray bum deep into the huge beast’s side. But it was not enough — no weapon in the System was enough — to knock down a charging korlat.

The furry monster came on, with incredible speed. Its two great front limbs grasped Curt and its jaws darted toward him, its hot breath and blazing eyes right in his face.

CAPTAIN FUTURE ducked out of the korlat’s grasping limbs by a movement of incredible agility, the monster’s claws tearing the sleeve of his gray zipper suit. As he recoiled from the furry beast, Curt fired at it again with his pistol.

Again the thin proton-beam burned into the huge body, seeking a vital center. But the korlat, not fatally injured, reared up with an enraged roar to leap again at Captain Future’s tense, crouching figure.

Then Grag acted! The big robot sprang upon the furry back of the beast and grasped its neck from behind, encircling that massive neck with his metal arms, and straining it backward.

There followed an unbelievable scene. Big as was the great robot, he looked small in comparison to the mighty beast on whose back be clung. The korlat threshed and rolled and roared, seeking to dislodge its attacker. But Grag held on, exerting all his tremendous strength to jerk the beast’s bead backward.

Captain Future dared not fire at the struggling pair, lest he hit Grag and disablingly damage his mechanism. Eek was cowering nearby, his teeth chattering with fear. Then came the climax to the weird struggle.

Grag’s metal body tensed as be put all his strength into one mighty effort. His arms jerked back the korlat’s head still farther. There was an audible snap. And the great furry beast went limp, its neck broken.

Grag stood swaying over his dead conquest, his photo-electric eyes blazing, a booming roar of victory breaking from him.

Nothing else was said. But as the strange eyes of the robot and the brilliant gray eyes of the red-haired Earthman met, another link was forged in the chain that bound Captain Future to the Futuremen — the chain which had begun on that long-dead day on Earth’s moon when Curtis Newton, an orphaned infant, had looked up with trustful baby eyes at the robot and android and Brain who were to rear him to splendid manhood.

Curt sprang to the locked door of the trap into which they had come and which had so nearly proved deadly.

“See if you can get this open, Grag,” he asked. “Use your chisels.”

The robot obeyed, taking from a little locker in his metal torso several sharp chisels. He removed several of his detachable fingers and inserted the chisels in their place.

Then Grag, with his chisel-armed hands, attacked the cement around the door frame. In a few moments he had chipped an opening through it, and could reach through and unhook the lock.

Captain Future dashed out into the big room of Victor Krim’s post. The half-dozen hunters there were now fleeing in dismay as they saw their trap had failed.

“Stop! Come back here!” Curt ordered, firing his beam over their heads.

FEARFULLY, the men obeyed. Captain Future’s gray eyes bored into the face of the Jovian who had led them into the trap.

“You had: a neat little idea to murder me, but it failed,” Curt said bitingly. “Now talk fast. Is Victor Krim on Charon?”

“No, he isn’t,” answered the scared Jovian. “He hasn’t come back yet from Pluto.”

“Who ordered you to try to kill me?” Curt lashed.

“Nobody ordered me,” answered the cowed Jovian sullenly. “When I saw you were Captain Future, I thought you had come here to re-arrest me and the other hunters.”

“Shut up!” one of the Martian hunters told the Jovian harshly. “He doesn’t know about us.”

“On the contrary, I know all about you,” Curt answered stingingly. “You’re escaped convicts from Interplanetary Prison — Rundall Lane, the warden there, let you go on condition you become Krim’s hunters here. Where are all the others who escaped?”

Appalled by Captain Future’s knowledge, the Jovian answered. “The rest are out hunting. We were to guard the post.”

“The prisoners Roj and Kallak escaped at the same time as you other convicts, didn’t they?” Curt pressed.

“They did, but Roj and Kallak disappeared soon after we reached this moon.”

“How did you escape being detected as escaped prisoners by Cole Romer when he explored Charon last year?” Curt asked.

“Krim kept us out of the way during the week or so that Romer was here,” the Jovian criminal replied.

Curt Newton considered the information, his face thoughtful. The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape!

“I’m leaving here,” he rapped, “but you convicts aren’t going to get away. I see there’s no ship here, so you’ll be safe till Planet Police can come to return you an to Cerberus prison.”

And Curt led the way out of the post, with Grag following in great strides, Eek perched again on his shoulder.

Otho was waiting in the
Comet,
and an unconscious moon-hog, stunned by a proton-beam, showed that the android had been busy.

“There’s the moon-hog you wanted — what did you find out in there?” the synthetic man demanded.

“We nearly found out what it’s like to be dead!” Captain Future said ruefully. “I was so busy thinking things out that I walked right into a trap like an absent-minded fool.”

Otho swore when he heard their story. “And while I’ve been chasing moon-hogs, you were fighting a korlat!”

“Yes, and Grag killed it with his bare hands,” Curt told him. The red-haired adventurer grinned at Otho. “No human could have done that. Remember that when you’re taunting Grag about not being human.”

Then, in the compact laboratory of the
Comet,
Curt began X-ray spectroscopic inspection of the stunned moon-hog.

“If the Magicians really do dwell in some secret part of Charon,” he muttered as he worked, “this animal and all native life here will have bones of high cobalt-content, the same as they.”

“It will have — there’s no doubt the Magicians are somewhere here on Charon,” Otho declared confidently. “For we know it’s on one of the moons their home is, and we ruled out Cerberus.”

They turned to the machine.

BUT a shock awaited them. When Captain Future finished his X-ray inspection, he looked up with an exclamation.

“There’s not a trace of cobalt in this animal! The Magicians can’t have come from Charon, either!”

Otho was staggered. “But they must have! We know from what old Kiri the Plutonian said that they came from one of the moons. And if it wasn’t Cerberus, it must be Charon —”

Curt Newton was not listening. The seeming failure of his cobalt clue had detonated a bombshell of knowledge in his brain.

Everything tied up together. And it all pointed to a fantastic but inescapable conclusion.

“We know that the Magicians live on one of the moons,” he said slowly. “And the cobalt clue has proved that they don’t live on Cerberus or Charon. But Pluto has three moons.”

“You don’t mean Styx?” Otho gasped. “But they couldn’t live on Styx — nothing could! It’s completely water-covered.”

“Nevertheless, start the
Comet
up and head for Styx,” Curt ordered.

“But it’s crazy —” Otho started to protest further, when Grag interrupted with a stern command.

“Do as master says, Otho!”

With incredulity still strong in his eyes, Otho obeyed. Soon they were out in clear space again. Pluto bulked huge and white on their left. Straight ahead gleamed the bright third moon, Styx.

Curt felt vibrant excitement rising to a high pitch in him as they hurtled toward the third moon. He knew his reasoning was logical, yet it pointed to a conclusion that was unbelievable. He combed his mind for some way of testing his fantastic theory.

Then, remembering something, he took from a locker the crushed, shattered remnants of a small mechanism. It was the mechanism worn by the white-furred Magician who had been killed in the fall on Mars — the instrument which had enabled that strange being to masquerade somehow as an Earthman.

Curt had closely studied the shattered thing during the voyage out to Pluto. It was too badly shattered to be re-constructed even by the scientific wizard. But he had fathomed that it operated by projecting a field of force. How such a force-field could make the furred Magician look like an Earthman, he still could not see.

But now, studying the shattered remnants, of the thing in the compact laboratory of the flying
Comet,
Captain Future bent all his attention to discover just what frequencies of radiant force the mechanism had been designed to emit. With delicate electrical and magnetic instruments, with microscopic examination of the fragments, and most of all with his unparalleled mental powers, the young master of science labored on the problem.

The
Comet
hurtled on toward Styx, whose gleaming disk expanded slowly. Grag sat petting the moon-pup and looking ahead. Otho, at the throttles, was looking more and more skeptical as they neared the third moon. And back in the laboratory, Captain Future worked on, rapidly and deftly.

AT LAST Captain Future finished. He had constructed a small instrument designed to detect radiated force such as the shattered mechanism had emitted. His detector was so small he could thrust it into a pocket of his gray zipper suit.

“This ought to test my theory about Styx,” he muttered. “If it’s true, it explains everything.”

“It’s sheer waste of time to go to Styx,” Otho declared as Curt came to his side. “We can’t land there — no ship ever has landed on that moon, covered as it is by ocean from pole to pole.”

“We’ll see,” Captain Future replied tightly, his nervous tension rising as they approached the third moon.

Styx, smaller than either Charon or Cerberus, expanded in the starry void ahead. It was known to have an atmosphere. The air whistled around the
Comet
as it cautiously descended.

A few hundred feet below them rolled the shoreless green sea that covered the whole surface of Styx. The big, dark waves of hat unbroken ocean heaved skyward and bared teeth of white foam at the hovering little ship.

“Now what?” Otho demanded disgustedly. “We can’t land here when there is no land. We’ve just wasted our time.”

“We’ll soon see if we have,” Curt muttered.

He had taken from his pocket the little detector instrument which he had built. He turned on the watchlike thing.

Instantly a tiny red light flashed out on the detector. A signal that it was near a powerful force-field of a certain frequency.

“I knew it!” Captain Future declared, his gray eyes shining. “By heaven, I’ve solved it — an age old planetary mystery — the riddle of Doctor Zarro’s secret base!”

“What are you talking about, Chief?” Otho demanded.

Captain Future was silent, trying to make up his mind. He knew he had penetrated the heart of the great plot against the System.

He felt that he could smash that plot, now and at once. But also, he felt that first his duty was to find and rescue the Brain. Tensely weighing alternatives, Curt came to a decision.

“Take the
Comet
down into that ocean, Otho,” he directed.

“Down into the water?” cried Otho unbelievingly. “But that’s death! The currents and waves of that sea will hurl the
Comet
to destruction against some rock or shoal!”

“Oh, so you’ve lost faith in me, have you?” Captain Future grinned at the android.

Otho’s green eyes flashed.

“You know I haven’t, Chief! I’d steer into the Sun if you told me to, and you know it!”

And Otho determinedly opened the throttles and sent the little ship gliding down toward the seething, shoreless sea.

The android braced his rubbery body for the shock as the
Comet
dropped toward the raging waves. And Grag, looking inquiringly at Curt but saying nothing, also seemed a little uneasy.

The
Comet
plunged in a moment beneath the surface of the sea.

And instantly that sea vanished from around them!
That great ocean abruptly disappeared, and they found themselves hovering in air a few hundred feet above solid land!

THE transition was staggering. There was no water in sight now. Far away to the horizons in the dusky daylight, stretched a rolling landscape, blanketed by a thick forest of giant white club-mosses — a weird, unearthly jungle.

“Devils of space — what’s happened?” yelled Otho. “We ought to be under water, and the water’s all vanished!”

“What has become of the ocean into which we plunged, Master?” Grag asked wonderingly.

“There was no ocean,” Captain Future declared.

“But we saw it!” Otho cried.

“What we saw was an illusion,” Curt told him. “An illusion similar to that by which the Magician made himself look like an Earthman — an illusion somehow projected as a field of force.”