Captain Future 06 - Star Trail to Glory (Spring 1941) (11 page)

Otho had the throttles of the
Comet
as it swept closer to the awesome celestial body after which the ship was named. The keen, slitted green eyes of the android and the gleaming photo-electric eyes of Grag surveyed the coma intently.

"There are lots of breaks in it," muttered Otho. "We can slide through one without touching, if we're careful. We'd better. That coma has a terrific electric charge."

"If the disabled
Star Streak
drifted in to the nucleus long ago," Grag suggested, "it would touch the coma. It couldn't help it,"

"Yes, and that would kill everyone aboard by electric shock," Otho said thoughtfully. "Everyone human, that is. It wouldn't hurt machines."

The ship circled round the comet in a closing spiral. Otho was looking down intently. Through rifts in the glowing green coma, he descried a small world inside. Grag watched also, calling directions as they sank toward the dangerous nebulosity. The two Futuremen, as always, were able to bury their feud when there was actual peril, and when they were on Captain Future's business.

They dropped closer to the flaring coma, seeking a wide rift through which the ship could go. A fine violet brush began to spray from all the metal inside the ship, even from Grag's metal body.

Otho expertly lowered the ship toward a long, ragged fissure in the coma.

"Here goes!" he shouted.

The ship dived with flashing speed, its rockets screaming. Raging seas of glowing green force surged about them. Then they were through the rift, inside the vast coma.

"Made it," Otho breathed. He peered downward. "Look at that little world. It's got an atmosphere and everything!"

"I see a little domed city!" Grag boomed.

"You're crazy," Otho retorted. "There'd be no sense in putting a dome over a city when this world has warmth and air and — " His jaw dropped. "Why, you're right! I can't understand this." The planetoid that was the solid nucleus of Kansu's Comet was a friendly-looking little planet, blanketed by queer yellow-green vegetation of fantastic shapes. On a small, grassy plain, rose a little city of metal and glassite cubical buildings, covered by transparent glassite.

"It's crazy to build a domed city here," Otho repeated. "We'd better land in that vegetation and reconnoiter,"

THE
Comet
came to rest in the yellow-green jungle, crushing fantastic trees and shrubs beneath it. A routine check showed the air was breathable and fairly warm. Grag and Otho locked up their two pets and stepped out of the ship, their gravitation equalizers automatically compensating for the difference in gravity.

A weird landscape greeted their eyes. The trees and bushes about them had straight, rectilinear branches. The yellow-green fruits and leaves were squares, polygons and triangles, as though part of a cubistic dream. Over this strange forest stretched the glowing green coma.

The android and robot started through the jungle. A few small rodents darted through the geometrical vegetation, but there seemed no other indigenous animal life. Reaching the edge of the plain, they stared toward the domed city. They descried figures moving in and around it. Some of them were cleaning the glassite dome, others bearing burdens through the streets inside, still others repairing walls.

"They're machine
men like
those who captured me!" Otho cried.

"Yes, and exactly like the intelligent machines that Kelso took with his expedition in the
Star Streak."

"I
don't see any men," Otho declared. "Nothing but those machine men. They must have built that city themselves. But why did they dome it?"

"Let's walk right in on them," Grag proposed. "I don't believe they'd be hostile. They're only semi-intelligent mechanisms."

"The ones who captured me were hostile enough."

"Yes, but they were only obeying orders," Grag pointed out. "These machines have no reason to harm us. They'll probably welcome me warmly, because I'm also a metal man. I won't let them harm you."

"Oh, now you're going to protect me," Otho sneered. "Okay, you ought to know your fellow-mechanisms. I'll go with you."

Grag and Otho emerged from the geometrical vegetation and started boldly toward the entrance of the doomed city. As they neared it, they were seen by a machine man polishing the glassite dome. He uttered a humming cry. A whole horde of the machine men came stalking out.

"Here's where we find out how hostile they are," Otho muttered.

"Don't worry, I can handle these simple creatures," Grag reassured confidently. "They'll look up to me as a superior machine." He raised his hand and spoke loudly in Earth's speech. "We come as friends!"

The machine men paid no attention. They were all staring with their big visi-plate eyes at Otho. A joyful humming cry rose from them.

"It is a man! Another man has come to our world!"

The mechanical horde rushed forward and swarmed about Otho.

"We had hoped another man would come!" their leader hummed. "See, the city is built and ready! What are your orders?"

"You mean you'll obey my orders because I'm a man?" Otho cried.

"Of course," hummed the machine man. "The man who made us told us we must always obey the orders of a man.”

"What do you think now, Grag?" Otho taunted. "Now I'll be big-hearted and protect you."

"You're not a man and nobody but these simple machines would think you were," growled Grag. "I think I'll smack you down, just to show them how little you amount to."

Grag raised his metal fist, pretending to threaten Otho. At the gesture, the machine men surged furiously toward him.

"Destroy him! He threatens the man!"

"Hold it!" Otho shouted, just in time to save Grag. "He wasn't threatening me. He's a servant of mine — dumb, but faithful."

The machine men stepped back. Grag was so angry he couldn't speak.

AS THEY were led proudly into the city, Otho looked around wonderingly. The little city had metalloy streets and houses, all designed for human occupancy, all clean, shining and unused.

There were even gardens and fountains, and big atomic heaters to warm the air.

"You don't need heaters and a dome on this warm little world," Otho said. "Why did you build them?"

"The man who made us had ordered us to build such a city," the machine man replied simply. "We built it exactly as he had ordered."

"The man who made you?" Otho repeated. "Was that Doctor Kelso?"

"That was the name that other men called him," the machine man said. "They called the ship we came in the
Star Streak."

"Imps of outer space!" Otho exclaimed. "Grag, these creatures built exactly the kind of city Kelso meant them to build on frozen Pluto!"

"If they were so obedient to Kelso's orders," Grag argued, "why did they mutiny in space?"

The machine man stared wonderingly.

"We did not mutiny. The other men in the ship mutinied against the man who made us. Those other men were weary of the long voyage and wanted to turn back to Earth. The man who made us refused, so the other men tried to seize the ship. The man who made us ordered us to subdue the mutineers. In the struggle, the ship's cyclotrons were wrecked, disabling the ship completely."

"So that's it!" Otho cried. "That last message didn't mean that the machines had mutinied, but that the other men had! The System's been wrong for decades!"

"The ship drifted into this comet," the machine man continued. "When it touched the coma, the electric charge killed the man who made us and all the other men in the ship, but did not harm us machines. Here we built a city as our maker had taught us, and here we have waited for long decades for men to come and live in our city."

The pathos of the situation touched Otho. Then he remembered something.

"Has another man been to this world lately?" he asked.

"Yes, a man came not long ago," was the reply. "We welcomed him. He took certain instruments from the wreck of the
Star Streak."

"Kelso's lost secrets — the mystery weapon of the space ship thieves!" Otho hissed excitedly. "What did the man look like?"

"We don't know, he wore a space-suit," the machine man answered. "He also took fifty of us machine men with him when he left this world. He said the man who made us had bequeathed us to him, so we had to obey him."

"Can you picture that!" Otho exclaimed. "That plotter, whoever he is, not only got Kelso's secret weapons here, but also a bunch of these simple-minded machine men to act as his hijackers in space."

"When he left, he said he would came back to rule us some day," the machine man said trustingly. "We thought at first that you were he."

"If they don't know what he looked like, we'll have to find clues to his identity, Grag," muttered Otho. He asked the machine man: "Can you take us to the wreck of the
Star Streak?"

"It is far across this world," the creature answered. "And it is almost our night period now. We keep day and night as men do. You will rest tonight and in the morning we will start for the wreck."

That night Grag and Otho spent in a shining, unused house in the pathetically perfect city. The machine men served them respectfully, obviously revering Otho as a man.

When morning came, Otho and Grag started with six machine men for the distant wreck. Hours passed as they trudged through the cubist vegetation under the glaring coma sky. The Futuremen began to wish they'd used the
Comet
for the trip. Finally they sighted a corroding metal bulk, the long-lost, famous
Star
Streak.

"There may be some clue here to the plotter's identity," Otho said.

Grag suddenly pointed at the sky.

"Look, a ship!"

A big, strange craft could be seen coming through the coma. Otho's slitted eyes flamed.

"Maybe it's the plotter we're after, coming back here for something!"

BACK on Mercury, before Grag and Otho had left on their perilous expedition, a group of young men stood excitedly in the unchanging twilight of Solar City Spaceport. Mercurians, Venusians, one or two Saturnians and Jovians, each wore proudly on his chest the silver comet-emblem of the Rocketeers. A tall young Earthman who also wore a bright new Rocketeer badge came striding across the spaceport to join them. He was a lithe, stalwart fellow with coal-black hair and a self-confident, cocky face.

"Are you a new Rocketeer, too?" a a young Mercurian asked him.

"That's right. My name's Ray Barret."

"You weren't in our pilot class that just passed the examinations here on Mercury."

Barret smiled. "No, I took my exams on Earth. Just got here, and I'm all ready to see what it's like at Suicide Station."

"Hope it's not as bad as they say," put in a lank blue Saturnian earnestly. "I understand the old Rocketeers haze new men plenty."

"Yes, and I don't like these rumors you hear about space ships being snatched from the Rocketeers testing them," muttered a Jovian youth.

Ray Barret shrugged. "I guess if we wanted a soft life, we wouldn't have become Rocketeers. The grind won't get me down."

"Here comes Losor!" interrupted a Venusian hurriedly.

The tall, gray Neptunian Rocketeer came up to them.

"Where's your certificates?" he grunted.

They eagerly handed him the precious documents which certified that they had passed the examinations and had won Rocketeer rating. Captain Future — for it was he who had disguised himself as Ray Barret — handed over his own fake certificate. Losor merely glanced at the documents and then shoved them into the pocket of his space jacket.

"Another bunch of infants for Papa Kardak to nurse along," he grunted. "Well, come on."

The fledging Rocketeers followed him eagerly to the new Zamor Twenty ship in which he had arrived at the spaceport.

"We're stopping at the Rissman, Tark and Garson factories to pick up new ships," Losor told them. "You kiwis will pilot them over to Suicide Station for testing."

Expertly the Neptunian veteran took the Zamor off the field with a staccato rattle of blasting tubes. The younger men hung around him as he steered north in the Twilight Zone. Captain Future, playing his part, was as youthfully eager as any of the others.

"Do you think any of us has a chance to get picked as a pilot for the Round-the-System Race?" he asked Losor with assumed cockiness.

"What, you amateurs? Why, that Round-the-System grind breaks the hearts of real Rocketeers! You kids wouldn't last through the first of the preliminary elimination races that decide what pilots will fly the race!"

Presently they came into view of the great Rissman space ship factory. A half-dozen big foundries, stamping shops and assembly plants were grouped around a massive central atomic power house. On the nearby field were parked several brand-new ships, each with the unique slim streamlined hulls that made the Rissman craft different from all others.

"Wait till I get the invoice from the office," Losor grunted, and strode off toward the office building near the power plant.