“The Four?” repeated the President perplexedly. “Who are the Four?”
Curt’s eyes were gleaming. “They’re a quartet we Futuremen have been after for a couple of years! They are, actually, a brain trust of crime. We believe they’ve been behind some of the biggest criminal coups in recent times. The vague information we’ve picked up is that they consist of four master scientists, an Earthman, a Venusian, a Martian and a Saturnian, who maintain a secret consulting service for criminals.
“Any pirate or criminal who needs a special scientific weapon for his purposes, goes to the Four. They usually can furnish what is needed, and they take a big percentage of the proceeds of the coup. They take none of the risks themselves, and so have never been caught. I’m sure that the Four are behind Crain’s impersonation of myself.”
“Say, you don’t think the Four have their base somewhere on Pirates’ Planet?” Otho cried. “Maybe that’s why we’ve never been able to find it.”
“It looks as though their base might be there,” Curt admitted. “But it’s sure to be cunningly hidden. Our best chance of finding it is through Crain. Catch him and we’ll have a real lead to the Four.”
“But how the devil are we going to catch these doubles of ours?” Grag wanted to know.
Captain Future grinned a little. “We’re going to let them catch themselves, as we’ve done with lots of others. Listen, here’s my idea...”
ON THE TRAIL OF THE FOUR
A few days later, a dumpy little freighter took off from New York spaceport. It was listed as the Willings, bound for Jupiter with a small but valuable cargo of refined platinum and tantalum.
The little old freighter plugged slowly out past the orbit of Mars. Actually, it was not a freighter at all. It was the swift little Comet, ingeniously disguised by a fake superstructure of light metal plates built around it to make it look bigger and dumpier. Its only crew were the Futuremen.
They were not far beyond the orbit of Mars when what Curt Newton had hoped for happened. A small ship came racing up toward them from the right quarter. It was an exact replica of their own Comet and it flashed an urgent signal.
“Captain Future, requesting you to stand by for us to come aboard!” came from the televisor, in a voice uncannily like Curt’s own voice.
“Okay, Captain Future!” Curt answered in a deepened voice. “We’re standing by!”
The fake Comet drove alongside the disguised real Comet. From the pretenders ship came three figures, two of them in space-suits. The third was a great robot exactly resembling Grag.
Grag himself was speechless.
“There isn’t another intelligent metal man like me in the System!” he protested. “But that one looks like me!”
“The nerve of those crooks!” Otho was raging. “Look, one of them is a dead ringer for me!”
“Be ready now,” Captain Future ordered. “Here they come.”
The three pretenders came into the airlock of the disguised Comet. And as soon as the three doubles were inside, the Futuremen grabbed them.
FACING THEMSELVES
It was as simple as that. The impostors hadn’t a chance to fight, because they had not been expecting the necessity. They found themselves facing a brace of deadly proton-guns, and stood speechless.
The Futuremen were speechless too, for the moment. These three were uncannily exact replicas of Curt and Otho and Grag. For a dramatic moment, the real Futuremen and the impostors faced each other. And no outsider could have told which was which.
Then Grag uttered a triumphant cry.
“I knew there wasn’t another robot like me in the System! Look, Chief!”
And Grag advanced upon the pseudo-Grag and tore at his metal body. The fake Grag was revealed to be a huge, vicious-faced Jovian criminal disguised in a metal space-suit made to resemble Grag’s metal body.
Captain Future spoke crisply to his own glaring double.
“A neat trick you’ve been using, Crain. Yes, I know who you are — Garis Crain, pirate and criminal, wanted by the Patrol for a dozen offenses.”
Crain’s face, a face so amazingly like Curt’s own, became desperate and hunted in expression.
“It was the Four who made you into my double, wasn’t it?” Curt pressed. “And their base is on Pirates’ Planet somewhere, isn’t it? Well, you’re going to take us there. You know the secret pirate wave-code and you can navigate us safely through the swarms.”
Crain assumed an attitude of sullen defiance. “I won’t do it.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” Curt said relentlessly. “Because if you don’t, we’ll be wrecked in the swarms. And you don’t want to die. You’d a lot rather go to Interplanetary Prison, than die.”
The Futuremen securely bound their prisoners. They disabled the fake Comet and left it drifting. They shucked away the disguise from the real Comet, and started into the Zone toward Pallas.
Curt steered right toward the dangerous meteor-swarms around Pallas. And when disaster seemed imminent what he had foreseen happened. Crain’s nerve broke. The criminal hastily babbled the secret wave-code by means of which they could steer their way through the dangerous swarms.
PIRATES’ PLANET
Thus the Comet came to Pirates’ Planet. It descended toward the night side, and poised above the dark blot of Red Lake. Miles to the west, the lights of the pirate city, Freetown, threw a glow into the sky.
“Now take us to the hidden base of the Four,” ordered Curt.
“Captain Future, I don’t dare!” Crain cried. “You don’t know what the Four are like. They’re devils! It was they who thought up this whole imposture, and picked myself and two others to play it because we were the right height and so on. If you try to meddle with them, they’ll kill you — and then kill me for bringing you here!”
Curt again applied pressure. “Crain, unless you take us to the Four, do you know what I’ll do? I’ll drop you over there in Freetown. The pirates over there don’t know about your impersonation of me. You’d not be fool enough to tell them or anyone. So when you drop in on them, they’ll think you’re really Captain Future. You know how those outlaws hate me. You can guess what they’ll do to you, thinking that you’re me!”
Crain’s ghastly face showed that he knew only too well what the bloodthirsty corsairs would do if they thought they had captured Captain Future.
“All right,” he choked. “I’ll take you to the base of the Four. But you’ll never come out of it alive.”
He directed Curt to steer the Comet toward a rocky hill on the eastern shore of Red Lake.
“The whole hill is hollowed out,” he explained. “The secret laboratories of the Four are inside of it.”
“Good — we’ll land right by it,” Curt declared. “The Four will think our ship is the fake Comet returning. And they’ll think that Grag and Otho and I are Crain and the other doubles coming back from the trip!”
The audacity of the plan was typical of Captain Future. And it held good chance of success. His hopes were high as he landed the Comet in the darkness beside the rocky hill.
Crain shakily gave them directions. But before leaving the ship, Curt rapidly prepared three heavy little metal chests which he and Grag and Otho took with them. Simon remained to guard the prisoners.
“Why do we have to carry these things?” grumbled Grag.
“We’re supposed to be bringing back platinum and tantalum, aren’t we?” Curt countered. “Besides, they may be useful in other ways.”
CRIMINALS’ HIDE-OUT
Otho was chuckling as they made their way toward a cunningly disguised opening in the side of the hollow hill.
“The Four will get an awful shock when they find out the doubles are the real Futuremen.”
They entered the cavernous opening in the hillside. A passage led through solid rock to a square rock chamber in which was a heavy door.
Curt touched the electrobell beside the door in the signal he had extorted from Crain. His hand rested on his proton
-pistol as they waited.
“Be ready to jump them the minute we have all four together,” he muttered to the others.
At that moment, a trap-door opened beneath them. They plummeted down through a vertical shaft into a space beneath. Curt struck a stone floor with a stunning shock...
Curt woke to find himself tightly bound. Otho was bound also, sitting beside him, and Grag was secured by a heavy chain.
They were in a big, brightly lit laboratory somewhere inside the hollow hill. Four men faced them — a crafty looking, iron-haired Earthman, a suave young Venusian, an ancient, wrinkled-faced Martian, and a Saturnian dwarf with a freakishly huge head.
“The Four!” he muttered.
“Yes, we are the Four, Captain Future,” coolly answered the crafty Earthman. “We have anticipated that sooner or later you would call upon us.”
He laughed at Curt’s expression of surprise. “We knew of your reputation for resourcefulness and audacity. We believed that sooner or later you might be able to locate our base here, and that if you did, you would attempt to enter by passing yourself off as your own doubles! So we took the precaution of inspecting Crain and the other doubles with X-Ray scanners, each time before we let them enter. The scanners would show whether the robot was really a robot, or a man in disguise.”
“Devils of space, so that’s what gave us away!” hissed Otho.
“It was not hard to disarm and bind you three while you lay stunned by your fall below,” continued the Earthman. “I suppose you realize your helplessness. What did you do with Crain and the others?”
Curt pretended to be crushed. “They’re out in our ship.” he muttered. “I suppose you’re going to murder us?”
“After we have extracted as much valuable information as possible from you — certainly.”
THE MYSTERIOUS CHESTS
“Can’t we make a bargain?” Curt asked desperately. “Those chests we brought really have a fortune in platinum in them. We wanted to carry out our whole scheme just as though we were really Crain and the others, so there wouldn’t be any slip-ups. Won’t you take the platinum and let us go?”
The Earthman pondered. “Bring in the chests,” he ordered.
The young Venusian member of the Four did so, one by one. Curt saw that there was suspicion on the face of the Earthman.
“Before we open the chests, use the X-Ray scanner on them,” he directed.
The dwarfed Saturnian brought the instrument and peered through it at the chests.
“Nothing in the chests but bars of metal,” he reported.
“So you were telling the truth?” the leader of the Four remarked to Curt. “Your devotion to realism was carried too far, my dear Captain Future. You lose not only the platinum, but your lives, also.”
He bent and unlocked one of the chests, and raised its lid. Whoosh! A cloud of invisible gas that had been stored in the chest of bars at high pressure suddenly burst out of it.
The Earthman fell in his tracks as the gas reached his nostrils. Almost in the same instant, the other three of the Four and also Captain Future and Otho lost consciousness as the potent gas expanded.
INVISIBLE “SLEEP-GAS”
Curt awoke, to find Grag bending over him. He scrambled to his feet.
“The Four are safe?”
“Sure, I’ve got ‘em nicely trussed up,” Grag boomed. “Chief, I sure was surprised when that gas knocked everybody out. Everybody but me, that is. It couldn’t affect me, since I don’t breathe.”
“Yes, I figured on that.” Curt grinned. “You see, I hoped we’d be able to nab the Four without trouble. But I thought that it was better to have a card up our sleeve in case Crain had tricked us and given us a wrong electrobell signal that would betray us. So when I put some metal bars in those chests, I also pumped the chests full of the invisible Uranian ‘sleep-gas,’ from that tank of it we carry for making ‘sleep-bombs.’ ”
“I knew that the gas would get Otho and me, as well as the Four, if it were ever released,” Curt added. “But it wouldn’t affect you, and I counted on your being able to set things aright in the hour or so that we’d be unconscious.”
“You didn’t count in vain, Chief,” boasted Grag proudly. “Though it took me nearly the whole time to cut that chain away from around me, by starting one of their atomic blasters and using its flame.”
“Anyone could have done that, if he happened to be a creature too dumb to breathe,” snapped Otho to the robot. “Come on and help me carry these four precious rascals out to the ship. They’re going to keep Crain company out in Interplanetary Prison.”
That is why, out in the great prison on Pluto’s moon Cerberus, a life sentence is being served by a man who is an uncanny double of Curt Newton. And his life is not easy there. Too many of his fellow prisoners persist in believing that he is the hated Captain Future!
THE END
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Captain Future 24 - Pardon My Iron Nerves (November 1950) Page 6