Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Chapter 3: Ambush in Space

  OUT beyond the orbit of Mars, out past the whirling wilderness of the asteroidal belt, flew a queer little ship. Shaped oddly like an elongated teardrop, and driven by muffled rocket-tubes whose secret design gave it a power and speed far beyond those of any other craft, it was traveling now at a velocity that lived up to its name of Comet.

  Inside the Comet, in the transparent-walled room at the nose where its controls were centered, Grag the robot sat on watch. The great robot sat utterly rigid and unmoving, his metal fingers resting upon the throttles that controlled the flow of atomic energy to the rocket-tubes, his gleaming photoelectric eyes staring unswervingly ahead.

  Curt Newton stood beside the robot, his hand resting familiarly on Grag’s metal shoulder as he too peered ahead, toward the largening white sphere of Jupiter.

  “Twenty more hours at this speed will bring us there, Grag,” the big young man said thoughtfully.

  “Yes, master,” answered the robot simply in his booming mechanical voice. “And then what?”

  Curt’s eyes twinkled.

  “Why, then we’ll find this Space Emperor who’s behind the terror out here, and take him back to Earth. That’s all.”

  “Do you think it will be so easy, master?” asked the robot naively.

  Captain Future laughed aloud.

  “Grag, irony is wasted on you. The truth is that it’s going to be a pretty tough job — the toughest we ever faced, maybe. But we’ll win out. We’ve got to.”

  His face sobered a little. “This thing is big — big enough to wreck the Solar System if it isn’t stopped at once.”

  He was remembering James Carthew’s haggard face, the desperate appeal in his trembling voice.

  “You’ll do your best out there on Jupiter, Captain Future?” the President had pleaded. “That horror — men retracking the path of evolution to brutehood — it mustn’t go on!”

  “It won’t go on if I can stop it,” Curt had promised, his voice like level steel. “Whoever or whatever this Space Emperor is, we’ll track him down or we won’t come back.”

  Curt was thinking of that promise now. He knew well how difficult it was going to be to fulfill it. Yet the prospect of the perilous struggle ahead exhilarated him strangely.

  Peril was like a heady wine to Curt’s adventure-loving soul. He had met it in the poisonous swamps of Venus, in the black and sunless caverns of Uranus, in the icy snow-hell of Pluto. And always, when the danger was greatest, he had felt that he was living the most.

  Grag broke the silence, the robot still looking ahead with his strange photoelectric eyes toward Jupiter.

  “Jupiter is a big world, master,” he boomed thoughtfully. “It took us long to catch the Lords of Power when they fled there.”

  Curt nodded, remembering that relentless hunt for the outer-planet criminals who had sought to hide on the giant planet. That had been the end of a blazing battle and chase that he and his three comrades had taken part in and that had reached from far Pluto to this mighty world ahead.

  “It may take us even longer to find this Space Emperor, but we’ll do it,” he said resolutely.

  There was silence, except for the droning of the cyclotrons in the Comet’s stern, and the muffled purring of the atomic energy they produced, as it was released by the rocket-tubes. Then into the control-room came the synthetic man.

  “You are late, Otho,” boomed the robot, turning severely toward the android. “It was your turn to take over a half hour ago.”

  Otho’s lipless mouth opened to give vent to a hissing chuckle. His green eyes gleamed mockingly.

  “What difference can it make to you, Grag?” he inquired mockingly. “You are not a man, and so you do not need rest as we men do.”

  GRAG’S voice boomed angrily. “I am as much like a man as you are!” he declared.

  “You, a metal machine?” taunted Otho. “Why, men are not of metal. They are of flesh, like myself.”

  The gibing, hissing voice of the android awakened all Grag’s rudimentary capacity for indignation. He turned his unhuman metal face appealingly toward Captain Future.

  “Am I not as near human as Otho, master?” he appealed.

  “Otho, quit teasing Grag and take over,” Curt Newton ordered sternly.

  Yet there was a merry spark in Captain Future’s gray eyes as the android hastily obeyed.

  Curt loved these three unhuman companions of his, the great, simple robot, the fierce, eager android and the dour, austere Brain. He knew they were more loyal and single-hearted than any human comrades could have been.

  Yet he derived a secret amusement from these ceaseless quarrels between Otho and Grag. Both the robot and the android liked to be thought of as human or nearly human. And the fact that Otho was more manlike was a continual irritation to big Grag.

  “I can do almost everything that Otho can do,” Grag was saying to him anxiously. “And I am far stronger than” he is.”

  “A machine is strong,” sneered Otho, “but it is still only a machine.”

  “Come along with me, Grag,” Curt told the robot hastily as he saw that the big metal creature was really angry.

  The robot followed him back into the main-cabin that occupied the middle section of the Comet.

  Simon Wright’s lens-eyes looked up inquiringly at them. The Brain’s transparent square case rested on a special stand, which embodied an ingenious spoolholder that automatically unreeled the long micro-film scientific work the Brain was consulting.

  “What is wrong?” rasped Wright.

  “Otho was just deviling Grag again,” Curt told him. “Nothing serious.”

  “He is not really more human than I am, is he, master?” appealed the big robot anxiously.

  “Of course not, Grag,” answered Captain Future, his eyes twinkling as he laid his hand affectionately on the metal shoulder. “You should know enough by now to ignore Otho’s taunts.”

  “Aye,” rasped Simon Wright to the robot. “It is nothing to be proud of to be human, Grag. I was human, once, and I was not as happy as I am now.”

  “Go back and check the cyclotrons, Grag,” Curt told the robot, and the great metal creature stalked obediently through the cabin into the power-room at the stern.

  Captain Future’s gray eyes looked inquiringly into the glittering glass ones of the Brain.

  “Have you found any clue yet, Simon?”

  “No,” the Brain answered somberly. “Not in all the records of human science can I find any hint of how that ghastly method of causing this strange doom — this atavism — could be achieved.”

  “Yet it has been done — it is being done now,” Curt muttered. “And that means that this time we are up against an antagonist who somehow has gone far beyond known science — further than we ourselves have gone!”

  With brooding, unseeing eyes, the red-haired adventurer stared around the cabin, his mind far away.

  The cabin was a marvel of compactness, with facilities for research in all fields of science. There was a chemistry alcove, with containers of every element known to science; an astronomical outfit, including an electro-telescope, electro-spectroscope, and a file of spectra of all planets, satellites, and stars above the fifth magnitude.

  There were samples of the atmosphere of every planet, satellite and asteroid. And a botanical division contained specimen plants and vegetable drugs from various worlds.

  BESIDES this equipment, there were many instruments which Captain Future and Simon Wright had devised, unknown to conventional science. A small locker contained every valuable scientific book or monograph ever published, reduced to micro-film. It was one of these micro-film spools the Brain had been consulting.

  “I know of every biologist of note in the System today,” the Brain was saying. “Not one of them could have discovered the secret of reversing evolution.”

  “Could such an epochal discovery have been made by a wholly unknown scientist?” Curt demanded.

  “Th
at seems unlikely,” the Brain replied slowly. “There is some great mystery about this which I cannot understand, lad.”

  Curt’s tanned face hardened. “We’re going to understand soon,” he affirmed. “We’ve got to, to stop this thing.”

  Thoughtfully, he reached into a locker for a little hemispherical musical instrument. Absently, he touched its strings, bringing forth queer, shivering, haunting tones.

  The instrument was a twenty-string Venusian guitar, two sets of ten strings each strung across each other on a metal hemisphere. Few Earthmen could play the complicated thing, but Captain Future had a habit of plucking haunting tones from it when he was lost in thought.

  Wright’s eye-stalks twitched annoyedly.

  “I wish you’d never picked up that thing,” the Brain complained. “How can I concentrate on reading when you’re making that dismal whining?”

  Curt grinned at the Brain.

  “I’ll take it into the control-room, since you don’t appreciate good music,” he said jestingly.

  TWENTY hours later saw the little teardrop ship decelerating in velocity as it hurtled toward the world now close ahead.

  Jupiter now loomed gigantic before them. It was a huge, spinning white sphere, attended by its eleven circling moons, belted with the clouds of its deep atmosphere, and wearing like an ominous badge the glowing crimson patch of the Fire Sea which men had once called the Great Red Spot. A world that was hundreds of times larger than Earth, a world whose fifty great jungle-clad continents and thirty vast oceans were still almost wholly unexplored.

  Only on the continent of South Equatoria, Curt knew, had Earthmen settled. There they had cleared the steaming, unearthly jungles enough to build towns and operate plantations and mines, using the Jovian inhabitants for labor. But only a small part of even South Equatoria was known to them. The rest was unexplored, brooding jungle, stretching northward to the Fire Sea.

  Curt Newton held the controls, and his three unhuman comrades were in the control-room with him as he expertly fingered the throttles. They flashed close past the gray sphere of Callisto, outermost of Jupiter’s four biggest moons, and plunged on toward the giant planet.

  “You’re going to land at Jovopolis?” rasped Simon Wright inquiringly.

  Captain Future nodded.

  “That’s the capital of the Earth colony, and there, I think, must be the heart of this menace.”

  Suddenly a bell rang sharply from the panel of complicated gauges and scientific tell-tales.

  “The ship-alarm!” Curt exclaimed. “There’s some other craft near us in space!”

  “There it is behind us!” Otho cried out. “It’s an ambush!”

  Curt glanced back through the rear curve of the Control-room’s transparent wall. A dark little space-cruiser had just darted out from behind Callisto, and from its bows a big flare-gun was loosing a flare of atomic energy that sped toward the Comet.

  No other space-pilot in the System could have moved quickly enough to escape that leaping flare. But Captain Future had reflexes trained since boyhood to superhuman speed.

  The Comet lurched sideward from a blast of its starboard tubes, just enough to let the flare shoot past it. Before the attacker on their tail could fire again, Curt Newton had acted.

  His tanned hand slammed down a burnished red lever beside the throttles. Instantly an astounding thing happened.

  From the Comet’s tubes shot a tremendous discharge of tiny, glowing particles. Almost instantly they formed a huge, glowing cloud around the little teardrop ship, hiding it from view and streaming back in a vast, shining tail.

  The Comet had become, to all appearances, what it was named after — a comet! This was Curt Newton’s method of camouflaging his ship when he wished to avoid discovery in space, or when he wished to confuse an enemy craft. It was operated by a powerful discharge of electrified atoms, or ions, produced in a special generator and released through the regular rocket-tubes.

  “I’m banking around on them!” Curt called to the android. “Stand by to use our proton beams on them, Otho!”

  “I’ll blast them out of space!” exclaimed the android fiercely as he leaped to the breech of the proton-guns.

  “No, I want those men alive if we can get them!” Captain Future snapped. “Try to cripple them by blasting their tail — that will force them down on Callisto.”

  As Curt swung the Comet sharply around, the black attacking ship rose viciously to meet it, letting go another burst of atomic energy from its flare-guns.

  “So you still want to play, do you?” grinned Curt. “That’s fine!”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE had avoided the leaping flares by a lightning roll of the Comet that did not change its direction of flight for more than a moment.

  Now he sent the little ship, still wrapped in its glowing cloud, swooping down upon the enemy, before it could turn.

  “Now — let go our beams, Otho!” Captain Future cried.

  The android obeyed. The pale proton beams lanced from the Comet, grazed past the tail of the black enemy.

  “Missed them!” hissed Otho in bitter disappointment. “They’re trying to escape, master!” boomed Grag, pointing a metal arm.

  The black enemy craft, its occupants apparently unnerved by the closeness of the proton beams, was diving sharply to flee away through space.

  “It’s easier to start a fight than to quit it, my friends,” muttered Curt, jerking open two of his throttles. “Here’s where you find that out.”

  Like a streak of glowing light, the Comet dived after the fleeing enemy. Pursued and pursuer rushed down through the dizzy depths of space at nightmare velocity.

  Curt felt his pulse pounding with excitement as he guided his craft in that terrific swoop. To Captain Future, this was living — this wild whirl and flash of battle out here in the awesome solar spaces where he felt most at home.

  “Try again now, Otho!” he cried a moment later.

  The Comet had pulled almost abreast of the other swooping ship. The android now loosed their proton beams again.

  The beams sliced away a third of the black ship’s tail.

  Crippled, its rocket-tubes blasted and useless, it slowed in its wild rush until it was merely floating. Then it began to drift with ever increasing speed toward nearby Callisto.

  “That got them!” Captain Future exclaimed, his gray eyes snapping with excitement. “They’ll drift in to Callisto and we’ll land there with them, and capture whoever’s in that ship.”

  “You think they were sent by the Space Emperor — the mysterious figure behind the Jupiter horror — to ambush us?” rasped Simon Wright inquiringly.

  “They must have been!” Otho declared. “The Space Emperor, whoever he is, didn’t want Captain Future coming to Jupiter to investigate him.”

  Curt Newton interrupted, his gray eyes lit.

  “But this may give us a lead right to the Space Emperor! If we can capture the men in that ship and make them talk —”

  The black enemy craft was now drifting in a spiral around Callisto, ever approaching nearer to that barren-looking gray moon. Curt kept the Comet trailing the other ship, but far enough away to be out of range of its flare-guns, and with the ion-discharge apparatus now cut off.

  “But lad,” said Simon Wright’s harsh voice, “how could the Space Emperor know that Captain Future was coming to Jupiter? The only person there whom the President would notify of our coming would be the Planetary Governor.”

  “Yes,” said Curt meaningly, “and that may give us another lead to him. But right now our best chance is to wring information out of the men in that ship.”

  Curt’s mind was vibrant with eager hope. His mysterious foe had struck at him already, even before he reached Jupiter. But it might be that the attack of the unknown plotter was going to recoil on his own head.

  “We near Callisto’s surface, master!” came the booming voice of Grag.

  Captain Future’s gray eyes lit with a reckless gleam. “Get ready for a scrap
then, Grag!”

  Down through the thin atmosphere of Callisto the black ship was sinking, falling faster and faster. Still the Comet clung to its trail, grimly following it down toward the barren surface of the big moon...

  Chapter 4: World of Creeping Crystals

  AT EVER increasing speed the small black space-cruiser and its grim pursuer sped down toward the surface of Callisto. This was the sunward side of the big moon, and in the pale sunlight it presented a drear and desolate landscape.

  A forbidding desert of drab gray rock, rising into low stony hills, it was infinitely repellent. The air here was barely breathable, as on all the larger moons, but because of its barrenness and also because of the grotesque, dangerous forms of life known to exist on its surface, few Earthmen had ever visited this world.

  Now the black ship was only a mile from the glaring gray rock surface. It hurtled downward at slowly increasing speed.

  “They won’t crash with much force,” Curt observed. “Callisto’s gravitation is not strong. It’ll be enough to shake them up and stun them for a moment, though, and we’ll jump them before they make trouble.”

  “I’d enjoy seeing their ship hit hard enough to splash them all over Callisto,” hissed the emotional android.

  Captain Future grinned.

  “You’re too bloodthirsty, Otho.”

  Otho stared at him puzzledly. “I can’t understand you humans some times,” he complained.

  Curt chuckled. Then he turned his attention below, ready for action.

  The black ship was falling toward the rocky plain. A moment later it struck the stony desert, bounced violently, then hit the ground again with a sharp impact and lay still.

  Instantly Captain Future sent the Comet speeding downward in a gliding swoop that brought it to a jarring landing close to the other ship. He jumped up from the controls.

  “Come on, Grag!” he shouted. “Otho, you stay here at our proton-beams, just in case.”

  “Be careful, lad,” cautioned the Brain.

  Curt paused to adjust the gravity equalizer he wore on his belt. Every interplanetary traveler owned one of these clever devices. Its “gravity charge” of magnetic force of selected polarity and strength made its wearer feel exactly as light or heavy as he was on Earth.