Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “Now, northward!” Guro called in his deep bass voice, and uttered a loud cry to their mounts.

  Next moment, Otho was clinging for his life. It was as though the creature had exploded forward.

  All four of the lopers were rushing at a nightmare pace along a dim trail through the moonlit jungle. Their speed was incredible, yet the motion was so gliding that Otho soon adjusted himself to it.

  Guro and the other Jovians were riding around him. There was still no chance to call Captain Future on the pocket televisor, so the android gave up the idea for the time.

  “It is a long ride,” Guro called to him over the rush of wind, “but we shall be with my people by tomorrow night, and you will go with us to the Place of the Dead.”

  “I am eager to see the Living Ancient again,” Otho called back, and reflected that he was not lying about that.

  The moonlit jungle through which they rode along narrow, dim trails was dense and wild. Huge tree-ferns reared their glossy pillared trunks nearly a hundred feet. Big stiff brush-trees towered almost as high. Slender “copper trees” whose fibers contained a high copper content gleamed metallically in the light of the moons.

  Snake-vines hanging from the tall trunks swayed blindly toward the quartet as they sped past. Sucker-flies swarmed around them, and deadly brain-ticks were visible on leaves. Somewhere off in the jungle, a siren-bird was charming its prey with weird song. Now and then a tree-octopus flitted hastily through the fronds above like a white ghost.

  OTHO was enjoying this wild, rushing ride through the moon-shot Jovian jungle. The android had, more than any human could have, the capacity for taking things as they came.

  Whether he was battling through blinding red sandstorms on desert Mars or wading poisonous Venusian swamps, climbing down into the awful chasms of mighty-mountained Uranus or braving the terrible ice-fields of Pluto, he did not usually bother to look far ahead.

  But now the necessity of getting word to Captain Future weighed upon his mind. Several hours of unceasing riding passed without his getting a chance to use his pocket televisor. One or other of the three Jovians was always near him.

  Finally Guro pulled in on his reins and their lopers came gradually to a halt, as the others did likewise.

  “We stop here to eat,” Guro announced. “The lopers must have a little rest. We start again at dawn.”

  They dismounted, and the four lizardlike creatures stretched out upon the soft black ground of the little clearing in which they had halted.

  “I will get food,” Guro declared, and strode out of the clearing into the brush.

  The other two Jovians were seeing to the girths of their saddles. Otho saw his opportunity, and crouched down quickly as though relaxing, drawing out his watchlike pocket televisor.

  He touched its call-button hastily. He was not sure that the little instrument, designed for short distances, could reach as far back as Jovopolis. Tensely he waited for an answering buzz.

  There was no answer. Otho felt something as near despair as his fierce, resolute nature could experience. Again he jabbed the call-button, and again.

  Then came a faint answering whirr from the little instrument, an indication that his call-signal had been heard.

  “This is Otho speaking,” he whispered tensely into the tiny thing, not turning on its visi-wave. “I am going with Jovians northward. The Space Emperor is to be —”

  A shadow fell across the moonlit ground in front of him. And a deep voice sounded.

  “What are you doing?” it demanded.

  The android turned swiftly. Behind him stood Gurot a bunch of brilliant flame-fruit in his hand. He stared down at Otho with suspicious eyes.

  Chapter 8: The Trail

  INSIDE Jovopolis’ former prison, Captain Future rapidly set his proton-pistol, then triggered quickly at the horde of monsters advancing down the corridor of the cell-block toward Joan and himself.

  The thin white beam from his weapon struck some of the creatures in the front of the savage mob. They collapsed as though struck by lightning, stunned by the potent beams.

  The others hesitated. But as more and more of them emerged from the unlocked cells, they came forward again.

  “Captain Future, it must have been the Space Emperor you spoke of who trapped us like this!” cried Joan Randall.

  “Yes,” gritted Curt, “and that means that the Space Emperor is one of those men who were with us in Quale’s office. Only they knew we had come here!”

  His mind was seething. Which of those men had followed them here and trapped them? Which one was the Space Emperor?

  Could it be Quale himself, he wondered? Or Lucas Brewer, or Kells, or young Cannig?

  As his mind grappled with that problem, he was firing again at the advancing monsters. Again the creatures retreated from the beam that had stunned a dozen of their number.

  A fight started between an ape-thing and a scaly green reptilian creature. Snarling, hissing, clawing each other, the two nightmare brutes soon had involved others in the battle. Their ferocity was bestial, terrifying.

  “What are we going to do?” cried Joan Randall. The girl’s face was deathly pale.

  Curt smiled grimly.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get out somehow. I’ve been in worse spots than this.”

  Somehow the confidence of this tall, red-haired young man was reassuring to Joan, even in the face of inevitable death.

  “If these walls are rayproof, there’s no chance to call Grag and Simon on my pocket televisor,” he was muttering. “I could make us invisible, but it wouldn’t last long and wouldn’t do us any good.”

  “Invisible?” cried the girl, astounded even in this moment of terror.

  “Yes, I could do it,” Curt smiled. “But it only lasts ten minutes or so. We’ve got to think of something else.”

  “Captain Future, they’re coming again!” Joan exclaimed fearfully.

  The evolutionary monsters had broken off their battle, and now were once more beginning to shuffle down the white-lit corridor toward the man and girl.

  Captain Future’s beam licked forth hungrily. Again, the creatures hesitated as some of them fell stunned. Curt had not set the beam at full strength. He didn’t want to kill these creatures who had been men once and might become normal if a cure were found for them.

  Curt’s clear gray eyes swept the interior of the cell-block again, in search of some way out. It seemed hopeless to think that they could escape or get any call for help through these soundproofed, rayproofed walls.

  Then his gaze fastened on the glowing uranite bulbs in the ceiling of the corridor. At once, his eyes lit up.

  “I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “The only way for us to get out is to destroy the lock of the door. And there’s a chance that we can do that.”

  “Your pistol’s ray can’t get at the lock,” the girl reminded him, her voice hopeless. “The electric mechanism is encased in the wall beside the door.”

  A QUADRUPEDAL monster hurtled through the air at that moment. Curt’s beam caught him and he fell unconscious in a mass at their feet.

  “My pistol won’t reach the lock,” Captain Future admitted, as coolly as though nothing had happened, “but maybe I can get at it with something else. Here, take my pistol and hold those creatures off while I work.”

  He did not ask the girl whether she could do it. He calmly assumed her courage, and this trust on the part of the red-haired adventurer steadied Joan’s nerve.

  She took the proton-pistol, and each time one of the growling, roaring monsters moved forward, she pulled the trigger.

  Meanwhile, Curt was bunching himself for a spring. He might have used his gravity equalizer, he thought fleetingly, but there was no time. With all his force, he leaped upward. The metal ceiling was only a few feet above his head. His superb muscles shot him up toward it, and his hand grasped one of the glowing uranite bulbs.

  He fell back to the floor, sliding the glowing bulb out of its socket. The thing was mer
ely a glass bulb containing a few ounces of the glowing, powerful white radioactive powder called uranite.

  Hastily, Curt took from his tungstite belt-kit a thin little glass tube. It contained a restorative gas he always carried with him. Deliberately, he broke both ends of the sealed tube, allowing the gas to escape. This left him a tiny glass pipette.

  He broke the uranite bulb, then deftly filled the little pipette with the glowing radioactive powder. As he worked, he glanced up every few moments to make sure that Joan Randall was managing to hold off the monstrous mob, smiling at her encouragingly.

  “Now I’ll try it,” he told her, when the pipette was full of the uranite powder. “Hope it works. If it doesn’t we’re stuck here.”

  Quickly Captain Future went to the door of the cell-block.

  He applied one open end of the pipette of uranite to the crack between door and wall, just where the lock was located.

  Then, with extreme care to make sure that he did not inhale any of the super-powerful radioactive powder, he applied his lips to the other end of the pipette and blew.

  The radioactive powder was blown in a little jet into the crack between the door and frame. Wherever a grain of the glowing stuff struck the metal, it sizzled and hissed, eating into the surface like a red-hot poker applied to an ice-cube.

  “If I was able to blow any of the powder into the lock, it ought to eat away the delicate mechanism there and the magnetic control of the bolt will be released,” he told the girl.

  “I — I don’t think I can hold them back much longer,” came Joan’s shaken voice heard over the babel of growls.

  Captain Future could hear the powerful uranite eating into the metal between door and wall. Had he got any of the grains into the lock? He waited, his nerves taut.

  SUDDENLY he heard a sharp click. The bolt of the door shot back, released when the magnetic pull of the lock was ended by destruction of the electric lock-circuit.

  “Come on, Joan!” cried the space-farer, seizing the girl by the arm.

  They burst out into the main hall of the prison and raced down it, monsters emerging after them.

  In a moment they were safe in the vestibule.

  “That was too close for comfort!” Captain Future declared. His big figure swung toward the startled orderlies. “Has anyone come through this vestibule in the last half hour?”

  They shook their heads. Curt’s tanned face frowned, but in a moment he spoke again to the orderlies.

  “You’d better use sleep-gas to get those creatures back into the cell-block,” he said. “And you’ll have to fix the lock.”

  As the orderlies hastened to restore order, Curt turned to the pale girl.

  “Joan, tell me — is there anyway someone from outside could have got to that door-switch without coming through this vestibule?”

  Joan nodded quickly.

  “Someone who knew the building could come into the main hall through the Prison Warden’s offices, which are unoccupied since this was made into a hospital.”

  “Then that’s how the Space Emperor, whoever the devil is, came and trapped us!” Captain Future said.

  He asked the girl another question.

  “Just before we were locked in there, you were saying that you suspected some Earthman here as possibly being the one behind this terrible blight?”

  “Yes, Lucas Brewer,” said the girl. “Brewer seems to have some queer, mysterious influence over the Jovians. They work in his radium mine as laborers, and they won’t work for any other Earthman, no matter what pay is offered them.”

  The girl continued.

  “You said that the Space Emperor, the one who is causing the horror, is worshiped by the Jovians. That’s what makes me suspect it is Brewer.”

  Curt frowned in deep thought.

  “That’s certainly grounds for suspecting Brewer. And also, we know now that the Space Emperor is one of the four men who were in Quale’s office when we left it, and Brewer is one of those four.”

  His chin hardened.

  “I think I have some questions to ask Mr. Brewer. Come along!”

  Chapter 9: Laboratory Magic

  THEY hastened back beneath the two brilliant jovian moons toward the metalloy mansion of the governor.

  Sylvanus Quale and Eldred Kells were bending over a map when Curt and the girl entered the white-lit office.

  “Why — what’s happened?” exclaimed Quale, his colorless face startled as he looked inquiringly at the disheveled two.

  “The Space Emperor tried to scrag us and nearly succeeded, that’s what happened,” rasped Captain Future. His gray eyes were searching their faces as he told what had occurred.

  “Where are Brewer and young Cannig?” he demanded.

  “They’ve left — gone back to Jungletown in their rocket-flier,” Quale replied.

  “Why did they go?” Curt demanded, his big figure stiffening.

  “That message that called me back here to my office was from Captain Gurney, the police marshal up there at Jungletown,” Quale explained. “He reported that the atavism cases are getting out of control up there, and also that the unrest of the Jovians up there seems to be increasing.”

  The governor paused, “Brewer said that he and Cannig ought to return to look after his company’s mine,” he continued. “He insisted on going.”

  “That’s right,” confirmed Eldred Kells, the blond vice-governor. “I tried to get them to stay, but couldn’t.”

  Curt was thinking. Either Brewer or Cannig could have slipped into the Emergency Hospital to spring that death-trap, before leaving.

  “Kells is going up to Jungletown at once, to see how bad conditions are there,” Quale told Curt.

  “I’ll go too,” Joan Randall said quickly. “If the number of victims is increasing so, I’ll be needed at the hospital there.”

  The girl secret agent flashed Captain Future a glance as she spoke. Curt realized she intended to continue her observation of Brewer and Cannig, if possible.

  Kells hesitated at her going along.

  “Jungletown is rather a tough, wild town for a girl to go into,” he declared. “But it’s true you’ll be needed up there. Come along, and we’ll start at once.”

  Captain Future made no comment as the man and girl left the office. A few moments later, the roar of their rocket-flier was heard as they took off from the nearby hangar.

  Curt turned toward the governor.

  “Quale, as governor here you know something about these legends of a mighty Jovian civilization that is supposed to have existed on this planet in the remote past?”

  The governor looked surprised.

  “Why, yes, I’ve heard the superstitious stories the Jovians tell,” he admitted. “And the few archaeologists who have looked at those queer ruins in the jungle say that they really were once the cities of a highly civilized race. But why do you ask, Captain Future?”

  “Has anyone ever unearthed any of the scientific secrets of that vanished Jovian race?” Curt demanded.

  Quale was a little startled. “Why, no. It’s true that some have hoped to find the hidden secrets of that mysterious race. One young archaeologist who was through here some weeks ago was sure he could. But no one has ever done so.”

  “What was the name of that young archaeologist?” Curt asked quickly.

  “His name was Kenneth Lester,” Quale replied. “He told me he’d been studying the Jovian legends and believed he was on the trail of solving the whole mystery of the vanished race. He went from here up to Jungletown, and then on northward into the jungles toward the Fire Sea.”

  Captain Future’s eyes narrowed.

  “Where’s Lester now? What did he say he’d found when he came back?”

  The governor shook his head.

  “Lester never came back. Nothing more was ever heard from him, though he’d promised to notify me of any discoveries he made. He had no experience with those jungles, and undoubtedly he perished up there in them.”

 
; Captain Future remained silent for a moment, wrapped in thought. The governor looked attentively at the big, red-haired young man.

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Curt said finally. “One more thing, though — I would like to have one of the most recent atavism cases from your hospital, for study by Simon Wright and myself, in order that we can try to find a cure for this thing.”

  A QUARTER hour later, in a borrowed police rocket-car, Captain Future reached the edge of the dark Jovopolis spaceport where the Comet waited. He carried out of the car an unconscious Earthman with a brutalized, flushed face — the atavism victim the governor had allowed him to bring from the hospital.

  Inside the little ship, Grag the robot greeted him with noisy, booming relief. Simon Wright’s lens-eyes focused at once on the big young adventurer’s taut face.

  “Did you succeed in trapping the Space Emperor, lad?” the Brain asked quickly.

  “He nearly trapped me, damn him!” Curt exclaimed ruefully. “Isn’t Otho back yet?”

  “No, he hasn’t been here,” Wright declared.

  Curt uttered an impatient exclamation.

  “I wanted to get on up to Jungletown at once. Now well have to wait for that crazy android who’s probably busy getting himself into trouble.”

  Concisely, he told Simon Wright all that had happened, while Grag listened also.

  “So I believe,” Curt finished, “that the Space Emperor has actually discovered the secret of making matter temporarily immaterial, by a step-up in frequency of its atomic vibration. The thing’s possible, isn’t it, Simon?”

  “It’s possible theoretically, though no known scientist has ever done it,” rasped the Brain. “Furthermore, not one of your four suspects is a scientist.”

  “I know!” Curt exclaimed. “And that’s what makes me think the Space Emperor has discovered the scientific secrets of the vanished race of this world. The secret of vibration-step-up is probably one of them, and the atavism weapon another.