Avengers of the Moon

by Allen Steele

  “Looks like your crew is getting bigger all the time, Cap.” The voice that spoke up from behind him was both familiar and expected. Turning around, Curt found Ezra Gurney seated in an armchair. Apparently he’d arrived earlier with Joan; Curt guessed that they’d already briefed the president about what had happened on Mars.

  “If that’s the case, then perhaps you’ll need them.” President Carthew shook Curt’s hand, then nodded to other seats facing his desk, behind which the gleaming New York skyline extended all the way out to Battery Pier and the harbor beyond. “Please be seated, all of you,” he added, with an uncertain glance in Simon’s direction. “I have a proposition for you.”

  When everyone except Grag and the Brain had taken seats, Carthew returned to his chair. “Curt, when we met a couple of weeks ago, you identified yourself to me as sort of a troubleshooter. I know now, of course, that this wasn’t entirely true.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President,” Curt replied. “I apologize to you for lying, but I—”

  “Don’t apologize. I understand completely.” Carthew made a casual flip of his hand. “I’m very glad I placed my trust in you. Not only did you verify the truth behind Senator Corvo’s scheme, but you also unearthed a far more dangerous plot that could have put the entire Coalition in danger, perhaps even sparked a war. For this, you have not only my own gratitude, but also that of every Solar Coalition citizen.”

  Curt started to speak, but Carthew raised his hand again. “Let me finish, please. I’ve discussed this matter in detail with Marshal Gurney and Inspector Randall, and also with their superiors, and we’ve agreed that the IPF’s association with you and your crew shouldn’t end here. Perhaps there’s a role for a troubleshooter after all, Curt … or better, Captain Future.”

  Curt felt his face growing warm. “To be honest, Mr. President, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that name. It’s a long story how I got it, but … well, I’d just as soon that people didn’t use it.”

  Carthew nodded sympathetically. “I understand. To be candid, I’ve never been comfortable with people always calling me Mr. President. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have people address me as Jim.” He shook his head. “But names like this aren’t for our benefit, Curt. They’re for the benefit of others. People need a leader to look up to, and they show that respect by addressing him or her as Mr. President. And even in these times—especially in these times—they need a hero. Someone they can call Captain Future.”

  Otho pointedly cleared his throat, and Carthew glanced in his direction. “I was thinking that the ‘Futuremen’ might be suitable for your companions,” he added, and Otho responded with a thumbs-up.

  “Captain Future and his Futuremen.” Repeating this, Curt couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of the name. He hoped it wouldn’t be used often, although he had a sneaking suspicion that it would. “And you say you’d want us to be—”

  “Troubleshooters.” Ezra steepled his fingers together. “Sort of an unofficial independent unit for the IPF, taking on cases where we can’t get involved without someone investigating them first. Or maybe just a good, hard fist when the Coalition needs it.”

  “We’ll supply you with a new ship,” Carthew continued. “In fact, we can build one with the same warp-drive capability that Solar Guard ships now have. You’ll have a budget to draw upon, and you can continue working out of your base of operations in Tycho, which will become a classified installation. When you’re not working for us, you’re free to pursue your own interests.”

  “And who would we report to?” Simon asked.

  “I’m gonna be your IPF liaison,” Ezra said. “As for Inspector Randall here, she’s being promoted to captain and permanently reassigned as your case officer.”

  He was grinning as he said this, and a sly wink told Curt that the old lawman knew more than he’d thought he did. Curt glanced at Joan, and although she was carefully maintaining a neutral expression, the brightness in her eyes told him that she was looking forward to her new role.

  And as for himself?

  Curt gazed out the window for a moment, thinking about all that laid behind, all that possibly lay ahead. He considered what the president had said about how people needed a hero. He’d never set out to become one, but perhaps this was what he was meant to do.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “If this is what you want, then this is what I’ll do my best to be.” He took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “I’m Captain Future.”

  Afterword

  When I was eleven years old, I met Captain Future in a drugstore in Franklin, Tennessee.

  Franklin was my father’s hometown, where my grandmother still lived. Every couple of weeks or so, we’d go see her. On one of these visits, we went to a drugstore on Main Street to get a few things for her, and while Papa did his business at the prescription counter I combed through the paperback spinner rack in search of something interesting to read—which, for me, was usually a science fiction book.

  On this particular Sunday afternoon in 1969, that turned out to be a Popular Library paperback whose cover featured a menacing robot lying prone on a lunar surface, firing a laser rifle straight at the reader. This was Outlaws of the Moon by Edmond Hamilton, and who could resist? Not me. I begged Papa for sixty cents to buy the thing, and despite his better judgment—why couldn’t his son be interested in football instead?—my father relented, and the rest of my visit to Gran’s house was spent with my nose in that book.

  Outlaws of the Moon wasn’t the greatest science fiction novel I’d ever read (and by the time I’d reached the sixth grade, I’d already read a lot of SF and fantasy). With the Apollo 11 only a few months away from achieving the first lunar landing, I could tell at once that the story was very dated; a 1942 publication date on the copyright page confirmed that the novel was twenty-seven years old. It was clearly written long before the Space Age, when it was still possible for a writer to portray the moon as being secretly inhabited by underground denizens.

  But it didn’t matter, really. This was one of those swashbuckling space adventure stories I couldn’t get enough of (really, I couldn’t … space opera wasn’t in vogue at that time), and it was also my introduction to Curt Newton and his odd band, the Futuremen. Over the next several years, even while I discovered the paperback reprints of other Depression-era heroes—Doc Savage, Conan, the Shadow, the Spider, the Avenger, G-8 and his Battle Aces—I kept coming back to Captain Future, the most science-fictional of all those pulp adventurers of a period that was gone long before I was born.

  I grew out of pulp fiction, as most young readers eventually do, and moved on to more adult fare. But I never completely lost interest in the pulps. Over the years, I’d continue to occasionally dip into a Shadow or Doc Savage paperback, on the theory that you can’t read serious literature all the time without becoming jaded, but mainly because this stuff is just plain fun. And once I became an SF writer myself, it wasn’t long before I wrote a satirical homage to one of my favorites, a novella titled “The Death of Captain Future.”

  This story was very well received when it came out; it won the Hugo and Seiun Awards and was nominated for the Nebula, and since then has been reprinted and translated numerous times. It wasn’t really about Curt Newton and the Futuremen, though, but instead the way a fan’s devotion can be carried to an extreme. A couple of years later, I wrote a sequel, “The Exile of Evening Star,” that was an attempt to produce a space adventure that was more representative of the pulp era. However, readers didn’t take to it as well as they did to the first story, and after a while it occurred to me that the only way to truly write something like a Captain Future story was … well, to write a Captain Future story.

  Avengers of the Moon is the first new, authorized Captain Future story since “Birthplace of Creation” appeared in the May 1951 issue of Startling Stories (along with an editorial sidebar, “Well Done and Farewell,” announcing that the series was taking “an indefinite leave of absence”
). It is neither an homage to the Hamilton novels nor a parody, but rather an effort to bring Captain Future into the twenty-first century for a new generation of readers.

  In order to do this, it was necessary to completely revise and update the characters and situations created by Hamilton. If one relies on the internal chronology of the original series, the first novel, Captain Future and the Space Emperor (published in the inaugural Winter 1940 issue of Captain Future), takes place in the far-distant year of 2015. When those novels were written over seventy years ago, nearly everything we knew about the solar system was what could be observed through the lens of a telescope, and the most advanced rockets were the V-2 missiles being built by the German army. Much has changed since then, and although some purists may object, I decided that it was more important to bring the series in line with the science and technology of our century than to be consistent with the 1940s version.

  At the same time, though, I’ve sought to maintain the spirit of the original. So, while developing this novel, I re-read the Hamilton novels and stories (whenever possible, in their first magazine publication in Captain Future and Startling Stories) and took extensive notes. As a result, the springboard for this novel is the “origin story” related in Chapter II of The Space Emperor and also the unpublished chapters of the same reprinted in The Captain Future Handbook by Chuck Juzek (a useful reference for everything about this character). Added to this revised and greatly expanded backstory is Curt Newton’s archnemesis Ul Quorn, who was introduced in Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones (Captain Future, Winter 1941) and reappeared in The Magician of Mars (Captain Future, Summer 1941) and The Solar Invasion (Startling Stories, Fall 1946), the last written by Manly Wade Wellman and one of three canonical Captain Future stories not authored by Hamilton.

  The one place where I directly quoted Hamilton are the three songs quoted in Part Four, which appeared in various stories over the course of the series. In most places, I took Hamilton’s creations, revised and updated them, and combined them with those of my own, much the same way Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes have been revised and updated by later writers. And while I’m aware of the 1970s Japanese anime version, I deliberately avoided any reference to this and instead took my inspiration entirely from the pulp stories. Therefore, Otho is not a comic relief sidekick renamed Otto, the Brain is not a robot, Grag is not stupid, Joan is not a helpless blonde, and kid sidekick Ken Scott doesn’t exist.

  There are many people who need to be thanked for helping me make this novel possible:

  David Hartwell, my late editor at Tor, for expressing interest in a new Captain Future novel and encouraging me to write it, and my new editor, Jennifer Gunnels, for a fine and insightful critique of the novel’s original draft.

  Eleanor Wood of the Spectrum Literary Agency, Edmond Hamilton’s literary executor, and my own agent, Martha Millard, for negotiating a formal arrangement with the Huntington National Bank, the Trustee for the Estate of Edmond Hamilton, for allowing me to use the characters and situations of the original Captain Future novels in this authorized continuation.

  Stephen Haffner of Haffner Press, publisher of The Collected Captain Future, for helping me trace the copyright ownership.

  Rob Caswell for reading the novel while it was being written and offering valuable criticism, and also updating the Comet while sticking close to the original hull design.

  Ron Miller for information about the Straight Wall and sending me a copy of his painting of the same.

  Dr. Young K. Bae for an intriguing conversation several years ago at the 100 Year Starship Conference about his concept of a photon railroad.

  Doug Beason, Wil McCarthy, Geoffrey Landis, Jeffrey Kooistra, Larry Niven, G. David Nordley, and Arlan Andrews, my colleagues at the Sigma group, for brainstorming the plasma-toroid gun (aka “plasmar”) I gave Curt Newton in homage to the “smoke-gun” ray gun depicted on the covers of the original Captain Future pulps.

  The staff at Gary Dolgoff Comics in Easthampton, Massachusetts, for allowing me to search their extensive magazine collection for copies of Captain Future and Startling Stories.

  And finally, as always, my wife, Linda, who has supported my writing for so many years, even mad projects such as this.

  —Allen Steele

  Whately, Massachusetts,

  December 2014–November 2015

  ALSO BY ALLEN STEELE

  Near-Space Series

  Orbital Decay

  Clarke County, Space

  Lunar Descent

  Labyrinth of Night

  A King of Infinite Space

  Coyote Trilogy

  Coyote

  Coyote Rising

  Coyote Frontier

  Coyote Chronicles

  Coyote Horizon

  Coyote Destiny

  Coyote Universe

  Spindrift

  Galaxy Blues

  Hex

  The Jericho Iteration

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  Oceanspace

  Time Loves a Hero

  Apollo’s Outcasts

  V-S Day

  Arkwright

  Novellas

  The Weight

  The River Horses

  Angel of Europa

  Escape from Earth

  Collections

  Rude Astronauts

  All-American Alien Boy

  Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories

  American Beauty

  The Last Science Fiction Writer

  Tales of Time and Space

  Nonfiction

  Primary Ignition

  About the Author

  ALLEN STEELE worked as a freelance journalist before becoming a prolific science fiction writer. He has garnered multiple Hugo Awards for his novellas and novelettes, and his novel Obital Decay won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. In 2013, he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award in recognition of his fiction promoting space exploration.

  Visit him online at www.allensteele.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: The Solar Age

  PART ONE: Encounter at the Straight Wall

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  PART TWO: Twenty Years Before

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  PART THREE: The Senator of the Lunar Republic

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  PART FOUR: The Photon Express

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  PART FIVE: The Search for the Magician

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapt
er IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  PART SIX: Fire on the Mountain

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  EPILOGUE: The Coming of the Futuremen

  Afterword

  Also by Allen Steele

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  AVENGERS OF THE MOON

  Copyright © 2017 by Allen Steele

  All rights reserved.

  Permission granted by The Huntington National Bank for the Estate of Edmond Hamilton.

  Cover art and design by Thomas Ed Walker

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8218-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-8644-5 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466886445

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: April 2017

    1.  All song lyrics by Edmond Hamilton.