QUIETLY Captain Future allowed a million in chips to remain on Number Seventeen. Not to be outdone, Ul Quorn placed a similar amount on Twenty-eight. The croupier pressed the starting button. The radium grain began to spin. The crowd around the table watched in hushed, taut silence. None watched more closely than fat, sweating Bubas Uum.
Curt used his elbow to direct the invisible narrow-magnetic field from the instrument under his jacket, so the alpha discharge would be drawn into Number Seventeen pocket. He knew Quorn was using a similar field, so he made his own as strong as possible. The alpha streak flashed as an atom was automatically smashed in the radium grain. The streak flashed toward Curt’s side —
“Number Seventeen wins again!” bawled the croupier.
“Pay him,” said Bubas Uum in a strangled voice.
Thirty million-dollar chips were pushed on Curt’s number. “I’m letting it ride,” he said coolly.
Quorn pushed out a mass of chips. “Ten millions on Twenty-eight.” The crowd gasped. Again the alpha particles flashed. And again, drawn in by Curt’s stronger, invisible magnetic field, they hit Pocket Seventeen.
“Gods of Venus, this Earthman has won nine hundred millions!” blurted a spectator behind Curt.
“Bring chips and pay him,” Bubas Uum ordered, his voice rising to a shrill, knife-edged tone.
Guards came hurrying with masses of chips. There were not enough million-dollar ones. A mass of smaller denominations was placed in front of Captain Future. Ul Quorn was glaring at him with pure hatred in his eyes. Curt knew that Quorn was cursing inwardly because his own secret alpha deflector field had not the power of Captain Future’s and could not buck it.
“Let it all ride on Seventeen,” Curt stated.
“Nine hundred million on one number?” gasped the croupier. “It’s impossible!”
Curt looked coolly at Bubas Uum.
“You’ve always bragged that no stakes were too high at the Pleasure Planet. What about it?”
Bubas Uum looked as though he were about to have apoplexy. But he finally managed to reply.
“I’ll — I’ll take the bet. You can’t win again. But I can’t cover the odds with cash. I — I’ll have to put up the Pleasure Planet.”
“I’m in on this play, too,” Ul Quorn interrupted. He pushed all of his remaining chips forward. “There’s over six hundred million here. It all goes on Twenty-eight.”
“Gods of Jupiter, I can’t cover that bet either, except with the Planet!” exclaimed the Jovian hoarsely. “The odds are fifteen thousand to one!”
Curt’s keen eye saw Quorn’s hand slide smoothly under his jacket. He realized the mixed-breed was setting his own magnetic deflector to highest possible strength, so it might overpower Curt’s field.
“Maybe he can make it this time,” Curt thought despairingly. “My own field’s at its top strength.”
There was nothing to do but go ahead. The croupier already had touched the starting button. The radium was spinning. Every watcher was wire-tense. This single play was for the highest stakes in history, for the Pleasure Planet itself. Yet only Curt and Quorn knew the real stakes — the last two space stones which held the mighty secret of Thuro Thuun! The neutron beam flashed down. As another atom was smashed, the alpha streak flared out.
“Look!” someone yelled wildly. “Seventeen has won again!”
It was true. Curt’s powerful magnetic field had overpowered Quorn’s.
Again he had forced the alpha particles into Pocket Seventeen.
“This Earthman has won the Pleasure Planet from Bubas Uum!”
But Bubas Uum scrambled to his feet.
“Guards!” he bellowed.
GOLD-UNIFORMED men came running, atom pistols in their hands. Bubas pointed furiously at Ul Quorn.
“Hold this Martian and the Earthman! There’s something crooked about this. I just saw the Martian fumbling under his jacket!”
Captain Future, realizing the imminent peril of discovery, jumped up and reached for his own concealed proton pistol. He was too late. Guards behind seized him. Other guards had seized Joan, N’rala and Ul Quorn. Bubas Uum waddled forward and tore open the mixed-breed’s jacket, revealing a small, flat, quartz-lensed instrument.
“I thought so,” grated the fat Jovian. “He’s been cheating.”
“So has the Earthman,” retorted Quorn, glaring at Curt. “Look under his coat too and you’ll see.”
Curt’s zipper-jacket was torn open, exposing an instrument similar to the one worn by Quorn.
“They’ve both been cheating!” Bubas Uum cried hoarsely. “Take them and their companions down to our prison. We’ll teach them what happens to people who try to get crooked with our honest games.”
Manacles of steelite were clapped on Captain Future’s wrists. He and Joan, with Ul Quorn and N’rala, were hustled out of the radium-roulette room, down a narrow stairway to the sub-level basement carved out of the rock under the Palace of Hazard. The guards hauled them into what was evidently one of the cells of Bubas Uum’s private prison. A rock-walled chamber without windows, and with a heavy steelite door, it was lit by one feeble uranite bulb.
The four manacled prisoners were fastened to fetters in the rock wall. Captain Future looked across the cell at Quorn and the Martian girl.
“You certainly scrambled the orbits for us all, Quorn,” he said coolly. “Why couldn’t you have been shrewder?”
“I denounced you myself rather than let you win everything,” stated Ul Quorn. “You will never get those space stones.”
Curt laughed, though he did not feel mirthful.
“You’re too sure, Quorn. You were just as sure you had killed me on your ship.”
“That,” Quorn conceded, “was a clever trick, Future. Maybe we could think up another like it to get out of Bubas’ clutch.”
“I know how far I could trust you,” Curt said calmly. “There’ll be no deals between you and me, Quorn.” He turned to the girl. “Chin up, Joan. We’re not blasted out yet!”
“You would be now if I had a pistol and could use it,” snapped N’rala.
The door opened, and Bubas Uum waddled into the room with two of his guards. The fat Jovian’s puffy green face was working with indignation as he surveyed his prisoners.
“So you would cheat, would you?” he shrilled. “You’d use your scientific tricks to swindle an honest radium-roulette game?”
“Cut your rockets, Bubas,” scoffed Curt Newton. “Your game is crooked, and I knew it. You have a synchronized timing device built into your radium-spinner, so you can call your winners at will. But it wasn’t good enough against the tricks Quorn and I used, that’s all. Cheating a crooked swindler like you isn’t a crime.”
BUBAS UUM’S jaw dropped in surprise. Then a look of eager interest livened his flabby green face.
“How did you do it, Earthman?” he asked. “This new method of cheating you’ve worked out — if I knew that, I could be sure of absolute control over the winners at the game. I will make a deal for your freedom if you tell me the secret of it.”
“So you can fleece more deluded people of even more money?” Curt sneered.
“He’ll never deal with you, Bubas,” interrupted Ul Quorn. “It’s Captain Future himself you’re talking to!”
Bubas Uum recoiled from Curt as though he stood on the edge of a deadly pit.
“Captain Future!” he rasped in obvious fright. “What are you doing here?” he demanded nervously. “System law doesn’t apply to this planetoid. You’ve no right to be here. I can have you executed, and nobody can do anything to me for it.”
Curt looked at the Jovian with contempt.
“You fat green toad, I’m glad I came here. It’s time this place was cleaned up.”
“Future’s trying to deceive you, Bubas,” explained Quorn. “He didn’t come here to investigate your place, but to get these two space stones you own.”
“How do you know that?” Bubas Uum asked suspiciously.
“Because I want those space stones myself,” Quorn admitted. “That’s why I was trying to win everything you had, including the stones, since rumor has always said you wouldn’t sell them. I will make a deal with you, Bubas. Give me those two space stones, and I’ll fix up every gambling game here with such scientific tricks that you can never lose unless you want to. I can do it. You’ve heard of Doctor Quorn, the scientist.”
Bubas Uum considered.
“I’d hate to give up the space stones, they’re so rare and valuable. I could torture all your knowledge out of you, Quorn.”
“Torture a secret out of a Martian?” jeered Ul Quorn. “It’s never been done in the System’s history, and you know it.”
“All right,” Bubas Uum reluctantly agreed. “You get my two space stones, Quorn. But first you have to prove that your devices will give me absolute control of my games.”
“I’ll make sketches of instruments that’ll enable you to control all your games,” Ul Quorn proposed quickly. “You give me the two space stones, and you can keep me locked in here till you’re satisfied my controls work. Isn’t that fair enough?”
“It sounds fair,” Bubas said cautiously. “If you’re locked in here, there’s no way in which you can trick me.”
“Of course,” Quorn declared, a shadow of mockery in his eyes. “I only stipulate that you allow N’rala to return to my ship now, and that you give me a space suit, which I shall need for a certain purpose.”
“Don’t be a fool, Bubas,” Captain Future broke in. “Quorn is planning something with those space stones that will put you and all the rest of us in his power.”
“What could I do with a few jewels?” Quorn asked scornfully. “Ignore Future, Bubas. You know he’s the enemy of your kind.”
“I know,” Bubas Uum muttered, “and I’m going to work out some way to dispose of him and his pals without having it traced to me. You draw your sketches now, Quorn, while I get the space stones.”
Quorn and N’rala were unmanacled. The Jovian and his guards left.
“GO AND wait in our cruiser with the freaks, N’rala,” Quorn ordered. “All hell will break loose when Bubas Uum finds me gone from this cell.”
“How can you go anywhere, with guards outside?” N’rala protested.
Quorn smiled. “I’m not really going out of the cell. I’m going into another universe. And when I come back —”
The Martian girl departed. The guards let her pass, as Bubas had instructed. Quorn, ignoring Curt and Joan, began drawing sketches on a small pocket pad. Captain Future watched helplessly. How was he to thwart the cunning scheme that Quorn had developed?
There was a sudden uproar in the distance. Bubas Uum came running in, disheveled and excited. Behind him were four of his guards. Bruised and battered, they dragged in Otho the android!
“Sorry, Chief,” Otho panted as he saw Curt and Joan fettered to the wall. “I was down in Bubas’ vault after the space stones. Like a fool, I let them take me by surprise.”
“Fasten him to the wall near the other two,” Bubas ordered furiously. “The cursed demon, he knocked three of my best men cold!”
“You’d better send out men to hunt for Future’s ship and the other Futuremen,” Ul Quorn warned. He handed the Jovian the sketches. “Here you are. Have instruments made according to these designs and attach them secretly to your games. They’ll do the work. You can pick your winners every time. Now how about the stones and the space suit?”
Bubas Uum, after doubtfully examining the sketches, brought in a space suit, and then handed over the last two space stones. One was brilliant red in color, the other jet-black.
Captain Future stiffened at sight of that black space stone. He could glimpse something tiny imbedded in its surface — something that looked like a single grain of ordinary Martian red sand. Curt knew that that sand-grain was the very core of Thuro Thuun’s tremendous secret, the pivot on which Quorn’s vast, menacing plot revolved.
Bubas Uum departed with the sketches, after posting guards outside the door. Quorn smiled mockingly at his fettered enemies.
“You’re about to see my final victory, Future. That will be your last sight.”
“I never admit defeat until the last hand is played out,” Curt Newton said, with a coolness that belied his inward despair.
Quorn laughed. “The last hand is played out, and you know it. Watch me, as I wring the last of the ancient secrets from the space stones — and go where Thuro Thuun went two hundred thousand years ago to win the mastery of worlds.”
Captain Future saw Quorn range the first six space stones in a row, setting apart the black seventh stone. Blue, green, white, yellow, violet, red glittered the six stones. Quorn brought out a tiny X-ray generator, turned its radiation on the stones, listened. Curt knew the stones were giving up the entire formula to Quorn. Quorn crouched, listening to the mental message from past ages. Finally he straightened triumphantly.
“The last of the formula!” he exclaimed. “Now I can follow the trail of Thuro Thuun into the infinite!”
RAPIDLY the mixed-breed donned the space suit. Then he fastened to its belt a flat, disk-shaped instrument of blue metal, from which sprayed tiny wires in a hemispherical cup. He smiled at Curt.
“I’ve had this mechanism ready for weeks, Future. Built it according to the directions in the first space stones. But I had to have the part of the formula in the last stones, to know how to operate the process safely.”
“I know what that mechanism is,” Curt retorted. “And I tell you that you can’t succeed in this mad plan.”
“Thuro Thuun succeeded ages ago. So will I!”
The mixed-breed was like a man transformed by overpowering emotion as he put on the glassite helmet of the space suit.
“What’s he doing?” Joan whispered awedly to Captain Future.
Quorn, garbed in the space suit, reached and touched one of the switches on the back of the queer blue mechanism at his belt. An aura of golden radiance sprang from it, enveloping him. He seemed to flinch and shudder from the shock of that glowing force. Then an incredible thing happened.
“Devils of space, he’s getting smaller!” yelled Otho.
Ul Quorn’s space-suited figure was shrinking in size. He was now only four feet tall, and growing even smaller.
“It’s impossible — we’re dreaming!” Joan gasped.
“No, he’s using Thuro Thuun’s secret formula, which enables one to change size at will,” gritted Curt.
Ul Quorn was a foot high, but he continued to shrink till he was only an inch high. A tiny space-suited pigmy, he ran toward the black space stone lying on the floor. They saw the infinitely tiny, still shrinking figure climb up on the seventh space stone and run toward the red sand-grain imbedded in it. Then the homunculus became too small for them to see.
“He’s disappeared into that grain of sand!” Otho yelped.
“He entered the sub-atomic universe inside that sand grain,” Captain Future explained hoarsely.
Otho stared. “You mean — that the speculations of the old scientists were right — that there exist sub-atomic universes, each atom of which is — a miniature solar system?”
Curt nodded, his face drawn and haggard.
“Yes. That sand grain is a tiny galaxy of such atomic systems. Thuro Thuun long ago found the secret of changing size. He went down into that sub-atomic galaxy. Now Ul Quorn has used the old Martian’s secret to follow him down into that tiny galaxy. Quorn means to unlock a forgotten threat in that miniature universe.”
Chapter 18: The Sub-Universe
READILY Captain Future understood the malefic possibilities of the situation, while Otho or Joan were completely baffled. But they read in his drawn face the desperate nature of the peril. “What can we do?” Joan whispered.
“If I could also get the whole formula from those space stones and build a size-changing mechanism like Quorn’s, I could go after him into that atomic galaxy,” Curt declared.
Joan paled. “That would be awful — to go down into another universe, and risk all its unguessable dangers.”
“No use worrying about it, for we’re chained here, and we’ll soon be quietly murdered by Bubas Uum,” Curt muttered. “And Quorn will come back from the sand-grain universe, with —”
“Curse it, if I could just get my hands out of these manacles!” swore Otho, twisting furiously.
The android’s words gave Curt an idea. Faint hope dawned in him. Maybe Captain Future wasn’t counted out yet! They were hanging from the wall-fetters to which their manacled wrists were hooked, but their legs were free. Curt raised his legs.
Hanging by his wrists, he touched Otho’s belt with his feet.
“What the devil, Chief!” said the android mystifiedly. “This isn’t any time for acrobatic tricks.”
“This particular acrobatic trick may get us out of this cell,” Curt said rapidly. “Listen, Otho. If I could get the chemical oil that softens your flesh out of your make-up kit, I could use it on your wrists. You could slip out of your manacles.”
“Blazing meteors, I never thought of that!” Otho cried.
“Hold still, while I try it,” Captain Future said. “Have to get these shoes off. Can’t grip anything with my feet unless I do.”
Curt kicked off his low space shoes. Then, hanging by his fettered wrists, he raised his legs until he could fumble at Otho’s belt with his bare feet. His toes worked feverishly till he got Otho’s make-up pouch open. By skillful manipulation, Captain Future pawed out of the pouch the flat sprayer flask of pink oil he wanted.
Otho’s synthetic flesh could be softened by application of this oil, then molded like plastic. The android took advantage of that phenomenon in making up his marvelous disguises. Captain Future meant to use the oil now for another purpose.
Holding the sprayer flask between his feet, he raised it up near Otho’s fettered wrists. Curt pressed the bulb with his ankles, and a fine spray of the pink chemical oil covered Otho’s wrists. Quickly the the synthetic flesh of the android’s forearms began to soften to puttylike consistency. It would remain in that state for only a few minutes, but that was enough for Otho. He pulled his wrists and hands until they easily slipped through the handcuffs.
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