Then Kincaid and Wilson and all their men suddenly started. A clear voice had suddenly spoken loudly from the air around them.
“Go to Earth and surrender yourselves to System law!” it commanded.
“Who said that?” snarled Kincaid, drawing his atom-pistol.
“It’s nobody — it just came out of the air!” gasped a man.
Again the voice spoke, from the empty air around them, repeating its command. It was loud, louder than any ordinary voice.
The men could not dream that it was the “sonic-silent” beam of the Brain that produced the effect — a beam of sound vibrations pitched below the limits of audibility but focused so as to become suddenly audible vibrations at a selected distance from the transmitter.
Over and over it repeated its eerie command. The darkness and increasing cold and the grim voice from empty air began to crack nerves.
“We can’t fix these cycs,” the engineers finally confessed.
“Let’s get out o’ here!” begged one of the men. “We’ll freeze if we don’t. An’ that voice means trouble.”
“It’s just a trick,” hissed Kincaid. “But we’ll go. We’ll head for Uranus and wait there a while, and come back with new generators.”
THE UNSEEN VOICE
They hastily loaded their great bales of valuable furs into their space-ship, and took off for Uranus. They established a camp among the Black Mountains of that planet’s equatorial region, near the Canyon of the Endless River. But on their second day there, the unseen voice spoke again.
“Go to Earth and surrender yourselves to System law!”
For two days, the voice spoke, hour after hour, repeating that relentless command. The raging Wilson and Kincaid searched furiously for its source without success. In desperation, they turned their atom-guns at random on the mist-hidden cliffs overhead. The only result was to start an avalanche from which they and their ship barely escaped.
The Lords of Power and their men flew to Saturn.
They made new camp near the Valley of the Silicae near the southern pole of that world. But again the voice remorselessly prodded them. There seemed no source of it. Curt and his comrades were projecting the “sonic-silent” beam from miles away.
The Silicae came crawling upon the camp of Wilson and Kincaid, attracted by their indiscriminate firing at nothing. The great gray inorganic monsters made them hastily remove camp northward. But in their new camp by the Wandering Lakes, deadly puff-balls from the Fungus Forest came upon the wind. And the grim, cold voice was still with them.
NO ESCAPE!
More than a little fearful, the Lords of Power essayed another attempt to escape their maddening tormentors. They fled to Jupiter and endeavored to hide in the vast fern-jungles south of the Fire Sea. But though they had pitched their camp in the ancient Jovian ruins which were shunned by all Jovians as the Place of the Dead, the cold voice reached them.
“Go to Earth and surrender yourselves to System law!”
In panic, the followers of Wilson and Kincaid deserted them, stumbling away through the fern-jungles in mad flight from the unknown. And at last utterly broken in nerve, Wilson and Kincaid steered toward Earth.
Curt Newton’s ship followed at a distance, still prodding the fugitives with the “sonic-silent” beam as they landed near Government Tower.
“Surrender yourselves to System law!” came the inexorable order.
At that a bewildered Planet Police chief and equally bewildered System President listened as two broken, haunted-looking men babbled a confession of having defrauded Plutonian natives by means of an illegal monopoly.
Later that night, the System President sat in his office high in Government Tower reflecting on the strange occurrence. His thin, aging face expressed sudden startled wonder as he heard a space-ship landing on the truncated top of the tower. No ship but his own ever landed there.
FOUR STRANGE FIGURES
He rose to his feet to call officers. Then he froze. In his office door had appeared four figures that seemed unreal. They were a tall Earth youngster, with red hair and clear, purposeful gray eyes; a lithe, green-eyed android; a giant metal robot; and a Brain brooding in a square transparent serum-case, watching with lens-like artificial eyes.
“It was we who drove Wilson and Kincaid to confess,” Curt Newton told the President quietly. “And I wanted to tell you this: the furs in their ship were stolen by fraud from the native Plutonians. The value of those furs, in needed goods, should be given to the Plutonians.”
The President stared, and then as the four strange visitants turned to leave, he asked a dazed question. “Who — who are you?”
The redheaded youngster turned, for a moment. “Just someone who didn’t want to see the whole future of Pluto’s people wrecked for profits.”
Then a quick, humorous smile lit his gray eyes and he added, “If you want a name to call me by, why, you can call me Captain Future!”
It was thus that Curt Newton became Captain Future!
THE END
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Captain Future 23 - The Harpers of Titan (September 1950) Page 6