Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946)
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“Rroda kun!” said Captain Future.
One creature faced him.
“Thai Thar? Who relieved you? Speak the Other-System language because —”
“I’m Captain Future,” said the red-haired giant, and dropped his cloak, letting it fall in folds over his hand that held the gun.
At once the three were on their feet.
“Careful!” warned one of the guards, “He may be a spy of Ul Quorn’s.”
“I’m not. Ul Quorn, if you wonder about him, lies stunned and bound just this side of the dimension-shift. Your friend Thai Thar is there, and will identify me.”
A guard started toward the door, but paused, gazing at Captain Future in perplexity. Captain Future spread his arms, still keeping the cloak swathed around his pistol hand.
“Can’t you see I’m unarmed? Here,” and he threw the glare weapon on the floor. “Go ahead.”
The man left hurriedly.
“You’re different, you men, different from other Dimension-X people I’ve seen,” Future said.
“Because the advance guard is of our low orders. We ourselves are what you call nobles or aristocrats. Because the Overlord doesn’t like us, we’re being used here as guards. Later, he’ll probably see we’re killed in the invasion we abhor.”
“Why does the Overlord dislike you?” persisted Captain Future. “And why do you dislike the invasion?”
“Hold your questions until we’re sure of your identity,” bade one of the two.
The man who had left returned.
“Thai Thar identifies him. He’s Captain Future, and he can be told the truth.”
“But when will Thai Thar be discovered helpless?”
“Shortly,” said the man who had brought the message. “By one of us who goes to relieve him.”
“And meanwhile I’ll get you out of here,” joined in another. “You will want to know about an invasion at another point of your universe.”
“Where?” demanded Captain Future.
“I have a star-map to show you. Come, wrap yourself in that cloak. We can talk on the way to — to where we’re going.”
Captain Future opened the folds around his hand.
“Gentlemen, I’ll confess that I mistrusted you, too. Look at this weapon. It would have blasted you all at the first sign of danger, but it’s falling to powder!”
“Of course,” said the man who had risen to accompany him. “Weapons of our make are safe in the protective ray-field around this guardroom. But yours was made harmless. A little device of my own, which I framed to guard against a possible piece of violence by Ul Quorn. You will see that fate must work in all universes, and that in this case fate directs us to trust each other.”
He held out a hand, like an Earthman.
“My name is Lai Thar, the brother of Thai Thar. Let’s be friends and allies. Follow me.”
Chapter 11: Oog on the Asteroid
LITTLE Oog, the meteor-mimic, was alone and miserable.
Only the news that Luna and all that satellite contained and recalled and stood for could have made Otho forget his tiny pet. But it had turned out that way. When Joan brought the news of the unthinkable vanishment, the Futuremen had trooped to the Comet’s telaudio for their own eyes to be convinced.
Then, with the grim knowledge that seconds would count in this new adventure, they had sailed away. And Oog, who had been mimicking a bit of sad-colored stone on the floor of their grotto, was left behind on Asteroid No. 697
His little mind, simple and material but shrewd, was almost as keen as Otho boasted. He could, and did, realize that he was forgotten and abandoned. He was full of woe. Turning back into a doughy little toddler of a beast, he made sad grimaces and trotted here and there in search of his friends.
He found the remains of Captain Future’s sandwich, and momentarily turned himself into a doll-like figure of the Futuremen’s chief. Sniffing around the place where Otho had lolled, he remolded his molecules into a slender, high-craniumed figurine of the android. Finally he went to where the Comet had lain careened, and changed himself into a miniature image of that.
Oog’s hyper-adaptable species runs rather to physical changes, but change in the brain stuff can take place. It was true, as Otho had said, that the meteor-mimic’s mind was able to appreciate some aspects of human affairs. When Oog became himself once more, he sighed almost like a lonesome child.
Scant hours had passed since he had been deserted on Asteroid No. 697 — hours that had been crammed with danger and adventure for the Futuremen, with loneliness and depression for little Oog. He waddled here and there about the tiny world, nosing and sniffing the tracks of his friends, which grew fainter in impress and odor as time went by. His brain grappled with the future, that most difficult of things to comprehend. If he was indeed marooned here, he would live alone, unseen of any other living thing, but he would never forget Otho who had loved him and forgotten him. He turned again into a miniature Otho.
“Ghosts of Ganymede!” half-choked a rough voice in the brush. “Look there, on the ground!”
Still mimicking Otho, Oog looked up. A burly Earthman in unkempt space-suit had come into the open and now stared at him with bloodshot eyes that seemed ready to spring from their sockets.
A moment later, the Earthman turned his head away.
“Don’t let me look — don’t let me look!” he quavered. “It’s that double-power Venusian liquor. No Earthman ought to touch it!”
Oog’s impulse for hiding caused him to change at once into a replica of a grassy clod. As he did so, another figure emerged. A Martian this time, rather slackly handsome and high-skulled, with on his wrist the scar that could come only from radio-manacles — bonds of the incorrigible criminal.
“I don’t see anything, you fool! What scared you?”
Without daring to look, the Earthman pointed to where Otho was. The Martian followed the gesture with his eyes, sneered, and turned his back.
“Nothing there,” he said.
With both strangers facing away, Oog turned back into a little Otho. At this moment the Earthman plucked up courage to steal another look. He howled as if caught in a blister-ray.
“I see it again!” he cried, and clapped his hands over his eyes.
The Martian also looked, but Oog was the clod again. The Martian laughed aloud.
“You’d better lay off mixing your planetary drinks hereafter,” he advised. “Now pay attention to me. We’re to make this place ready for Ul Quorn’s invasion, like on the Moon.”
“I only half-understood what’s up,” grumbled the Earthman. “Why can’t he do as he did with the Moon, and gobble it right out of the Solar System?”
“Because he needs an asteroid out of that other dimension to bring here and fit into and around and over this one,” the Martian said, in an impatient tone that suggested he was tired of explaining to his more obtuse companion. “Those pale people are jockeying one into position — loads of fuel and machinery go into a space-operation of that sort — but we have to keep guard here to make sure that nobody is on the lookout. The Futuremen have been meddling around here, it’s one of the few habitable asteroids, you know.”
THE Earthman grimaced.
“The Futuremen are all prisoners, I hear,” he said. He sat down, close to Oog’s position. At his hip, within a foot of Oog, hung a holster with an atomic pistol.
The Martian went into an explanation of how Ul Quorn had communicated, by secret radio, with members of his old crime group who would do key assignments to prepare for the invasion. The trans-dimensional seizure of the asteroid had a twofold purpose, as he explained — to experiment on a small scale with machinery that later might operate against even major planets, and to seize a base at a convenient point from which to observe and move anywhere against the Solar System.
His companion asked for many explanations of astronomy, dimension-engineering and general strategy, and both were too busy to dream of what a creature like Oog might be doing.
Oog half-forgot his forlorn position at sight of the big pistol.
He was fascinated by such things, but the Futuremen took pains to keep them out of his way. Now he became Otho again, and stealthily drew near, hoisting the weapon from its holster with an effort. It was too heavy for him to examine easily, and he dropped it. A whim made him scramble into the holster, and then to become an image of the pistol.
“All I get out of it,” the Earthman was saying, “is that some sort of bad-dream people are coming from another dimension to this one, and that Ul Quorn, being hated and hunted through the Solar System, figures to profit by helping them. He’s making sort of dimensional stepping-stones at the Moon and here, and later maybe on Jupiter and Uranus. His friends are a little sick when the light shines on them, so he wants Solar System lieutenants, like us, to do the spade-work.”
“That’s it, in a nutshell,” said the Martian. “I refer to the thick shell of that nut you call a head.”
“Will you stop those insults,” grumbled the Earthman, getting up, “or I’ll —”
“You’ll consider yourselves under arrest,” said a voice that both men knew, and the Pseudo-Otho, too.
Captain Future came forward out of the undergrowth.
They stared. “How did you get here?” gasped the Earthman.
“Out of Dimension X, one jump ahead of that little world that’s supposed to come and coincide with this one,” said Captain Future. “You’re both my prisoners. You’ll come back to New York, in your own ship, and you’ll tell us some things we want to know about Ul Quorn’s plans.”
The Martian had drawn his gun. Its spitting blast would have been fatal to anyone less poised and sudden and lightning-swift than Captain Future. But the big red-haired figure moved aside, a fraction out of line of fire, and sparks flew up in a harmless little volcano among broad-leaved plants.
Coming in around and under the gun-muzzle, as a clever boxer avoids his opponent’s jab and gets inside it, Future struck once with his fist. The Martian, his head almost torn off by the blow, whirled backward clear off his feet for half a dozen paces and fell in a silent heap.
The lesser gravity of the asteroid had made that flight through air possible. In falling senseless, the Martian took his gun with him. Future leaped after him to secure it.
“No you don’t!” bawled the Earthman, his hand at his own holster.
He whipped out what he found there — and howled in abject terror.
The gun had turned once more into a little Otho figure, kicking and writhing in his grasp.
“It isn’t liquor — it’s real!” he wailed, and dropped to his knees.
Oog, still as Otho, twisted free and ran to where the fallen gun lay. With an effort he pulled it up and stood pointing it like a tiny cannoneer. But the Earthman needed, not that threat, nor the motion of Captain Future, who by now had the Martian’s weapon.
“I’ll talk, I’ll talk,” sobbed the hoarse voice. “I’ll do anything you say. But get me to a doctor who’ll fix me so I don’t see — and feel — things that aren’t there!”
Captain Future grinned briefly.
“Get on your feet,” he ordered. “Grab up this languid friend of yours and carry him to your ship.”
As the prisoner turned his back to obey, Future stooped and scooped Oog into his hand.
“Oog, I’m proud of you,” he whispered, “Otho and the others, when we get them free, will be proud of you, too. And the whole Solar System will be prouder still. Because I’ve started my counter-attack against Ul Quorn, and you’re helping me. But that’s nothing to how you’re going to help me from now on.”
Chapter 12: Space Ambush
THE two captives were not escorted to New York by Captain Future for — on the communication system of the space-craft he had seized — he managed to sort out a certain specific wave-length, and upon it he got into touch with Ezra Gurney.
In a latitude just within the Martian orbit, from which all inhabited planets were remote and where no ships wandered, Future was met by his own Comet and a larger police cruiser — the one commanded by Gurney, the other by a junior officer named Elnisor, a Venusian chosen for courage, loyalty and ability to keep secrets.
The three craft lay to in emptiness, and Gurney and Elnisor came aboard to interview Captain Future. The big, powerful redhead lounged by his idled controls, with Oog cuddled in the hollow of his arm. The meteor-mimic greeted the visitors by impersonating first Gurney, then Elnisor, then one of the two melancholy prisoners who sat bound in a corner.
“Glad to see you, Ezra,” greeted Captain Future. “I’ve been far away, but I never doubted that we’d meet again. You brought what I told you?”
“Everything,” said the old marshal, his bright eyes inquisitive in his hard-lined face. “Supplies and equipment aboard the Comet, and men, the best and closest-mouthed on call, aboard the auxiliary cruiser. But what’s it about? Who are these specimens you have all tied up?”
“Two items for our collection of jailbirds,” replied Curt. “They were planted for a reception committee to help Ul Quorn’s invasion strike home on Asteroid Six-Ninety-Seven. I gathered them in, with priceless help from little Oog here. They’ve talked some, and I’ll talk more in a moment. Meanwhile, we’re going to occupy that asteroid ourselves, and knock the invasion back down its own throat.”
“But how? And what? Who’s invading us? Where are they coming from?” Ezra Gurney had thought he was through being amazed at Captain Future, but now he fairly spluttered with mystified eagerness.
“Briefly, it’s like this,” began Captain Future.
“A whole system from many dimensions away — I call it Dimension X — wants to overrun us. Dimension X has a dying sun, and its race of struggling people lives on worlds that are dimmed and doomed. Their fight for life has taught them amazing things in the field of big-scale caloric engineering.
“They’ve activated the central substances of their planets to produce extra internal heat and power, and such sources give them the basis for dimension-shifting devices on a mighty scale. They managed to slide one world of theirs to a point in their space where it coincided with the position of Luna in ours — and, by partial shift to a between-dimensional point, gobbled Luna up. It’s a stepping stone between us and Dimension X, if you follow me.”
“I follow you, a long way off,” said Gurney, “They’ll tackle us from the Moon?”
“No. There’s only a small way to Dimension X there, and in any case they know that we’re at least partially on the defensive on Earth. The asteroid coup will give them a wider beach-head, and in a less suspected place.”
“Where does Ul Quorn come into this?” persisted Ezra.
“He came in by chance and cosmic bad luck. Remember when he seemed to burn into nothingness as his ship fell into the sun. But that ship was full of dimension-traveling mechanisms. The heat activated it beyond even his dreams, and he was flung into Dimension X.
“He got into trouble — trust Ul Quorn for that — and then he succeeded in lining up the greedy element to invade us — trust Ul Quorn for that, too. There’s an Overlord and a whole mob of would-be conquerors, who see their own salvation and that of their race in seizing our system and setting up a new life under a bright, warm sun.”
“But can they?” demanded Ezra Gurney. “If they can shift whole worlds across dimensions, they must be invincible.”
Curt shook his head.
“I don’t think they are. In the first place, we’re a tough race ourselves, on our home worlds. In the second, the very brightness of the sun will be agony to them. Even as undisputed masters, they’ll take much conditioning and modifying to stand the light and heat of Old Sol. To attack, they must come armored and shaded, attacking by night. In the third place, they’re not all conquest-mad.”
SUDDEN astonishment caused the mouth of the old marshal to drop open.
“Curt!” cried Ezra. “You’ve met, and made friends with some of them?”
“Fill in the gaps of that story while we work,” said old Ezra. “What do we do first?”
“These prisoners and this ship go back to New York,” replied Captain Future. “Glad you brought Elnisor. He’ll know enough to take them home without talking to anyone. The rest of us head for Asteroid Six-Ninety-Seven and prepare to meet the initial waves of the invasion.”
“Exactly,” agreed Curt. “But it’s a poor sort of tunnel that doesn’t run both ways. As a matter of fact, we’ll invade them.”
* * * * *
It later became a commonplace, in philosophizing on space-and-time relativities, to say that Dimension X’s invaders established their cosmic bridgehead on Asteroid No. 697 within one terrestrial hour, and that they lost that bridgehead by surprise counter-attack within ten terrestrial seconds.
The mechanism and operation that accomplished so great a hole between dimensions were not so freely to be discussed, for their principles remain locked in the secret archives of the Cosmic Science Department, in the Government Library at New York.