“But we haven’t even got the tools and substances to try that,” Otho burst out. “And we can’t get them from any place.”
“There are enough non-metallic tools in the Comet to give us a fighting chance,” Captain Future reminded. “Grag and Simon will be hovering over Styx’ atmosphere, for I told them to stay there and warn off all approaching ships. If we could get into communication with them and have them drop the things we need without entering the atmosphere.”
“Sure, all we have to do is to build a telaudio transmitter,” Otho retorted. “It’s easy, without metal. I’ll dream one up right way.”
“Not a telaudio, a heliograph,” Curt Newton said. “It’s not always misty in the day. A big enough heliograph would flash reflected sunlight brightly enough to be seen by Grag and Simon.”
Hope dawned on Otho’s face for the first time. “Chief, I didn’t think of that.”
“We’ll start to work on it at once,” Curt Newton said. “The Stygians will give us the glass and other materials for it, when they understand we want to communicate with our friends. We’ve got to have the thing ready to use tomorrow. We may have little enough time in which to work!”
Dawn found the work of constructing the heliograph going forward by torchlight in the open plaza of the city. Curt Newton and Otho had got Lo Quior and Jim Willard, with other of the telepicture technicians to help them. A number of Stygians watched their labors curiously.
Captain Future’s improvised heliograph consisted of a wooden frame twenty feet square, to which were attached a number of parallel wooden axles that each bore an oblong section of glittering glass. These shutters would reflect the sunlight brilliantly when they were closed.
“We need to rig a single control for all the shutters, so that we can send sharp code-flashes,” Curt Newton explained.
A kuru came galloping through the dawn-misty streets of Dzong and was pulled up beside them. Th’ Thaan hastily dismounted.
“Someone is coming from Planet Town,” the Stygian reported. “Our sentries on the wall have just told me.”
Captain Future stiffened. “Is that devil Su Thuar starting already?” They hastened to the wall. Out on the foggy plain, a single man was approaching the city in an uncertain, staggering run.
“Why, it’s Jon Valdane, alone,” Joan Randall exclaimed in amazement.
CURT NEWTON’S face hardened. “Then it must be a trick of some kind. Keep your eyes open.”
Valdane staggered up to the gate and beat upon it.
“Let me in!” he wailed.
“I can’t see anybody else coming,” Newton declared. “Keep watch while I open the gate.”
Jon Valdane tottered inside and collapsed in a limp heap when the gates were opened. The chubby financier was a pitiful sight. His sagging face bore the livid red weal of a recent blow, and he was gasping wildly for breath. His clothes were stained and torn.
“Why did you come here?” Curt snapped. “Did Su Thuar send you here as a spy?”
Valdane looked up with wild eyes.
“Su Thuar is a devil from the pit!” he croaked. “He told me that since we’re all prisoners for life on Styx, my wealth and my pay meant nothing more to him. He treated me like a servant. He struck me when I objected.”
Captain Future looked down at him grimly. “Your greedy plot ruined this world, Valdane. Now it’s recoiled on yourself. That’s only justice. You can’t stay here. Go back to your friends.”
“No, don’t send me back to those devils,” Valdane pleaded. He clutched Newton’s arm. “Let me stay, and I’ll tell you what they’re planning.
Joan Randall’s fine eyes showed pity. “Let him stay, Curt.”
“We ought to wring his neck,” Otho declared disgustedly.
“You can remain here but it’ll be to face trial on Earth if we ever get back there,” Captain Future told the shattered man. “Now, what is Su Thuar planning?”
“He’s going to lead those brutes in Planet Town here and take the city away from the Stygians,” Valdane babbled. “Now that Planet Town is in ruins, they say they’ll live in this unharmed city and use the Stygians as their slaves. Su Thuar is their undisputed leader now.”
“When are they going to attack us?” Curt Newton asked quickly.
“As soon as they can prepare weapons,” Valdane said in husky tones. “Su Thuar has already got them to work making more blow-guns and stone clubs.”
Curt Newton’s heart sank. When that attack by the brutal mob of the interplanetary town came, he would have to meet it with only a handful of men. The Stygians’ creed would prevent them from resisting by physical violence. And if the attack succeeded, Su Thuar would be master of this moon and everyone upon it.
Chapter 17: Attacked
SILENTLY Captain Future fought down the despairing foreboding that had gripped him. His red head raised indomitably, and his voice rang.
“That means Su Thuar and his band will be here tomorrow or the next day. Very well, we’ll get ready for them.”
“What can we do?” Ezra Gurney muttered hopelessly. “We ain’t got time now for you to rig this blight-destroyer you were planning.”
“I’m going ahead with that,” Newton declared. “It’s our one best chance of escape, if we can contrive to build it. Meanwhile, Ezra, you and Jim Willard start preparing weapons. Make swords of tough glass.”
He looked at Th’ Thaan, the Stygian. “Can’t the Stygians forget your pacifistic creed and fight? It’s that, or slavery for you.”
For a moment Th’ Thaan seemed tortured by deep doubts. “It is forbidden for us kill,” he said at last. “We can resist only with our powers of illusion.”
Ezra Gurney and the young assistant director began feverishly to superintend preparation of long, keen glass swords and knives with which to arm their party. The Stygians made no objection to their work.
Meanwhile, as full daylight came, Captain Future and Otho waited for the mists to clear so that they could use their heliograph. As the morning advanced, the mists did not clear. The fog might not clear for days, Curt Newton knew. He waited with agonizing uncertainty.
A slight wind was blowing. The great bank of fog was moving, but had not thinned out. Then, before noon, it began to clear.
“It’s lifting,” Otho exclaimed. “Now’s our chance.”
Captain Future stood ready at the lever of the big, rude heliograph. Finally, the mists were gone. The small, distant Sun shone from the dusky sky.
Somewhere up in that shadowy sky, the Comet was hovering outside Styx’ atmosphere. Curt Newton was banking on his knowledge of Simon Wright and Grag that they would be keeping anxious telescopic watch on this part of Styx.
He closed the mirror-covered shutters of the heliograph. The glittering glass surface brilliantly reflected the pale sunlight into the sky. Newton rapidly opened and closed the shutters, in long and short flashes that spelled out a message in the standard interplanetary code.
“Calling the Comet!” he signaled swiftly. “Stand by and do not enter atmosphere. But drop the following materials and tools to us, here in Dzong —”
He listed their requirements, from his knowledge of what the Comet’s equipment could provide.
“Hurry up,” Otho warned. “The mist’s thickening again.”
Curt Newton hastily finished the message, as another bank of fog came drifting across the heavens.
“They’ll soon drop the stuff, if they saw our flashes,” he said tautly. “Now all we can do is to wait, hoping the message was seen.”
Twenty minutes later, he and the other anxious watchers saw a white parachute floating down from the misty heavens nearby.
“Good old Simon and Grag — they saw!” exulted Otho.
When they got to where the improvised parachute lay, they found it attached to a bundle that contained the non-metallic instruments, materials and chemicals for which Captain Future had asked.
There was also a brief note from Simon Wright.
“The whole System is stunned by the disaster to Styx,” it read. “A full squadron of Planet Patrol cruisers has arrived, but I have prevented them from entering the Stygian atmosphere by my warning. We are waiting, and will be watching.”
“This stuff gives us a fighting chance, at any rate,” Captain Future declared, eagerly.
“A chance that’s cursed slim, when it depends on building a completely nonmetallic electric machine in a day or two,” Otho muttered.
Yet Otho plunged into the labor with the same unremitting zeal as Curt Newton himself. Joan Randall joined them in the work, as did Lo Quior, the little Martian telepicture technician. Their workshop was in the big council-hall itself.
Madly impossible task it seemed, indeed, to build a complicated electric generator and projector without the use of metal. Yet Captain Future’s energy and genius drove the work forward despite all difficulties.
THE source of electric power did not present so many obstacles. A series of powerful Sanderson chemical batteries were soon constructed, using glass tanks and the chemicals which had been dropped from the Comet.
The coils and tubes of the hard-radiation generator were the great problem, since they had no wire. Curt Newton planned to use carbon for the filaments of his coils and valves, though its mediocre conductivity would make the generator one of comparatively low efficiency.
“The point is, to destroy the blight in a small area at least,” Captain Future declared. “Then ships can land safely in that area, bringing equipment with which to construct a bigger, efficient generator.”
He and Otho made their coil-forms of glass. Upon these forms they toilsomely wound their coils, using cord of twisted moss-fibers instead of wire.
“How in space can that moss-cord replace metal wire?” Ezra Gurney demanded skeptically.
“It will work, though the efficiency will be poor,” Newton insisted. “I made preliminary tests of the fiber, and it’s the best material available for our purpose.”
When the coils were completely wound, they were subjected to carefully-controlled heat in an improvised oven. The high degree of heat slowly carbonized the fibers, burning away impurities.
Curt Newton inspected the coils after the baking. They were now of brittle, delicate carbon wiring, whose large diameter partly made up for its indifferent conductivity.
“Now the tubes,” he exclaimed. “Otho, while I’m working on that you bake out the carbon rods we’ll need for our connections.”
Night had come. They were working now by torchlight. The Stygians watched their labors wonderingly, thinking that it was part of their effort to communicate with their ship. Curt Newton did not undeceive them.
Ezra Gurney and Jim Willard returned from a reconnoitering expedition out in the darkness. They reported no sign yet of attackers.
“But they’ll come soon, I’m thinkin’,” muttered the old veteran. “What I’d give for a couple of atom-guns when they do come.”
Dawn found Captain Future reeling with fatigue. He had not slept for two nights, and even his iron frame felt leaden from weariness.
But he insisted on driving the work ahead. Their motor-generator was completely finished, though the radiation projector was not. He tested the generator, closing the circuit of rigid carbon rods that connected it with the series of Sanderson batteries.
The rotor of the big, crude motor turned with shrieking noisiness upon its axles of toughened glass. But it delivered current from the attached generator-high voltage current to operate the projector.
“Turn it off,” Newton ordered. “That’s enough for a test-run. Those vibrations might shatter the carbon cells if it runs too long.”
He had improvised tubes with nonmetallic grids and filaments. These were a failure. He had to go to work on them again.
Then, in later afternoon, two Stygian scouts rode their kurus hastily through the mists into the city.
“The aliens of Planet Town are coming,” the scouts reported excitedly. “They are only a couple of miles away.”
“Ezra — Willard — Lewis — get our men on the walls and at the gate,” Curt Newton ordered. “I’m going on with this. Perhaps it will be possible to finish it before they get here. And if it works, and kills the blight in this area, the Comet and other ships can land.”
“What about Valdane?” asked Ezra grimly, jerking a thumb toward the chubby, terrified financier whom they had kept under guard with the other prisoner, Rosson.
“Leave him there,” said Newton. “He’d be no good as a hostage, for Su Thuar doesn’t care whether we kill him or not.”
Old Qu Lur and Th’ Thaan had gathered their Stygians. The moon-men all wore the strange telepathic lenses upon their foreheads.
“We will use our powers to the utmost to halt the attackers,” Qu Lur declared earnestly.
Curt Newton kept Otho with him, toiling with desperate haste in the fabrication of new tubes for the projector. Time was running out, now.
His hands trembled as they finally finished the task and inserted the new tubes in the apparatus. Again, he closed the circuit that sent the batteries’ current flowing into the makeshift mechanism.
The shrieking of the generator’s glass axles did not quite drown the slow, rising hum that came from the projector. Its radiating-sphere of carbon showed no change, and they felt nothing.
But Curt Newton knew that the mechanism was emitting hard radiation that was drenching the area for at least a dozen miles in every direction.
“Is it working?” Joan Randall whispered. “Is it killing the blight?”
“I don’t know yet,” he answered in taut tones. “It should work quickly, if at all.”
The shrieking, spinning rotors of the generator threatened to shatter their carbon coils at any moment. Curt Newton imprisoned a speck of the gray dust that still floated everywhere, and inspected it through his make-shift magnifier.
He uttered a hoarse cry of triumph. The gray spores were turning black. They were dying — killed by the radiation.
“It’s working,” he cried. “The blight in this area is destroyed, clear up to the limits of the atmosphere. The projector will keep any living spores from entering this area, so long as it continues to run.”
At that moment, there broke upon their ears a fierce, distant chorus of raging yells that came from the southern side of Dzong.
“Su Thuar’s band,” cried Joan Randall. “They’re here.”
“There’s still time enough,” Curt Newton answered feverishly, racing toward the door. “I can call the Comet to come, by the heliograph.”
Then, as he and Joan emerged from the tower in which he had built his projector, Curt Newton stopped, appalled.
He had forgotten one thing. He had forgotten the mist! The big, drifting bank that had shrouded Dzong all day still lay over it.
And while that mist veiled the city, he could not use the heliograph, could not flash his message to Simon Wright and Grag.
The bitter irony of it struck to Captain Future’s soul. He and the others had achieved the impossible, only to have their work made futile by mere mist.
Chapter 18: Last Stand
DEEP fog still hid the skies but, sooner or later Curt Newton knew the mist would pass. It would pass, in time — but time was what they would not have if Su Thuar’s forces won the city. That would end all hope, indeed.
“We’ve got to hold them off, till the mist clears and we can get a heliograph message through to the Comet!” Newton exclaimed.
He started forward with Otho on a run, toward the south wall of the city. Joan Randall started to accompany him, but he motioned her back.
“No, Joan! Somebody’s got to stay here by the heliograph, to send the message the moment the mist clears. And you’re the only one of these people who knows the message-code.”
She protested, but he was deaf to her objections as he and the android ran to join the other defenders.
“Just let me get my hands on that devil Su Thuar,” Otho was
swearing. “I wish to blazes we’d killed him that night on Saturn four year ago, when you shot it out with his brother.”
They climbed up to the south wall, upon whose parapet were Ezra Gurney and Jeff Lewis and young Jim Willard.
The Stygians were there too, ranged all along the wall, their faces turned toward the misty plain southward, each man wearing the telepathic lens upon his forehead.
“They’re comin’,” Ezra Gurney grimly told Captain Future. “Hear them?”
Out of the mist came again that chorus of ferocious yells. Then from the fog appeared the mass of hundreds of men, advancing rapidly.
Curt Newton recognized Su Thuar at their head. Behind the Venusian criminal followed the motley throng of interplanetary adventurers who, deeming themselves trapped forever on Styx, were willing to follow their leader to conquer and enslave the Stygians.
“They’ve got plenty of those blowguns, as well as war-clubs,” Jim Willard explained. “Su Thuar hasn’t been idle.”
Old Qu Lur spoke from his station on the wall, to his rows of waiting Stygians.
“Now!”
Captain Future and the other watchers perceived then a sight that stunned them with wonder.
Out from the city Dzong there suddenly rushed a magically-materialized band of stalwart men in the gray uniform of the Planet Patrol. They charged the attackers, leveling their heavy atom-guns as they did so.
“The Patrol,” yelled a terrified Saturnian behind Su Thuar. “They’ve landed somehow. There they come.”
The whole mob halted in its tracks, wavered on the verge of flight. Curt Newton was breathless with hope.
But Su Thuar’s cunning and courage reversed the situation. The Venusian shouted to his followers. “Don’t be fools. It’s only one of the Furries’ illusion-tricks.” But the mob still held back. For now the advancing Patrol band was triggering its atom-guns, loosing brilliant bolts of energy toward them.
Su Thuar’s yell came clearly. “See that? Those atom-guns haven’t killed a one of us. They’re just illusion.”
Captain Future 16 - Magic Moon (Winter 1944) Page 14