Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Grag grunted scornfully.

  “I’ll bet it’s valuable! It’ll be like that new-fangled space-suit you invented, that we had to cut you out of.”

  “You just wait and see,” Otho promised mysteriously.

  Otho, third of the Futuremen, was a synthetic man, or android. His body was quite human in shape but was of rubbery white synthetic flesh. And though his hairless head was well-shaped with regular features, his slanted, mocking green eyes had depths of alien, ironical intelligence.

  Otho suddenly uttered a hissing cry of anger. A small, gray animal with sharp snout and beady little eyes had been sniffing at a metal cylinder among his materials while he was arguing.

  “Get away from my work, you cursed little pest!” swore Otho, cuffing the little beast aside.

  Grag snatched up the animal.

  “You cuff my Eek again and I’ll stretch your rubber neck from here back to the Sun!” he threatened Otho.

  “He was going to eat one of my metal pieces!” raged the android. “If ever I get that nasty little pet of yours alone —”

  Eek, the guilty little animal, cringed on Greg’s shoulder. The little beast was a moon-pup, a species of non-breathing, telepathic animals that ate metals and minerals. Grag had adopted him as a pet, but Otho hated his insides.

  “I’ll bet he’s been chewing at this cylinder,” Otho exclaimed, anxiously picking up the metal part at which Eek had been sniffing.

  Then an astonishing thing happened. The metal cylinder changed shape in Otho’s hands. It squirmed and flowed and shifted shape and color and was suddenly a fat, doughy little animal with short, thick legs and big, solemn eyes.

  It was Oog, Otho’s own pet. Oog was a meteor-mimic, from a genus of animals on a distant asteroid which had the power of shifting the cells of their bodies at will to imitate any object or animal.

  Curt burst into laughter.

  “It’s your own little mutt, Otho,” he chuckled.

  “Cursed if it isn’t,” swore Otho. “Oog, you know better than this.”

  “Now get back and check those eyes, before I heave you and Grag and your whole menagerie out of the ship,” Curt threatened.

  Otho put away his mysterious work and hastened back to the cyc-room in the stern. Quickly he returned to report the eyes all in order.

  “All right, here’s where we eat dust,” Captain Future remarked.

  He shifted the space-stick to the right. Now, instead of skirting the edge of the great black cloud, they were at once in the strangling darkness. But Curt snicked on the powerful infra-red searchlights, and these cut a dim path through the dust. His foot resting lightly on the cyc-pedal, Curt eased the ship further inward.

  They cruised slowly through the dust for several hours. By gravitometer and meteorometer readings, Curt located the few solid bodies in the cloud. They proved to be lifeless, barren rock masses of asteroid size.

  “Not much in here really worth inspecting,” Curt Newton admitted.

  “Something’s coming up behind us!” Grag yelled. “There it comes — looks like a red-hot meteor bearing down on us!”

  Curt turned swiftly, glimpsed the burning red speck rushing upon them from behind. Hastily he jammed the cyc-pedal down and flung the space-stick over. The Comet veered away with a roar of rocket-tubes. But the plunging red speck instantly veered its course also, to follow them.

  “Friends of Pluto, the thing’s following us!” Otho hissed.

  “Hold it!” Curt exclaimed suddenly. “That’s no meteor. It’s the torpedo signal! We’re needed at Earth!”

  It was the red torpedo that President Carthew had launched from Earth. Propelled by its super-powerful charge, it had plunged into outer space at a speed almost that of light. It had followed an invisible beam straight to the Comet, veering aside only when its automatic steering-mechanism operated to make it avoid space ships or meteors in its path.

  Now it was automatically circling the ship of the Futuremen. Even through the cosmic dust, the torpedo blazed its red summons. It had been made to emit infra-red light capable of penetrating any obscurity.

  CAPTAIN FUTURE’S gray eyes flashed.

  “Something’s up back there at Earth, boys! We’re blasting back right now.”

  A tension had gripped them all. The Futuremen fully realized the significance of that urgent summons. Curt rapidly drove the Comet back out of the cosmic cloud. Then he really opened her up. With all the power of its nine mighty cyclotrons pouring from its tail-tubes, the little ship screamed Sunward.

  Within a time that seemed incredibly short, the ship was roaring down toward the great greenish sphere of Earth. Curt Newton glanced toward the silvery, barren globe of the Moon as they raced down past it.

  “Can’t take time now to stop,” he muttered, referring to their home.

  He had already flashed a televisor message ahead to inform of the time of his arrival. Precisely on schedule, the little ship was diving across the daylight side of Earth toward sunlit New York.

  Curt Newton’s keen eyes discerned the gleaming spire of Government Tower soaring above the streets and parks of the metropolis. He sent the Comet rushing down toward the little square deck atop the tower at suicidal velocity. Then, with a blast of the brake-tubes, they landed.

  “Come on!” he told the others, opening the airlock door. “They’re waiting for us.”

  The Futuremen made a weird quartet as they emerged down the stairway into the President’s office. James Carthew sprang to his feet. Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney and Commander Halk Anders came forward eagerly.

  Captain Future’s gray eyes swept them.

  “Looks like everyone’s here tonight. Must be something big in the wind.”

  “Something big is right, blast it!” swore Halk Anders.

  “Now, quiet down, Halk,” drawled Ezra. “Halk’s a little excited, Cap’n Future. But he’s got plenty of reason to be.”

  “I’ll say he has!” Joan Randall cried tensely to Curt. “We’ve really got our hands full this time.”

  “Oh, we have, do we?” Curt repeated dryly. “You’ve already figured out that I’m going to need your invaluable assistance, have you?”

  “Sure I have,” retorted Joan calmly. “This’ll give me a swell chance to use my seductive feminine wiles on you, you big mug.”

  Ezra Gurney chuckled.

  “She ain’t entirely foolin’, Cap’n Future.”

  “It’s excitement she’s crazy about, and not me,” scoffed Curt Newton. He looked at the President. “Just what is it that’s happened?”

  “Ul Quorn is out,” said James Carthew gravely.

  There was a dead silence. Captain Future’s good-humored, handsome face suddenly froze. It became dark and grim as he heard the name of his great enemy.

  “Quorn escaped?” gasped Otho. “Devils of space, then we will have our hands full!”

  “An’ that ain’t all,” drawled Ezra Gurney. “He took out with him a dozen of the most dangerous prisoners on Cerberus.”

  “How did they escape?” Captain Future demanded rapidly.

  “Captain Future, we don’t know,” confessed Halk Anders. “Quorn got the others out of their cells somehow. A little ship suddenly appeared in the prison court. They piled in it, and then that ship disappeared.”

  “You — mean, the ship escaped by becoming invisible?” Curt asked.

  “No, it didn’t just become invisible — it just wasn’t there any more!” insisted the Commander. “Patrol cruisers were right on top of it when it vanished. They tore the air to ribbons with their blasts, but they didn’t get that ship. It was simply gone into nothingness!”

  “That is unexplainable,” Captain Future muttered. “Unless Quorn used some totally new scientific principle —”

  “Maybe he learned the accelerator-secret that Gray Garson used in his space-ship hijackings?” Joan Randall suggested.

  “No, he couldn’t have,” Curt bleakly answered. “When we sent Garson to prison, we used
my ‘mental eraser’ device to make him lose all memory of the accelerator-secret.”

  HALK ANDERS went on to tell of the raids by Ul Quorn’s band on the Pluto laboratory and the Neptunian research-station.

  “And his latest feat was to hold up the freighter Eros off Saturn and rob it of atomic tools,” the Commander concluded. “With that vanishing ship of his, he’s just laughed at the Patrol’s efforts to catch him.”

  “That’s why it was decided to call you, Captain Future,” James Carthew said. “We’re afraid that these preparations of Quorn portend some big coup on his part.”

  “There’s no doubt of it,” agreed Captain Future. “Quorn is no petty criminal, whatever else he is. He’s got something big planned.”

  Halk Anders faced Curt. “The captain of the Eros, the ship that Quorn held up and robbed, landed in New York yesterday. He says that Ul Quorn gave him a message for you, Captain Future.”

  Curt stiffened.

  “A message for me from Quorn? Where is the man?”

  “I can call him in a few minutes,” the Commander answered. “He said he’d be waiting near here.”

  A few moments later the Commander returned to the office with a stiffly striding old spaceman whose bald head and face were deeply bronzed.

  “This is Captain James Willis of the Eros,” he said.

  Ezra Gurney strode forward.

  “Jimmy Willis! I haven’t seen you since we were space-lads together!” the old marshal exclaimed delightedly.

  Captain Willis stared a moment at the old marshal, and then held out his hand.

  “Oh, Ezra Gurney,” he said. “Glad to see you, Ezra.”

  Curt Newton stepped forward.

  “I’m Captain Future. How is it that Ul Quorn came to give you a message for me?”

  Captain Willis explained in a slow, deep voice.

  “My freighter was two million miles off Saturn, bound for Neptune with a cargo of atomic machine tools to be used in undersea-ship construction. Quorn’s little ship suddenly appeared in space beside us. They had a couple of heavy atom-guns trained on us. We were unarmed and couldn’t resist.

  “Quorn made me come aboard his craft as a hostage,” Captain Willis continued. “He sent his men into my freighter to rob it of part of our cargo of machine tools. Then, when he had what, he wanted, Quorn let me go back to my ship. But first he gave me a message that he said I was to deliver to Captain Future when I got back to Earth.”

  “What was Quorn’s message?” Curt Newton demanded grimly.

  Captain Willis fumbled in the pocket of his space-jacket.

  “It was this,” he said.

  And the freighter-captain drew an atom pistol from his pocket and fired it pointblank at Captain Future!

  Chapter 4: Solar System University

  CURT NEWTON had moved swiftly a second before the freighter-captain drew the weapon. Curt had noticed something significant about the old spaceman’s appearance which warned him an instant before the deadly attack.

  Thus it was that when the crackling blast of atomic force from the pistol shot toward him, Captain Future was already lunging beneath it. It blazed past his red head. The next moment he was upon Willis. A quick wrench of the freighter-captain’s wrist sent the weapon from his hand.

  The others had been too stunned by the unexpected attack to move. But now, with a booming roar of rage, Grag leaped forward and pinioned Captain Willis inside his great metal arms.

  “He tried to kill you, Chief!” roared the robot. “I’ll break him into bits!”

  “No, wait!” Curt cried to Grag. “Hold him, but don’t hurt him!”

  Ezra Gurney uttered a dumfounded exclamation.

  “Devils of space, I can’t understand this! Jimmy Willis is one of my oldest space-pals. Why would he try to kill you?”

  “Ul Quorn bribed him to do this!” Joan cried, her eyes blazing.

  “No, not that,” declared Curt Newton. “This man isn’t responsible for his actions — he’s a mere tool of Quorn’s, operated by remote brain-control.”

  “Remote brain-control?” repeated Halk Anders bewilderedly. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s one of the pleasant little devices of the Magician of Mars,” Curt answered grimly. “A tiny instrument which, when it is imbedded in a man’s skull and attached to his brain’s nerve-centers, completely cuts out his own will and personality and makes him a mere automaton controlled from a distance by a similar instrument. The control is along an undimensional beam that operates almost instantaneously over any distance.”

  Curt pointed to a faint scar on the crown of the bald head of Captain Willis.

  “That’s where the control-instrument was implanted in his skull. This man is a mere automaton now. From somewhere in the System, Ul Quorn is at this moment seeing and hearing through this man’s eyes and ears.”

  “A trick of that devil Quorn to murder you, Chief!” Otho cried. “He must have planted the control in Willis’ skull when he had him as a hostage aboard his own ship, and then sent him here to get you!”

  Captain Future nodded calmly.

  “Undoubtedly he did. That’s why I was on guard when this man came in. It seemed strange to me that Ul Quorn would have allowed him to go free after the robbery of his ship. Quorn is ordinarily ruthless, as shown by the fact that he left no survivors after his Pluto and Neptune raids. I figured he had some hidden reason for letting Captain Willis go. And observing Willis closely, I noticed that he didn’t seem to know his friend Ezra Gurney. That made me remember Quorn’s brain-control device. I spotted the scar on his head just before he acted.”

  James Carthew, the President, had witnessed the astounding scene with unbelieving eyes. Now he spoke incredulously.

  “Then that man Quorn can at this moment see and hear us through the senses of Captain Willis?”

  “He can,” Curt Newton declared. “Ul Quorn’s will rules this man’s body from whatever place in the System that Quorn is lurking in at this moment.”

  Captain Willis spoke. His eyes stared straight into Captain Future’s face as his loud, deep voice sounded.

  “You’re right, Future,” he said. “This is Ul Quorn talking.”

  The President shivered.

  “Good God — this is uncanny!”

  Willis’ stiff lips moved again.

  “I knew you’d be called in against me, Future, so I laid this little plan. Neat, wasn’t it? It would have succeeded against any other man. I compliment you on your alertness.”

  Curt Newton spoke bleakly to Captain Willis.

  “Quorn, I know you can hear me through this man even though you’re millions of miles away. I warn you now — I’m not out to put you away in prison this time, but to destroy you. After your killings in those raids, there’ll be no quarter!”

  “No quarter suits me, Captain Future!” rang Willis’ hollow voice. “When I have accomplished what I intend to do, I’ll be able to hunt you and your precious Futuremen down and repay you for everything.”

  THE scene was one of weird drama. Captain Future and his great antagonist, the Magician of Mars, facing each other in bitter challenge through the automaton-like form of the old space captain! Facing each other, even though at this very moment they were miles apart in the universe!

  “War to the death!” Quorn repeated in Willis’ voice. “And this time, Future, I’ll have a weapon that can crush even you!”

  Captain Willis suddenly went limp and fell in a senseless heap.

  “Ul Quorn has relaxed his control of the man,” Curt declared.

  “Can’t you take that hellish thing out of his skull?” Ezra Gurney asked anxiously. “Jimmy Willis is one of my oldest friends.”

  “It won’t be hard to remove the brain-control,” Captain Future answered. “Get the surgical kit from the Comet, Otho.”

  Otho was back in a moment with the instruments. The others witnessed the uncanny surgical skill of Captain Future as he deftly made an incision and removed
a tiny, button-like instrument from Willis’ head.

  “He’ll come back to consciousness as his normal self,” Curt promised as the unconscious space-captain was taken out. “Quorn’s strike at me missed. Though that devil will strike again as soon as possible.”

  Curt paced up and down the office, frowning.

  “We’ve got to find out the nature of Quorn’s vanishing ship, his power to disappear and reappear at will. Until we know how to combat that power, we can’t hope to meet Quorn on even terms.”

  He looked at Halk Anders.

  “Wasn’t there any clue at all as to how Quorn’s ship was able to vanish into nothingness?”

  The Commander hesitated. “We have something that might be a clue, Captain Future. Some weeks ago, a young Saturnian scientist named Skal Kar was mysteriously murdered. He had a secret laboratory on Ariel, the inmost moon of Uranus. One night he brought to his laboratory a Martian girl with whom he’d become infatuated. He took her into the building. A little later, the guards outside heard a disturbance. They forced their way into the laboratory. They found Skal Kar murdered — and the Martian girl had vanished into nothingness!

  “She vanished from that building, just as Quorn’s ship is able to vanish,” Anders continued. “We’ve not been able to find her. But we’ve suspected there might be a connection with Quorn’s escape from Cerberus. For the Martian girl answers the description of — N’Rala.”

  “N’Rala — Quorn’s sweetheart?” exclaimed Curt. His gray eyes narrowed. From Otho and Grag came exclamations of surprise.

  They had good reason to remember Ul Quorn’s wicked Martian sweetheart, from the previous epic struggle between Curt and Quorn.

  “I thought that that girl was still in prison,” rasped the Brain.

  “No, she was released a few months ago,” informed Halk Anders. “She got a light sentence in Mars prison, at the time you rounded up Quorn’s accomplices in the Space-stones case. She pleaded that she’d only been an innocent tool of Quorn, that he’d hypnotized her.”

  Joan Randall sniffed.