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

by Edmond Hamilton

  “We’ll find out when we get to our base,” answered the voice of the fat Earthman, Lucas Brewer. “By taking at least a hostage back to Quorn, we’ll be able to placate that devil a little for our failure.”

  Indifferent to this peril, Johnny Kirk became drowsy from the close air and monotonous drone of the rocket-tubes. He did not know how much time had passed before he was aroused by the sound of Thikar’s bull voice.

  “The dual sextant shows we’re there, Xexel. Hold her steady while I shift back over.”

  Once more Johnny heard the penetrating vibration begin. He braced himself. And, as he expected, there came again the mysterious, rending shock of uncanny force which seemed to plunge him into a black abyss.

  His consciousness swam up out of the blackness a few moments later. Presently the locker door was unlocked and opened. Johnny Kirk, who had braced himself for this moment, plunged out like a mad wildcat. His small fists flailed right and left at the criminals. He beat a devil’s tattoo on the paunch of the Earthman before the hand of the towering Jovian grabbed his collar and shook him to a state of limpness.

  “Try that again and I’ll snap your neck,” roared Thikar.

  “Aw, go chase a meteor, you big greenie,” gasped Johnny, shaken but unterrified.

  They hauled him out of the ship. And Johnny Kirk momentarily forgot his belligerence in the amazement of the scene.

  The little ship was resting on the floor of a vast, semi-dark rocky cavern. It was an awesome natural chamber whose black rock walls towered sheer to a jagged roof two hundred feet overhead. The cavern was a half mile long, and almost that wide. Through it foamed a river that emerged from one end of the cavern and vanished into the other.

  A big mass of blue-shining mineral that cropped from the cavern wall shed a vague light that relieved the darkness. By the shore of the river, near the middle of the cavern, Johnny Kirk perceived a group of small metalloy buildings clustered around a long, looming framework of metal girders. Krypton-lights illuminated this queer little community.

  JOHNNY KIRK was thunderstruck. “How did they get the space ship into this cave? I must be dreamin’!”

  His captors led him toward the little group of portable metalloy shacks. His astonishment increased as he saw that the big, long framework of metal girders cradled a new space ship under construction. It was several times larger than the little ship in which he had been brought here. A half dozen men under direction of a rugged, hard-featured Earthman were manipulating the marvelous atomic machine tools which automatically squeezed alloy bars into the exact shapes required by the construction of the ship.

  “Building a big space ship here in a cave!” Johnny muttered. “They sure are wacky. How’ll they ever get it out?”

  The portable metalloy shacks were supply shacks and barracks huts. As they approached, a man and girl came to meet them. Under the glow of krypton bulbs, the man seemed a slender, unimpressive figure. But when Johnny Kirk was hauled before him, the youngster quickly revised that opinion.

  This man, he saw, was a mixed breed. He wore a striped Martian turban and yellow-sleeved purple robe. There was something tigerish about his drowsy black eyes that chilled the tough Earth youngster.

  “Who is that you’ve brought, Thikar?” the Magician of Mars asked the giant Jovian, eying Johnny Kirk.

  Thikar shifted uneasily.

  “This brat was with the Futuremen on Ariel, Quorn. I wanted to blast him for spoiling our attempt to trap Future, but Lucas Brewer insisted on bringing him along to you.”

  A dangerous yellow spark glimmered back in the depths of Ul Quorn’s unfathomable eyes, but he spoke without change of expression.

  “Am I to understand,” Quorn purred, “that you failed to spring the trap on Future?”

  “It wasn’t our fault, Chief!” protested the big Jovian. “We hid in the jungle on Ariel near the stockade, just as you told us to do. And Captain Future came to investigate Skal Kar’s laboratory just as you figured he would. We’d have got his Comet and left him for the gas-beasts to finish, as you planned, if it hadn’t been for this brat.”

  Thikar told how Johnny Kirk had foiled their attempt to hijack the Comet.

  “We had to rocket out of there quick, Chief. The Earth-brat tried to stop us but I knocked him out and we brought him along.”

  LUCAS BREWER spoke hastily to Quorn.

  “I thought maybe the boy could tell us how much Future has learned.”

  Quorn’s black eyes suddenly had raging lightnings in them.

  “You stupid fools! I give you a perfect plan for getting rid of Future and you let the unexpected presence of a boy ruin it! You idiots can’t carry out the simplest orders to help me!”

  Thikar’s green face darkened with passion and his hand strayed toward the atom pistol at his belt.

  “Nobody can talk to me like that,” the big Jovian said thickly.

  Quorn’s black eyes narrowed to pinpoints and his own arm tensed clawlike above the pistol in his belt-holster.

  “Do you feel rebellious, Thikar?” he purred tigerishly. “Would you like to argue the matter with me? If so — go right ahead!”

  Johnny Kirk saw Thikar’s sullen eyes waver and drop before the deadly menace in the mixed breed’s face. The Jovian was outfaced.

  The girl beside Ul Quorn intervened. She was pure Martian in beauty, with midnight hair and slumbrous eyes and smooth red features of sultry loveliness. In her tight green bodice and slit skirt, she was lithe and quick as a sand-cat of her native world.

  “We’ll get nowhere by quarreling with each other,” she told Ul Quorn anxiously in her low, husky voice. “Wouldn’t it be better to find out what the boy actually can tell us about Captain Future’s plans?”

  Johnny Kirk saw a glint of yellow light that was pure hatred come into the dark eyes of the Martian beauty as she pronounced the name.

  “You’re right, N’Rala,” Ul Quorn told her somberly. He bent his gaze on Johnny. “Who are you, boy? What were you doing with Future?”

  Johnny bristled. “I’m one of Captain Future’s gang, see? If you think I’m going to tell you anything about him, you’re crazy. And when Captain Future catches up with you, it’ll be too bad for you!”

  UL QUORN stared at the belligerent youngster.

  “You’ve got a lot of faith in Future, haven’t you?”

  “Sure I have. He’s the greatest guy in the System,” shrilled Johnny. “The swellest fighter and the swellest scientist of them all.”

  To Johnny’s amazement, Quorn nodded slowly.

  “You’re not far wrong,” said the mixed breed thoughtfully. “There is nobody in the System to match Future in brilliance and audacity — except myself.”

  Quorn’s voice rang oddly sincere.

  “It’s too bad that two men like Future and me have to be enemies, that soon I shall have to kill the only man in the System I could accept as my equal.”

  N’Rala’s eyes flashed angry impatience.

  “One would think you had forgotten the feud between you and Future!”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten,” Quorn answered softly. “I’ve never forgotten that it was his Futuremen who killed my father. He and they must die for that, once we have the treasure and its power. But when I kill Future, I’ll be killing the only man in the System whom I really respect.”

  N’Rala and the others stared at the brooding mixed breed in wondering incomprehension. It was Thikar, the Jovian, who broke the silence.

  “If that brat won’t tell us anything, we might as well dispose of him now,” growled the big Jovian, nodding toward Johnny Kirk.

  Johnny clenched his small fists. He felt death close, but he was resolved not to show fear.

  “Come on, you guys, and try it!” he taunted.

  Ul Quorn, looking at him, smiled.

  “He has courage, and I like courage,” murmured the Magician of Mars. “And he might come in handy as a hostage. Lock him up in that empty supply shack for the time being.”r />
  Johnny Kirk was hauled away by the Jovian, and tossed unceremoniously into a small metal shack at one edge of the little community. As he picked himself up, he heard the door barred on the outside.

  “Big green mug!” he muttered wrathfully.

  The supply shack was one of portable type, but its metal walls were windowless. The floor was of the hard black rock.

  “Tough joint to crack,” Johnny Kirk told himself, frowning. “Still, I got something to work with.”

  He peered through the crack of the door. He could see a narrow sector of the dim-lit cavern. It included the other buildings and the half-completed space ship over which Quorn’s men were laboring with feverish haste.

  “Wonder where this cave is?” Johnny marveled. “It can’t be on that moon Ariel — maybe it’s on one of the other moons. And how in the devil did they get in here in that little space ship?” He shrugged, gave up speculation.

  His captors had searched Johnny. But they hadn’t found the thin, flat case he carried in his shirt. They had only slapped his pockets. The lad drew out the case. In it were a dozen fine steelite tools. It was the burglar kit he had won from the Martian burglar, in gambling.

  The tough youngster took a thin saw-blade and began passing it back and forth through the crack of the door, above the lower hinge. He meant to saw through the hinge, but the hard metal resisted.

  He sawed on, only stopping hours later when Thikar came and shoved a bowl of synthetic food in to him. After eating, Johnny slept for a time. He awoke to begin work again on the hinge. When he had it almost sawed through, he quit work on it and began on the upper hinge.

  He stopped again to eat and sleep. He had no notion of how much time had elapsed. Finally he had the top hinge nearly severed also. Johnny peered toward the other buildings. No one was close by, for all Quorn’s men seemed gathered around the big new space ship which seemed practically completed.

  Johnny hastily cut the last bit of the hinges away. He grabbed the door and slid it inward, and slipped out through the opening. At once, he darted along the dim cavern away from the lights of Quorn’s base.

  “Don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll find a way out of here somehow,” he told himself doggedly.

  He moved along the shore of the river that foamed through the dim cavern, picking his way hastily amid enormous black boulders. Suddenly in the semi-darkness there rose from behind a boulder an awesome, unhuman shape. Before Johnny Kirk could recoil from that vague figure, it had seized him.

  Chapter 8: People of Darkness

  UNDER the brilliant moons of Uranus, Captain Future and Grag flew northward to begin their hazardous attempt to reach the radite cavern. Their little borrowed Tark cruiser thrummed sturdily over the vast mountain ranges and awesome chasms.

  “We ought to see the Valley of Voices soon,” Curt Newton commented, peering ahead from the controls. “From what they told us, the entrance to the caves is near the western end of that valley.”

  “Cursed if I like meddling in caves,” grumbled Grag. “Remember the time we were trapped in that cavern on Neptune’s moon?”

  Curt chuckled. “I remember. You wore your finger-drills down to the bits cutting a way out.”

  “And anyway, this is all a gamble,” Grag went on. “We don’t know for sure that Quorn’s base is really down in that radite cavern.”

  “No, but everything points to it,” Captain Future defended. “And we’ve got to get that devil before he slips away into the other universe, Grag.”

  The robot clenched great metal fists.

  “If I get my hands on Ul Quorn he’ll never trouble us again!”

  They flew on above the unending peaks and ridges until Curt descried a moonlit gorge far ahead. It was of great depth, a sheer-walled valley between two towering ranges that ran roughly from east to west.

  It was the famous Valley of Voices. Curt Newton brought the little Tark down into it and came to a landing in a little plain near the western end of the valley. Captain Future slung around his shoulder the bulky instrument he had brought from Lulanee, followed Grag out of the ship.

  “So this is the Valley of Voices,” grunted Grag. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

  They looked along the great gorge at whose bottom they stood. It was deep shadow down here at the floor of the valley. They could only dimly see the grassy fields and shrubs around them, and the “floating flowers,” the unique flora of Uranus. Those large white blossoms drifted in the air like fairy blooms, drenching the soft night with fragrance.

  The moons gleamed off the upper walls of the valley. Those sheer cliffs were mantled with thin, glittering sheets of talc that had exuded from the rock.

  “I thought there were some wonderful echoes in this place,” Grag commented disappointedly. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “It’s only when the wind blows and strikes those hanging sheets of talc that you hear anything,” Curt told him. “Listen now!”

  The wind had begun to sigh through the valley as he spoke. And as it struck the thin, drum-like talc sheets on the cliffs, a dim babel of sounds began to strike their ears. They grew louder as the wind strengthened.

  Hundreds of voices speaking in many different planetary languages could be heard. Snarls of animals, the hoarse chattering of cliff-apes and screams of great thunder-hawks, and others added to the din. The roar of rocket-fliers echoed loudly. Crash of thunder and hiss of rain intensified the uproar that had now become almost deafening.

  “Melt me down!” swore Grag. “Talk about echoes — this place is a madhouse of them!”

  “Every sound that has been made in this valley for ages past is recorded by the peculiar crystalline substance of those talc-sheets,” Captain Future told him. “The wind striking the sheets releases every recorded sound, over and over again.”

  The wind died a little, and the uproar lessened as Captain Future and the towering robot trudged along the floor of the valley. Curt’s keen eyes soon spied the entrance to the labyrinth of caverns below.

  IT WAS a large, roughly circular aperture in the southern cliff, into which, poured a small stream. Curt Newton entered with intrepid step, and in a moment he and Grag stood in a smothering darkness. Curt took from his belt the small infra-red lamp he had brought and sent its ruddy beam quivering forward. It disclosed a gloomy natural tunnel winding down through the rock, with the stream flowing through it.

  “Depressing-looking place,” muttered Grag in dislike. “Dark as outer space.”

  “There’s a little light in the lower strata,” Captain Future told him. “The veins of radioactive mineral in the rock shed a certain amount of light.”

  Curt had opened the case of the instrument whose strap was slung around his shoulder. It was a radite-compass, used by Uranian prospectors. Its mechanism was sensitive to the emanations of radite, even at a great distance, and actuated a needle that pointed always to the emanations’ source.

  The needle pointed northeast and downward, showing that the radite cavern they sought was somewhere in that direction. Captain Future and his great comrade tramped on down the winding tunnel, their feet splashing in the stream that flowed through it.

  Presently the runnel debouched down into a vast cavern. It was feebly illuminated by the weak radiance of shining radioactive ores that rifted the roof and walls.

  “I can see pretty well here, Chief,” Grag announced.

  “That’s why I brought you instead of Otho. Your photoelectric eyes see better than his in semi-darkness,” Curt informed the robot.

  Grag seemed flattered.

  “Sure, that son of a rubber plant couldn’t see his hand in front of him here, I’ll bet.”

  Pleased with himself, Grag followed Curt along the eastern wall of the vast, dim cavern. White lichens towered about them like a grotesque forest. On the rock ledges above them he saw enormous bat-like creatures, their scaly white wings folded about them in sleep.

  Following the guidance of the radite-compass need
le, Captain Future entered the first tunnel that diverged northeastward. A larger underground stream ran through it, broiling downward. The two intrepid adventures pressed on.

  “How much farther do we have to go, Chief?” Grag demanded.

  “Plenty far,” was Curt’s unpromising answer. “The intensity gauge on the radite-compass shows the deposit is still a long way off. And moderate that bellowing voice of yours, will you?” he added warningly. “The People of Darkness range through all these caverns.”

  “The cave-people they warned us about?” Grag said. “Who’s afraid of them? They might have scared out other explorers, but not me.”

  The connecting caverns seemed endless as Curt and the robot penetrated ever deeper. Curt felt a gnawing anxiety that spurred him onward. The thought that even at this moment Ul Quorn and his band might finally be departing into the other universe was a deepening shadow of worry across his mind.

  He and Grag were moving down a dim chasm beside the waters of a racing little river, when Curt glimpsed something rushing toward them.

  “Cave-spider!” he yelled, and grabbed for his proton pistol.

  “Holy sun-imps!” gasped Grag.

  The thing charging toward them was an incredible monstrosity. Its huge, hairy white body was supported by eight-foot jointed, hairy limbs upon which it moved with blurring speed. Its saucer-like eyes glowed redly in its hideous face, beneath which great fanged jaws gaped widely.

  Captain Future aimed with deliberate care at the onrushing monster. The blue streak of his proton ray drove through the creature’s left eye. The giant thing threshed in a wild flurry of dying limbs.

  “It looks like something out of a bad dream!” Grag declared.

  “It’s the biggest cave-spider I’ve ever heard of, though I knew they grow big down here,” Curt admitted. He strode forward to the thing a little cautiously.

  The giant spider was already dead. But, bending over it, Curt discovered something that sent a new thrill of alarm through him. Imbedded in the hairy, hideous body of the cave-spider was a short metal spear.