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

by Edmond Hamilton

  “Your health, gentlemen,” he announced, and drained the glass.

  “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it,” muttered a Venusian.

  Otho felt a queer glow inside him. It seemed that for once he had taken on something that was having effect on him. He found himself a little unsteady on his feet, for the first time in his life. But he also felt a sensation of extreme warmth and well-being.

  A quarter-hour later, after two more radium-chloride highballs, Otho was wobbling at the bar with his arm around the big Earthman’s neck. They and the other sailors were lustily but uncertainly rendering a space song, roaring out the choruses at the top of their voices.

  A hand whirled Otho around. His misty vision discerned that it was old Ezra Gurney who stood there.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a space-struck kiwi!” swore Ezra. “We wait for you to come back with those sextants, an’ you’re here gettin’ crocked. It’s a good thing Simon sent me after you!”

  “Hello, Ezra, old pal!” cried Otho. “Have a radium-chloride highball with me. Bes’ drink in the universe!”

  “Radium chloride?” cried Ezra. “Holy sun-imps, is that what you’ve been drinking? You come with me!”

  He dragged Otho out, the android calling back farewells to the crowd. The cool night air cleared the mists from Otho’s brain as he and Oog followed Ezra back to the Planet Police station, and into the Comet. And he was normal enough to hang his head when Ezra told the Brain and Joan where he had been found.

  “You’ve disgraced yourself, Otho!” stormed the Brain. “Curtis and Grag may be in danger, and you delay our going after them by this idiocy.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Otho muttered. “But I didn’t dream the stuff would affect me like that, or I wouldn’t have touched it. I was just trying to show off by drinking it. I’ll never do it again.”

  It was a chastened and penitent Otho who helped the Brain make the finishing touches on the dual space sextant.

  “If everything’s ready, let’s start for that radite cavern at once,” begged Joan anxiously. “We don’t know what’s happened to Curt.”

  “We’re going to start — we’d have been gone a half hour ago if it hadn’t been for Otho,” rasped the Brain.

  OTHO meekly took the controls of the Comet, while the Brain poised beside the dimension-shifter.

  “I’m shifting right over into the co-existing universe now,” Simon called. “All clear on the sextants, Otho?”

  “All clear,” the android called back.

  “Stand by for a shock, then,” muttered the Brain. “Here goes.”

  Projecting a tractor-beam from his case, the Brain flung the switches. At once a terrific shock of force tingled through them all.

  Their senses cleared. The Comet was now floating in an empty abyss of space, with nothing in sight but distant, burning stars.

  “The other universe!” Ezra Gurney whispered awedly. “It don’t seem real!”

  “Start her moving, Otho,” ordered the Brain. “Bring us to position 16-443 — 57-398 — 135-40 on the sextants.”

  Otho obeyed. He sent the Comet flying through some few miles of space, then stopped it at the indicated position.

  “We’re now at a spot coincident with the radite cavern of our own universe,” announced the Brain. “I’m shifting back over.”

  Again they felt the terrific shock of the dimensional-thrust forces that hurled them back across the fifth-dimension gulf. Then they found the Comet poised inside a big, gloomy cavern.

  It was the radite cave, deep in Uranus in their own universe. They saw a foaming river rushing through the center of the cave, and beside the river a small collection of metal shacks among which krypton-lights were still burning.

  “That’ll be Quorn’s workshop!” the Brain exclaimed. “Head right down on it, Otho. Ezra, stand ready to use that proton cannon.”

  The Comet swooped down, ready for action. But the place appeared deserted. There was a big, empty ship cradle, but no one around it. Beyond it lay a small space ship.

  “Quorn’s gone!” rasped the Brain as they emerged from their craft. “We’re too late to stop his treasure expedition into the other universe!”

  “Isn’t that Quorn’s little ship over there?” Ezra demanded.

  “Yes, but that’s only the small ship stolen from Skal Kar, which he’s used up till now,” Simon retorted. “You can see that Quorn’s been building a bigger dimensional-ship here, as we figured he would.”

  “Look, there’s Grag and young Johnny!” cried Otho.

  Out of the little ship which they were discussing had emerged two figures — the great metal robot and the tough Earth youngster.

  “Where’s the chief?” Otho cried to the robot.

  “Gone into the other universe with Quorn’s men, disguised as one of them!” groaned Grag. He told of the hazardous journey of Captain Future and himself down through the caves, and of Curt’s stratagem. Grag continued, “Quorn’s big new ship, the Nova, took off and vanished into the other universe before I could run out from hiding! I’d have done something even though the chief had ordered me to stay hidden, but there wasn’t time. I’ve been inspecting Quorn’s older, small ship to see if Johnny and I couldn’t use it to follow into the other universe. But Quorn had taken the dimension-shifter out of it to put into the Nova.”

  “Curtis took a long chance, disguising himself as one of Quorn’s men,” muttered the Brain. “I don’t like it. The Magician of Mars would be hard to fool for long.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Joan cried anxiously. “Why don’t we get started into the other universe after them?”

  “I’ve heard of girls chasing after men,” drawled Ezra, “but I’ll bet you’re the first that ever pursued a man into another universe.”

  Joan paid no attention, in her anxiety and dismay. The Brain was speaking in his metallic, incisive voice.

  “We’ll have to stock the Comet with radite before we go. The fact that Quorn fueled his ship with radite argues that it is a vast distance in the other universe to the treasure. We’ll need super-power.”

  Grag and Otho labored intensively in the next hour, digging out masses of radite from the outcrop of blue shining mineral. Johnny Kirk valiantly toiled to help carry it into the Comet. Finally, the bins of the ship were crammed with the super-powered radioactive fuel.

  “All right, we’re starting,” declared the Brain as they gathered again inside the ship. “Stand by, everybody.”

  He operated the dimension-shifter. As its force hit them, they passed again through a brief interval of reeling darkness.

  Then, again, they found the Comet floating in the abysmal starry spaces of the co-existing universe. They stared at the distant, glowing stars that blazoned the firmament in an unfamiliar diadem. A dismaying fact was entering their minds forcefully.

  “Now that we’re in the other universe, we don’t know where to go to follow Quorn and the Chief!” blurted Otho.

  The crushing realization had borne home upon them that they had no idea where Ul Quorn and his band had gone in this vast and alien universe.

  Chapter 12: Incredible World

  CAPTAIN FUTURE realized his peril, as the World of Frozen Life began to revive around him. He was alone and without weapons, hopelessly marooned by Ul Quorn on this dangerous planet. And as it grew sunnier and warmer with the passing of the eclipse-night, all the weird creatures and plants around him were emerging from their frozen hibernation.

  Already the two enormous green reptilian monsters between whose frozen bodies Curt had hidden were stirring ominously. Hastily, he leaped out from between them. He darted back into the concealment of a thick grove of the green tendril-trees. The trees and the grass and moss beneath his feet were also regaining life and were no longer brittle and frozen.

  Curt Newton glimpsed the two eight-legged reptiles he had just fled from rising to their feet and yawning cavernously. To his great dismay, the scaly beasts began to snif
f around the ground.

  “Scented my trail!” Captain Future thought sinkingly. “And here they come!”

  The two crocodilian-headed monsters were lumbering rapidly forward, on his trail. They emitted a hissing, blood-chilling roar.

  Curt immediately leaped for a low branch of the towering tree under which he stood. Barely in time, he pulled himself up into its foliage. The two green monsters reached the spot where he had just stood, turned their ophidian eyes up at him. They snarled, showing appalling fangs.

  Curt looked around him. Frozen birds that had been perched amid the tendril-like foliage of the tree were now coming to life also, flying off with screaming cries. The whole uncanny forest of this strange planet was waking to life with an increasing clamor of cries.

  To add to Captain Future’s dismay, he discovered that he shared the tree with a giant climbing snake. Its — boa-like, oily black body had a dozen pairs of very short legs, and its head was round and bulldog-shaped. Its sluggish blood apparently made it slower to awake than most life here, for it was just beginning to writhe and stir on the branch opposite Curt where it had slept.

  “This tree is going to be a pretty crowded place in about five minutes,” Curt thought with grim humor.

  He looked sharply around. There was no other tree near enough for him to reach by jumping. The hissing, snarling green monsters below prevented escape by the ground.

  Hot white sunlight now flooded the whole weird forest. The black climbing-snake had opened filmy eyes, and was regarding Captain Future with an unwinking stare. Then the creature began to slide its massive, oily length across the tree toward him.

  “If I only had my proton pistol, or an atomic bomb,” Curt wished futilely. “A bomb? Say, that’s an idea!”

  He yanked out of his belt-kit the little fluoric hand-lamp he always carried there. Its current was produced by a tiny atomic battery. Curt began hastily working to “short” the battery.

  The climbing snake was now edging out his own limb toward him. The bulldog jaws of the creature were gaping in anticipation.

  Captain Future finished his hasty task. At the moment he “shorted” the tiny atomic battery, he flung it at the snake’s face. The battery exploded in a brilliant little flash of atomic energy.

  The climbing snake recoiled, scorched and terrified. It slid down the tree with frantic haste, and then ran away through the forest on its short legs. The green-scaled monsters below, also terrorized by the little atomic explosion, had already taken to their heels.

  CURT NEWTON dropped from the tree.

  “What a world!” he thought disgustedly. “And no way of getting away from it. No wonder Quorn figured that leaving me marooned here was as good as killing me.”

  He had seldom been in a more unpromising situation. He was a castaway on this wild, dangerous world of another universe. A fifth-dimensional gulf separated him implacably from his own universe. And Ul Quorn and his band had gone on to seek the treasure of this star.

  Curt Newton considered. There was no possible means of his getting away from this planet by his own efforts. Therefore, his only hope was to get someone here to take him away. And the one possibility in that direction was the Futuremen.

  “Before long,” Captain Future thought, “Simon and Otho will have equipped the Comet with a dimension-shifter. They’ll go first to the radite cavern. Grag and Johnny will tell them how I came into this universe with Ul Quorn’s band, and they’ll enter this universe after me.

  “But how the devil will they trail Quorn here?” Curt realized. “There’s a million stars in this alien universe — they won’t know to which one Quorn has come.”

  He frowned as he considered that problem. There was only one answer. He must somehow get a call to the Futuremen, tell them he was here.

  “And all I’ve got is my little pocket-televisor!” he thought hopelessly. “It wouldn’t reach a fraction of the billions of miles from here to the point where the Futuremen will enter this universe!”

  Curt looked up into the sky. Though the eclipse-night was passing, the brighter stars of the alien constellations still shone dimly. He knew just where in these alien heavens the Comet would enter this universe, when it came. He had, with his usual keenness of observation, mentally plotted the course followed in these skies by the Nova during its voyage.

  But that point where the Comet would enter this universe was billions of miles away. How was he possibly to get a call across that vast distance, with only his little pocket-televisor of limited range?

  His eye fell on the space-suit and two impellers which lay on the ground nearby. He had discarded them when he landed on this world. But now he saw possibilities in them, for they still contained some power.

  “I should be able to build a crude amplifier to step up the power of my televisor,” he thought. “But even so, it wouldn’t have nearly enough range to get across that distance.”

  Then Captain Future’s tanned face lighted up.

  “But say, if I could rig up a direction-cone and beam my call in a concentrated ray toward that point in space, it might reach! It’s worth trying, anyway!”

  The wizard of science at once began work on the task. He carried the space-suit and impellers into a little shadowy grove. Then he took from the flat pockets of his belt the array of tiny, compact tools and instruments that had helped him in more than one dilemma.

  FIRST, he dissembled the flat, oblong case of his pocket televisor. The visi-screen he tossed aside — he couldn’t waste power on that. The tiny tubes and coils, he considered doubtfully.

  “The power I’ll have to use may blow them instantly,” he thought. “Well, it’s worth trying.”

  Curt Newton took the receiver part of the little televisor and used its little coils and tubes, by adroit rewiring, to add to the power of the transmitter. Then he labored to hook up the atomic batteries in the two impellers, to act as auxiliaries to the tiny battery of the televisor.

  Finally, with his tools he made from the flexible metal of the space-suit a direction-cone such as was used for beam-casting. This he attached to his amplified transmitter. He carefully pointed the cone toward that section of the alien skies where the Comet would appear if it came.

  “Captain Future calling the Comet!” Curt spoke loudly into the transmitter. “I’m on the outermost planet of the double star at approximate direction from you of 25 — 122 — 89 degrees. My location on that planet is near equator on sunlit side. Look for my smoke signal.”

  Curt at once shut off his power. He had no means of knowing whether his beam had reached that distant spot in space. And even if it had, there was no certainty that the Comet was even in this universe.

  “Still, if the time table I figured out is right, they may be entering this universe in the Comet any hour now,” he thought. “I’ll just have to keep beaming my call as long as I can.”

  An hour later, he sent the call again. But as he was finishing his message, there was a sudden flash of light inside his televisor. The rubes and coils had fused into a smoking wreck.

  “That does it!” Captain Future exclaimed. “Too much power, and it blew the apparatus — I should have known it would. Now if neither of my calls got them, I am sunk!”

  THERE was no possibility of rebuilding the fused apparatus. So Curt busied himself in gathering dried branches and moss and building a large fire. Upon it he threw masses of green tendrils which sent a pillar of black smoke into the sunlight.

  The fire seemed to throw the fierce creatures of the planet into a panic. They bolted in all directions as the unfamiliar scent of the smoke reached them.

  “Well, even if nobody ever comes to see my smoke signal, it’ll give me a chance to get a little sleep,” Curt grinned.

  Calmly, he stretched out on the ground beside his smoking fire. In an instant he was asleep.

  He dreamed that the climbing snake had come back and had suddenly seized him. Then Curt awoke to sudden realization that he was no longer dreaming, that someth
ing had grabbed him.

  He exploded like an uncoiling spring, in the moment he awakened. His lunging movement brought him to his feet and sent stumbling backward the figure he had glimpsed bending over him. Then as Curt’s eyes cleared, he saw that it was Joan Randall he had thrust away. Beyond her, Otho and Grag and the Brain were approaching.

  “I like that!” pouted Joan injuredly from where she had fallen on the moss. “I come all the way into this other universe to follow you, and when I find you, what do you do? You push me on my face!”

  Captain Future laughed with relief as he picked her up and put her on her feet. He kissed her lightly.

  “Joan, I never was so glad to see you. Even though at first I thought you were a climbing snake.”

  “Now he calls me names!” Joan declared. But in her dark eyes glimmered dancing happiness.

  “Chief, we sure are glad to find you!” greeted Otho as the Futuremen came up. “We got your televisor call, though it was terribly weak. We came on and found this planet, and saw your smoke signal —”

  “And found you calmly sleeping, after all the worrying we’d done about you,” Joan concluded. “But where’s Ul Quorn?”

  “Gone on after the treasure,” Curt answered soberly. “We’ve got to get after him at once. Come on — I’ll tell you what happened once we start.”

  The Futuremen had landed the Comet in a nearby glade. Ezra Gurney and Johnny Kirk met Curt in the door of the ship. The tough Earth youngster’s face wore a beaming grin.

  “I knew there couldn’t ever anything happen to you, Captain Future!” Johnny declared. “I wasn’t worried about you like the others.”

  “Blast off, Grag,” Curt ordered the big robot, smiling at Johnny. “Head for the nearest of the other two planets. Quorn must have headed for one of those worlds after he left this one.”

  As the Comet tore up through the atmosphere of the World of Frozen Life, Captain Future told them rapidly of how Ul Quorn had detected his imposture.