Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940) (3 page)

In less than a minute, Corvo and his three men lay horribly dead, their skulls smashed to pulp by the robot’s metal fists, their necks broken by the android’s rubbery arms. Then Grag and Otho stood still, gazing around with blazing eyes.

“Set me down by your master and mistress!” ordered Simon Wright urgently. “They may still live!”

The robot put the Brain down by the two scorched forms. Wright’s lens-eyes rapidly surveyed the bodies.

“Newton is dead, but Elaine is not dead yet,” the Brain declared. “Lift her, Grag!”

With ponderous metal arms, the huge robot raised the dying girl to a sitting position. In a moment she opened her eyes. Wide, dark and filled with shadows, they looked at the Brain and robot and android.

“My — baby,” she whispered. “Bring me Curtis.”

It was Otho who sprang to obey. The android gently set the whimpering infant down beside her. The dying girl looked down at it tenderly, heartbreaking emotion in her fading eyes.

“I leave him to the care of you three, Simon,” she choked. “You are the only ones I can trust to rear him safely.”

“We’ll watch over little Curtis and protect him!” cried the Brain.

“Do not take him to Earth,” she whispered. “People there would take him away from you. They would say it is wrong to let a human child be reared by a brain and robot and android. Keep him here upon the moon, until he grows to manhood.”

“We will,” promised the Brain. “Grag and Otho and I will rear him here safely.”

“And when he is a man,” whispered Elaine, “tell him of his father and mother and how they died — how his parents were killed by those who wished to use the gifts of science for evil ends. Tell him to war always against those who would pervert science to sinister ambition.”

“I will tell him,” promised the Brain, and in its toneless metallic voice was a queer catch.

The girl’s hand moved feebly and touched the whimpering infant’s cheek. Into her dying eyes came a strange, far-seeing expression.

“I seem to see little Curtis a man,” she whispered, her eyes raptly brilliant. “A man such as the System has never known before — fighting against all enemies of humanity —”

SO ELAINE NEWTON died. And so her infant son was left in the lonely laboratory on the moon, with the Brain and the robot and the synthetic man.

Simon Wright and Grag and Otho kept their promise, in the years that followed. They reared little Curtis Newton to manhood, and the three unhuman tutors and guardians gave the growing boy such an education as no human had ever received before.

The Brain, with its unparalleled store of scientific knowledge, supervised the boy’s education. It was the Brain who instructed Curtis Newton in every branch of science, making him in a short period of years into a complete master of all technical knowledge. And together the bodiless Brain and the brilliant, growing youth delved far beyond the known limits of science and devised instruments of unprecedented nature.

The robot instilled some of his own incredible strength and stamina into the boy, by a system of super exercises rigidly maintained. In mock struggle, the red-haired youth would pit himself against the great metal creature who could have crushed him in a second had he wished. Gradually, thus, Curt’s strength became immense.

The android endowed the growing lad with his own unbelievable swiftness of physical and mental reactions. The two spent many hours on the barren lunar surface, engaged in strange games in which the lad would try to match the android’s wonderful agility.

And as he grew older, Curt Newton started secret voyages through the Solar System, in the little super-ship Simon Wright and he had devised and built. The four secretly visited every world from scorched Mercury to Arctic Pluto, and so he came to know not only the Earthman colonies of each world, but much of the unexplored planetary wildernesses also. And he visited moon and asteroids that no other man had ever landed upon.

Finally, when Curtis Newton had grown to full manhood, Simon Wright told him how his father and mother had died, and of his mother’s dying wish that he war always against those who would use the powers of science for evil ends.

“You must choose now, Curtis,” the Brain concluded solemnly. “You must decide whether you will make your purpose in life the championing of mankind against its exploiters and oppressors, or whether you will seek happiness for yourself in normal, comfortable life.

“We three have given you the education and training you would need for such a life-long crusade. And we three will stand by you and fight at your side, if you take up that cause. But we cannot decide for you. You must do that for yourself.”

Curt Newton looked up through the glassite ceiling at the starry vault of space in which bulked Earth’s cloudy sphere. And the big, red-haired young man’s cheerful face grew sober.

“I believe it’s my duty to take up the cause you speak of, Simon,” he said slowly. “Men such as killed my parents must be crushed, or they’ll destroy the nine worlds’ civilization.”

CURTIS NEWTON drew a long breath.

“It’s a mighty big job, and I may go down to defeat. But while I live, I’ll stick to it.”

“I knew you’d decide so, lad!” exclaimed the Brain. “You will be fighting for the future of the whole Solar System!”

“For the future?” repeated Curt. The humor came back into his gray eyes. “Then I’ll call myself — Captain Future!”

That very night, Curt had flown from the moon to Earth and had secretly visited the President, offering the service of his abilities in the war against interplanetary crime.

“I know you’ve no faith in me now,” he had told the President, “but a time may come when you’ll need me. When that time comes, flash a signal flare from the North Pole. I’ll see it, and come.”

Months later, when a mysterious criminal was terrorizing the inner planets and the Planet Police were helpless, the President had remembered the red-haired young man who had called himself Captain Future, and as a desperate last hope had summoned him.

Captain Future and his three unhuman comrades had smashed the menace in a few weeks. And since then, time after time the signal flare had blazed from the North Pole — and each time Curt Newton and his comrades had answered. Each time, the fame of the mysterious foe of evil had become greater throughout the Solar System, as he destroyed one supercriminal after another.

But now, Captain Future had been called to face the greatest and deadliest antagonist he had ever confronted. The mysterious being who was striking down the Earthmen of Jupiter with a fearful horror that changed men into primeval beasts!

OUT beyond the orbit of Mars, out past the whirling wilderness of the asteroidal belt, flew a queer little ship. Shaped oddly like an elongated teardrop, and driven by muffled rocket-tubes whose secret design gave it a power and speed far beyond those of any other craft, it was traveling now at a velocity that lived up to its name of
Comet.

Inside the
Comet,
in the transparent-walled room at the nose where its controls were centered, Grag the robot sat on watch. The great robot sat utterly rigid and unmoving, his metal fingers resting upon the throttles that controlled the flow of atomic energy to the rocket-tubes, his gleaming photoelectric eyes staring unswervingly ahead.

Curt Newton stood beside the robot, his hand resting familiarly on Grag’s metal shoulder as he too peered ahead, toward the largening white sphere of Jupiter.

“Twenty more hours at this speed will bring us there, Grag,” the big young man said thoughtfully.

“Yes, master,” answered the robot simply in his booming mechanical voice. “And then what?”

Curt’s eyes twinkled.

“Why, then we’ll find this Space Emperor who’s behind the terror out here, and take him back to Earth. That’s all.”

“Do you think it will be so easy, master?” asked the robot naively.

Captain Future laughed aloud.

“Grag, irony is wasted on you. The truth is that it’s going to be a pretty tough job — the toughest we ever faced, maybe. But we’ll win out. We’ve got to.”

His face sobered a little. “This thing is big — big enough to wreck the Solar System if it isn’t stopped at once.”

He was remembering James Carthew’s haggard face, the desperate appeal in his trembling voice.

“You’ll do your best out there on Jupiter, Captain Future?” the President had pleaded. “That horror — men retracking the path of evolution to brutehood — it mustn’t go on!”

“It won’t go on if I can stop it,” Curt had promised, his voice like level steel. “Whoever or whatever this Space Emperor is, we’ll track him down or we won’t come back.”

Curt was thinking of that promise now. He knew well how difficult it was going to be to fulfill it. Yet the prospect of the perilous struggle ahead exhilarated him strangely.

Peril was like a heady wine to Curt’s adventure-loving soul. He had met it in the poisonous swamps of Venus, in the black and sunless caverns of Uranus, in the icy snow-hell of Pluto. And always, when the danger was greatest, he had felt that he was living the most.

Grag broke the silence, the robot still looking ahead with his strange photoelectric eyes toward Jupiter.

“Jupiter is a big world, master,” he boomed thoughtfully. “It took us long to catch the Lords of Power when they fled there.”

Curt nodded, remembering that relentless hunt for the outer-planet criminals who had sought to hide on the giant planet. That had been the end of a blazing battle and chase that he and his three comrades had taken part in and that had reached from far Pluto to this mighty world ahead.

“It may take us even longer to find this Space Emperor, but we’ll do it,” he said resolutely.

There was silence, except for the droning of the cyclotrons in the
Comet’s
stern, and the muffled purring of the atomic energy they produced, as it was released by the rocket-tubes. Then into the control-room came the synthetic man.

“You are late, Otho,” boomed the robot, turning severely toward the android. “It was your turn to take over a half hour ago.”

Otho’s lipless mouth opened to give vent to a hissing chuckle. His green eyes gleamed mockingly.

“What difference can it make to you, Grag?” he inquired mockingly. “You are not a man, and so you do not need rest as we men do.”

GRAG’S voice boomed angrily. “I am as much like a man as you are!” he declared.

“You, a metal machine?” taunted Otho. “Why, men are not of metal. They are of flesh, like myself.”

The gibing, hissing voice of the android awakened all Grag’s rudimentary capacity for indignation. He turned his unhuman metal face appealingly toward Captain Future.

“Am I not as near human as Otho, master?” he appealed.

“Otho, quit teasing Grag and take over,” Curt Newton ordered sternly.

Yet there was a merry spark in Captain Future’s gray eyes as the android hastily obeyed.

Curt loved these three unhuman companions of his, the great, simple robot, the fierce, eager android and the dour, austere Brain. He knew they were more loyal and single-hearted than any human comrades could have been.

Yet he derived a secret amusement from these ceaseless quarrels between Otho and Grag. Both the robot and the android liked to be thought of as human or nearly human. And the fact that Otho was more manlike was a continual irritation to big Grag.

“I can do almost everything that Otho can do,” Grag was saying
to
him anxiously. “And I am far stronger than” he is.”

“A machine is strong,” sneered Otho, “but it is still only a machine.”

“Come along with me, Grag,” Curt told the robot hastily as he saw that the big metal creature was really angry.

The robot followed him back into the main-cabin that occupied the middle section of the
Comet.

Simon Wright’s lens-eyes looked up inquiringly at them. The Brain’s transparent square case rested on a special stand, which embodied an ingenious spoolholder that automatically unreeled the long micro-film scientific work the Brain was consulting.

“What is wrong?” rasped Wright.

“Otho was just deviling Grag again,” Curt told him. “Nothing serious.”

“He is not
really
more human than I am, is he, master?” appealed the big robot anxiously.

“Of course not, Grag,” answered Captain Future, his eyes twinkling as he laid his hand affectionately on the metal shoulder. “You should know enough by now to ignore Otho’s taunts.”

“Aye,” rasped Simon Wright to the robot. “It is nothing to be proud of to be human, Grag. I was human, once, and I was not as happy as I am now.”

“Go back and check the cyclotrons, Grag,” Curt told the robot, and the great metal creature stalked obediently through the cabin into the power-room at the stern.

Captain Future’s gray eyes looked inquiringly into the glittering glass ones of the Brain.

“Have you found any clue yet, Simon?”

“No,” the Brain answered somberly. “Not in all the records of human science can I find any hint of how that ghastly method of causing this strange doom — this atavism — could be achieved.”