Captain Future 06 - Star Trail to Glory (Spring 1941) (3 page)

CURTIS NEWTON, the young planeteer famous through the whole Solar System as Captain Future, straightened from the work that had intently engrossed him for hours. He stood surveying the object of his labor. It was a peculiar square case of transparent metal, resting on his laboratory table.

"All finished, at last!" Captain Future exclaimed with relief. "Want to try it out now, Simon?"

A rasping metallic voice answered him. It appeared to come from the odd square case before him.

"Give me a minute to familiarize myself with the controls, Curtis."

"Oh, all right," Curt Newton conceded impatiently. "You're so all-fired deliberate about everything. I want to see how it works!"

Waiting anxiously, Captain Future made a striking figure. The young Earthman was six feet four in height, and his lithe ranginess in his drab zipper-suit made him seem even taller. As he stood running one hand through his mop of torch-red hair, his space-tanned, handsome face and clear gray eyes mirrored his eagerness to test the results of his work.

Curt looked more like a fighting man than a scientist. But the big ring on his left hand — a ring whose nine bright "planet" jewels constantly revolved around a radiant "Sun" jewel — identified him on nine worlds as the System's greatest scientific wizard. The matchless laboratory on the Moon was silent witness to his abilities.

In the uninhabited airless satellite, under the floor of Tycho crater, was the maze of underground rooms of Captain Future's home. The ceiling of this biggest room was a large glassite window which gave a view of outside space. In the black vault bulked the green, huge sphere of Earth, and the dazzling Sun whose rays poured in to glitter off the laboratory's crowded scientific equipment and unfamiliar machines.

"Very well, Curtis, I'm ready to test the projector now," came the rasping voice from the square, transparent case on the table. "But I still wish I hadn't let you talk me into this."

"Think how convenient it will be for you to be able to move about, Simon," Captain Future argued. "Remember how helpful it was in that case of the Seven Space Stones, when you could use that phony Thinking Machine body to get about in? And look how much easier your scientific researches will be, when you can handle instruments."

"It is true that mobility would facilitate my studies," admitted the metallic voice. "That is the only reason I agreed to your proposal."

Simon Wright, whose rasping voice was speaking, had been one of the greatest scientists in the System. Approaching death had made it necessary to remove his brain and house it inside a metal case whose compact pumps and purifiers circulated the serum which kept the Brain alive. In the front of the case were Simon's lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and his mechanical resonator-mouth.

Captain Future had just finished installing a new mechanism inside the Brain's case. It was a projector which could shoot magnetic beams of several different orders out through the walls of the case itself. The control of this little projector was connected directly to the nerve-centers of the Brain.

"I'll try the tractor beams for motion first," rasped Simon.

A THIN blue beam shot down from the square case, and the Brain at once rose smoothly into the air from the table. He poised there, motionless. Then he jetted a blue beam from the back of his case, and at once the push of the magnetic ray sent him gliding through the air toward the wall of the laboratory. Around the laboratory the Brain flew silently and smoothly, while Curt watched.

"Simon, it's perfect!" Captain Future exclaimed as the Brain came to a halt in mid-air beside him. "You can move in air or space at will now."

"It's true that this expands my powers, without being a drag on my thought processes, as a body would be," the Brain conceded. "There is a certain pleasure in self-locomotion which I had forgotten."

With a sudden jet of blue beams, the Brain flashed again around the big sunlit laboratory, so fast that the eye could hardly follow.

"Fire-imps of Jupiter!" breathed a hissing voice from a door of the room. "Look, Grag. Simon can fly now!"

It was Otho the android who stood in the door, gaping amazedly. Otho was one of the Futuremen, Curt Newton's unhuman trio of loyal comrades. He was a synthetic human being who had been made in this very laboratory, long years ago. He was manlike enough superficially, but not his rubbery white synthetic flesh, the slitted, slanting green eyes in his hairless white face, the devil-may-care recklessness and humor in his thin features. Unhuman, too, were Otho's speed and agility and skill in disguise.

"I must have been drinking Jovian fern-wine, or else I'm dreaming!" Otho gasped, staring. "Tell me, Grag, do you see it, too?"

Grag the robot, third of the legendary Futuremen, was peering in equal astonishment over the android's head. Grag towered seven feet high, a massive metal giant whose glowing photoelectric eyes, round metal head and mighty metal body gave him an alien majesty.

"What does it mean, Master?" Grag asked Captain Future in his booming voice. "I thought Simon didn't want a body."

"I don't have any body!" the Brain rasped angrily, poising beside them. "I wouldn't have one. A body is just a drag on the mind. But with these beams I can move at will and do things for myself."

In illustration, the Brain jetted two thin blue rays which fastened upon a tool on the table with magnetic grip. Using the beams as arms and hands, the Brain deftly manipulated the tool.

"Swell, Simon!" Captain Future approved. "Now you won't need Otho or Grag to help you in your experiments."

"And now I can be of more aid to you, Curtis, in times of danger," added the Brain, his lens-eyes fixed on the big young planeteer.

"As though anyone could be a greater help to me than you've been!" Curt cried warmly. "You, who took care of me almost from the time I was born, who reared me and educated me here on the Moon —"

"Say, Chief, Grag and I had a hand in that, too!" Otho exclaimed indignantly. "We educated you as much as Simon did."

Curt chuckled. "I'll say you did. I'll never forget the system you two used when I was disobedient. You would catch me, Otho, and then Grag would spank me."

FOR a moment there was a little silence. All four had been swept back in memory to past years. The Brain could remember when he had been Doctor Simon Wright, famous scientist of an Earth university, a colleague of the brilliant Roger Newton. And he remembered how danger had come to Roger Newton. Unscrupulous men coveted Newton's scientific secrets.

He could remember how he and Newton and the latter's young wife had fled from Earth, seeking refuge on the barren Moon.

Here they had built the underground laboratory-home, and here Roger Newton's little son Curtis had been born. And here Newton and the Brain had continued their great scientific experiment of creating artificial, intelligent, living beings. Grag the robot had been their first creation. And Otho the synthetic man was their second.

But the unscrupulous plotters who coveted Roger Newton's scientific secrets had followed them to the Moon. They had killed Newton and his wife and were themselves killed by Grag and Otho. Little Curtis Newton, a helpless infant, had been left in the lonely Moon-home in the care of the Brain, the robot and the android.

Strange guardians for a human child though they were, they had given Curtis Newton an education such as no boy ever received before. The Brain's vast scientific knowledge, the tremendous physical strength of giant Grag, and the speed and agility of Otho, all were transmitted to the growing youth. Small wonder that Curt Newton had reached maturity as a man with superhuman capabilities — a man of tomorrow!

Curt had dedicated himself to unrelenting war against such criminals as had destroyed his parents. He had offered his services to the President of the System Government. He had called himself Captain Future because he felt he was fighting for the future of the System's peoples against would-be exploiters and oppressors. And time after time, Captain Future and his three loyal, unhuman Futuremen had, by scientific mastery and sheer daring, beaten down dark super-criminals and plotters, Otho broke the silence. The android was always the most restless of them, and he had something in mind which he broached to Curt in a cunningly casual tone.

"Say, Chief, I thought I'd take the
Comet
around to those chasms on the other side of the Moon, for another load of beryllium ore."

"We don't really need any more beryllium now," Curt stated. "You just want to get off on another jaunt over in those chasms. Suppose you crashed in one of them while fooling around."

"Yes, suppose you crashed," Grag boomed loudly to Otho. "Then the
Comet
would be wrecked! Of course, if your neck were broken, that would be all to the good, but we mustn't risk the ship."

"Why, you walking junk-heap — " Otho began to explode.

Curt saw that the eternal argument between the android and the robot was about to begin.

"All right, Otho, get going if you want to," he said hastily.

"Thanks, Chief. I'll deal with this cast-iron museum piece when I get back." The android started for the door. He stopped to pick up a small, gray, bearlike animal with beady eyes and a sharp snout that was sniffing at a scrap of metal by the door. "Guess I'll take Oog along with me. He likes to get out once in awhile, too."

"That's not your pet Oog!" Grag bellowed indignantly, stalking forward. "It's Eek, my pet."

"Your brain is rusting," Otho retorted. "This is Oog."

Grag angrily tore the little animal from his grasp.

"Do you think I can't see? You just thought you'd take Eek with you and drop him in a chasm, because you don't like him —"

Grag stopped suddenly. The little gray, snouted animal he had snatched away had suddenly changed its appearance. Its shape and color shifted bewilderingly, and abruptly it was a completely different animal. It was now a fat, doughy, white little beast, with shapeless legs and big, solemn eyes.

“WHY, it is Oog!" Grag blurted, amazed. He dropped the little animal angrily, "I won't stand this any longer! He's always imitating my Eek and fooling me!"

"Take it easy, Grag," soothed Captain Future. "There comes your precious Eek now."

Grag's pet was just such a snouted, gray, bearlike little beast as Oog had been imitating. Eek was a moon-pup, a queer species native to the Moon. He did not breathe air. He devoured metal and metallic ores for his food, and he could understand telepathic commands.

Oog, Otho's pet, was a meteor-mimic he had captured on one of the asteroids.

The fat, doughy white creature possessed a power of shifting the organization of its body cells at will. Thus it could perfectly imitate anything near its own size, be it beast, bird or rock. Its faculty was an extreme development of protective coloration.

Otho was chuckling as he picked up his Oog and started into the tunnel leading to the hangar of the
Comet.

"Back soon, Chief," he said.

"You'd better be!" Curt called after him sternly. "If you try to leave the Moon on some expedition of your own, I'll melt you down and make a new android of you!"

They heard a roar of blasting rockets a moment later. Through the ceiling window they glimpsed a small teardrop ship zoom up into the black sky with incredible speed and roar westward. It was the
Comet,
famous space ship and flying laboratory of the Futuremen.

"Master, I'm getting tired of all these tricks Otho uses to annoy me!" boomed Grag. "I won't stand for it."

"Grag, I am getting tired also of you two scrapping," Curt Newton declared. "If you don't get out of here with your complaints, I'm going to fit your metal carcass with rockets and launch you out into space full blast toward the star Deneb. For your information, that star is five hundred light-years away. Now will you leave me in peace?"

Sulkily Grag stalked out of the laboratory. They heard him muttering indignantly to Eek as his heavy, clanking steps receded. Captain Future had a rueful smile on his face as he turned to the Brain.

"Simon, what are we going to do about those two?" he appealed. "They'd die for each other, but they'd rather die than show it. Can't we do something?"

The Brain's lens-eyes fixed thoughtfully on him.

"We might be able to devise an aura of hypnotic force that would project a powerful good-will suggestion into their minds. It would take the fight out of them."

"Simon, that's a great idea! It could be done. We'd have them gushing over each other. What a joke on them it would be!" He looked thoughtfully up toward the ceiling, stroking his chin as he spoke. "To construct a small projector of carrier waves for the hypnotic encephaloid vibration, we'll need —"

Curt's voice trailed into silence. He had become queerly rigid as he stood gazing up through the glassite window in the ceiling. "Simon, look at Earth!" he cried. The Brain turned his lens-eyes upward.

"The North-Pole signal, lad! The summons from the President!"

EARTH bulked green and huge in the star-studded black sky. On the white North Polar ice-fields of the planet, a brilliant point of light was winking and throbbing. It was the summons to Captain Future! Curt had arranged with the System President to have that North Pole beacon flashed whenever there was urgent need of him.

"They need us for something, Simon! I'll call Otho back at once and we'll blast off for Earth." He jumped to the big televisor instrument in the corner. A switch tuned it instantly to the secret wave of the Futuremen. "Otho, the chief calling! Turn around and blast back here full speed. The President is calling us."

OTHO'S voice came from the televisor, yelping with excitement.

"That means trouble ahead! I'll be back right —"

Otho's words were interrupted by a strange sound from the televisor. "Say, something's happening! I —"

"Otho, what's wrong?" Curt yelled. There was no answer. Captain Future swung around, his gray eyes blazing now. "Otho's been attacked or overcome in some way, Simon! Come on, we'll use the electroscopic finder to see where he is in the
Comet."