Captain Future 14 - Worlds to Come (Spring 1943) Page 2

  “Good riddance to that pile of useless scrap metal!” he jeered. “Look, Chief, I’ll show you how a slug-horse should be ridden.”

  An agile bound took him to the slug-horse’s back. The animal began to vibrate as before, but this time to no avail. No matter how rapid and violent, the motion, the lithe android had no difficulty in keeping his seat. Finally he dismounted in triumph.

  “You two make too much of a fuss about nothing,” grinned Curt Newton. “Let me show you how to handle the creature.”

  “Held on, Chief,” yelled Grag. “He’s dangerous!”

  BUT Curt Newton was already upon the beast. To the amazement of both Otho and Grag, the slug-horse did not vibrate at all. He raced forward over the rocky surface at Curt’s bidding, then turned obediently around and slithered back.

  “Holy sun-imps!” gasped Otho. “Why, you might be a cowboy from Pluto itself! How did you do it?”

  “It’s easy enough when you know how. This little gadget at my belt contains a vibration ray of the same frequency as his own. Slug-horses find such rays very soothing. It’s impossible to control them by sheer strength alone.”

  “Is it?” growled Grag. “Throw off your ray, Chief. Let me try one more time!”

  Once more he leaped upon the Plutonian beast, this time with more determination than ever. The slug-horse’s vibrations increased in violence until the two onlookers thought that even Grag’s metal body would be shaken to pieces, but still he held on. The animal twisted, squirmed, went into convulsions.

  “There!” panted Grag. “He can’t throw me!”

  With a suddenness that startled every one, the slug-horse collapsed. When the astonished Grag dismounted, it presented a disheartening appearance. It was as flat and squashed as if a mountain had fallen upon it.

  Grag shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand it. Chief. What happened?”

  “Your weight was too much for it,” taunted Otho. “A slug-horse is built to carry a rider, not a perambulating junk-yard!”

  “Go back to the test tubes where you were born,” replied Grag majestically. “It didn’t throw me, did it?”

  “It didn’t,” agreed Curt Newton. “But you threw it, and that’s almost as bad. It’ll take a couple of days before that slug-horse is back in shape to be ridden again.”

  “Curt!” called a pleasant, woman’s voice.

  Out of the Moon-home had emerged a dark pretty girl, Joan Randall, one of the shrewdest and most courageous investigators of the Planet Patrol. Floating a few feet off the ground alongside her came the weirdest of all the Futuremen, Simon Wright.

  Simon had once been a brilliant, aging scientist on Earth. When he was on the point of death, Curt Newton’s father had surgically removed the living brain and installed it in a special serum-case of transparent metal.

  The case contained the serum and pumps and purifiers that kept the brain alive. In front were Simon’s glass lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the aperture of his mechanical speech-apparatus. From his case, the Brain could project magnetic traction beams, by means of which he was enabled to wield tools or instruments, or glide swiftly through space.

  Simon Wright rarely showed emotion. Ordinarily absorbed entirely in scientific research, his icy mentality was little affected by the disturbances that upset ordinary mortals. Only one thing could arouse him — danger to his ward and pupil, Curt Newton.

  THE story of Curt’s birth and boyhood was the saga of the Brain’s wisdom. A generation before, Curt’s parents had fled to the Moon to protect their scientific discoveries from an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. Together with Simon Wright, they had built their combination laboratory and home under Tycho.

  Here their experiments had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. And here, soon after Curt Newton’s birth, Corvo had killed his parents, to be killed in turn by the avenging Brain, robot, and android.

  The three unhuman beings had reared and educated young Curt Newton. Their combined instruction had made him the most skillful planeteer in space and the System’s greatest scientist. For some time, Curt had devoted his immense abilities to the eradication of crime from the System. In that war against the enemies of society, he had come to be known as Captain Future.

  The Brain’s strange box form now glided toward him.

  “Lad, you’ve done it!” he called, “That last suggestion of yours for using a borate flux did the trick!”

  He held in one of his tractor beams a small, many-faceted, transparent disk that glittered like crystal. Actually it was the new metallic alloy upon which he had been working.

  Joan added, “From now on, Curt, we’ll always be able to keep in touch with each other. Simon has made a metal crystal for each of us. We’ll always have to keep them upon us. They’ll project such thoughts as we wish farther than any audiophone will project sound vibrations.”

  “But they must be used with care,” cautioned the Brain. “The crystals will wear out in time, and they are difficult to reproduce. Their use must be reserved for emergencies.”

  “We still have the problem of permanence to solve,” agreed Curt. “Meanwhile, Simon, the crystals represent a definite advance in thought projection, I don’t think there’s any limit to the distance at which they will operate.”

  A grizzled man in the black uniform of the Planet Police came running up the steps from the Moon-home with a spryness that belied his age. This was the veteran marshal, Ezra Gurney. He and Joan, temporarily off duty, were visiting the Futuremen for a well-earned vacation. The marshal’s face was eager and excited.

  “Curt, there’s a call for you from the Planet Patrol! There’s trouble within Mercury’s orbit!”

  Curt’s eyes lit up. “Good! The way I feel now, I’d be interested even in a couple of space-ship thieves.”

  The old marshal shook his head. “These aren’t thieves. Curt. A strange shimmering craft has appeared out of nowhere, about a third of the distance from the sun to Mercury. It appears to be caught in the sun’s gravitational pull. And it hasn’t got the power to get out.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” said Otho. “The sun’s pull will take time to act.”

  “Not as much as you think,” returned the marshal grimly. “The craft was driving ahead at it full speed when it appeared.”

  Curt’s face paled. “Then we’ll have to move fast. Quick, Otho, the Comet!”

  The android was already darting into a passage that led through the solid lunar rock to a roomy chamber. This was the hangar of a small space ship of teardrop design — the Comet, super-swift vessel of the Futuremen.

  Otho slid behind the controls. Joan Randall was already in the ship. The others joined her quickly. Overhead, doors opened automatically, and the powerful craft streaked up into the star-studded heavens.

  A few moments later, Marshal Ezra Gurney, his ears glued to the audio-phone, looked up in alarm.

  “I’ve just had a report on the speed of that strange ship!” he announced. “Curt, it’s going faster than the fastest model space cruiser in the System! It’s going faster than we are!”

  “We’ll catch it,” said Curt Newton grimly.

  Ezra Gurney shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Curt, we’re too late. That ship is doomed!”

  Chapter 3: Visitors from Space

  AS THEY rushed ahead, Curt Newton listened to the audio reports describing how the strange ship was being drawn nearer and nearer to the sun. Otho was racing the Comet toward the trouble spot, but it was clear to Curt that at their present pace they would never reach the ship in time to help.

  “How about the vibration-drive, Chief?” demanded Otho.

  “I’m afraid it’s our only hope. Any other craft in between?”

  “None, Chief.”

  The vibration drive was a new principle of space-travel developed by Curt and the Brain. The ordinary rocket-propelled ship derived its motive power from the reactions of particles produced with the aid of giant cyclotrons from
atomic explosions in a special chamber, and expelled at high speed.

  Curt and the Brain, making use instead of the reactive push of high-frequency electromagnetic vibrations projected from a drive-ring at the stern of the ship, had been able to build up velocities many times the speed of light. But such velocities, useful as they were in interstellar travel, could not safely be used inside the solar system.

  “What’s your plan, lad?” demanded Simon.

  “I had intended to cut directly ahead of the ship, slow down to make contact, and then reverse our direction, using the Comet’s power to push them away from the sun instead of toward it. But they’re going so fast that I’m afraid there isn’t time.”

  “No, Curt, there isn’t. We won’t be able to accelerate to the speed we need to overtake them, and then reverse.”

  Curt’s eyes suddenly lit up. “But we have got time to cut between that ship and the sun!”

  “What’s the idea, Chief?” exclaimed Otho. “There’s no sense in our getting burnt up, too!”

  “We’re probably better insulated than they are, so we’ll be able without too much danger to ourselves to shield the other ship from the fiercest heat. My idea is to use our side-rockets to push them away from the sun. In that way, we’ll get the ship to swing through a very eccentric elliptical orbit.

  “And if we succeed in doing that, the faster they’re plunging at the sun right now, the better. The high velocity will take them far past the sun, and we’ll be able to give them the extra push that will carry them beyond Mercury’s orbit to safety.”

  “Then here goes the vibration-drive, Chief. I’m putting on the stasis projector to protect our bodies from the acceleration.”

  The Comet leaped forward in space. Despite the protecting stasis of force Curt, like the others, suddenly felt the grip of the terrific acceleration. It threw him against a wall, held him there, appeared to be flattening him out. But the distance between the Comet and the endangered craft was quickly decreasing. In a couple of hours they could see it with the aid of the space-visor screen, a tiny black dot in space, silhouetted against the blazing sun.

  Otho cut off the vibration drive, began to decelerate. Even with their speed decreasing, they were rapidly eating up the remaining distance that separated them from the other ship. Otho skillfully cut in to one side of the stranger, and now they raced along side by side.

  CURT threw a lever, and the side-rockets leaped into activity with a roar. The other ship, forcefully repelled, widened the gap between them.

  “Holy sun-imps!” cried Otho “They’re pushing us the other way, into the sun!”

  “Action equals reaction,” rasped the Brain. “If we push in one direction, we get pushed in the opposite direction. It’s an old enough law of physics for you to have learned it, Otho. We’ll have to use our rockets on the sun side to close the distance.”

  They drew close again, blasted the rockets once more. Slowly the other craft was being pushed out of the straight line of its fall toward the sun. Its course was now faintly elliptical.

  “This is hot work,” grumbled Otho. “We may be insulated, but our insulation isn’t perfect.”

  The sun was looming ahead, only two million miles away. The inside of the Comet began to resemble an oven. Again and again the rockets blasted at the other ship, driving it further and further out of its former straight-line course.

  Otho, speechless now in the intense heat, stuck doggedly to the controls. The old marshal, Ezra Gurney, was gasping for breath, and Joan was pale. Only Grag didn’t mind the terrific temperature. To his special metal body a few hundred degrees more or less meant little.

  Curt Newton noted grimly that they were winning. The two ships raced past the sun together, with less than a half million miles to spare. The flaming corona seemed to reach out at them, and Curt could hear the creaking of the Comet as some of the stellite plates began to buckle under the intense strain.

  Then they were streaking away from the sun just as rapidly as they had approached. The heat grew less intolerable, and Curt wiped his forehead.

  “We made it, Chief,” cried Grag triumphantly, “Now all we’ve got to do is give them a little shove, and we can leave them to themselves.”

  “Not yet,” cautioned the Brain, “First we’re going to see who’s in that ship.”

  Several hours afterward, when they were safe from the sun’s gravitation, and both ships had reradiated into space some of the excess heat they had absorbed, the two ships swung together, clung with the force of the Comet’s magnetic grapple.

  The inner door of the Comet’s airlock opened, and Curt Newton stepped into it. “Be careful, lad,” warned the Brain. “You don’t know who these strangers are.”

  Curt, his hand on a proton pistol, nodded. The inner door of the airlock closed, the outer door swung open. Some one was waiting in the airlock of the strange ship.

  Curt Newton raised his proton pistol, then uttered a cry of surprise. “Hol Jor!”

  BACK in the lunar home once more, the giant robot labored on the repairs needed for the Comet’s hull while Curt Newton and the Brain considered what the far-traveled star-captains had told them.

  “Dimensional travel,” admitted the Brain, “is a great advance. But it would be more valuable if you could reach your destination exactly.”

  “We came closer than we had expected,” pointed out Mar Del.

  “Too close for comfort,” agreed Hol Jor. “We emerged from the other dimension to find ourselves going full speed directly toward your sun.”

  “Let us forget past dangers,” said Ki Illok impatiently, “Our reason for coming here was to ask for help with regard to Gorma Hass and his Sverds.”

  Curt Newton nodded. “So no one understands his origin, or the nature of the strange creatures?” he asked.

  “No one,” repeated Hol Jor. His eyes wandered about the laboratory, taking in the wonders of this strange place that so few men had ever had the opportunity to see. Enormous generators, transformers, synthesizers, and atomic furnaces were near the walls. Some of them were instruments such as Hol Jor had never before encountered.

  Mar Del and Ki Illok, just as curious as the Antarean, had been staring unashamedly. But Ki Illok, who was far from being a scientist, was most closely interested in the question Curt had just asked.

  “Who or what Gorma Hass is, no one knows,” he stated emphatically. “As for the Sverds, they are not human, they are invulnerable to all ordinary weapons, and they possess enormous strength, Grag is a weakling compared to them.”

  Grag looked up from his work. “Is that so?” he bristled. “Let me get at them, Chief, and I’ll show these fellows what I can do. Watch this.”

  He lifted one of the warped metal plates that had come from the Comet’s hull, bent it in his metal hands.

  “Showing off again,” jeered Otho. “Now, how about showing us how you can ride a Plutonian slug-horse?”

  “Never mind that,” ordered Curt Newton. He turned to the Brain. “Simon, here is a problem that will challenge all our skill and ingenuity. I am in favor of undertaking it.”

  “Aye, lad, especially if Hol Jor is right in thinking that Gorma Hass expects eventually to extend his operations to other star systems.”

  “Chief,” put in Otho, “we can have a dimensional drive built into the Comet in a few days. Why not have that weak-brained, strong-armed junk-pile” — he indicated Grag — “start work at once?”

  “Why, you misguided son-of-an-inner-tube —” roared Grag.

  “Silence, you two. We’ll start work on the dimension-drive at once.” Curt faced the girl. “And for once, Joan, you’ll be able to come along.”

  “I’d love to —” she began, when Marshal Ezra Gurney, who had been at the long-distance audiophone, entered the laboratory.

  “Sorry, Joan,” he apologized. “You and I have to get going after a couple of porite thieves. The government’s supply works on Venus has been blasted open, and a large quantity of the drug
stolen.”

  The eager look faded from Joan’s face, to give way to an expression of disappointment.

  “This always happens whenever you get started on something that looks interesting, Curt,” she sighed. “Well, at any rate. I’ll be able to keep in touch with you for a while with that metal crystal Simon gave me.”

  The Brain was already in motion, gliding toward the craft they had rescued, anxious to examine the dimension-traveling device. He was in a deep study of its mysteries while Curt kissed Joan farewell, and saw her and the marshal take off in a Patrol ship.

  Chapter 4: Through the Dimensions

  OTHO’S eager, green eyes looked a question, “Ready, Chief?”

  Curt glanced through the visi-plates and nodded. The Futuremen were driving outward from the sun in the direction of Mars, away from heavy traffic, using the ordinary rocket-propulsion method. On the floor of the Comet, Eek, a moon-pup, and Oog, a meteor-mimic, pets of Grag and Otho respectively, rested quietly. The moon-pup was a small bearlike creature, the meteor-mimic a fat, white and doughy little animal. Both the robot and the android would have been unhappy without their pets.

  A few thousand feet ahead of them, Hol Jor was cruising slowly along. His ship had just showed a green signal light. Then it seemed to waver and blur in front of Curt’s eyes. Suddenly it disappeared from sight. It had started on its journey through the dimensions. It was time for the Comet to follow.

  Otho pressed a stud, and the Universe began to fade out. The stars dimmed, then disappeared entirely. The Futuremen were now out of their normal three-dimensional world.

  It was a world of ghosts and shadows that they had entered. Far ahead of them they caught sight of Hol Jor’s ship. Then quite unexpectedly that vanished, only to reappear a few moments later, strangely distorted, as if seen in a concave mirror.