Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Curt drew his proton-pistol and crept forward. He gained the screened door of the lighted offices, then poised there, listening.

  “Don’t like giving those damned greenies guns,” one of the Earthmen inside was saying. “They’re too cursed eager to get them.”

  “What difference does it make to us?” another demanded. “They’re only going to use the guns in a war with another tribe, Brewer says.”

  “That’s what Brewer says,” the first man muttered, “but I’m not so sure about it.”

  “Neither am I, gentlemen,” spoke a throbbing voice from the doorway.

  THE six Earthmen whirled, astonished. In the door bulked Curt Newton’s big, broad-shouldered figure and red head, a little grim smile playing on his lips, and his slender proton-pistol leveled at them.

  With an oath, one Earthman reached for the flare-gun at his belt. Captain Future’s proton-beam licked forth, and the man fell stunned.

  “I could kill you with this beam as easily as stun you,” Curt said pleasantly. “Don’t make me do it.”

  “It’s Captain Future!” exclaimed one of the men, going pale as he recognized the unique ring on Curt’s finger.

  “You men,” Curt told them, “are going to spend a long time out on the prison moon of Pluto for violating interplanetary law! Supplying natives with guns is risky business.”

  “I didn’t want to do it!” the first overseer defended desperately. “Brewer made us. He’s been getting rich that way, for the greenies will labor for guns when they won’t for anything else.”

  “How did you get the guns up here from Jovopolis without detection?” Captain Future demanded.

  “They were shipped in as trade-goods,” the man explained hastily. “But each box had a false bottom, under which were the guns.”

  “You’ll have a chance to testify to all that when the time comes,” Curt said grimly. “In the meantime, I must ask you to sit down in those chairs and keep your hands up. I am going to make sure that you remain here while I am busy elsewhere.”

  Helplessly, the men sat down, their hands raised. Curt tore flexible metal cords from the shutters at the windows. Swiftly, he went about using them to bind the men to the chairs.

  He worked with his pistol in one hand, keeping behind the seated men. In a few minutes, he had all of them securely lashed.

  “Be sure and wait till I come back, gentlemen,” he grinned at them, and then started a rapid search of the office and other buildings.

  He was hoping to find some evidence that would definitely establish whether or not Lucas Brewer was the Space Emperor. But he could find nothing.

  Time was flying. The throb of ground-drums from the moonlit jungles westward seemed louder. Curt rapidly made up his mind.

  “The Space Emperor was to appear to the Jovians tonight in these jungles, according to Otho,” he muttered to himself. “So that’s where all those Jovians who left here must have gone.”

  He hastened out into the moonlight, and hurried across the clearing toward the jungle.

  “If I can be there when the Space Emperor shows up, and if I can get him when he isn’t in an immaterial state —”

  He plunged into the jungle, following the Jovians westward along dim trails, able to hear their excited voices as they pressed on.

  Somewhere ahead, he knew, lay the meeting place Otho had spoken of, the locale that the Jovians called the Place of the Dead. From there, the ground-drums were throbbing. And there, if he was lucky, he would come to grips with the dark super-criminal who was terrorizing a world.

  Chapter 13: Place of the Dead

  BOOM! Boom! Through the moonlit Jovian jungles throbbed the heavy, rhythmic vibration, one that was felt rather than heard.

  Ground-drums of the flipper-men, beating in the night like the dark heart of the savage Jupiter! Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Captain Future looked up tensely through the canopy of tree-fern fronds high above. Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and Io were converging near the zenith, four brilliant moons nearing wonderful conjunction.

  “The hour of the four moons meeting must have been the appointed time,” he muttered to himself.

  A moment later, his big figure tensed as he hurried on along the dim trail he was following through the forest.

  “What’s that?”

  A dim, deep chanting sound came through the jungle in a murmurous wave, rising and swelling strangely in the night and then dying away.

  For more than an hour, Curt had followed the Jovians through the unearthly wilderness. The green natives had pressed on at high speed, as though afraid that they would be late for the great gathering.

  They had unerringly followed narrow trails that wound tortuously through the ferns. And they had kept the angry red glow of the Fire Sea always on their right.

  The jungle was weird tonight! The drenching radiance of the four moons made it a fantastic fairyland of deep black shadows and dappled silver light. High overhead stretched the great tree-ferns’ masses of feathery fronds, tipped with spore-pods. Gleaming bright in the moons towered the metallic copper-trees. The blindly swaying snake-vines hung like dark pendulous serpents from the branches.

  In the choked spaces between the great fern-trunks bloomed supernally lovely shock-flowers, tempting, wonderful blossoms ready to give the unwary toucher a stinging electric shock from the biochemical “battery” inside their calyxes. Giant night-lilies flourished in the shadows, their yard-wide white petals slowly closing and unclosing. Down from the upper canopy when it was stirred by the breeze floated shining clouds of spore-dust, silvering all things below.

  Curt could glimpse iridescent moon-bats gliding on motionless wings above the fern-tops, and bulbous balloon beasts floating slowly by. From beneath his feet more than once came the queer rasping sound of “diggers” burrowing. There was no sign of the dreaded “crawlers” about, and for that the big redhead felt thankful.

  “Must be almost there,” he told himself as the throbbing and chanting from ahead grew louder.

  A tension such as he had seldom felt was mounting inside Captain Future as he hurried on. He felt himself on the verge of a second encounter with the Space Emperor.

  But what would be its result? Would he be able to catch the Space Emperor off guard in his normal material state, or was there no chance of that?

  “Getting close,” Curt muttered. “Take it easy, my boy —”

  Boom! Boom! The ground-drums were throbbing so near now that he could feel the vibration strongly beneath his feet. Tensely, he crept on.

  The jungle was thinning ahead. He stopped a moment later, sank down behind a clump of shock-flowers.

  Captain Future looked out upon an uncanny scene. It was a mile-wide circular clearing in the jungle, in which only scattered tree-ferns and shrubs and vines grew.

  IN THIS clearing, bathed in the wonderful silver radiance of the four moons, lay the crumbling ruins of what had once been a great city.

  City of Jupiter’s unguessable past, mystery metropolis that long and long ago had fallen to wreck and had been swallowed by the jungle! Cyclopean masses of crumbled black masonry of grotesque architecture, towering solemnly out of the shrubs and clinging vines.

  There had been paved streets and courts, Curt saw, but they were broken and covered by creeping moulds and fungi. There had been curving colonnades, but of them there remained nothing but a few broken, lonely black stone pillars.

  “Place of the Dead,” he whispered to himself. “It’s well-named.”

  Captain Future had looked upon dead planetary cities before. He had seen the wonderful lost city on Tethys, moon of Saturn, whose history no man knows. He was familiar with those mysterious wrecks which are found everywhere in the deserts of Mars.

  But he had, he felt, never looked upon a place more somber and darkly sentient than this ruined and forgotten metropolis that brooded beneath Jupiter’s brilliant moons. The spirit of a mighty past reached out from it to lay cold fingers on the heart.

 
; Captain Future glimpsed, far toward the center of the ruined city, a large circular plaza in which thousands of the Jovians were gathered in a tightly packed mass. Almost all seemed to possess flare-guns. They were facing toward a low, half-preserved black structure which partly hid them from Curt’s view. It was from there that emanated the deep, rumbling throb of the booming ground-drums.

  “Have to get closer,” Curt muttered tensely. “If the Space Emperor’s already there —”

  Stealthily, he slipped out of the jungle into the vast circle of ruins. Like a shadow, he worked toward the low and half-ruined stone structure that lay between him and the plaza of the gathered Jovians.

  Keeping always within the shadows of brooding masonry masses, moving soundlessly over the broken paving, the big adventurer advanced. He breathed more easily when he reached the deep shadow of the low building. From the plaza on the other side of it came loudly the deep throb of the ground-drums and the steady, swelling chanting of thousands of bass Jovian voices.

  Boom! Boom! Boom! quivered the deep vibrations, shaking the ground under him.

  Full of deep fanaticism, laden with a strange note of overwhelming sadness and despair, the chanting of the natives swelled frenziedly.

  Curt knew the Jovian tongue well, but this chant was apparently in an archaic form that he could not understand.

  HE FLATTENED himself on the broken paving and inched forward until he could peer out into the moonlit plaza from behind the corner of the crumbling building. His eyes photographed the strange scene before him in a second.

  Directly in front of the ruin behind which he crouched were the two great ground-drums. They consisted of deep pits that had been dug by the Jovians in the black ground, thirty feet deep and shaped like hollow cones with the apex at the surface.

  A group of Jovians at each pit held a heavy fern-trunk with a flattened end, which they raised a little and then allowed to fall heavily, producing by the concussion the throbbing vibrations in the ground.

  Captain Future saw between the ground-drum pits a great black stone globe carved with the outlines of continents and seas. It was set with scattered silver stars that he guessed immediately marked the location of other cities of the Ancients. He saw something else on the surface of the globe that made him start. He peered closer.

  “If that’s what it is —” he whispered tautly to himself, and then forgot his discovery as he heard a sound.

  It was the distant, almost inaudible sound of a rocket-flier landing. The Jovians appeared not to have heard it through the boom of ground-drums and the chanting, but Curt’s super-keen ears had detected it.

  He waited, his pistol in his hand. After a few minutes, as the four moons overhead gathered together in a dazzling cluster, the chant of the Jovians ceased and the fern-trunks were withdrawn from the ground-drum pits. An air of tense expectancy seemed to grip the thousands of green men.

  “Zero hour,” Curt thought. “The four moons have — met!”

  Chapter 14: The Living Ancient

  A STIR ran through the crowd of Jovians, and there was a movement near the far edge of the grotesque, moonlit crowd.

  “He comes! The Living Ancient comes!” sped the rustling Jovian cry.

  “The Living Ancient?” Curt wondered. “So that’s what he calls himself?”

  Into the packed plaza from the jungle on the far side of the city was coming a dark shape.

  Curt raised his proton-pistol. If he could blast the Space Emperor before he became immaterial —

  He saw that it was indeed the Space Emperor, the same figure he had battled in Orris’ cabin in Jovopolis. A grotesque shape in his dark suit with its tiny eye-holes.

  The Space Emperor was material, Curt saw at once. For he was carrying someone — the bound figure of a girl in a white synthe-silk uniform, whose dark, wavy hair fell back from her moonlit white face.

  “Joan Randall!” Captain Future gasped. “That devil has seized her and brought her here for some reason!”

  Curt’s whole plan of action was upset by the disastrous surprise. He knew the Space Emperor was now material and vulnerable. But he could not blast him down while he held Joan.

  The Space Emperor uttered a few words in his deep voice. Out of the worshipful Jovian crowd, two green natives sprang in obedience. They took the bound girl from their sinister ruler’s arms.

  As the Jovians stepped back with Joan, Curt’s pistol was poised to blast the super-criminal. But the Space Emperor had touched something at his belt as the Jovians stepped back. And now the Space Emperor moved glidingly forward, through the two Jovians.

  “Too late!” Captain Future hissed, with a feeling of blind anger.

  Too late! The Space Emperor had made himself immaterial, and no proton-beam could harm him.

  A great cry arose from the Jovian horde as they saw the dark figure glide forward through their comrades, like an unreal phantom. It was a cry of fanatic worship.

  The Space Emperor glided forward, until he reached the paving between the ground-drum pits. There he turned to face the Jovian throng, his back toward Captain Future.

  Curt could see now that the dark criminal moved, in his immaterial state, by the reactive push of a force-tube attached to his belt. There was a small switch beside it, that he guessed was the control of the Space Emperor’s de-materializing apparatus. Apparently, the device that would return him to a normal state had also been changed into an immaterial state.

  The two Jovians laid down Joan Randall’s helpless form a little to one side of and behind the Space Emperor. Then they stepped back into the throng. The deep, heavy voice of the black figure rolled out, speaking to the masses of Jovians in their own language.

  “I bring to you again the command of the great Ancients, of whom I am the last living one,” vibrated his voice.

  A sigh of awe swept through the horde of green natives as they heard, “You know that the spirits of the Ancients are wroth with the Earthmen who have come to this world,” the black figure continued. “You have seen our curse fall upon many of them and change them into beasts.”

  “We have seen, lord,” came a great responding cry from the Jovians.

  “It is the curse of our anger that has made them change so,” went on the Space Emperor. “Before you leave here, you shall see me put that curse upon this Earth girl.”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE’S big body went rigid. The super-plotter was going to use the dread atavism weapon on Joan —

  “The time is almost here,” the dark criminal was saying loudly, “when you must gather and sweep the Earthmen from this world to appease the anger of the Ancients. Are you ready for that?”

  “We are ready, lord,” answered a big Jovian fervently from the throng. “We have obtained many of the Earth guns from the Earthman at the radium mine, in exchange for our labor. All through the jungles now, the villages of our people only await the great signal of the ground-drums to attack the Earthmen.”

  “That signal will be given to you soon, perhaps within hours!” the Space Emperor declared. “I will lead you when the moment comes and we will sweep first upon the Earthman town they call Jungletown, and then upon the other Earthman cities until all are taken. Then I, the last of the Ancients, shall rule this world for your good.”

  “You shall rule, lord,” answered the Jovians in a reverent, humble chorus.

  Captain Future was clawing in his belt, working to extract something from that flat, capacious tungstite container.

  “There’s only one chance to get Joan away before that devil inflicts the blight upon her,” he whispered fiercely to himself. “The invisibility charge —”

  Captain Future extracted from his belt the little mechanism he wanted. It was a disclike instrument that was one of the greatest secrets of Curt and Simon Wright.

  He took it, pressed a stud upon it, holding it above his head. He felt the unseen force that streamed down from it flood through every fiber of his body with stinging shock.

  Quickly, Captain Fu
ture saw his own body becoming a little misty and translucent. For Curt was disappearing!

  The little instrument was one which could give any matter a charge of force that caused all light to be refracted around it, thus making it invisible. But the charge only lasted temporarily, for ten minutes. Then the charge dissipated, and such matter became visible again.

  Captain Future, as he became slowly invisible, felt an utter darkness close in around him. With all light refracted around him, he was now in complete darkness. He could see nothing whatever! For no light could reach his eyes. By that he knew finally that he had become completely invisible.

  Curt started soundlessly around the corner of the ruined building, moving in an absolute and rayless blackness.

  Captain Future could move in this darkness that now encompassed him, almost as well as by sight. His super-keen senses of hearing and touch, and his long practice in this, enabled him to do what no other man could have done.

  He crept around the crumbling ruin. He knew that, had he been visible, he would be standing in full view of the Jovian thousands. He could hear the Space Emperor, still speaking in his heavy, disguised voice, exhorting the green natives.

  CURT crept toward that voice. Moving with utter care, he crept on until he neared Joan. He could hear her frightened breathing. He clapped his invisible hand over her mouth and felt her body quiver in wild alarm.

  “It’s me — Captain Future,” he murmured in the faintest of whispers in her ear. “Lie still, and I’ll untie you.”

  He felt Joan stiffen, then relax. He groped at her bonds, which he discovered were tough metal cords.

  Curt could not untie the cords, nor break them. Frantically he clawed in his belt, and brought out a sharp little tool. Slowly, so as to make no twanging sound, he cut the cords.

  “Don’t get up,” he murmured to the girl. “I’ll drag you slowly back around the ruin. If the Jovians notice you, we’ll have to run for it.”