Ka Thaar made no answer. He was staring at the robot and Simon Wright, as though still unable to believe his eyesight.
Curt Newton spoke desperately. “Lu Suur, what happens to us is important only to us. But whatever you do, you must not detonate the charges you’ve planted down in that plateau.”
“And why not?” demanded Lu Suur ironically. “We’ve gone to considerable pains to prepare them. The radio-detonator here will set them off and blow this whole plateau open. The sight of that will madden the Roons to a panic that will send them against the colony in a big attack and that means the secession I’ve had in mind for nine years.”
“I know all that,” Captain Future said. “And I’m not trying to appeal to your conscience. I’m appealing entirely to your self-interest when I tell you that you must not blow the plateau!”
Lu Suur looked at him narrowly. “Cain, what are you trying to say?”
“That the legends of the Roons are true, that the Old Ones, the Kangas, actually sleep in a crypt beneath that plateau and will awake if their crypt is uncovered by your blast,” cried Newton.
Lu Suur burst into laughter. “Cain, you’re an ingenious sort of traitor. Too bad you turned out to be a Patrol spy. I could really have used a man of your cleverness.”
“It’s true!” Curt Newton affirmed desperately. “You saw the inscribed monolith back there in the valley where you left your ship?”
“There are old carved monoliths like that all around the plateau, remnants of some crazy forgotten race,” said La Suur contemptuously.
“They’re warnings,” Newton insisted. “Warning written by the ancient Denebians of the Kangas who lie beneath the plateau.”
“And I suppose you can read ancient Denebian?” mocked the other. “The lie isn’t even clever.”
Newton, desperately trying to convince the Venusian, put his hands up to his face, removed waxite plugs, pulled away false scar-tissue. His hands came down to reveal his own normal clear, tanned face instead of the evil, scarred countenance of Rab Cain.
“What does that prove?” snapped Lu Suur. “As a Patrol spy, you’d naturally be disguised —”
He was interrupted. Ka Thaar was staring at Newton, and there was a wild expression on the young Mercurian’s face. He uttered a cry. “Captain Future!”
Chapter 18: The Kangas
GRIMLY, Curt Newton had taken this final desperate gamble to convince the arch-conspirator of the reality of dreadful peril. The disclosure of his identity seemed almost stunning.
In their eyes, the Earthman whom they had known as Rab Cain seemed suddenly mantled with the fame that for years had blazed one name across the universe like a meteor. “Future!” hissed Lu Suur. All his irony, his satiric amusement was gone now. Naked hatred glared in his eyes. “So you’ve been on Roo all this time?”
“Yes,” said Newton. “And you know now that I can read Denebian, that my warning about the plateau is no trick!”
Lu Suur, glaring at him, seemed not to have heard. “I might have known,” he whispered. “The stories that you had been shot down and lay wounded back in the System, the whole set-up — it was clear enough, if only I’d seen it.”
He shook his head. “Future, I underestimated you. But now you are underestimating me when you try to stop me with this last crazy stratagem. Do you think I’ve spent all these years at Roo, playing a part I hated and working toward secession and a vitron monopoly, to give it up now because you threaten me with childish superstitions?” His voice took on a deadly meaning. “I’m not making the mistake a lot of men have made, of letting you live a minute too long.”
Ka Thaar had been staring at Curt Newton during these moments. But now the young Mercurian turned to Lu Suur. “But the danger must be real,” cried Ka Thaar. “If Captain Future says the Kangas will awake if we blow the plateau, it must be so!”
“You ought to know that it’s only another trick,” snapped Lu Suur. “But then, you always were hypnotized by this fellow’s fame.”
“But if you blow open the crypt, the Kangas will awake!” persisted Ka Thaar.
“They won’t — all that is merely Roon legend,” declared the Venusian. “Watch these prisoners. I’ll deal with them in a moment but it’s time we set off the blast now.”
With hopeless eyes, Captain Future saw Lu Suur starting toward the radio-detonator which would fire the charges buried in the plateau.
A half-dozen atom-guns covered Newton and his comrades. Their own captured weapons lay on the ground out of reach. But Curt Newton gathered himself for a final suicidal attempt to stop the Venusian.
But Ka Thaar had suddenly swung around toward Lu Suur. The Mercurian’s cry was sharp, imperative.
The Mercurian youngster had both his atom-pistols in his hands and his tawny eyes were flaming as he faced the others.
Lu Suur stopped and turned. “Don’t be a fool, Ka! You can’t turn against me at this stage of the game.”
Ka Thaar’s thin, dark face was set like metal. “I’ve been loyal to you when it was a mere matter of inciting the Roons and bringing on a rebellion. But this in different. This means planetary disaster.”
Lu Suur’s eyes became like ice behind his spectacles.
“Drop those weapons, Ka. You haven’t a chance. We got eight atom-guns.”
Ka Thaar’s tawny eyes flared brighter as he stood, slightly crouched, facing the men whose atom-guns were trained on Captain Future and his comrades.
“Eight guns?” mocked the Mercurian youngster. “Then which of you eight wants to be the first to shoot it out with me?”
The brutal faces of the motley criminals grew livid with fear and rage. Yet none of them dared turn his weapon away from Newton and others toward the Mercurian’s thin, crouched figure.
Ka Thaar’s dark face was terrible as he taunted them. “Eight of you, all afraid of my reputation as a gunman? Eight, afraid to shoot it out with one? By space, I’m glad that I’m through with you all!”
He took a quick step sidewise, his tigerish eyes never leaving the frozen line of men. His foot moved out then to kick the atom-pistols on the ground toward Curt Newton. “Pick them up, Future,” he said.
Then the spell broke. The burly, vicious-eyed Jovian in the row of criminals uttered an oath and swung his gun toward Ka Thaar.
ATOM-GUNS crashed like lightning and living bolts of fire seemed to dance between the men. Ka Thaar was standing, his atom-pistols jetting blinding death at the criminals who were firing at him as they turned. The Jovian was down, two other were falling —
Captain Future had dived to snatch up one of the weapons on the ground. He came up with it, working the trigger as he rose, his and the Mercurian’s deadly, unerring blasts scything the men before them.
Grag was rushing forward, booming his battle-cry. Otho and Ezra and Carlin were beside him. A gun-blast seared Newton’s cheek as his own blast cut down the Uranian who had fired it.
He dimly heard Joan’s cry. “Curt — Lu Suur!”
The Venusian arch-plotter, near the radio-detonator, had whipped out his weapon and fired. Ka Thaar, rushing forward to intercept Lu Suur, took that blast in his side and staggered to his knees.
The raging Venusian was bending, fumbling with the switches of the detonators. Captain Future aimed and fired in one movement.
But at the very moment the crashing blast left his pistol and lanced toward Lu Suur, the sound of it was swallowed by the reverberation of a titanic explosion.
“The blast!” yelled Curt Newton. “Get behind the ridge!”
The whole surface of the white plateau seemed to be heaving skyward under the explosion of scores of powerful trinite charges.
The moon was rocked by the reverberation, the rocky ridge swaying sickeningly under them as Curt Newton dragged the others down with him behind the crest.
Chunks of rock were hurled high into the air and crashed down around them. Debris and splinters of stone rained upon their prone bodies. Clouds of dust choked them. Then
the shock died away.
Captain Future stumbled up, back to the top of the ridge. He looked downward, appalled.
A giant crater had been blown in the surface of the plateau. It was still veiled by shifting clouds of dust, but its depth was great.
“Lu Suur touched off the blast just before I killed him! Newton choked. “And now — look!”
Down in the dark, dust-shrouded depths of the giant new crater, a strange blue light had suddenly come into being.
“The Kangas have awakened and are coming out,” Captain Future exclaimed hoarsely.
He whipped around to them. “Joan — all of you — hurry to the Comet and get away if I fail!”
He stooped and snatched up the unused trinite charges that still lay on the ground beside Lu Suur’s dead form.
Then, cradling the little black cases in his left arm, Newton ran down the side of the low ridge and across the plateau toward the edge of the great crater which had been torn by the blast.
As he ran, Captain Future’s free hand was pulling out of his jacket the instrument he had shoved there when they left the Comet. It was the psycho-amplifier, the ancient weapon of the Denebians against the Kangas. The instrument he had ordered Simon to build merely to impress the Roons, was now their last hope!
Newton jammed the headset on as he ran, its flat induction coils fitting closely over his skull, its tungsten rod dangling from the cable. He was within twenty feet of the crater when he stopped short, frozen.
“Awful!” he whispered. He was shaken by a horror and a fear that no man in the universe had felt for a million years.
Up over the edge of the crater, from the newly gouged depths, was coming a fat, black, obscene thing. It was a big, semi-liquid, plastic mass, that heaved itself painfully over the rim and was followed by another of its kind.
The Kangas! He was looking at creatures no human eye had fallen upon for ages. They were looking back at him.
For they had eyes. It was the only recognizable feature of those insanely plastic black bodies — the two enormous, pupilless eyes that fixed solemnly upon Captain Future.
Newton had been desperately raising the rod of his psycho-amplifier, his thumb fumbling for the switch-button in its grip. But he did not complete his gesture of aiming the rod at the two horrors.
He couldn’t complete that gesture! He was frozen by the super-hypnotic command projected at him by the two creatures before him.
He felt as though his brain was congealed to ice. The impact of infinitely powerful and infinitely alien minds was holding him like a child in their power.
HE WAS in the power of the mighty beings whose race had died out ten thousand centuries before, the ancient kings of the universe who had reigned before ever man was, the Old Ones!
Curt Newton made frantic mental effort to raise the rod of the psycho-amplifier in his hand, to thumb its button. He couldn’t do it. Sweat trickled down his brow. He felt his mind cracking —
“Curt!” came a scream behind him. Joan had followed him!
That scream distracted the attention of the two Kangas, briefly. For just a moment, the hypnotic grip of the two creatures upon his mind relaxed as they glanced at the girl.
In that fleeting moment, Newton was able to bring up the rod in his hand to point at them and to press the button in its grip.
He felt the subtle current of electro-encephalic vibrations streaming from the rod toward the two Kangas. The powerful force of his own mental command, amplified manifold in intensity by the apparatus he wore, was being projected at his two nightmare antagonists.
Terrible contest between two giant, ancient minds and one man’s mechanically amplified will raged for a few moments in awful silence.
Then the two Kangas began to retreat slowly back down into the crater, at his unspoken command. He followed, step by step.
Not his mere weak human will was driving them, beating down their hypnotic attack. Only the instrument of ancient Denebian science which the Denebians of long ago had devised to conquer these dark horrors, enabled him to overcome them in this ghastly duel.
The Kangas had retreated down over the edge of the crater. Curt Newton was at the brink, above them. His senses reeled as he looked down into the depths.
For down there in the dusty darkness he glimpsed the curved upper surface of a giant dome of metal. It was the crypt in which Kangas had slept for a million years, and in which they had now awakened.
There was a round opening in the top of that metal dome. Dim blue light streamed upward out of it. It revealed vaguely the interior of the great crypt — a horror of scores of obscene, fat, black shapes writhing amid unearthly machines and objects. Others were already toilsomely climbing the sides of the crater after the first two.
Captain Future felt the sudden combined mental attack of the creatures below beat down even his artificially amplified resistance. But as he staggered wildly, he was blindly tossing into the crater the little sealed charges of trinite he had held in his left arm.
He glimpsed the little cases falling toward the open crypt. He reeled backward. Then came a titan shock and blast as the explosion turned the interior of the crater into an inferno. Newton was hurled backward as by a giant hand.
He regained complete awareness to find Joan Randall bending over him. Wildly, he staggered up. “The Kangas?” he cried hoarsely.
“I think they are dead,” she choked. “I think everything in that crater must be destroyed.”
Captain Future stumbled over shattered stone to the brink of the crater. The whole crater had been half collapsed by the explosion. It held a mass of broken rock, twisted metal and crushed black bodies.
The Kangas were dead, indeed. The last representatives of the once-mightiest race in the universe had awakened only to perish.
Newton and Joan, after minutes, stumbled back across the plateau to the ridge. The others were there. They had refused to flee. They were, like Captain Future, too dazed as yet to rejoice at the miracle that had saved an unsuspecting universe from the return of the most dreaded creatures ever to inhabit it.
Philip Carlin plucked Newton’s sleeve urgently. “Ka Thaar is nearly gone. And he wants to see you.”
The Mercurian’s youngster’s thin face was drained of color and his eyes were glazing as he looked up at Captain Future.
“I tried to stop Lu Suur from setting off the blast,” he whispered. “But I couldn’t. The Kangas —?”
“Are dead,” Newton told him. “There’s no more danger now. You saved us all, Ka — saved us from a disaster that would have brought our whole race into the shadows.”
There was a queer gleam in Ka Thaar’s fading glance. “And I fought beside you, didn’t I? I fought shoulder to shoulder with the Futuremen! Years ago, I used to dream of that!”
The words dribbled into nothing as his head rocked back and the emptiness of death came quietly into his eyes.
JOAN sobbed against Curt Newton’s shoulder. He looked down at the dead youngster, moved as he had not been for years.
At last, Simon Wright broke the silence. “Curtis, what about the Roons? They will have seen the blasting of the plateau as a final omen, and they’ll be boiling with superstitious excitement now.”
Newton nodded wearily. “But we can soon quiet them. All we need to do is to dig out the crushed body of one of the Kangas and take it back with us to show the tribes that the Old Ones are really dead.”
He looked up at the great pink disk of Roo. “And the danger of rebellion will collapse, with Lu Suur dead. Harmer can be sent back to the System under arrest, and a new governor appointed.” He smiled. “And the people in the System will get their vitron as freely as before, without ever knowing the price that was paid to keep it that way.”
Joan looked down at Ka Thaar. “Curt, shall we bury him here? I think he’d like that.”
Captain Future, gazing at the dead, strangely happy young face, nodded slowly. “Yes, I think he’d like it. There’s another thing I want to do t
hat, I think, would please him.”...
Two hours later, the Comet rose from the desolate satellite and sped back up into the sky toward the great pink planet. Its trail of rocket-fire faded swiftly, against the darkness, and the last echo of its rockets died away.
There was silence on the deserted moon, except for the whisper of the thin wind. The shattered plateau lay quiet beneath the stars. But now, near it, there rose in the planet-glow a high and massive cairn of rocks. Upon the face of that lonely tomb, the scorching blast of an atom-gun had deeply engraved a brief legend.
KA THAAR OF MERCURY
A FUTUREMAN
THE END
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Captain Future 18 - Red Sun of Danger (Spring 1945) Page 15
