Captain Future 03 - Captain Future's Challenge (Summer 1940)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “Can’t you let me take the Comet for a trip to Venus?” Otho begged. “It’s for scientific reasons,” he added hastily. “There’s a rare specimen of fungoid creature on that unexplored north Venusian continent that I want to get.”

  Curt Newton chuckled.

  “You and your rare specimens!” he scoffed at the android. “You’re just bored here on the moon, as usual, and trying to think up an excuse to get off on one of your crazy, hell-raising space-jaunts.”

  “Well, anyone would get bored hanging around this cursed moon where nothing ever happens. Since we got back from Pluto, we haven’t been off this shriveled little world.”

  A rasping, metallic voice interrupted the android’s sulky complaint.

  “If you want something to do so badly, Otho,” rasped that harsh, un-human voice, “your wish is gratified. You can take Grag and me over to the sub-lunar test chamber.”

  Both Curt and Otho turned. The other two Futuremen had appeared in one of the doors of the laboratory. One of them was Grag, the robot, whose mighty metal shape loomed seven feet in height. Like a huge metal travesty on mankind he towered, his massive jointed arms and legs hinting the giant strength he possessed. Grag’s eyes — gleaming photoelectric eyes set in the front of his bulbous metal head — looked inquiringly toward Captain Future as he towered high there.

  Curled up familiarly on Grag’s metal shoulder was his particular pet — a little bearlike animal with gray, siliceous flesh, a sharp nose and curious little eyes. And the great robot held in one metal hand the handle of the case which contained the third Futureman.

  The third Futureman had no body. He was Simon Wright, known from one end of the System to the other as the Brain. For he was simply a human brain that lived in a square, transparent case. Inside that case were the compact pumps and serum-purifiers that circulated artificial blood-serums to keep the Brain living. In the front of the case were the Brain’s artificial lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the resonator-mechanism by which he spoke.

  Strangest trio in the whole System — these three unhuman Futuremen who were spoken of with awe on every world! Simon Wright, the living Brain who had once been an ordinary living man; Grag, the great metal robot, strongest being in the whole Universe; and Otho, the synthetic man. Three unhuman comrades, with scientific powers and strange abilities beyond compare, who companioned Captain Future, the greatest scientific wizard of all, on his hazardous adventures in defense of law and right!

  The Brain was speaking again, his lens-eyes turned toward Curt Newton’s face as his mechanical voice rasped.

  “Have you solved the problem of your experiment yet, Curtis?” he asked.

  Curt shook his head ruefully.

  “Not yet. I can compress the electron-orbits well enough, but can’t reverse it. Watch —”

  He reached toward the switch of the electrical projector, beneath which lay the little square block of gold.

  “Wait!” boomed Grag hastily. “Eek is there —”

  The little gray siliceous animal that had been curled up on Grag’s shoulder had spied the gold, and had made for it. Eek was a moon-pup, a native lunar siliceous animal who was non-breathing and who ate metals and ores. Eek especially loved silver and gold.

  “Better get him out from under that projector, Grag,” chuckled Curt, “or he’ll be reduced in size with the gold.”

  “Say, that’s the best idea I’ve heard yet, Chief!” exclaimed Otho. “Shrink Eek down to the size of a molecule, and then the little pest won’t be forever chewing up things and making trouble.”

  GRAG had snatched Eek hastily from under the projector. Now the big metal robot turned wrathfully on Otho.

  “You’re always complaining about Eek!” he accused Otho. “You forget that Eek saved all our lives out on Pluto.”

  “I deny that!” Otho shouted. “And even if that cursed moon-pup had saved my life, I still wouldn’t like him.”

  “That’s because only humans like myself like pets,” Grag said proudly. “Of course, since you’re not quite human, Otho —”

  “Quiet, Grag!” said Curt hastily, as Otho began to answer furiously. “I want to show Simon my experiment.”

  Captain Future closed the switch. A beam of red light shot down from the projector onto the little block of gold. The gold block shrank. In minutes, it dwindled in size until it was only one-tenth as big. Curt; turned off the red beam.

  “I could make it so small as to be invisible,” he said. “Trouble is, I don’t know yet how to make things big again.”

  “Well, we will be back in a few hours,” the Brain told him. “To the Comet, Grag. Come along, Otho.”

  Soon, Curt Newton heard a roar of rocket-tubes as the Comet, his superswift space-cruiser, took off from its underground hangar for the short flight around to the Moon’s other side. Curt remained standing, looking musingly around the now silent laboratory, his red head bathed in the sunlight from the great window overhead. He loved this strange dwelling on the wild moon. It was home to him. Here, indeed, he had been born.

  All Curt’s first childhood memories were of this place, and of the three Futuremen, the robot and android and Brain. To him, those awesomely un-human beings had never seemed strange, but familiar and dear. They had been his protectors, his tutors.

  The Brain, master of science, had given him the unparalleled scientific education that was the foundation for his later wizardry of science. Grag the robot, strongest of all beings, had developed his strength and endurance. Otho, most daring and agile and swift of all, had trained him in quickness and skill. They loved the growing boy, and Curt gave them the affection another lad would give his parents.

  Not until he had reached manhood, had the Brain told him of his parents. Of how Roger Newton, young Earth scientist, had fled here to the moon years before with his young wife and with the Brain himself. For Simon Wright was an Earth scientist himself, whose brain had been removed from his aging, dying body and encased in its present serum-case, to live on.

  His father and mother, Curt had learned, had fled to this refuge on the moon to escape plotters who coveted their scientific discoveries for sinister purposes. Here in their new lunar home, Roger Newton and the Brain had carried on their great attempt to create artificial living beings. And here they had created two such beings — Grag, the metal robot, and Otho, the synthetic man.

  But the plotters they had fled from had followed them to the moon, and had murdered Roger Newton and his young wife. Grag and Otho had slain the murderers. And, dying, Curt’s mother had left her newly born son in the care of the robot and android and Brain, begging them to protect and educate and aid him.

  ALL this, Curt Newton had learned when he had reached manhood. And, learning, he had come to a great decision — a decision to apply his unparalleled scientific wizardry and superhuman abilities to a war against all interplanetary criminals.

  “The growth of interplanetary traffic, the mingling of planetary races and increase of scientific knowledge, will bring dangers to the System peoples!” Curt had declared. “Danger from such criminals as murdered my parents. With your help, and with the education you’ve given me, I can help the System peoples fight those dangers.”

  “It is what your dying mother wanted, lad,” the Brain had rasped. “And Grag and Otho and I will fight at your side. But it means devoting your life single-mindedly to this great cause.”

  “I know,” Curt had said earnestly. “I’ll probably go under, sooner or later. But until I do, I’ll use every ounce of my brains and strength to crush those who try to exploit the System’s races.”

  Curt had flown secretly to Earth that very night and offered his services to the President of the System Government.

  “If you ever need me, flash a signal-flare from the North Pole,” he had said. “I’ll see it — and I’ll come.”

  “But who are you, anyway?” the bewildered President had asked.

  And a debonair smile had lit Curt’s face as he answ
ered, “You can call me? — Captain Future!”

  Thus had been born the career of Captain Future. Since then, the North Pole signal-summons had flared many times. And each time, Curt Newton and the three Futuremen had answered quickly, and by sheer daring and scientific mastery had crushed the plots and plotters who endangered the System.

  Curt’s reverie of memory was interrupted by a soft chiming note. He looked up at the wall. On that wall were ten clocks. Nine of them showed the exact time on each of the nine worlds. The tenth clock showed the standard solar time used by all space ships. It was just ten o’clock.

  “Time for me to be getting back to work, instead of wool-gathering,” Curt told himself. “Now, if I used a higher frequency beam in this projector, would it —”

  He was turning toward the projector, as he spoke. But he suddenly stopped. A paralyzing force had struck him. He slumped to the laboratory floor like a dead man.

  “Something’s blocking off all the electric nerve-currents in my body!” the thought flashed through Curt’s mind. “This is no accident — someone’s causing this —”

  He made a superhuman mental effort to move. If he could just get to a cabinet across the laboratory, he could use the instruments in it to neutralize this paralyzing force. But he was helpless, unable to stir a finger. He lay prone. And in a moment, he heard men entering the air-lock outer door of the sub-lunar dwelling.

  Captain Future waited grimly. Into the laboratory cautiously came a band of space-suited men. The foremost, a bulky Jovian, held a gunlike weapon whose fan of invisible force covered the red-haired scientific wizard.

  Curt, still unable to speak or move, surveyed his attackers with flaring gray eyes. Hastily, they tied him with unbreakable metal ropes, keeping out of the range of the invisible force themselves. Then the Jovian snicked off his weapon. Curt found he could move. He made a tremendous effort to break his bonds, but it was futile.

  “Put a space-suit on him,” the Jovian was ordering. “He mustn’t die as we take him to the ship — the Wrecker’s orders!”

  Curt’s voice was low and deadly as he spoke to the Jovian.

  “Who is the Wrecker? Who ordered you to do this?”

  THE Jovian laughed hollowly. “You’ll meet the Wrecker soon, Captain Future. You’ve ruined a lot of schemes, but you won’t ruin his. He’s too smart — he struck at you first!”

  Curt’s eyes narrowed. There was something strange about this Jovian and his men. Their set expressions, and hollow eyes... Inwardly, Curt was seething. Whoever the Wrecker was, he was the first who had ever dared made a deliberate attack on Captain Future’s home. It was a challenge to Captain Future — a challenge Curt grimly accepted.

  The Jovian leader had taken from his belt a small square recorder-machine into which he spoke in loud tones.

  “To the Futuremen!” he said loudly. “We have your leader, Captain Future. Make no effort to trace us, make no effort to leave the moon, and he will not be killed. Otherwise, he dies!”

  The Jovian hung the recorder by the door, and set a trip-switch so that it would speak the words when the Futuremen came.

  “Now out of here quick, before they return,” he continued hastily. “The paralysis-beam wouldn’t work on all three of those unhuman devils. That’s why we had to strike when they were gone.”

  Curt had been garbed, still bound and helpless, in a space-suit. Now his captors carried him out of the lunar laboratory and across Tycho crater to a black ship waiting hidden in the peaks.

  Captain Future was tossed into a small supply-room off the main corridor of the ship. The space-suit was removed, but not his bonds. And a tall, stringy, yellow-faced Uranian stood guard over him with a drawn atom-pistol.

  Curt felt the ship lurch upward with a roar of rocket-tubes, then hurtle off through space. He squirmed around to look through the window. The ship was flying away from the moon and Earth, and heading almost straight toward the blazing orb of the sun.

  “They’re going to coast close past the sun, which means they’re heading for one of the worlds now on the other side of the System,” Curt thought quickly. “Jupiter, or Uranus or Neptune —”

  Captain Future craned toward the window. His heart went cold as he glimpsed the green sphere of Earth, On its North Pole, a brilliant little flare of light was throbbing forth.

  “The signal!” Curt muttered appalledly. “The summons from the President!”

  It was the beacon-flare used by the President to call Captain Future and the Futuremen when peril threatened the system. And he, Captain Future, who had never failed to answer that summons swiftly, could not answer it now, for he was being carried off across the void, a helpless prisoner.

  Chapter 3: Solar Peril

  CURT NEWTON felt an emotion as near despair as he ever had experienced. That call from Earth meant grave danger, a vital emergency of some kind. And he couldn’t answer! He was tied hand and foot with unbreakable metal ropes. Over him stood the armed Uranian guard.

  But Captain Future had won out of equally perilous situations in the past. That trap on the Prison Moon of Pluto, and the death-pit in the Place of the Dead on Jupiter, and many others. He lay still, his bronzed face immobile, his keen gray eyes roving about.

  The ship was throbbing on its course sunward. Curt realized that its objective must be either Jupiter or Uranus or Neptune, the three planets on the other side of the System. Which was it?

  Curt started as he heard his captors talking. They were saying something about the wrecking of some of the System’s gravium mines. Did that mean that the Wrecker, the mysterious leader behind these strange men, was striking somehow at the System’s gravium supply?

  “It must be so,” Curt thought. “A threat to the gravium sources of the System — that must be why Carthew called for me!”

  Gravium was the very life-blood of interplanetary civilization. For without it, gravitation-equalizers could not be made. And without equalizers, men didn’t dare visit other planets of greater or lesser gravitation than their own.

  The first space explorers, back in 1971, had found that out. Landing on worlds of lesser gravitation than Earth, their circulation, internal organs, their whole anatomy, were damaged. All were sickened, many crippled and killed. It seemed at first that it would be impossible for men ever to live on other worlds.

  Then Mark Carew, one of those first explorers, had discovered on Mercury a queer metal unknown on Earth. He called it gravium, for an electric current sent through a coil of this metal would decrease or increase the weight of any matter immediately around the coil, according to the current’s polarity and strength.

  Carew invented a gravitation equalizer, whose core was a gravium coil. The equalizer, worn in a flat case on the body, could be set to compensate automatically for any difference in gravitation. The wearer of the equalizer always felt the same weight, no matter how strong or weak was the gravitation of the world he visited.

  The gravitation equalizers had made widespread interplanetary traffic possible! Every interplanetary traveler wore one. Because of them, Earthmen could visit Jupiter and the other giant planets without ill-effects, and similarly Jovians and other planetary races could visit Earth. Without equalizers, space-travel would stop.

  And it was only the precious metal gravium that made the equalizers possible. Small wonder that gravium was the most valuable metal in the System! The companies which mined the gravium were required to sell all of it to the System Government, which supervised the manufacture of the all-important equalizers.

  “If this Wrecker and his crowd have really ruined part of the System’s gravium supply,” Captain Future thought, “it’s no wonder that President Carthew called for me.”

  Then renewed remembrance of his present situation, his inability to answer that call, swept over him. He writhed mentally. His mind worked at top speed to discover a way out of his captivity. The yellow Uranian still watched him like a hawk with those hollow eyes, his atom-pistol ready in his hand.

/>   Curt looked out the window. Hours had passed, and the ship was now flying very close to the stupendous orb of the sun, which it would pass closely on its way to the other side of the System.

  THE ship already had its “halo” working, Captain Future saw. The “halo”, a screen of vibrations that repelled radiant heat waves, was a necessity to all ships routed close to the sun. It enclosed the craft like a shell of blue light.

  The Uranian guard saw Captain Future looking out of the window, and laughed hollowly.

  “You don’t want to go outside, do you?” the guard asked ironically. “You wouldn’t live long if you did. Captain Future.”

  Curt knew that. Only the “halo” kept the ship from being destroyed by the terrific heat of the sun. The sun was an overwhelming spectacle. Though several million miles away, the giant star seemed near enough to touch. Its radiance was blinding even through the light-filter windows. Out from it raged huge prominences — tongues of solar flame capable of destroying a world, leaping out like claws clutching at the ship.

  Captain Future was not stunned by the sight. He had been far closer to the sun than this when he and the Futuremen had carried out perilous solar researches in their ship, the Comet. His mind was concentrated now on a desperate scheme of escape that he had evolved.

  Curt twisted a little to bring his left hand into full view. On that hand he wore his famous ring — the emblem of Captain Future, with its nine little bright planet-jewels revolving slowly around the central radiant sun-gem. Curt spoke to the yellow Uranian guard.

  “Would you help me escape if I gave you this ring?”

  The Uranian answered scornfully. “Of course not! I could take it away from you, if I wished so.”