“I’ve got to go back to our cell!” he exclaimed. “I left some of my notes on the Andromedan binaries there — I was studying them and left them on the floor.”
The little Venusian actually started back. But Captain Future grabbed him in time.
“Are you crazy?” Curt demanded. “Get in there after Joan.”
Kansu Kane sputtered. “You can’t order me around like a servant, sir! I have rights —”
Curt ended the argument by shoving the irate little astronomer bodily into the space-boat. He leaped in after him, spun shut the round door of the space-boat; and then began hastily unscrewing the bolts that held it to the cruiser hull, With the wrench hung there for the purpose.
THE last bolt gave way. Captain Future leaped forward through the single compartment of the space-boat, to the simple controls. He opened one of the throttles carefully.
The space-boat veered aside from the towering wall of the racing cruiser, and began moving off in a course at right angles to that of the larger ship. It was impelled by a subdued blast of its own small rocket-tubes.
The Legion ship, a black, unlighted mass, moved on away through the vast gulf of starry space, rapidly disappearing. Curt turned the space-boat in a course back Sunward.
“We’ve made it!” Joan cried eagerly. “Oh, Captain Future, I never thought —”
Kansu Kane interrupted wrathfully.
“All my notes, all the fruit of weeks of work left in that ship!” he sputtered to Captain Future. “And you dared lay hands on me —”
“Be quiet — we’re not out of danger,” Curt interrupted sternly. “They’ll find that stunned man quickly. When they do, and discover our escape in this boat, they’ll turn back —”
He was opening the throttles to the limit as he spoke. The little space-boat darted Sunward at mounting velocity.
Abruptly it shuddered, bucked wildly, and then righted itself and sped smoothly on again.
“What was that?” Kansu Kane asked startledly.
“Ether-current,” Curt replied briefly. The tanned face of the red-headed scientific wizard tautened. “We’re in a dangerous part of space —”
“Captain Future! They’re after us!” Joan cried.
Curt turned swiftly. Back there against the stars, the black mass of the Legion of Doom cruiser was again rapidly growing visible.
“I thought they would be,” Curt said between his teeth. “And they’ve got more speed than we — our only chance is to duck and dodge until we lose them.”
The old thrill of space-fighting came to Captain Future as he twisted and dodged out here between the stars. But the cruiser had too great an advantage in speed to be shaken off. And twice the space-boat ran into strong ether-currents that tossed it violently, making it lose ground. The Legion cruiser was steadily overtaking them.
Curt wondered why the cruiser didn’t blast them out of space with its atom-guns. They could have done it, he knew. Why had Doctor Zarro been so determined to make them prisoners?
“They’re getting closer,” Joan faltered.
The space-boat was suddenly caught by another and stronger ether-current, that gripped it and swept it away despite the force of its rocket-tubes.
CAPTAIN FUTURE fought to break clear of this strong, invisible current, but the rocket-tubes seemed utterly powerless. At appalling speed, the space-boat was whirled through the void.
He realized the terrible peril into which they had fled. Its nearness had been haunting him during all this time.
“The cruiser has given up the pursuit!” Joan cried joyfully. “They’re turning back — leaving us!”
Captain Future’s tanned face was grim.
“They’re doing so because they don’t want to be trapped as we’re trapped.”
“Trapped?” cried Kansu Kane. “What do you mean?”
“We can’t get out of this ether-current,” Curt gritted. “It’s too strong. And its whirling us on into the most dangerous spot in space, one from which no interplanetary ship has ever escaped.”
Joan’s hand went to her throat. “You mean —”
Captain Future nodded grimly.
“Yes. We’re being carried into the Sargasso Sea of Space.”
Chapter 5: Trail to Pluto
WHEN Otho, the android, and his antagonist, were hurled from the speeding ship of the Legion of Doom, the starlit desert was fully fifty feet below.
Plunging down through the darkness, fiercely clutching his opponent, Otho made a supreme effort to twist his own body uppermost.
The synthetic man, the swiftest and most agile of beings, succeeded in his maneuver. In the split-second of fall, he turned his antagonist beneath him, and it was that other man who hit the ground and cushioned Otho’s fall.
Even so, the shock of impact nearly stunned Otho.
Groggily, after a moment, he staggered to his feet. “Devils of space, that was close!” he hissed pantingly.
He bent over his opponent, whose body had been crushed beneath him. The Legionary lay still, instantly killed.
Then Otho’s eyes bulged from his head. He stared down at the dead body as though unable to credit his senses.
“Am I going crazy?” he exclaimed to himself. “How in the name of the nine worlds —”
An incredible, unnervingly fantastic thing had happened.
The Legionary with whom Otho had struggled had been an Earthman. As they had fought up there in the door of the ship, as they had fallen in the starlight, Otho had seen that clearly.
But now, in death, the Legion of Doom man had magically changed into a creature of weird and unheard-of aspect.
His crushed body was now that of a semi-human being covered from head to toe with short, thick white fur! The feet were two-toed, and the grotesque hands two-fingered. The head itself was a flattened, unhuman one, even the face covered with white fur. There were two eyes, huge, black, pupil-less orbs staring in death.
The creature wore a leather harness. To its belt had been attached a cylindrical metal instrument or weapon, but this had been crushed to fragments by the shock of impact.
“Have I gone delirious from the shock?” gasped Otho. “I can’t be seeing this!”
Then a far-off, dying drone of rocket-tubes recalled his attention. He looked up and saw the Legion of Doom cruiser, a tiny black spot, rocketing up into the starry sky and disappearing.
Wild dismay and anger filled the android’s mind at the sight.
“They’re gone — with the chief their prisoner! And there’s no telling where they’re taking him!”
His rubbery body, still in its Martian disguise, was rigid in impotent wrath.
“If I was just in that cursed ship — !”
Otho had one trait that was even stronger than his devil-may-care lust for excitement and adventure. And that was his loyalty to Captain Future. And now he had let Doctor Zarro’s dark Legion take his chief prisoner.
“I’ve got to get back to the Comet!” he told himself fiercely. And then he groaned. “What Grag will say to me about letting the chief be taken! And I deserve it!”
OTHO started across the starlit desert in a swift run, but in a moment he turned and came running back. He had remembered the dead body of the magically transformed Legionary. That weird, furry corpse might be a clue to Doctor Zarro’s Legion. He would take it for the Brain to inspect.
The furred body was heavy, as Otho slung it across his shoulders. But in his throbbing anxiety and anger, he hardly felt its weight. Again he started across the sands, intending to skirt around the city Syrtis to the hiding-place where the Comet waited.
Only the stars’ white eyes looked down on him. Only the stars, and the whirling sand-devils that glided before the night winds and whispered of the mysteries of old Mars.
Otho kept well out from the lighted towers of Syrtis. And finally he stumbled up to the gleaming, quiescent bulk of the Comet, lying silent between the concealing sand dunes.
He touched the secret button in
its side and the door slid open. Otho stumbled in, and dropped the body on the floor.
The compact laboratory in the mid-section of the Comet was in semi-darkness. The Brain was peering through the biggest telescope toward Sagittarius, while Grag, the robot, was exposing photographic plates on a smaller telescope at the Brain’s directions.
Grag’s great metal figure turned quickly, and the lens-eyes of the Brain turned to see also, as Otho entered.
“It’s me — Otho!” the android said hastily, seeing that they did not recognize him in the Martian disguise.
Simon Wright guessed instantly from Otho’s battered appearance that something was wrong.
“Where is Curtis?” the Brain rasped sharply.
Otho gulped. “They’ve got him — the Legion of Doom. It was my fault, partly.”
The android told rapidly what had happened. When he had finished, there burst from Grag a booming roar of rage.
The great robot, his photo-electric eyes blazing, advanced ominously toward the crestfallen android.
“You let them take him?” boomed Grag. He clenched huge metal fists furiously. “I told the master you would get him into trouble! I wanted him to take me. But no, you talked him into taking you. I knew this would happen!”
“It wasn’t altogether my fault,” flared Otho defensively. “I waited in the observatory as he ordered, and when the Legion men came in, I delayed them as long as I could, dodging about and not letting them catch me. But then there was an alarm from the ship and they returned to it — I tried to follow, but was pushed off.”
“If I had been there I would have torn that ship apart before I would have let them take away the master in it!” Grag shouted.
The cold, austere, rasping voice of the Brain cut across their argument like an icy sword.
“Be quiet, Grag,” Simon Wright ordered. “This will get us nowhere. We must follow that ship, quickly.”
“I don’t know where it’s heading for,” Otho admitted miserably. Then the android added quickly: “But I did bring back one of the Legion of Doom — dead. And the queerest thing happened to him as he died.”
HE TOLD them of the magical transformation of the Earthman Legionary into a strange furred creature, in death.
“I want to see that body,” said the Brain instantly. “Grag, put me down by it.”
The Brain’s lens-eyes moved to and fro on their flexible stalks, keenly inspecting the grotesque corpse.
“I’ve never heard of a race like this before,” muttered Simon. “And I can’t understand how it could look like an Earthman when it was living.”
“It did look just like an Earthman, dressed in a uniform.” Otho affirmed emphatically.
“Did it feel like an Earthman when you were struggling with it?”
Otho hesitated. “I don’t remember very well — yes. I do remember now! It felt furry in my grasp, as we fell. I’d forgotten that.”
“Then,” the Brain declared, “this creature was never an Earthman. It simply had some means of making it appear like one, some strange means of giving the illusion that it was an Earthman.”
“But why should the illusion vanish so suddenly when the thing died?” Otho demanded.
“You see that broken instrument at the creature’s belt?” the; Brain said. “It’s too badly shattered to find out anything from. But I believe it may have been a device to create the illusion that disguised this creature as an Earthman. The instrument was shattered in the fall, and so the illusion vanished.”
“It seems a pretty far-fetched idea,” muttered Otho. “And yet it’s about the only one that explains what happened.”
Grag had been pacing to and fro in wild restlessness, with clanking strides. Now the robot uttered an angry shout.
“Why do we stand here talking, when master has been taken?” he boomed furiously. “Why don’t we follow?”
“We have to know where to follow, Grag,” the Brain explained calmly.
“Yes, we can’t just comb the whole System for that ship,” Otho added.
“Don’t talk to me!” Grag told the android. “It’s all I can do to keep from giving you a thrashing, as it is.”
“You and ten thousand metal junkmen like you couldn’t do that!” flamed Otho, springing to his feet.
Eek, the moon-pup, had awakened and had ambled over to the group. Now, sensing its metal master’s anger with Otho, the little gray beast bared its teeth belligerently at the android.
“No more of this quarreling!” Simon Wright’s cold voice lashed. “That is an order.”
The two other Futuremen relaxed their angry stiffness. Bodiless the Brain might be, unable even to move without help, yet both Otho and Grag were subservient to the vast, calm intellect housed in that transparent serum-case — the intellect that had helped create them.
“Put this body on the operating table under the X-ray lamps,” the Brain ordered. “I’ve been studying its eyes, and I think I have a clue to where it came from.”
Otho unfolded the operating table, and Grag laid the white-furred body on it and switched on the powerful X-ray lamps.
Through fluoroscopic spectacles that were slipped on over his lens-eyes, the Brain studied the interior anatomy of the furry corpse.
“I was right!” he declared finally. “This creature is a native of Pluto or somewhere near it.”
“How can you tell?” Otho asked doubtfully.
“Those huge-pupiled eyes prove that the creature originated on a world of eternal dusk, one with less light even than Neptune,” the Brain answered. “The furry, light-boned body must have evolved on a cold, medium-sized world. That means Pluto, for it’s the only world in the System which answers those conditions.”
“But maybe the creature came from some world outside our System completely?” Otho suggested.
“No, that’s impossible,” rasped the Brain, “for its eye-retinas are adapted to ultra-violet radiation exactly like that of our Sun. No two suns emit exactly the same kind of radiation. This creature comes from within our System — from Pluto.”
“But no one has ever seen such creature as this on Pluto!” Otho objected. “The native Plutonians don’t look like this.”
“Pluto is still largely unexplored,” Simon reminded him. “That icy planet and its three moons may hide more than one unknown race in their frigid wildernesses.”
“Then Doctor Zarro’s and the Legion’s headquarters must be out there at Pluto?” Otho cried eagerly.
“I’m sure of it,” the Brain replied. “It is possible that all the men of the Legion of Doom, who seemed to be Earthmen, are really creatures like this one, in some illusion-disguise.”
Otho gasped at that suggestion. But Grag’s mind clung to one thing — his master.
“They will have taken master to Pluto, then?” he cried. “We go there after them?”
“We go at once!” the Brain snapped. “Blast off Mars at once and lay a course straight for Pluto.”
A few minutes later, with Grag at its controls, the Comet rose from the starlit Martian desert, shot up above the lighted towers of Syrtis, and rocketed headlong into the void.
“Better turn on the ship’s camouflage, now that we’re clear of Mars,” the Brain rasped. “We don’t want that Legion ship to spot us pursuing them.”
Grag obeyed, pulling down a burnished red lever beside the throttles. The result was amazing.
The Comet suddenly became a real comet! Captain Future had long ago devised this perfect method of camouflage for his craft. It was achieved by projecting a dense discharge of glowing ions from the rocket-tubes. That cloud of electrified atoms, clinging around the ship and trailing behind it in space, made the Comet to all appearances live up to its name.
The camouflaged ship rushed on. As the hours dragged by the Brain used a small telescope in the control-room to continue his scrutiny of the tiny dark spot in the constellation Sagittarius.
“How can you think of that dark star now, when the chief is in dan
ger?” Otho exclaimed to him.
SIMON glanced at the android with cold, calm lens-eyes.
“I am as worried about Curtis as you,” he said, “but I must continue these studies of the dark star he asked me to make. He will need all possible data to combat Doctor Zarro’s plot.”
“He will, if he’s still living,” Otho said gloomily.
“Master still lives!” boomed Grag loudly, with perfect faith. “We will find him — you will see.”
Otho gloomily resumed his survey of space ahead. In a moment there was a hissing cry from the android.
“Something ahead! It may be the ship we’re after!”
They saw it — a big, queer-looking space ship coming toward them, driving nearer by the second.
“It can’t be the Legion ship, for that’s going the other way —”
“It’s diving on us — it’s going to ram us!”
The strange ship ahead was swooping down into the path of the camouflaged Comet, and would collide with it head-on.
Chapter 6: Graveyard of Space-Ships
MEANWHILE, what had happened to Captain Future and his companions?
The Sargasso Sea of Space! The legendary, mysterious peril to navigation that was dreaded by every space-sailor in the System!
Joan Randall’s pretty face was pale and stricken, and little Kansu Kane stared bewilderedly, as Captain Future told them that their space-boat was being drawn into that deadly trap.
The space-boat was still being carried at frightful speed through the void by the ether-current gripping it. The Legion of Doom cruiser, recoiling from the danger, had vanished.
“It’s my fault,” Curt Newton said, his tanned face self-accusing. “I knew from the currents that we were getting near the Sargasso. But I thought I could escape it and shake off pursuit.”
“You were wonderful to get us out of that ship!” Joan cried loyally to the red-haired scientific wizard. “And you’ll get us out of the Sargasso — I know you will.”
“What is this Sargasso of Space you’re talking about?” Kansu Kane demanded. “I’m no space-sailor — I never heard of it.”
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