“The same as before — that dark star is at least fifty thousand miles in diameter! It’s unbelievable that it should have so little mass. Something must be distorting our mass-measurements.”
“That problem has baffled me, too,” confessed Kansu Kane. “I am beginning to believe now that my mass-measurements have been in error.”
“Prepare the magnetoscopes and we’ll make new measurements,” directed Simon.
The Brain brooded over the problem as Kansu Kane bustled around the instruments. It was the greatest scientific mystery he had ever encountered. That colossal dark star thundering toward the System should, in the natural course of things, have enormous mass, but all astronomical measurements had indicated that its mass was negligible.
But if those measurements were really in error, if the dark star really was as massive as it might naturally be expected to be, Doctor Zarro’s prophecy of solar disaster was not unfounded! Such a huge and massive body, if it struck the System would rip through the planetary orbits and suck worlds into it as it moved. And if it collided with the Sun, half or more of the System’s worlds might well perish in the titanic catastrophe!
The Brain became suddenly aware that Kansu Kane’s bustling movements had ceased. The waspish little astronomer had sunk down and lay prostrate, his eyes staring up emptily.
“Kansu! What is the matter?” rasped the Brain.
THERE was no answer. Simon turned his lens-eyes down to Joan and Otho. They too lay prone, stiff, unmoving.
Then the Brain’s keen microphone ears caught a hissing sound, as of flowing gas.
“Overpowering gas of some kind!” flashed the thought of the Brain. “It’s being pumped into the building —”
That, he knew, could be the only explanation. But why, he wondered, had Otho been overcome by the gas? The android was impervious to almost any poison and could breathe air that would kill a human, but that did not harm his lungs.
Then the Brain understood. This gas being pumped in was one which affected, not the lungs, but every cell in the body, paralyzing cellular chemical activity and thus “freezing” the whole body. Otho and Joan and Kansu Kane must still be conscious like himself, but their bodies were utterly paralyzed.
And the Brain could do nothing! His only powers of movement were his ability to move his flexible eye-stalks. He could only wait.
The hissing of gas ceased. Simon heard the sound of a door opening. Twisting his eyes downward, he saw a half dozen men in space suits enter the building.
They wore the black disk of the Legion of Doom on their shoulders. They were led by a tall, space-suited man, whose transparent helmet allowed his enormous, bulging forehead and skull, and gaunt face and burning eyes, to be seen.
“Doctor Zarro himself!” muttered the Brain. “I might have known.”
Doctor Zarro looked down contemptuously at the stiff, helpless forms of Joan and Otho and Kansu Kane. Then, while his men guarded the doors, the tall, burning-eyed prophet climbed the metal ladder to the eyepiece-platform of the great reflector.
Doctor Zarro and the Brain stared at each other, the burning black orbs of the black prophet and the cold, glittering lens-eyes of Simon Wright meeting and clashing in tangible shock.
“So this is the famous Brain,” mocked Doctor Zarro in a deep, harsh voice muffled by his helmet. “So this is the greatest scientist in the System, except for Captain Future — this miserable brain in a box!”
The Brain, completely unmoved, asked a question.
“Have you killed my friends?”
Doctor Zarro laughed mirthlessly.
“They are not dead — they are not even unconscious! But they cannot move, while the freezing-gas holds them.”
The dark prophet bent closer.
“I heard you were coming here, Brain — and so I came too. You are going to tell me just how much you and Captain Future have learned about me and my Legion. If you tell, I will grant you the gift of quick death. If you refuse —”
“I will tell you nothing,” replied the unfrightened Brain coldly.
“You had better think twice!” warned the tall prophet. “You are utterly helpless in my hands. I can make you long for death.”
SIMON WRIGHT was calm. “A great many men in the past,” he said, “have threatened me. They thought themselves safe to do so because I have no body and cannot resist. But all those men regretted their threats.”
“You think your Captain Future will avenge you?” Doctor Zarro’s harsh voice was ugly. “Get rid of the idea, Brain! He is already destroyed — before ever I came here, I gave orders that have by now been carried out.”
The Brain uttered a rasping laugh.
“You’re not the first who has thought he had eliminated Curtis. You’ll find you are mistaken.”
Yet inwardly, the Brain was wondering. The quickness with which Doctor Zarro had learned that Captain Future was on Pluto was highly suspicious. It might be that the black prophet had in fact laid a deadly trap for Curt.
Doctor Zarro was speaking menacingly.
“I know that you and your red-headed captain trailed me here through the dead body of one of my Legionaries. What else have you found out?”
The Brain remained coolly silent.
“I’ll make you talk!” the dark doctor cried.
He reached out to a little switch on the side of the Brain’s transparent case. It was the switch of the compact perfusion pump which circulated serum through Simon’s living brain, constantly purifying and stimulating it.
The switch clicked off. The perfusion-pump stopped instantly. And at once the Brain felt the effects.
A dull ache was his first sensation. Then the aching became stronger, became an increasing agony that seemed to spread fiery pain through every fiber of his brain.
The Brain’s vision and hearing blurred as that torturing agony increased, as his starved cerebrum-cells cried for the serum whose flow had been stopped.
“Are you ready to be helpful now?” questioned Doctor Zarro mockingly.
The Brain could hardly see the dark figure hovering over him. But he answered, his rasping voice thick, slow.
“The answer is the same,” he mumbled, indomitably.
He dimly heard Doctor Zarro’s fierce exclamation of impatience. Then the rending, torturing agony became so intense that Simon could neither see nor hear.
Chapter 10: The Marching Mountains
AS CAPTAIN FUTURE’S disabled rocket flier plunged down toward the ice-fields after being hit by the Legion cruiser that had attacked them, the red-haired adventurer’s brain was working with lightning rapidity. The blast of the cruiser’s atom-guns had not completely destroyed the ship, thanks to Curt’s swiftness of reaction in dodging. But the whole tail and rocket-tubes were shorn off, and icy air was screaming into the wrecked flier as it tumbled toward destruction, turning over and over.
Curt saw just one chance to avoid death in crashing impact below. While Tharb the Plutonian howled in panic, and Grag clutched amazedly to a stanchion to keep from being thrown out, Captain Future took the one chance left him.
He threw himself back to the stern of the falling flier. The single cyclotron that powered it was still there, unharmed. Clinging to it, Curt tore away the output power-tubes that had led to the now vanished rockets. Then the young wizard of science scrambled back to the controls.
“Master, we’re going to strike!” yelled Grag.
Turning over and over, they were now very close to the gleaming ice. All that had happened had taken but seconds.
Curt’s tanned hands grabbed the throttles. He waited an instant until, in its turning, the falling flier’s stern was downward. Then he opened all throttles wide.
From the cyclotron, down out of the blasted tail, raved an uncontrolled blaze of atomic energy. That terrific fan of force, hitting the ice-field only yards below, checked the fall of the flier by its reactive push.
Next moment the crippled craft, turning on over, lost the braking effect
. But it had been enough to slow their fall. They hit the ice with a crashing impact that stunned Curt Newton partially, but that did not destroy them as it would have except for his stratagem.
Curt got to his feet. Still a little groggy from the experience, he saw the hairy Plutonian and the big metal robot staggering up likewise.
“The Legion cruiser is gone!” Curt announced, peering up through a shattered window of the wrecked flier. “They thought we were as good as dead when they saw us fall.”
“We are as good as dead!” yelled Tharb, the hairy Plutonian’s big phosphorescent eyes dilated with terror. “Listen to that!”
Curt became aware of a thunderous, cracking, crashing sound that seemed growing louder and nearer by the minute.
“The Marching Mountains!” Tharb howled. “We fell right in their path!”
Captain Future’s heart skipped a beat. He sprang out of the tangled metal wreck, the other two following.
In the brilliant moonlight, he stood petrified for a moment on the rough ice, staring northeastward. He and his companions looked frozenly up at an awful peril thundering down on them.
The Marching Mountains! The vast thousand-foot high range of icy hills that was but one of similar glacier-ranges which perpetually moved around the planet!
THE forefront of the appalling walking ice-range was a towering, gleaming cliff that was only a few hundred yards from them. And the whole cliff was advancing on them, moving at an incredible speed of many yards a minute, pushed forward by the vast glacial masses of ice behind it. From the icy moving cliff fell great bergs and masses of ice, over which the main range moved crushingly as it came on.
“Out of here!” Captain Future yelled, “We’ll have to run for it — this way!”
“There is no use running from the Marching Mountains,” cried Tharb hopelessly. “We cannot get out of their path and they will soon overtake us.”
Yet the hairy Plutonian joined Curt and Grag as they started in a dead run away from the crackling, crashing glacial range.
It was characteristic of Captain Future that even as he and the robot and the Plutonian fled over the moonlit ice-fields from the pursuing death, his keen mind was trying to solve the problem of how that Legion of Doom cruiser had come to attack him.
It must be, Curt thought tensely, that Legion cruisers had been in hiding somewhere near the city Tartarus. And Doctor Zarro had ordered one, perhaps by televisor, to follow Captain Future and destroy him and his companions.
But how had Doctor Zarro even known that he was here on Pluto? No one in Tartarus had known it except Ezra Gurney, and the three men he had called in to ask for information — Victor Krim, the Charon fur-magnate, Rundall Lane, the warden of Cerberus prison, and Cole Romer, the government planetographer.
Could one of those three be Doctor Zarro? None of them had looked like the dark, burning-eyed prophet. But Curt, remembering the mysterious, baffling way in which the white-furred creature had been disguised as an Earthman, wondered flashingly if Doctor Zarro’s impressive appearance was not a similar strange disguise.
“The ice gains on us, Master!” Grag’s booming voice yelled over the ominous crackling roar from behind.
“Faster, Grag!”
“It is useless!” cried Tharb a moment later. “See — we can go no farther!”
Captain Future’s heart chilled as he saw what lay ahead in the moonlit ice-field.
It was the salt river Phlegethon, which they had been following northward when the attack bad come. A wide, deep racing torrent whose roar could be heard even above the deafening thunder of advancing ice from behind.
They reached the icy shore of the torrent. One glance showed Curt that to swim that wide, raging deep flood was impossible.
Tharb turned to them, and there was a certain fatalistic dignity in the hairy Plutonian’s bearing.
“This is our end,” he said, and stood gazing dully back at the oncoming glacial cliffs.
“Our end — nothing!” Curt yelled, his gray eyes flashing in the moonlight. “Grag, help me push one of these ice-cakes into the river! If we get one of these cakes into the river, we can float down on it and maybe get out of the path of the glacier-range before it reaches the river! That current is terrific — it will take us miles in a few minutes!”
THARB, spurred out of his despair by the thin chance suggested, sprang with Curt toward a great flat ice-cake that lay partly in the water. They pushed with all their strength to slide the mass into the river.
Grag’s physical strength was almost unlimited. Beneath his tremendous push, and that of Tharb and Curt, the big cake began to slide slowly into the water. Then it moved faster.
“Jump onto it before it floats clear!” Curt yelled. “Hurry, Grag!”
The flat ice-cake was already swirling out into the super-swift current, as the three comrades leaped.
Curt Newton and Tharb landed in a heap on the frozen surface. Grag, following, sprang a little short. The big robot’s metal body began to slide over the edge of the cake.
Curt gripped his metal wrists, and pulled mightily. He just dragged back Grag’s great figure in time.
“Dig hand-grip holes out of the ice!” Captain Future yelled to his companions. “It’s going to be hard to hang onto this thing!”
“See — the Marching Mountains come on!” Tharb cried fearfully. “They will reach the river before we are past them!”
“Maybe not,” Curt gritted. “Though it’s going to be close.”
The scene was like one of nightmare. The three great moons of Pluto, looking down upon the silver-lit, frigid world. The wild salt river raging northward through the ice-fields. The gigantic, portentous range of glacial white cliffs advancing thunderously and inexorably toward the river, from northeastward.
And in the center of the racing, whirling river, the big ice-cake riding the current at dizzying speed, and bearing on it the clinging trio — the fur-clad form of Captain Future, the crouching, hairy shape of Tharb, and the huge, gleaming metal robot.
The icy range of the Marching Mountains was now within a hundred yards of the river, bordering it like a towering white cliff, for many miles. Curt could see, far ahead, the end of the walking range. Would they pass it before it stamped over the river and crushed them?
His ears were deafened by the combined roar of maddened waters and thunderous crashing of the advancing glacier. The crazy pitching of the ice-cake they were riding threatened each moment to dislodge them from the precarious hand-holds they had scratched out of the ice.
Now the advancing cliffs were within a few yards of the river. They towered over the racing current in ominous, on coming precipices. Great masses continually fell from them, and were crushed under by the main advancing glacial bulk.
Curt glimpsed the end of the looming cliffs, a little ahead. The current, as though sensing their dire peril, leaped faster. The ice-cake shot past the end of the moving range, at the moment that great white chunks were already falling on them from it.
“We’re safe from the Mountains, anyway!”
Curt cried encouragingly.
“Master, look at that — the ice mountains conquer the river!” Grag cried wonderingly, staring back.
CAPTAIN FUTURE glanced back and saw that the vast glacier was grinding on across the river, marching steadily on.
“Don’t those Marching Mountains fill up the river every time they cross it?” he cried to Tharb.
The Plutonian shook his head.
“No, for most of the river’s real current runs in deep underground channels, and as soon as the mountains have passed, the current clears away the ice left above.”
They were soon out of sight of the appalling walking ranges. But the thunder of waters in their ears was still loud, their speed still slowly increasing.
“We can’t get off this ice-cake until the current slows down,” Captain Future shouted.
“It will not slow down — it will rush faster, in the great rapids that flow into
the icy sea!” Tharb cried.
“The icy sea? The Sea of Avernus?” Captain Future shouted. “That’s right — this river Phlegethon does flow into that ocean. And your people live beyond that sea, you said?”
“They do, but I doubt now that we will ever see them!” yelled the fearful Plutonian.
The river rushed them on. And presently Curt Newton glimpsed that ahead there was a sheer brink beyond which he could see nothing.
“Here’s the rapids! Hold tight!” he yelled.
The ice-cake was to the brink in seconds. For a moment it seemed to hover there, terrifyingly poised.
Curt had a glimpse in that moment of what lay beyond. A long, icy slope, down which the river rushed in foaming rapids toward a great, moonlit, heaving ocean that stretched far out into spectral, shrouding mists.
“Here we go!” cried Captain Future, with a reckless laugh.
The ice-cake plunged down into the rapids. The next moments were a jumble of overwhelming sensations, of foaming white waters seeking to wash them off their precarious raft, of a dizzy spinning around and around, of a sickening sense of falling into thunderous abysses.
Then as they clung, they became gradually aware that the whirling and pitching of the ice-cake was dwindling, that the roar of waters was rapidly lessening.
Drenched and half-frozen, Curt raised his head. They were out on the moonlit ocean — their ice-cake had been borne out onto the heaving waves with unbelievable quickness by the rapids. Now their forward motion was slowing down.
“We had better get to shore quickly,” said Tharb apprehensively. “This ocean teems with monsters who would have us at their mercy on this clumsy mass of ice.”
They started paddling with their hands in the icy water, urging their makeshift raft back across the moonlit ocean to the nearest shore, from which the river had ejected them.
Their progress was painfully slow, but Captain Future’s hopes were mounting elatedly. If Tharb’s grandfather, old Kiri, could tell the dwelling-place of the queer, white-furred Magicians, it was almost sure that the secret base of Doctor Zarro and his Legion would be found in that same place.
Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) Page 9
