Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941)

by Edmond Hamilton

“These eyes will produce a world of power!” the Earthman was exclaiming. “Power enough to melt hundreds of square miles of the ice-fields by our electro-thermal radiation.”

  “I hope our plan works,” said one of the Plutonians soberly. “It would mean much to my people, to have all that melted away.”

  As he pointed to the guttering, moonlit ice-fields that stretched outside the glassite wall, he suddenly stiffened in surprise.

  “Why, look at that!” he gasped. “A ship —”

  The four men stood petrified by an incredible sight. Outside the laboratory, a small rocket-ship had suddenly appeared out of nothingness.

  As the four engineers gaped, men who carried atom guns came running from the little ship. They burst into the laboratory. Their leader was a slender, red-skinned man with a smooth, handsome face. He wore a striped Martian turban and a long, yellow-sleeved purple Martian robe.

  Alarm flashed in the eyes of the young Earthman as he recognized the leader.

  “You’re Doctor Ul Quorn, the criminal scientist that escaped from Cerberus prison!” he cried. “The one they call the Magician of Mars!”

  Ul Quorn bowed mockingly.

  “I see that my fame has reached you.”

  “What do you and your band want here?” demanded the Earthman.

  Quorn looked at the six massive cyclotrons.

  “We learned about those cyclotrons. We need them.”

  “You can’t have them!” flared the Earthman. “It’s taken us years to have them built. We’ll not give them up!”

  Ul Quorn shot him, his suave face impassive. The atom-blast from the mixed breed’s weapon dropped the Earthman in a heap.

  The other three engineers stared unbelievingly. Then one of the Plutonians lunged toward the televisor and flung open its switch.

  “Calling the Planet Patrol!” he yelled. “Quorn’s band is here at North Pluto Labor —”

  The atom blast of Thikar, the Jovian, cut the Plutonian down before he could say more. Two more crackling, lightning-like blasts stopped the other two engineers before they could make a move.

  “Now, get those cyclotrons out of here and into our ship at once!” Quorn ordered his followers.

  “That’ll be a job,” grunted Thikar, eying the massive machines.

  “You fool, we’ve got to have them!” Quorn lashed. “Without them, we haven’t the slightest chance of reaching the treasure I promised you.”

  The mention of the mysterious treasure inspired the criminals. They began the heavy work of transferring the eyes to their little ship. Ul Quorn watched them. Beside him waited the lithe Martian girl he had called N’Rala. Presently they had the last of the six cyclotrons aboard their craft.

  “Quick, out of here now before the Patrol comes!” Quorn ordered.

  Their little rocket-ship rose from the ice-field. Then magically, it vanished.

  The heaving blue sea that swept almost all the planet Neptune, gleamed in the sunlight. It washed against the rock cliffs of a small group of barren islands five hundred miles south of the Black Isles.

  Upon one of these desolate islets were the metalloy shops and docks of Neptunian Oceanic Research Station. The pompous, gray-skinned, peaked-skulled Neptunian who directed the activities of a half-score scientists here was shaking his head.

  “There’s a lot of money in those metal bars,” he declared.

  HE AND one of his subordinates were eying a mass of long bars of blue-gleaming metal which lay in one of the supply-houses.

  “Well, that alloy is expensive,” admitted his assistant. “But it’s about the strongest known to science. With it we can build a diving ship that will go down into even the greatest deeps of our ocean. Just think, sir, what that will mean! We can explore the great oceanic abysses for the first time,” he ended enthusiastically.

  “Yes, I know,” agreed the older Neptunian impatiently. “But this stuffs so valuable it might tempt thieves. It’s only been a few days since Ul Quorn’s band raided that North Pluto laboratory, remember.”

  The younger man scoffed politely at his superior’s apprehensions.

  “Oh, well, Quorn’s criminals probably just wanted those super-powered cyclotrons to give their ship more speed. They wouldn’t want this alloy.”

  The younger Neptunian was wrong. That evening a small rocket-ship appeared magically behind the research station. The staff of the station did not hear it, nor did they hear Ul Quorn and his men emerge from the ship.

  “Take no chances of them giving an alarm this time,” ordered Quorn, his black eyes merciless. “Cut them down at once.”

  The Neptunians had no chance. They were absorbed planning their new diving ship when the criminal band charged in upon them.

  The hideous crackle of atom-gun blasts was brief. Then the Neptunian scientists lay on the floor in scorched, unmoving heaps.

  “Good work!” approved Ul Quorn. “Now get those bars of alloy into our ship.”

  Thikar, the Jovian, muttered protestingly to Gray Garson.

  “First we stole the super-cycs and now it’s these metal bars. Why don’t we loot something worthwhile, like gold or radium?”

  “Quorn knows what he’s doing,” Garson retorted. “He’s preparing to secure a treasure worth all the gold and radium in the System.”

  “That’s what he says. But he doesn’t tell us what it is,” grumbled the Jovian. “He just says it’s something great.”

  The bars of alloy finally loaded in the ship, the craft rose from the rocky isle into the gathering twilight. It poised for a moment, then vanished.

  The quiet dusk deepened. One of the scorched Neptunian bodies stirred slightly. This man was not dead, but was dying. He feebly tried to write with his own bloody finger on the floor. “Quorn did —” But he was dead before he could finish his message.

  HIGH in Government Tower, in the city of New York on Earth, was the center of the great web of the Planet Police. Here functioned the vast organization that maintained the law throughout the system. Here were headquarters of its four divisions — the planetary police, the colonial police, the secret service, and the famous Planet Patrol.

  Halk Anders, Commander of the entire organization, paced his office restlessly. He was a stocky rock of a man, with a massive head and grim, scarred face.

  He turned to face two other people, a girl and an older man. The girl was Joan Randall, ace secret service agent. The older man was Marshal Ezra Gurney, famous police veteran.

  “We don’t need to do that!” Halk Anders told the girl angrily. “Ever since Quorn’s bunch escaped you’ve been deviling me to have the President call in Captain Future. I’m tired of it. Just because you and Ezra are on assignment to work with Future, you want him on every case.”

  Joan Randall faced her irate chief calmly. She was a slim girl in gray silk space-jacket and trousers, with dark hair and liquid brown eyes.

  “But, Chief, the Patrol can’t cope with Quorn!” she protested. “That mixed breed is the greatest scientist in the System — except one. This weird vanishing ship he’s using shows what he can do.”

  “I think maybe Joan is right, Halk,” drawled old Ezra. “Remember, it took Cap’n Future to get Quorn the first time.”

  Ezra Gurney was a white-haired, wrinkled-faced old man with faded blue eyes, who chewed rial leaf deliberately as he spoke.

  “Well, well get Quorn this time ourselves,” boomed Anders. “He got away from Cerberus, and gave us the slip after his raid on the Pluto laboratory. But he won’t give us the slip this time!”

  “What makes you so danged sure you’re goin’ to get him now?” demanded Ezra Gurney.

  Halk Anders explained. “As soon as I got word of Quorn’s raid on the Neptunian research station, I had a net of Patrol cruisers flung around that whole sector of space to trap him. They’ve been closing in that net, and though Quorn may vanish in that queer way he’ll surely have to reappear somewhere inside their sector. I’m expecting a report that they’ve caught him at
any moment.

  “Ah, here’s the report now!” he continued as a Martian officer entered the office and saluted. “Did they get him, Mako?”

  The Martian officer shook his head.

  “Sorry, sir — Quorn must have slipped them again. I just got a flash that Quorn’s band held up the space-freighter Eros off Saturn. They looted the freighter of certain valuable atomic machine-tools. Then they vanished as usual in their own craft.”

  “Well, Halk,” drawled old Ezra dryly, “it looks like Quorn and his vanishin’ ship gave the Patrol the slip again.”

  Halk Anders’ face was purple.

  “By all the space-gods, I give up! I can catch any ordinary criminal or pirate, but that slippery breed can vanish and reappear as he pleases, and that’s too much for me!”

  “Then you’ll have the President call Captain Future?” Joan Randall asked eagerly, her dark eyes glowing.

  “Yes, blast it, I will,” swore the enraged Commander. “Come along.”

  James Carthew, the gray-haired President of the Solar System Government, had his offices in the topmost suite of Government Tower. He listened gravely as Halk Anders blurted out his request. The Commander concluded bitterly: “So I’m asking you to call Captain Future, though it’s an admission of my own failure.”

  “No, Commander,” denied the President quietly. “You’ve done all anyone could do. The cold fact is that Ul Quorn’s distorted scientific genius makes him invulnerable to the ordinary Patrol methods. The System has only one scientist capable of combating that criminal.”

  CARTHEW rose to his feet.

  “Captain Future isn’t home on the Moon now. He and the Futuremen left weeks ago on a research expedition. They did not say where they were going. We will have to call them by the red torpedo!”

  Carthew led the way up a small stairway to the little square deck that was the very topmost tip of Government Tower. Only two men were allowed to land their ships on this deck — the President and Captain Future.

  It was magnificent up here in the darkness between the wind and the stars, the brilliance and splendor of the greatest city in the System spread far below. The great avenues were like rivers of blue-white krypton light, flowing northward to the space-port.

  Carthew stepped toward a thing in a special cradle at the rail, a six-foot metal torpedo that looked like a miniature space ship.

  “Captain Future left this here,” he explained to Anders. “He said that when he was not in his Moon-home and so could not be reached by our North Pole beacon, this thing would find him.”

  He touched a button upon the side of the torpedo. Then he stood hastily back from it as red fire jetted from its lower end.

  Swoosh! With a bursting gush of crimson flame from its stem, the metal cylinder soared skyward at incredible speed. It blazed across the heavens like a tiny red comet. In a twinkling it was gone.

  JOAN RANDALL looked after it with brilliant eyes.

  “I wonder where it’s gone?” she murmured. “I wonder where Curt and the Futuremen are now?”

  “Wherever they are, they’ll be zoomin’ back here soon,” muttered old Ezra confidently.

  Halk Anders put a doubtful question to the President.

  “Who is Captain Future, really? Oh, I know I’ve worked with him and his three Futuremen, the Brain and the robot and that android, in more than one case. But I’ve never yet learned just who he is and where he came from and how he acquired his mastery of science.”

  James Carthew hesitated before replying.

  “That’s a story known only to Ezra and Joan and myself — and one other. But I don’t think Captain Future would mind if I told it to you.”

  The President looked off into the windy darkness as he spoke.

  “A generation ago there was a brilliant young scientist here on Earth. His name was Roger Newton. He had made certain valuable scientific discoveries that were coveted by an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. To escape Corvo’s plots, young Newton fled to a refuge on the barren, lifeless Moon. With him went his young wife and his colleague, Simon Wright.”

  “Simon Wright?” echoed Halk Anders in surprise. “You mean the Brain?”

  “Yes, the Brain,” nodded Carthew. “Wright had been a famous, aging scientist here on Earth. Newton removed his living brain from his dying body and placed it in the serum-case which it still inhabits.

  “Roger Newton and his wife and the Brain built a laboratory-home on the Moon under Tycho crater,” he continued. “There they created two intelligent living creatures — Grag, the metal robot, and Otho, the synthetic android. And there was born Newton’s son, Curtis.

  “But Victor Corvo pursued them to the Moon. He killed Newton and his wife — and was himself killed by the Brain and robot and android. It was those three unhuman, superhuman beings who reared the infant Curtis Newton to manhood in that wild, lonely lunar home. They raised him to be the finest scientist and the swiftest, strongest adventurer in the System. When Curtis Newton reached manhood, he entered the life-work he had chosen.”

  James Carthew looked back into memory.

  “I remember the night Curtis first came here. He told me he meant to devote his life to combating such interplanetary criminals as had killed his parents. He said he would call himself Captain Future, and that whenever I had need of him I had but to signal and he and the three Futuremen would come. And he has come, many times. He has crushed many criminals. But he’ll go after Quorn with an even fiercer purpose, a greater determination.”

  “Why so?” Halk Anders asked. “I know he trapped Quorn before, but why should he hold a grudge against than breed?”

  Carthew answered the Commander somberly.

  “Ul Quorn is the son of Victor Corvo, who killed Future’s parents! There is a blood-feud between those two men.”

  Chapter 3: The Futuremen

  FAR, far outside the Solar System, in the vast and awesome deeps of space that stretch toward the stars, the formless black bulk of a great cloud of cosmic dust was drifting. Clinging to the edge of that cloud, coasting along its dark shores, moved a small tear-drop space ship.

  It was the Comet, famous ship of the Futuremen. In its main laboratory cabin, bent intently over an elaborate scientific instrument, Curt Newton was occupied making observations on the cloud.

  “I’ve nearly got its course plotted now, Simon,” announced Curt without raising his head from the eyepiece.

  “Better take a couple more readings to make sure, lad,” rasped a metallic voice beside him.

  “I’m going to,” agreed Curt. “But I’m almost certain that the cloud will pass billions of miles from our System.”

  He continued studying the cloud through his electro-telescope. Curt Newton, the red-haired young wizard of science known to all men as Captain Future, had come out here with his Futuremen to ascertain the course of this dark, drifting cosmic cloud. He wanted to be sure that it would not drift into the System itself.

  He and his comrades had been checking the speed of the drifting dust for days. They were so far in outer space that the Sun itself seemed only one bright star among the myriad stars that spangled the firmament.

  Curt finally straightened.

  “All readings check!” he announced crisply. “The cloud won’t come near the System, thank the stars!”

  Curt Newton made a striking figure, standing erect. He was six feet four in height, long-legged and wide-shouldered in his green zipper-suit. He had the lean, rangy look of a fighter, an impression strengthened by the proton-pistol whose well-worn butt protruded from a holster at his belt.

  But underneath his disordered mop of red hair, Captain Future’s tanned, handsome face and keen gray eyes were those of a thinker and dreamer. Deep in those clear eyes glimmered the brilliant intelligence that made him the greatest scientist in the System. Mentally, as well as physically, he was truly a man of tomorrow.

  “Simon, I want to have a look inside that cloud,” he declared to his companion. “The instrume
nts show there are solid bodies inside it.”

  “It’ll be dangerous venturing into that dust,” warned the Brain. “Even with our infra-red searchlights, we’ll be flying half-blind.”

  Simon Wright, the Brain, was a curious spectacle as he hovered beside Curt. He was a living human brain housed in a square, transparent case whose circulating serums kept him alive. He had artificial glass lens-eyes mounted on flexible stalks on the front of his case, above his resonator speech-apparatus and between his microphone ears. The Brain had an ingenious means of locomotion. Magnetic beams he could jet from his case supported him in the air, enabled him to propel himself in every direction.

  “Let’s take the chance!” Captain Future proposed eagerly. “We may never again have such an opportunity.”

  “I see you’re set on the crazy idea, lad,” rasped the Brain’s metallic voice. “All right, let’s risk our lives for nothing.”

  “What would life be worth without a little risk?” laughed Curt. He strode toward the control room. “I’ll tell Grag and Otho.”

  In the control room, Grag, the robot, sat in the pilot-chair and kept the Comet coasting the cloud. Otho was working intently on the floor.

  “I’ll take over, Grag,” Curt told the robot. “We’re going to have a look inside the cloud.”

  “I don’t see why,” grumbled Grag as he gave up the pilot-chair. “We haven’t lost anything in there.”

  Grag’s metal body towered seven feet high. His massive jointed arms and legs hinted of the physical power that made him the strongest being in the System. His mighty metal figure, his bulbous metal head and gleaming photo-electric eyes, made him an awe-inspiring figure.

  “Go back and check the eyes — before we enter the cloud,” Curt directed him. “We don’t want to have any trouble once we’re in there.”

  “Let Otho check the eyes!” protested Grag in his booming mechanical voice. “While I’ve stood shift for hours, he’s been playing.”

  OTHO looked up from the pieces of metal he was assembling.

  “Playing?” he retorted indignantly. “I’m about to accomplish a valuable scientific achievement.”