“He’s been buying Lifewater with the embezzled money, sir,” reported Halk Anders, his square face grim.
“Lifewater?” Carthew turned pityingly to the trapped thief. “Why did you do it?”
Webber wrung his hands.
“I was crazy to do it, sir. But I was getting old and here was a girl I loved and wanted to win. I heard of the Lifewater — the wonderful elixir that could make me young. So I stole treasury funds and bought the elixir from a secret vendor. It did make me young. I told everyone I’d had a new rejuvenation treatment.”
His voice choked with emotion.
“Then, a few days ago the Lifewater vendor camp back. He told me that the Lifewater’s effects were only temporary. Unless I had another vial of it soon, I’d age and die suddenly! So I tried to steal more money to buy it. But they caught me. And now I’ll die — “ He broke off into convulsive sobs.
“It’s the same damned story every time, sir!” exploded Halk Anders to the President. “That cursed syndicate sells people the Lifewater without telling them they’ll have to keep drinking it or die. That way, they make people slaves to the stuff.”
Carthew’s fine face turned haggard with worry.
“Then our broadcast warning to the System did no good? Do they still refuse to believe that the Lifewater is infinitely deadly?”
“No, it hasn’t done any good,” Anders answered bluntly. “The criminals who self the stuff tell people that our warning was false. They say it’s mere propaganda to break up the illicit trade. Some people are so crazy to get their youth back, they’re only too ready to believe that.”
Carthew’s hand clenched and banged the desk.
“Anders can’t your organization smash the syndicate that’s behind this abominable traffic?”
THE commander shrugged helplessly. “God knows we’ve tried, sir. We’ve raided hundreds of the syndicate’s outlets, but the Lifewater vendors almost always get away. The few we’ve captured won’t say a word.”
“But I told you to put the best secret agents of the Planet Police on the search for the source of the stuff.”
“I did,” Halk Anders replied desperately. “Two of them are here now. They’ll tell you themselves what we’re up against.”
The commander opened the door and called out. A grizzled, white-haired man and a slender girl entered.
The man was Ezra Gurney, famous veteran Planet Police marshal of the interplanetary frontiers. The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl was Joan Randall, ace secret agent of the Intelligence organization.
“Ezra and Joan can tell you how much they’ve found out about the syndicate, sir,” Halk Anders declared grimly.
Old Ezra Gurney shook his head, his faded blue eyes discouraged.
“Ain’t found out anything that’d help, sir,” he drawled. “I’ve been combin’ the inner planets trying’ to discover where the Lifewater’s cumin’ from. I thought a check of space traffic would work, only it doesn’t. It’s certain the stuffs all comin’ from one single world. But what world is it?”
Joan Randall’s brown eyes were clouded as she also addressed the man who governed the mains worlds.
“I’ve been to Mars, Venus and Mercury without learning any more,” she admitted. “I only found out that the Lifewater traffic is expanding by leaps and bounds. Thousands of aging people en every world are eagerly paying extortionate sums for the elixir. I think the whole traffic is directed by some ruthless criminal who means to expand it to the limit. Frankly, I’m getting afraid. Every day, more thousands of youth-hungry people are drinking the Lifewater, becoming enslaved to it. And if the syndicate isn’t broken up, if the diabolic traffic keeps on —”
She was interrupted by a shrill, terrible scream. It came from the convicted embezzler. Wilson Webber.
They stared at him in horror. He suddenly began aging at an appalling rate. His youthful looking face rapidly grew parched and wrinkled. His hair whitened.
“The Lifewater’s effect — expiring!” Webber gasped, his thin hand horribly clutching at the air. “I — dying —”
He slumped to the floor and lay there. An old, wrinkled man now, feebly stirring, his finny eyes ware swiftly glazing.
“Get a physician, quickly!” cried Carthew.
Hulk Anders shook his head somberly.
“There’s no help for him, sir. Nothing can help a Lifewater addict who’s been deprived of the elixir.”
In a few moments, Webber lay still, a shrunken dead figure. There was utter, shocked silence as the commander pulled down a rich drape to cover the ghastly body.
“An’ that,” came Ezra Gurney’s grim drawl, “is what happens to a man who drinks the Lifewater once and then steps drinkin’ it. Only a few have died like this, so far. But all the thousands drinkin’ the stuff will have to obey the master of the syndicate or die the same way.”
James Carthew’s hands trembled as he realized the horrible possibilities disclosed. The Lifewater traffic played with evil cunning on the wistful desire of aging men and women to renew their youth. Those deceived people must inevitably become the abject slaves of the syndicate that alone could supply the insidious elixir.
And behind the hidden, far-flung syndicate was one directing mind. That evilly ambitious individual might enslave tens of millions to the mysterious youth-elixir. Then he could use his control of the Lifewater to command his millions of slaves.
The black potentialities of it made Carthew’s mind recoil. Moreover, the menace was growing day by day, minute by minute. The Planet Police could not penetrate and destroy the heart of the spreading cancer. There was no one else to turn to — but wait!
Carthew’s desperate thoughts swung suddenly to one whom he could always turn to in time of dark danger.
“This poisonous Lifewater traffic must be smashed before more people become slaves to it,” the President declared, rising determinedly to his feet. “We’re going to call Captain Future!”
Chapter 2: Coming of the Futuremen
PLUNGING sunward in flaring glory, a great comet sped through the Solar System. Its vast glowing coma, brilliant nucleus, and million-mile tail were an awesome spectacle as the celestial wanderer raced to complete its parabolic orbit around the Sun. Space ships cautiously detoured far around the glowing monster.
But one space ship, a small, streamlined craft shaped oddly like an elongated teardrop, clung audaciously to the very edge of the coma. Its rocket-tubes steadily blasting fire, the little ship boldly accompanied the great comet on its dizzy rush toward the Sun.
The teardrop craft was itself named the Comet. It was the ship of the Futuremen, most famous of all interplanetary adventurers.
Inside its main laboratory cabin, Captain Future, leader of the strange quartet, was studying the great comet.
“A little closer to the coma, Otho,” he asked, without raising his head from the compact spectroscope he was using.
A hissing voice answered from the control room in the prow of the racing ship.
“Closer it is! But we’re nearly inside the cursed coma right now, Chief.”
Curt Newton, the young man known to the whole Solar System as Captain Future, made no answer. He was intently maneuvering the spectroscope that was trained on the comet through a part.
“There is a solid nucleus inside that coma, Simon,” he exclaimed finally, raising his head in excitement. “We’re going inside!”
Curt Newton’s figure was bathed in the coma’s glare of now harmless white radiance that came through the filtering parts.
He was lean and rangy, six feet four at height, with the wide shoulders and narrow hips of a fighting man. Under his torchlike mop of red hair was a space-bronzed face. Its handsome features and keen gray eyes bore the stamp of brilliant intelligence, a powerful will, and a gay, rollicking humor.
Curt wore a zipper-suit of dark synthesilk with a flat gray tungstite belt. From a holster of black Plutonian leather protruded the well-worn butt of a stubby proton pistol. In his left han
d he wore a ring whose nine “planet jewels” revolved slowly around a central “Sun” jewel. That was the unique identifying insignia of Captain Future.
“What about it, Simon?” Curt eagerly asked the Futureman beside him. “Think we can get inside that coma without cracking up?”
Simon Wright, the Futureman he had addressed, answered in a rasping, metallic voice.
“It’ll be dangerous, lad. But we can try it.”Simon Wright was known all over the System as the Brain. For that was precisely what he was — a human brain living in a transparent serum case equipped with solutions, pumps and purifiers. In the front of his square case were his glass lens eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the resonator with which he spoke. At the sides were his microphone ears.
Once he had been a famous Earth scientist. His brain had been removed from his dying body. Now it lived and thought in that square case, yet only Captain Future was a greater scientist than the Brain.
“We may be able to slip through an opening in the coma,” he rasped to Curt. “But if the coma touches our ship, it means sure death.”
“Okay, we’ll try it,” Curt Newton declared. “Once we’re inside, we can land on that solid nucleus and explore. I’ll tell Otho.”
THE young, red-haired scientific wizard shouldered forward from the main laboratory cabin to the control room in the bow. Otho, the android, manipulated the control throttles. Grag, the robot, was playing with a small gray animal perched on his metal shoulder.
“I’ll take the throttles, Otho,” Curt announced. “We’re going to try to slip inside the coma.”
“Devils of space!” swore Otho. “That coma’s heavily, charged. If it touches us, we’ll be blasted into electrons!”
Otho was an android, a synthetic man, who had been constructed artificially in a laboratory years before. His body was made of rubbery white synthetic flesh, yet completely manlike. His head and face were hairless but definitely human, and his slitlike green eyes sparkled with a reckless light. Craziest of all daredevils, swiftest and most agile of all men alive, was Otho.
“Last time we went meddling too close to a comet, we almost got scragged by those electric things inside it,” he reminded Curt.
Grag, the robot, spoke in his booming voice.
“If Otho is afraid, we can leave him here, Master.”
“Afraid?” Otho sputtered furiously at the robot. “Why, you perambulating junk-pile —”
Grag sprang erect at that remark. The robot was huge — a manlike metal figure seven feet high, with mighty arms and legs, and a bulbous metal head. His metal face was made especially strange by his luminous photoelectric eyes and mechanical speech apparatus.
Grag the robot was the strongest being in the whole System, but he was also intelligent. He keenly resented Otho’s scoffing reference to the fact that he was made of metal. That was the one thing Grag couldn’t stand being chaffed about.
“I’ll stretch your rubber neck out ten feet and tie a knot in it,” he boomed angrily at Otho. “I’ll —”
“Cut it, you two!” commanded Captain Future. “Isn’t it dangerous enough hanging onto that comet, without you two feuding again? I’m damned if I know why I’m crazy enough to go careering through the System with a space-nutty outfit like this bunch.”
Curt’s voice was stern, but there was a glimmering humor in his gray gaze as he severely eyed the robot and the android.
The little gray animal on Grag’s shoulder was glaring at Otho with bright, hostile eyes. Eek, the little moon-pup from Earth’s satellite, was a siliceous, mineral-eating, non-breathing creature which Grag had adopted as a pet. Eek could see thoughts telepathically. Now it echoed its master’s anger with Otho.
Captain Future had taken the throttles. He depressed one, steering the little ship closer to the flaring comet.
“Hang on, you two,” he commanded over his shoulder, as the rockets blasted louder. “We’re heading for that coma.”
The comet was an appalling spectacle as the ship of the Futuremen drew nearer to it, with rockets throbbing steadily. The whole firmament before them seemed a sheet of glowing electrical flame.
Even through their ship’s super-insulated walls, the radiant electric force penetrated, Curt’s red hair suddenly bristled. A violet brush of sparks sprayed from the walls, and particularly from Grag’s metal body.
“Look at the electrical potential Grag’s working up!” exclaimed Otho, shouting with laughter. “We’ll be able to stand him up in a corner and use him for an electrostatic battery.”
“I don’t like this, Master,” complained the robot. “And Eek is scared.” He patted the cowering little moon-pup.
“Eek is always scared, the little sissy,” retorted Otho. Then he peered ahead in alarm. “Split my atoms — look at that display.”
A BOILING sea of electric force glared in front of them. The violet electric brush and snapping sparks in the control room were becoming nerve-racking. They were feeling the fierce breath of the comet’s awful power.
Yet Captain Future still drove the little ship toward the awesome coma. Looking for an opening in the great shell of force, his searching gray eyes refused to be daunted by the glare.
There was a queer smile on Curt’s tanned face. It was in moments of peril like this, in audacious defiance of the blind forces of the Universe, that Captain Future felt most alive.
“I think I see an opening,” he said quietly. “Hold tight, boys. I’ll have to shoot her through at full speed.”
“Curtis, wait!” came a rasping cry from the Brain back in the laboratory cabin. “Come here and look at Earth.” Curt turned the ship off. Locking the controls, he turned with the other two Futuremen into the laboratory cabin. The Brain moved his lens eye from the incredibly powerful telescope so Captain Future could look through it.
Earth was like a little gray ball in the heavens, companied by the smaller, whiter Moon. But even at this distance the telescope brought into bright clarity the brilliant point of light blazing on Earth’s northern pole.
“It’s the signal! boomed Grag in his deep voice. “The President is calling you, Master.”
“Hang it all,” said Curt in disappointment. “Just when were about to get inside this comet. Now we have to give it up.”
Simon looked meaningly at Captain Future with his inscrutable lens eyes.
“It must be important, lad,” rasped the Brain. “The President never summons us by that signal, unless he has a good reason.”
Curt nodded, frowning. “I know. We’ve got to blast for Earth and find out what’s up. But why in the name of a thousand Sun imps did this have to come up just now?”
Carrying Simon, he led them back to the control room.
He swept the little teardrop ship around, by a vicious jab on the throttles. Then, opening all rocket-tubes to the limit, he sent the swift craft hurtling at dizzily accelerating speed toward Earth.
Otho was more excited than any of the others.
“Troubles afoot in the System. I smell action ahead. Let’s hope it’s something serious.”
“You space-struck idiot,” growled Curt Newton. “I can toss you back into that comet if you want action so badly.”
Grag grunted agreement.
“Otho is always craving trouble. But when it comes, we have to pull him out of it.”
“When did you ever put me out of any jam?” Otho retorted disdainfully.
“How about that time on Pluto?” Grag demanded.
Curt Newton slapped listening to their bickering. His face sobered as he and the Brain stared at the gray planet toward which they were rushing.
“Wish I knew what’s wrong,” Curt muttered. “Things seemed quiet enough since we cleaned up that mess out at Neptune.”
The little teardrop ship, the Comet blasted on at top speed toward the Earth and its summoning signal. Captain Future thought somberly of the many times he had answered that call. Each time, he and the Futuremen had found themselves called on to battle deadly
perils. Was it to be the same this time?
“We can’t always win,” he thought grimly. “We’ve been lucky, but the law of averages eventually has to turn against us.”
HIS mind was going back over the amazing career that had been his in the past few years. For his was the blazing career of Captain Future!
Years ago at Curt Newton’s birth, that career had been made inevitable by an amazing synthesis of events. Everything seemed to have combined to produce the greatest adventurer in all interplanetary history.
Curt’s father had been Roger Newton the brilliant young Earth scientist. But Roger Newton had been too brilliant for his own safety. He constantly had made discoveries that unscrupulous men coveted. To escape them, Newton and his young wife had fled for refuge to the barren, airless Moon. They had taken with them the living brain that had once been Simon Wright.
Roger Newton and the Brain dreamed of creating intelligent living beings. In the laboratory home they built beneath Tycho crater on the Moon, the two scientists labored toward that goal. They succeeded. They first created Grag, the intelligent metal robot and then Otho, the synthetic man. At almost the same time, Curt himself was born.
Curt was still an infant when his parents were murdered by the unscrupulous plotters who had followed them to the Moon. The Brain, Grag and Otho swiftly avenged the murders. And as she lay dying, Curt’s mother had left the helpless infant in their care.
The unhuman three reared Curt to manhood on the lonely Moon. It was the strangest boyhood and youth any man ever had. Besides they gave him the most exhaustive education conceivable. He learned scientific secrets from the Brain until he surpassed his teacher in scientific wizardry. He was taught swiftness and skill and cunning by Otho the android. His strength and powers of endurance were carefully fostered by the giant Grag.
Thus Curt Newton reached manhood. He was a man such as the System had never seen before. His strength, speed and endurance were unmatched by those of any other human being. He knew a dozen sciences more thoroughly than any specialist. He had roamed the spaceways of the System since boyhood, daring all the perils of the far worlds with his three unhuman tutors. In the hardest manner possible, he learned the languages and dangers of the remotest worlds, asteroids and moons.
Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) Page 2
