“Then Otho has been here?” Ezra Gurney cried excitedly, “But where’d he go? Was he captured?”
Curt’s keen eyes had found on the floor a drop of chemical oil and a crumb of blue pigment. He began to understand.
“Otho killed this Saturnian, who was trying to kill him. Then Otho disguised himself as the Saturnian. He was trying to find Joan. He must have done this as a desperate expedient to save Joan from some deadly danger!”
Chapter 11: In the Fungus Forest
FUTURE had felt worried about Otho and Joan Randall for the last few hours. Now, with this discovery, his worry sharpened into urgent anxiety.
“Something happened here, and we don’t know what it was,” Curt muttered, his gray eyes sweeping the disordered room “We know that Joan was searching for one of the syndicates branches. She must have located this place. And Otho, searching for Joan, must have followed her here. Now they’re both gone, Otho in disguise. Where did they go?”
“Danged if I can understand this,” declared Ezra Gurney bewilderedly, scratching his white head.
Captain Future made a swift search of the building. He found nothing that would show where the missing ones had gone.
Thomas Keene, his youthful face desperately eager, clutched Curt’s sleeve as he returned to the room.
“Did you find any of the Lifewater, Captain Future?” he asked avidly.
The tall, young scientific wizard shook his flaming head.
“No Keene They must have taken it all with them.”
But I’ve got to have Lifewater soon, or I’ll die!” Keene cried shrilly. “I guided you here because I thought you’d get the elixir for me. If you won’t, I’ll have to get it elsewhere!”
“Quiet down,” Curt ordered sharply. “We’ll do what we can for you. Rut right now there are other things that are more urgent.”
Keene sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands. Leaving Ezra to watch him, Captain Future went out into the small court behind the building. He inspected it thoroughly. In the first faint dawn light, he detected unmistakable tracks on the cement paving.
“They left here in a rocket-car,” Curt muttered to himself. “Whatever happened here must have alarmed them. They hastened off to report to the syndicate’s headquarters. If we only knew where that was!”
At that moment he heard thee sound of scuffling from inside the building, and then a yell in Ezra Gurney’s voice.
Curt Newton raced back inside. Ezra was picking himself up from the floor, his faded eyes flaring with anger.
“What happened?” Curt shot at him. “Where’s Keene?”
“He got away, the devil!” yelled Ezra furiously. “Pretended to be sittin’ there broodin’. Then when I turned around to say somethin’ to Simon here, Keene knocked me down and ran out.”
With the old marshal, Curt Newton plunged out into the front street. Thomas Keene was not anywhere in sight.
“See if you can find him, Ezra,” Captain Future ordered sharply. “He must not escape.”
Simon Wright was calling from inside. Curt returned to the building while Ezra started searching along the street.
“Lad, see what you make, of this,” the Brain asked.
Curt knelt down beside Simon to examine the dead Saturnian. In the wrinkles of the dead Doctor Qarth’s zipper-suit clung tiny, microscopic brown specks.
“Dead fungus spores!” Captain Future exclaimed. His face lit up “Simon, we’ve got a lead here. This Saturnian has recently been in a fungus forest undoubtedly the forest near this city!”
EZRA came back, swearing with practiced thoroughness.
“Keene got away, Cap’n Future. I televised headquarters to broadcast a new’ alarm for him.”
Curt’s tanned face became thoughtful.
“Keene seemed to have been pretty desperate for the Lifewater. Maybe he knows of another syndicate branch here in Ops and has gone there to try to get the elixir.”
“Or else Keene’s the Life-lord himself,” said Ezra.
“Maybe so,” Curt admitted. “But I’m more interested in trailing Otho and Joan, and making sure of their safety, right now. The trail leads to one of the fungus forests, Ezra”
Curt told him of the clue of the dead fungus spores.
“But it’s death to go into those fungus forests!” Ezra protested. “Those spores kill anything they touch.”
Yes, but scientists and explorers have penetrated the fungus forests, by wearing auras of sporicidal force.”
“That’s so,” Ezra admitted. His faded eyes flashed. “Blazin’ meteors, maybe the Life-lord has had his headquarters in the fungus forest, all along! He and his men could go in and out by wearin’ auras. The space ships that take the syndicate’s Lifewater to other worlds could land in there, and nobody’d ever see them. Maybe the Fountain of Life itself is in that forest!”
“I’m going to find out,” Captain Future declared. “Ezra, I want you to get me one of those aura projectors. Can you?”
“Sure, there’s a supply of ‘em at Government Building,” the old marshal replied.
“Bring me one, and get Grag from the Comet. I want him to help Simon on a job here.”
When Ezra had gone speeding off in the Planet Police rocket-car, the Brain looked inquiringly at the tall scientific wizard, “What do you want me to do here while you’re searching the fungus forest, lad?”
“Keen must be recaptured,” Curt explained quickly. “Now, if he was telling the truth, he’s actually desperate for the Lifewater. After slipping away from us, he’d go to another branch of the syndicate in Ops. If he knew of one, he’d try to get the elixir there.”
“He would, if he was telling the truth,” the Brain amended.
“What I want you and Ezra and Grag to do,” Captain Future added “is to stay in this place. Customers of the syndicate — people who want to buy the Lifewater and don’t know what’s happened here — will be coming to buy the elixir. Grab all those customers. Try to find out from them where there is another syndicate outlet in Ops. Some of them are sure to know. When you, find out the location of another branch, raid it at once. You may find Thomas Keene there.”
“I understand,” rasped the Brain. “Though if Keene is the Life-lord, as Ezra thinks, our calculations are all awry.”
“Keene’s only one of our suspects,” Curt reminded him. “Where did Martin Graeme disappear tonight? Has that Martian, Sus Urgal, really been at his rooms all night? And where’s Khol Kor?”
“It’s a bewildering tangle, lad,” Simon admitted. “While we are trying to penetrate it, the poisonous Life-water traffic is going on unhindered all over the System.”
“I know, I know,” Curt snapped. “But we’re working as fast as we can. The paramount necessity now is to learn whether the Lifewater syndicates heart is really in that fungus forest, and if Joan and Otho are there.”
Ezra Gurney reappeared, breathless with haste. Grag came stalking behind him. He handed Curt, a little cubical mechanism, an aura projector.
CURT fastened the device to his belt, under his flat gravitation equalizer. Then he rapidly told Ezra and Grag his plan.
“So we’re to stay here and keep shop for the Lifewater syndicate and nab its customers,” Ezra said grimly.
“I’d rather go with you, Master,” pleaded Grag.
“Simon will need you,” Captain Future replied soothingly. “If I want you, I’ll call back by televisor.”
Curt hurried out to the rocket-car. He entered the tubular, wheeled vehicle, slammed shut its door. Furiously he sent it racing with a crescendo roar of tubes through the dawn-lit black streets of Ops.
Curt swung past the spaceport. Soon he was out of the great Saturnian city and heading eastward over the rolling farm-fields. The Sun had now risen, a small, brilliant disk. The Rings were a pale white, arc across the high southern heavens.
Quickly, Captain Future left behind him the broad cultivated fields and pastures that surrounded the city. Before him stretc
hed the blue, grassy plain, undulating away to the far horizon. Here and there the treeless flat-lands dipped into valleys. The only vegetation were low black shrubs with purplish blooms.
Curt knew that the fungus forest lay eastward from Ops hardly more than an hour by fast rocket-car. It was the only fungus forest in this whole part of Saturn. The others were thousands of miles southward. Therefore this must be the one the dead Saturnian had been visiting. It would be a perfect hideout for the Lifewater syndicate’s base.
Captain Future’s heart pounded with hope. If the Life-lord had his headquarters there, was the Fountain of Life itself somewhere in the deadly forest? That hardly seemed likely. After all, explorers protected by auras had sometimes penetrated the forest. Yet, it might be. There was no telling what he would find among the fungi.
An hour after leaving Ops, Curt Newton’s car crested the rim of a deep, broad valley that stretched away for many miles.
Down in this valley, filling it from rim to rim, sprawled a choked forest of fantastic, mushroomlike Yellow growths. They made the valley stand out like a bright yellow blot on the rolling blue plaint.
“The fungus forest, all right,” Curt, muttered. His eyes swung shrewdly along its edge. “Now, how do I pick up the trail in it?”
Curt finally adopted the plan of cruising slowly along the whole eastern rim of the valley, searching for the tracks of passing vehicles. Coming from Ops, they must enter the valley from this side.
He finally discovered a track. Crushing down the blue grass, it led directly down into the fungus valley. The Life-lord and his criminal henchmen must have habitually traveled from Ops to the forest by this path. Probably, Captain Future thought, they had usually made the trips by night to avoid being noticed.
Curt Newton decided to leave the rocket-car and enter the fungus forest on foot.
“Rocket-car’s too easy to hear coming,” he thought. “Hope I won’t have far to go in that cursed forest.”
He ran the car into the concealment of a small dip in the plain. Then, making sure that the aura projector at his belt was in operating condition, he started descending into the valley.
As he climbed down the grassy slope into the deadly yellow forest, Curt switched on the projector. At once, the shining blue aura of force shrouded his whole body. The blue cloud was capable of killing the fatal fungus spores instantly, before they could even touch him.
Curt could see out through the wavering blue force of the aura, though dimly. Despite the protection of the device, the skin on his back crawled as he strode among the fungi.
GREAT, yellow, bulbous, fantastic mushroom growths towered on all sides of him. In the air drifted golden, beautiful, terrible clouds of spore dust, bursting constantly from popping spore pods and raining upon the purple soil.
There was no ordinary vegetation, and no animal life whatever, in, this deadly place. For anything those golden spores settled on instantly became a crawling mass of devouring fungi. Only the fact that the spores were heavier than air kept them from drifting devastatingly over the whole of the planet.
“Sure hope, my aura doesn’t give out,” Curt prayed fervently. “If it does, I’d last about ten seconds.”
Through the yellow gloom of the enormous, crowded fungi, through the drifting clouds of golden, deadly dust, Captain Future indomitably followed the trail worn by passing rocket-cars.
Suddenly he glimpsed ahead a small, oblong metal structure. At sight of it he crouched back quickly out of sight.
“The Life-lord’s rendezvous!” he breathed. “This is the place, all right.”
The little metal building stood in the concealment of towering fungi, at the edge of an open clearing. The purple soil had been scarred and blasted in the past by powerful forces.
“Space ships landing and taking off marked up that clearing. This is where the syndicate’s ships from all over the System have come to get the Lifewater from the Life-lord.”
He drew his proton pistol and crept forward, still shrouded: by his blue aura. He reached the side of the small building, and peered cautiously in through an hermetically sealed window.
Curt Newton’s blood leaped at the sight inside. The room he looked into had double air-lock doors and sealed windows. He saw cases packed with vials of shining, opalescent Lifewater.
At a desk sat a shining, aura-shrouded shape.
“The Life-lord at last!” Curt whispered fiercely.
His eyes moved unwillingly from the concealed, shining shape of the master of the illicit elixir traffic, to the others inside the room.
Three of the criminal syndicate stood near their master. Curt recognized the red Martian as Thorkul, the man he’d nearly trapped on Venus. Also there were a brawny greener Jovian and a Uranian.
Tied hand and foot, lying on the floor, were two helpless people. One was Joan Randall, her face pale under its disguising makeup. The other was a Saturnian. Curt instantly recognized him through the disguise as Otho.
“Devils of space, again they discovered that Otho was an impostor!”
He listened. The Jovian was reporting to the shrouded Life-lord, who apparently had only recently arrived.
“That’s how it happened, Life-lord,” the Jovian explained. “That girl came to our branch in Ops. She wore that disguise, wanting, to buy’ the Lifewater, I saw by the X-ray spectacles she was a spy. We grabbed her and took her out to the rocket-car to bring her here. We waited while Doctor Qarth destroyed all the evidence in the branch. Then Doctor Qarth came out, and we started for here.
“But on the way here,” the Jovian continued, “I happened to bump against Doctor Qarth inside, the car. He was wearing a gravitation equalizer hidden under his jacket! Why should a native Saturnian be nearing a gravitation equalizer? I realized he wasn’t Qarth but somebody doubling as him. So I jumped him when he wasn’t, looking, and knocked him out. We found out that he was one of the Futuremen! We brought him and the girl here, and have been waiting for you.”
FUTURE sucked in his breath sharply. So that was how Otho happened to be exposed! He began to understand.
“I don’t like this,” the Life-lord was saying harshly. “One thing after another has gone wrong since that devil, Captain Future, reached Saturn. So far, we’ve scraped through. But that red-headed fiend never gives up when he gets on a trail. He must be stopped!”
“What about, hose two! What shall we do with them?”
“We’ll put them out of the way, of course,” the Life-lord snapped. “But first we’ll make one more effort to get them to talk. I want to know if anyone else suspects our, rendezvous.”
Captain Future waited to hear no more. He realized now the imminent and deadly peril of Joan and Otho. He must get in there and fight to save them. But he would be one against four.
“Invisibility that’s my only chance!” Curt thought swiftly. “If I can get Otho loose —”
“He hastened around to the air-lock entrance of the building. Noiselessly he opened the outer door and entered the air-lock.
The lock was pervaded by a constant glow of the blue sporicidal force. That was to keep any of the deadly spores from getting through the lock. Curt could safely switch off his aura here.
Standing in the narrow air-lock, Captain Future hastily drew a disklike instrument from his belt and held it above his head. From it an unseen force tingled down through his body.
It was one of the red-haired scientific wizard’s greatest secrets. That disk-shaped instrument gave his body a charge of energy that refracted all light around it and so made him invisible. But the charge lasted only ten minutes before it would dissipate and he would become visible again.
Curt Newton felt darkness closing in on him, until he was in utter blackness. He was invisible now. But, because all light was refracted around him, he could see absolutely nothing.
Yet Captain Future, from long practice and by aid of his remarkable sense of hearing, could move blindly and with great skill.
He groped to the inne
r door of the air-lock and softly opened it.
Listening, he gathered that Joan had been ungagged hauled to the desk behind which the Life-lord sat.
“Are you going to tell us who else, besides the android, knew where you went?” the Life-lord was demanding.
“I’ll tell you nothing!” Joan voice flashed.
Curt groped silently along the edge of the wall. He reached Otho, bent over the bound, gagged android.
“It’s Future!” Curt breathed, ‘I’m going to untie you. Be ready to help me jump the Life-lord and his men.”
OTHO’S body twitched eagerly in answer. Curt’ began to work at the android’s bonds. Then he heard the Life-lord’s voice.
“Bring that Futureman over here too!”
Curt Newton, hearing that command, leaped soundless away from Otho to avoid discovery. But his blind leap sent him caroming squarely into a solid body.
“Somebody just bumped into me!” yelled Thorkul, the Martian. “Somebody invisible!”
“It’s Captain Future!” cried the Life-lord. “They always said he could make himself invisible. Look out!”
Curt, still unable to see anything, had drawn his proton pistol. He shot at the sound of the Life-lord’s voice. But the arch criminal had moved aside, for his voice came shrilly from another part of the room.
“Out of here, before the invisible devil gets us!” the Life-lord shouted. “Snap on your auras!”
Curt heard’ the air-lock door slam and knew that the Life-lord and his criminal followers were escaping. Still hampered by his inability to see, he shot at the door as it slammed shut.
Then he heard the crash of smashing glassite, followed by the roar of a departing rocket-car outside, as the criminals sped off.
Joan’s voice came frantically, to Curt.
“Captain Future, they smashed a window from outside to let fungus spores in on us! And Otho and I are tied and can’t do anything!”
Curt Newton had been about to pursue the escaping criminals. He stopped short. Vision was coming back to him as his invisibility faded. He saw that the window’ in the west wall was shattered.
Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) Page 11
