Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) Read online

  CURT NEWTON twisted angrily in his bonds, as he understood the intention of the Uranian. He strained convulsively but could not break the bonds. No man could.

  “You can’t keep me under the influence of that accursed ray all the way!” he shouted furiously.

  “Of course I can, and I shall,” Ru Ghur beamed. “And you’ll be so happy in your dreams come true that you won’t even know you’re on the ship and won’t be bothering us by attempting to escape.”

  Curt shrank as from something unclean. There had always seemed something unholy to him about the Lethe-ray. And he knew that exposure to it for too long a period could wreck the mind, could send it down into a drugged darkness from which it would never return.

  Ru Ghur had started the machine humming. He twisted the intensity control knob a notch higher, and his hand rested for a moment on a switch.

  “You understand the principle of the Lethe-ray, of course,” he said. “It blocks off all those main portions of the brain concerned with real sensations, facts and memories. Thus it releases the hopes and dreams that live in the imagination, to dominate the whole brain. You lose all touch with the world around you because your brain is no longer in contact with it. The only reality becomes those secret hopes and wishes which you cherish in your inmost mind.”

  He turned the switch. From the quartz lens of the machine, an invisible force streamed down on Captain Future’s head. He felt himself instantly whirled through a rushing, howling darkness — and was suddenly in a wholly new environment.

  He stood upon a small asteroid whose parklike green forests were wrapped in a golden haze. A soft wind stirred perfume from large, pastel-colored asteroid-orchids that grew in profusion. Flame birds cut like flying fires through the branches overhead.

  He knew that little asteroid. He had seen it in his dreams many times since he once had chanced to land on it. It was uninhabited, away from the main trade routes, a golden, forgotten little world. And he had always hoped that some day when the lawless days in the System were no more, he could make that world his home.

  Now that day had come! Curt Newton felt a bursting, vibrant joy that the long struggle was over. There was no more need for the Futuremen to blaze their grim trail between the worlds, there was no more need for them to maintain their vigilant watch on the harsh, wild Moon. The dangerous days in the System were over, as he had dreamed they might be some day. Captain Future, the personification of avenging law throughout the civilized universe for so long, was no more. He was just Curt Newton now, and this was his home.

  Curt walked on through the golden forest to a clearing gay with brilliant flowers. There was a small house here, a shimmering white plastic cottage drowsing in the sunshine, lapped by the unbroken peace of this unvisited little world.

  A dark-haired girl came out of the cottage and came happily into his arms.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Curt,” she murmured. “It’s just as we always dreamed it would be.”

  “I still can’t get used to it, Joan,” he confessed smilingly.

  “I still think I’ll suddenly get a call from the System Government and that it will all start over again.”

  She shook her head. “The Patrol will never need you again, Curt.”

  He went into the house with her. Simon Wright, the Brain, was there, in the little laboratory where at last he was able to continue his abstruse researches without interruption.

  From behind the house came the voices of Grag and Otho raised in one of their perpetual arguments.

  Curt Newton felt a deep happiness. “I almost think that I’ll wake up and find that I’ve been dreaming,” he murmured to Joan.

  “Dreaming yet, Captain Future?”

  That soft, mocking voice suddenly shattered the whole fabric of golden happiness.

  Curt Newton found his head rocking dizzily, and opened his eyes to find himself in the cabin in Ru Ghur’s speeding space-ship. That hours had passed, he could guess from the altered positions of the planets he could glimpse through the port-hole windows.

  RU GHUR’S moonlike face beamed down at him.

  “Did you like it, Captain Future? Did you like the Lethe-ray?”

  “You devil!” flamed Curt Newton, stricken to the heart by the sudden fading of that golden dream that had seemed so real. “No wonder people have sold their souls for that infernal ray!”

  “So you saw your dreams come true?” taunted Ru Ghur. “And then you had to leave it all and come back here? Ah, that’s too bad. But you can go back to them. We just turned off the ray for a few minutes to feed you, Captain Future. People lose strength quickly under too much of the Lethe-ray. And you’re too valuable a hostage to lose.”

  Curt Newton mechanically drank down the nutrient fluid they raised to his lips. His bonds were not loosened.

  “And now we’ll let you go back to your happiness, lad,” crooned Ru Ghur. “Why, I envy you.”

  He switched on the Lethe-ray, and swiftly Curt Newton felt himself whirled back into that golden world of his dreams. Dreams — dreams... He knew nothing but those cherished visions made real. It was the old life of struggle and danger that seemed a dream. Curt knew that many hours must have passed when again he found himself coming back from that dream world into the reality of Ru Ghur’s raider ship. Kra Kol, the thin gray Saturnian who was Ru Ghur’s lieutenant, had turned off the Lethe-ray and was again holding the glass of stimulant for Curt Newton to drink.

  “Wait — wait a minute,” mumbled Curt. “I’m too dizzy to drink now.”

  “Well, hurry up,” growled Kra Kol. “We’re nearly to Leda, and you’ve got to be well under the ray when we make our attack on the Martians there.” Captain Future well realized that his only chance of escaping this diabolical captivity beneath the ray was in the few moments when the ray was turned off. And he must find a way to freedom somehow, for if he underwent much more of the drugging influence of the Lethe-ray, he would become utterly sodden and incapable of action.

  Kra Kol had gone to the port-hole windows to look out, apparently to judge their nearness to Jupiter’s moon. Curt’s reviving brain seized upon an expedient that suddenly occurred to him.

  He leaned forward in his bonds toward the Lethe-ray machine directly in front of his chair. He could just reach the little control panel with his face.

  He fastened his teeth on the knob of the intensity control. With swift turning movements of his head, he turned the knob so that its pointer reached low on the intensity scale.

  “If you’re too dizzy yet to drink this stuff, you’ll go without it,” Kra Kol said angrily, coming back to him. “It’s all foolishness keeping a prisoner alive, anyway.”

  Captain Future had jerked his head back just in time.

  He maintained a numb, dizzy look as he drank the liquid. Immediately, Kra Kol switched the Lethe-ray and hastily went out of the cabin.

  Captain Future felt the Lethe-ray strike his brain. But its intensity now was nearly zero and it had not nearly so powerful an effect. It merely brought a certain vagueness, but did not make him incapable of thought and action.

  “Now if I could just get loose and get my hands on a weapon!” he thought grimly.

  He could do nothing while he was bound in this chair, a typical space-ship recoil chair, supported by a pedestal that slid up and down in a pneumatic sleeve. The raider ship shook to brake blasts, making it evident that it was nearing Jupiter’s moon. And these brake blasts gave Captain Future an idea.

  He twisted his bound feet under the chair until they found the safety dog that locked the sliding pedestal into the sleeve. He kicked until he had forced the dog out.

  “Now for a good, hard bump,” he thought ruefully.

  A few minutes later came another brake blast. The pressure of deceleration, as usual, threw Curt’s recoil chair upward.

  But this time, without the safety dog in place, the movable upper part of the chair was thrown clear out of the sleeve. Curt Newton, and the chair frame into which he was bound, w
ere hurled with a crash to the floor. He had been expecting it and ducked his head to avoid being knocked unconscious.

  WHEN his head cleared, he began to make calculated movements that enabled him after many efforts to roll clumsily toward the base of a tall electrical mechanism that was part of Ru Ghur’s elaborate scientific equipment.

  He had spotted that machine as having a base with sharp metal edges that would serve his purpose. He twisted until he could bring his bound hands against that sharp edge, and then began rapidly rubbing his bonds to and fro.

  “There’s not much time,” he thought tightly. “Unless I’m much mistaken, there’s going to be battle and sudden death in a few minutes.”

  His head was clear, now that he had completely escaped the influence of the Lethe-ray. And Captain Future, as he worked urgently at his bonds, was remembering what Ru Ghur had told him.

  The Uranian had said that they were going to Leda, one of Jupiter’s smaller moons, to make a surprise attack on Bork King’s Martian outlaws who had forestalled the raiders in robbing a radium shipment from a liner.

  “A case of wolf eat wolf,” Curt Newton thought grimly. “But the important thing is that Ru Ghur is the particular wolf I’m after above all others.”

  He knew that Ru Ghur had been able to find Bork King’s hiding place on Leda by somehow tracing the radium shipment the Martian outlaws had stolen. But how, he could not guess.

  “There’s something unearthly about the way that Uranian devil can trace radium at any distance,” he thought.

  He finally got his hands free. As he tore at the rest of his bonds, he heard a whistling roar outside the ship.

  “That’s atmosphere!” he muttered. “We’ve reached Leda!”

  In a moment he was on his feet, searching the cabin. He soon found an atom-pistol amid Ru Ghur’s private arsenal of weapons. He sprang to open the cabin door.

  At that instant, he heard from forward in the raider ship the sharp cry of Ru Ghur.

  “That’s Bork King’s ship down there in the glade! Don’t use the guns! Give them the sleep-gas!

  Captain Future sprang to the port-hole windows. He looked down on the nighted jungles that covered this side of Leda.

  Those weirdly beautiful jungles were flower forests! Instead of trees, gigantic flowers towered on massive stalks to a height of a hundred feet. Huge, waving moon lilies, great flame roses whose blooms were thirty feet in diameter, enormous, nodding orchids — their dense thickets lay in the silvery light of great Jupiter like a vast garden planted by giants.

  Several of Jupiter’s smaller moons possessed such flower forests, due to an excess of carbon dioxide in their atmosphere. But the great flower jungles of this moon Leda were the wildest and most beautiful of all.

  Captain Future glimpsed the torpedo-shaped bulk of a small space-cruiser on the ground, half-hidden amid towering flame roses. Men were running toward the ship in alarm.

  Ru Ghur’s raider ships poised for a moment amid the gigantic flowers, their keel jets blasting. A great cloud of white vapor spurted down and enveloped the glade.

  “Sleep-gas!” Curt Newton exclaimed. “They had the keel-jets of their ship loaded with it!”

  The raider cruisers quickly landed beneath the towering fame roses. The raiders poured out.

  Captain Future waited tensely, watching for an opportunity to attack Ru Ghur when the odds were less suicidal.

  In the dappled planet light of the glade of giant flowers, Bork King’s Martian outlaws lay in stupefied sleep, though the breeze had quickly carried away the sleep-gas.

  Ru Ghur uttered sharp commands.

  “Gather up their guns, and find Bork King and bring him back to consciousness. Kra Kol, look for the radium.”

  The Saturnian entered the Martian cruiser, and returned a moment later.

  “The stuff’s in there, all right!” he said.

  “Good!” said Ru Ghur. “As soon as the men have made sure we have all the Martians, we’ll have them carry it into the Falcon.”

  Two raiders came up with a man whose hands were bound. “Here’s Bork King,” one of them said. “We revived him.”

  BORK KING, Curt saw, was a big, iron-framed Martian of middle age. His craggy red face, fierce black eyes and shock of bristling black hair made him an indomitably belligerent figure.

  “So it’s you and your cursed raiders who jumped us!” he shouted violently as he recognized Ru Ghur.

  Ru Ghur wagged his head sadly. “I’m sorry we had to do it. But you shouldn’t have gone after radium. That’s what brought us after you.”

  Bork King uttered an angry roar. “Since when do we Companions of Space have to ask your permission as to what we can loot?” he demanded.

  “You’re no ordinary pirate, Bork,” said Ru Ghur shrewdly. “I know your history, that until you were outlawed, you were one of the secret Martian officials called the Guardians of Mars.” The fat Uranian leaned forward. “I want to know more about the Guardians of Mars and what they guard. I believe that information would be valuable to me.”

  “You’ll get no information from me!” roared Bork King. “Untie my hands and I’ll settle this man to man!”

  Captain Future saw the Uranian shake his head. “I’m not a fighting man, Bork,” Curt heard him say, and sigh. “I’m just a peaceful old scientist. I hate violence and bloodshed. But since you are obstinate, I fear I’ll have to force you to tell me what I want to know. Kra Kol, bring him to my cabin in the Falcon.”

  Captain Future instantly leaped across the cabin and crouched behind the door, his atom-pistol in his fist.

  A grim little smile played over Curt Newton’s lips. This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The fat Uranian was going to get a disastrous surprise when he entered his cabin.

  Curt Newton seldom had underestimated an opponent of Ru Ghur’s caliber. But he did so in this case, and it was his mistake that was disastrous.

  For as Ru Ghur and Kra Kol and the big Martian prisoner came along the corridor to the cabin, Curt heard the tramp of their feet suddenly halt.

  “There’s something wrong!” Ru Ghur’s voice exclaimed. “The Lethe-ray machine in there is hardly running at all! That means —”

  Captain Future cursed himself for a fool. He should have turned the machine back to normal.

  Ru Ghur had darted out of the Falcon.

  “Men, this way!” he yelled. “Our prisoner is loose in the ship!”

  Curt Newton bounded out into the corridor. He triggered his atom-gun at Kra Kol, but the Saturnian darted out in time to escape.

  Curt rushed past Bork King to the door of the ship. Scores of armed raiders were running toward it. Captain Future was trapped.

  Chapter 5: Space Trail to Danger

  A SMALL space-ship, shaped oddly like an elongated tear drop, screamed at highest speed from Earth’s Moon toward the spaces beyond Jupiter. It was the Comet, famous ship of the Futuremen. And in it, Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney shared tension with Otho and Grag and the Brain.

  “We’ll be there in another hour!” Otho called back from the space-stick he had held for long hours of the flight.

  “We’re too late — away too late,” muttered old Ezra discouragement in his wreathed face.” Look how long it’s been since the Orion was attacked.”

  Grag drew his giant metal form grimly erect.

  “If that devil Ru Ghur has harmed the Chief, he’ll pay!”

  “Ru Ghur couldn’t know that the Orion’s telaudio operator was Captain Future,” Joan said hopefully.

  But her fine eyes were dark with apprehension. They had all felt that chilling premonition since their discovery that the very ship upon which Curt Newton had gone disguised was the one last attacked by the radium raiders.

  Grag paced the cabin restively, frequently peering ahead. The big robot paid no attention even to his pet. Eek, the gray, bearlike little moon pup which usually claimed so much of Grag’s attention, pawed unheeded now at his metal feet, then discons
olately retired to curl up beside Oog, the fat little white animal that was Otho’s grotesque mascot.

  Only the Brain showed no perturbation. It was not that Simon Wright felt no anxiety. But he had known a lifetime of cool self-control.

  “We’re close to the sector in which the attack took place,” Simon murmured, for he knew the solar spaces as an ordinary man knows his back yard. And the bucking of the ship meant it was plowing through some of the powerful ether currents that are frequent between Jupiter and Saturn.

  “There isn’t a sign of the wreck,” commented Grag, peering anxiously through the magnifying lookout-lens.

  Two cruisers suddenly drove into sight ahead of them, rushing toward the Comet. They bore the insignia of the Planet Patrol.

  “Patrol, ahoy!” Ezra spoke quickly into the telaudio, after sliding its tuner to the Patrol wave length. “Marshal Gurney speaking from the Comet. Did you corner the raiders?”

  “No, sir,” an officer’s downcast voice replied. “They got away again. We boxed this whole sector as soon as the alarm came through, but they had slipped past somehow.”

  “What about the Orion’s crew?” Joan asked quickly.

  “The radium raiders never leave witnesses,” came the answer. “Everybody on the wreck was dead.”

  “Everybody?” whispered the girl.

  “The Chief can’t be dead,” Otho hastily reassured her. “It’d take more than Ru Ghur and all his devils to kill him.”

  “Where is the wreck?” Ezra Gurney demanded of the Patrol captain.

  “We let it drift and called Jupiter base to send out salvage tugs for it,” was the reply. “We’re combing this sector for the raiders.”

  “You let the wreck drift?” Simon Wright exclaimed sharply. “Don’t you realize that the ether-currents will suck it into the Sargasso Sea of Space?”

  “Good grief, that’s right!” exclaimed Grag, dismayed. “The Sargasso’s only ten or twelve degrees counter-sunwise from here.”

  “I guess we overlooked that,” admitted the Patrol captain.