Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) Read online

  “You know what an ether-current is, don’t you?” Captain Future asked him. “Well, there are many strong ether-currents, strange running tides in the luminiferous ether itself, out in this part of the System. They all flow into a central vortex, and anything that is carried into the vortex can’t get out again, against the currents. That central vortex is the Sargasso Sea of Space.”

  Curt reached for the throttles. “I’ll try once more to break out of the current,” he muttered. “But I’m afraid —”

  He opened the throttles to the limits. It was futile. The power was not enough to get them out of the remorseless grip of the ether-current that was sweeping them fatally on into a dreaded, unknown region of space.

  Captain Future shut off the rockets. “No go,” he said, shaking his red head. “Might as well save our power, until we get into the central vortex. Then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  Joan smiled at Curt shakily. She had an unchangeable confidence in him. Curt knew. He wondered gloomily if that confidence was to be destroyed. For he could see only a thin chance of escape from this strange space-trap.

  “Better get some sleep,” he said, and she obeyed.

  Captain Future peered ahead, his handsome, tanned face keen and unafraid. He sensed that they were approaching the central vortex of the vast maelstrom of ether-currents. For the space-boat was now being rolled over and over and bumped roughly as it was borne on.

  Joan awoke from the motion, and rubbing her eyes, came anxiously to his side. There was still nothing visible to the eye, yet they knew they were entering the boiling heart of the vast invisible whirlpool.

  “Hang on to a stanchion,” Captain Future told the other two in a low voice.

  CLINGING for support, they felt their craft batted about by titanic, unseen tides. Everything was topsy-turvy.

  Then, after terrifying minutes of chaotic movement, the space-boat seemed to enter smooth, undisturbed space. It floated now as placidly as though on a millpond.

  “Why, we’re out of the currents now.” Kansu Kane faltered, peering out with myopic eyes.

  “We’ve escaped from the Sargasso?” Joan cried joyfully to Captain Future.

  Curt shook his bead. “I’m sorry to disillusion you. We’ve reached the dead-center of the whirlpool of currents, an area of undisturbed space at the heart of this space-maelstrom.”

  He opened the throttles, starting up the rockets.

  “We’ll try to buck our way back out, but I’m pretty sure it’s useless.”

  Rockets flaming, the little boat shot back in the direction from which it had come. In a half-minute it plunged again into the titanic, invisible ether-currents. The currents grasped the craft once more and flung it like a toy back into the dead-center.

  “Thought so,” Curt muttered. “We’re in here to stay, unless we can devise enough new power to carry us out.”

  “Where do you expect to find any additional source of power in this empty hole in space?” Kansu asked hopelessly.

  “There,” said Captain Future quietly, pointing ahead.

  They stared. Far ahead, avast jumbled metal mass floated motionless in space. The mass was lenticular in shape, and hung at the very center of the dead-area here in the maelstrom.

  As their craft hummed closer, they saw that this far-flung, jumbled mass was a great aggregation of space ships and debris of all descriptions. All this flotsam was held together by its own slight mutual gravitation.

  “What is it?” Joan Randall whispered awedly.

  “It is the graveyard of space ships,” Curt said. “The last resting-place of every ship that has been sucked into the Sargasso Sea of Space since interplanetary travel began. No ship has ever escaped here — all that blundered in are still here.”

  He steered the space-boat straight toward the edge of the vast wreck-pack. Now they could see it more clearly.

  In the pack were space ships of every kind that had ever sailed the System. Great Jovian grain-boats, dumpy Martian freighters, streamlined liners from the Neptune and Uranus routes, black cruisers of the Planet Police, ominously armed pirate ships, even small space-yachts. These dead ships floated, rubbing slowly against each other’s sides. And between and among them floated all kinds of interplanetary debris that had been swept into the maelstrom — meteors large and small, fragments of splintered asteroids, bits of metal wreckage, and stiff, space-suited bodies of dead men who perhaps had floated in the void for years before drifting into this last resting place.

  UNUTTERABLY awe-inspiring was the sight, here in the thin, pale sunlight of outer space. Here was the end of many a brave-hearted voyage. Here many a good ship that had once throbbed from world to world had come to peace and quiet at last. Here was a Valhalla of space ships and space-men whose eternal tranquility and silence would not be disturbed until the System ended.

  “Do you think there are any living people in those ships, Captain Future?” asked Joan Randall in a low voice.

  “I’m afraid there’s no chance of that. The air-supply of any ship that drifted in here would soon be exhausted, and then any living people aboard would die.”

  “Then we will perish when our boat’s air-tanks are empty?’ the girl cried. “Only two days from now?”

  “We’re going to try to get out of here before then,” Curt said grimly. “There’s just a chance that if we fitted up this space-boat with additional cyclotrons taken from some of these wrecks, it would give us enough power to fight out through the currents. We’ll have to go through the wrecks first and see if we can find enough cyclotrons in good condition,” he added.

  Joan shuddered. “Search through those deathly, silent ships?”

  “You can wait in the space-boat with Kansu Kane, if you want,” Curt told her. “It’ll be strenuous work searching.”

  “No, no, I want to go with you!” the girl cried.

  “Well. I don’t,” Kansu Kane said sourly. “Maybe I can, reconstruct my lost Andromedan notes from memory, while you two are scrambling around in there.”

  Curt and Joan donned the black suits and glassite helmets. He tested the suit-phone to make sure it was working, and then they passed out through the tiny airlock of the space — boat.

  They stepped out into sheer space and floated together, seeming suspended magically in nothingness at the edge of the vast wreck-pack, with stars above them and stars below them. Then Curt drew the impeller-tube from the belt of his suit. He fired it, and its tiny rocket-blast sent him gliding toward the nearest wreck. Joan followed, using her impeller also. Curt bumped against the side of the wreck. It was a cargo-ship that bore the name, “Thenia, Venus,” on its bows. They clambered back along the top of its torpedo-shaped hull, and found the whole stern was crushed as though by a giant hand.

  “A meteor did that,” Curt told the girl through the suit-phone. “No use looking in it for good cyclotrons. Come on.”

  The next wreck, a big liner, was the “Paris. Earth.” It seemed undamaged, and Curt and Joan managed to enter it through an air-lock whose doors were wide open.

  Inside the liner, an unnerving scene met their eyes. The enclosed decks were strewn with dead passengers, Martians, Venusians, Earthmen and men and women of other races, lay about, stiff and frozen. Yet, perfectly preserved, they all seemed sleeping.

  “What happened to this ship?” Joan whispered, her face white inside her transparent helmet.

  “They must have blundered into the Sargasso and then run out of air,” Curt muttered. “Looks like somebody here opened the air-lock doors finally, to bring a quick, merciful death.”

  Curt went back down to the cyclotron-rooms. The great, cylindrical generators of atomic power were unharmed.

  “So far so good. We’ve got to have more.”

  They entered an old-looking liner of the type built long before, that had been attacked by space-pirates. Its strong-room had been looted, its officers blasted down, and then the attackers had punctured its hull by atom-gun fire, slaying all in it.

/>   “I never realized so many horrible things had happened in the System in the past,” Joan said, shivering.

  “This particular thing happened a long time in the past,” Captain Future remarked. “The ships here in the center of the wreck-pack are all old ones. We’d better work back out toward the edge of the pack, where we’ll be more likely to find good cyclotrons in the newer ships.”

  But when they scrambled out of the liner of long-ago tragedy, Joan pointed suddenly deeper into the wreck-pack.

  “What can that be, Captain Future?”

  Curt stared. She was pointing at a strange object several ships away. It was a cylinder of blank gray metal several hundred feet long, without the lines of a ship at all.

  “I don’t know — it’s certainly no space ship of our System,” Curt declared. “It may be from outside the System — a queer wreck out of interstellar space that drifted into the System and was caught here in the Sargasso.

  His gray eyes kindled with scientific interest. “We’ll take a look. Come on, Joan.”

  They started toward the enigmatic cylinder. But they stopped again, before they reached it, stricken with wonder by the appearance of the craft that floated next to it.

  THIS was a space ship of ridiculously small size and flimsy appearance. It was crudely designed, with projecting rocket-tubes of an ancient, inefficient type. The little vessel was the most antiquated and obsolete of any they had seen yet.

  “Why, it looks like one of the first space ships that was ever built!” Joan cried. “Could men ever have sailed space in a craft like that?”

  Curt’s tanned face was suddenly tense and strange.

  “I’ve an idea I know what craft this is,” he said. “Yes, I’m right — look at the name on its bows!”

  The name was Pioneer III.

  “Pioneer III?” cried Joan. “Why, that was the ship of Mark Carew, the first man ever to —”

  “The first man ever to sail beyond Jupiter,” Captain Future finished softly, staring almost in reverence at the clumsy little craft. “Mark Carew, the second great trail-blazer of space — the man who first visited Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, and who was lost in space in a later voyage. And this is where he was lost, here in the Sargasso.”

  The mystery of the interstellar cylinder was forgotten for the moment in the intense interest aroused by this new find. Curt and Joan pried with a bar until they were able to enter the little Pioneer III.

  The ancient little ship had carried a crew of only six men. They lay dead, frozen, eternally preserved — those Earthmen who long and long ago had roared out into the void in their tiny craft, to blaze the trail for all those who would come after.

  Awedly, Captain Future stepped gently toward the control-cubby in the prow. There, in the pilot’s chair, sat the frozen body of a dark, thin-faced man of middle-age. He sat there, his worn face seeming almost lifelike, his open black eyes staring out eternally through the window of his little ship.

  “Mark Carew!” breathed Joan, in a hushed whisper. “I’ve seen so many monuments and pictures of him. The second man ever to sail space — only Gorham Johnson was before him.”

  Curt’s eyes bad glimpsed the notebook clutched in the dead explorer’s hand. Gently, he took it from the stiff fingers.

  It was a diary. He and Joan together read the last entries on its open page.

  Jan. 22. (Earth calendar.) Our voyages are over. We shall never reach Pluto, as I had hoped. That is reserved for some, other pioneer. For yesterday we ran into appalling ether-currents, that swept us into this dead, empty area from which we cannot escape. Our air cannot last long, we were almost out and had counted on replenishing our supply on Saturn.

  Jan. 23. We found one of our air-tanks, on which we had relied, empty. It had sprung and leaked, unknown to us. Death is a matter of hours. We have sat here, silent, thinking of the Earth we shall never see again. Will our bodies ever be found, we wonder? It does not matter — yet I would like to see Earth’s blue skies again.

  Jan. 24. Crew half unconscious — air failing — partial asphyxiation. This is — the end. The end of us, but not — of our work. Others will come after us. I seem — to see — all space filled with ships — in some future time. Maybe — Gorham Johnson and I and our men — will be remembered. Hand stiff — eyes failing — can’t write — more —

  That last scrawled entry trailed away. There was no further writing in the little book.

  Captain Future, a hard lump in his throat, raised his hand to his helmet in salute to the sitting, staring corpse.

  Chapter 7: Encounter in Space

  THE red-haired scientific wizard and the girl climbed out of the silent little ship that was mute monument and tomb of brave men.

  Captain Future’s attention was at once re-engaged by the big gray metal cylinder that floated in the wreck-pack close by. He had momentarily forgotten it, but now his interest was rekindled.

  “That cylinder must be a ship from outside the System!” he exclaimed. “Come on — we haven’t much time, but I’m going to have a look at it.”

  Joan Randall clambered pluckily with him to the side of the enigmatic, huge cylinder. They hung there, peering along its curved wall. There seemed no doors or port-holes in it anywhere.

  “I don’t like the look of it,” faltered the girl, her brown eyes distrustful. “It looks too strange and alien.”

  “There can’t be anything living in it after all this time,” Curt assured her. “And there must be a door in it somewhere. I wish we could find and open it.”

  Next moment, he stiffened inside his space suit and heard a sharp cry from Joan. A door was opening in the cylinder.

  It opened like the iris shutter of a camera, expanding from a tiny aperture into a circular opening ten feet across.

  “What opened that door?” cried the girl, panic-stricken. “We weren’t even near it.”

  Curt’s gray eyes flashed. “That door must be telepathically operated — when I wished a door would open, it opened!”

  His scientific passion kindled. “What kind of a race would devise such mechanisms? Come on, Joan!”

  W ith fearful reluctance, the girl followed him through the magically opened door. They found themselves in the interior of the great cylinder, a maze of girders, catwalks, and machines of unguessable design and purpose.

  Along the sides were metal shelves, atop each of which glowed a purple lamp. The purple beams of each lamp bathed a grotesque, motionless creature lying apparently frozen on each shelf.

  The creatures were wholly alien.

  They looked like horrid hybrids of octopus and man. Each had a scaly body with horny protuberances along its spine from the head down, and four tentaclelike arms.

  “They must have come from another star — drifted into the Sargasso here while exploring our System, long ago,” murmured Captain Future. “They don’t look like air-breathing creatures to me.”

  “What is the purple light over each of them?” Joan asked fearfully.

  “I don’t know — some kind of preservative force,” Captain Future muttered. “There’s a mystery here.”

  He found some tanks along the wall. All were empty. They had contained a reddish liquid, whose traces remained.

  “Blood was carried in these tanks!” Curt asserted. “It must have been their food. And when they ran out of it...”

  He approached the front end of the cylindrical ship. There was a control board there, with levers, dials and switches of unfamiliar aspect — fruit of an alien science and mechanics.

  A GLOW of colored light broke out around the control board as Captain Future and Joan approached it! Their nearness had actuated some delicate mechanism amid those tangled devices.

  Then Curt noticed that the purple lamps over the two octopus-creatures nearest the control-board had gone out. And that those two creatures were stirring.

  “I understand now!” he cried, leaping forward, alarm in his eyes. “They ran out of food — blood — and so the
y put themselves into suspended animation. But they set a detector to wake their two leaders whenever any warmblooded creature entered this ship —”

  He was pawing desperately at the grotesque controlboard, seeking to smash the detector, wherever it was.

  “If those two wake completely, they’ll wake all the others by turning off the lamps — our lives won’t be worth anything. They need our blood!”

  “Captain Future!” screamed Joan. Curt whirled around, and at the same moment was gripped by scaly tentacles.

  The two octopus-creatures had awakened more rapidly than he had dreamed possible! One had seized him, sliding a tentacle around his knee, another around his throat, two others around his chest.

  The other creature was scrambling toward the glowing control-board, to wake all the others lying in suspended animation!

  Joan Randall, her face ghastly white inside her space suit helmet, was trying to tear away the tentacles around Curt. Captain Future, by a fierce effort, got his arm free and snatched out his proton-pistol.

  He fired point-blank at the octopus-creature who was reaching his four tentacles to the switches of the control-board. The proton-beam dropped the grotesque creature in a scorched heap.

  The thing holding Curt whirled him up to dash him against the floor. But Curt shot again, down at the thing whose tentacles held him aloft.

  The proton-beam tore into the scaly body, and Captain Future tumbled to the floor as the octopus-man slumped dead.

  Curt staggered up and looked around wildly. None of the other octopus-men sleeping under the purple-lamps had stirred. The detector which had been set off by Joan and himself had been designed only to awaken the two leaders of the alien crew, who had then meant to awaken all the others.

  “That was close!” Curt panted. “Food was what they wanted — blood. Where in the Universe could they have come from? Intelligent creatures, immune to cold of space and airlessness, but requiring vital blood-elements —”

  “Let’s get out of here, Captain Future!” pleaded Joan shudderingly. “This place is unclean, unholy!”