Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) (7 page)

“It seems a pretty far-fetched idea,” muttered Otho. “And yet it’s about the only one that explains what happened.”

Grag had been pacing to and fro in wild restlessness, with clanking strides. Now the robot uttered an angry shout.

“Why do we stand here talking, when master has been taken?” he boomed furiously. “Why don’t we follow?”

“We have to know where to follow, Grag,” the Brain explained calmly.

“Yes, we can’t just comb the whole System for that ship,” Otho added.

“Don’t talk to me!” Grag told the android. “It’s all I can do to keep from giving you a thrashing, as it is.”

“You and ten thousand metal junkmen like you couldn’t do that!” flamed Otho, springing to his feet.

Eek, the moon-pup, had awakened and had ambled over to the group. Now, sensing its metal master’s anger with Otho, the little gray beast bared its teeth belligerently at the android.

“No more of this quarreling!” Simon Wright’s cold voice lashed. “That is an order.”

The two other Futuremen relaxed their angry stiffness. Bodiless the Brain might be, unable even to move without help, yet both Otho and Grag were subservient to the vast, calm intellect housed in that transparent serum-case — the intellect that had helped create them.

“Put this body on the operating table under the X-ray lamps,” the Brain ordered. “I’ve been studying its eyes, and I think I have a clue to where it came from.”

Otho unfolded the operating table, and Grag laid the white-furred body on it and switched on the powerful X-ray lamps.

Through fluoroscopic spectacles that were slipped on over his lens-eyes, the Brain studied the interior anatomy of the furry corpse.

“I was right!” he declared finally. “This creature is a native of Pluto or somewhere near it.”

“How can you tell?” Otho asked doubtfully.

“Those huge-pupiled eyes prove that the creature originated on a world of eternal dusk, one with less light even than Neptune,” the Brain answered. “The furry, light-boned body must have evolved on a cold, medium-sized world. That means Pluto, for it’s the only world in the System which answers those conditions.”

“But maybe the creature came from some world outside our System completely?” Otho suggested.

“No, that’s impossible,” rasped the Brain, “for its eye-retinas are adapted to ultra-violet radiation exactly like that of our Sun. No two suns emit exactly the same kind of radiation. This creature comes from within our System — from Pluto.”

“But no one has ever seen such creature as this on Pluto!” Otho objected. “The native Plutonians don’t look like this.”

“Pluto is still largely unexplored,” Simon reminded him. “That icy planet and its three moons may hide more than one unknown race in their frigid wildernesses.”

“Then Doctor Zarro’s and the Legion’s headquarters must be out there at Pluto?” Otho cried eagerly.

“I’m sure of it,” the Brain replied. “It is possible that all the men of the Legion of Doom, who seemed to be Earthmen, are really creatures like this one, in some illusion-disguise.”

Otho gasped at that suggestion. But Grag’s mind clung to one thing — his master.

“They will have taken master to Pluto, then?” he cried. “We go there after them?”

“We go at once!” the Brain snapped. “Blast off Mars at once and lay a course straight for Pluto.”

A few minutes later, with Grag at its controls, the
Comet
rose from the starlit Martian desert, shot up above the lighted towers of Syrtis, and rocketed headlong into the void.

“Better turn on the ship’s camouflage, now that we’re clear of Mars,” the Brain rasped. “We don’t want that Legion ship to spot us pursuing them.”

Grag obeyed, pulling down a burnished red lever beside the throttles. The result was amazing.

The
Comet
suddenly became a real comet! Captain Future had long ago devised this perfect method of camouflage for his craft. It was achieved by projecting a dense discharge of glowing ions from the rocket-tubes. That cloud of electrified atoms, clinging around the ship and trailing behind it in space, made the
Comet
to all appearances live up to its name.

The camouflaged ship rushed on. As the hours dragged by the Brain used a small telescope in the control-room to continue his scrutiny of the tiny dark spot in the constellation Sagittarius.

“How can you think of that dark star now, when the chief is in danger?” Otho exclaimed to him.

SIMON glanced at the android with cold, calm lens-eyes.

“I am as worried about Curtis as you,” he said, “but I must continue these studies of the dark star he asked me to make. He will need all possible data to combat Doctor Zarro’s plot.”

“He will, if he’s still living,” Otho said gloomily.

“Master still lives!” boomed Grag loudly, with perfect faith. “We will find him — you will see.”

Otho gloomily resumed his survey of space ahead. In a moment there was a hissing cry from the android.

“Something ahead! It may be the ship we’re after!”

They saw it — a big, queer-looking space ship coming toward them, driving nearer by the second.

“It can’t be the Legion ship, for that’s going the other way —”

“It’s diving on us — it’s going to ram us!”

The strange ship ahead was swooping down into the path of the camouflaged
Comet,
and would collide with it head-on.

MEANWHILE, what had happened to Captain Future and his companions?

The Sargasso Sea of Space! The legendary, mysterious peril to navigation that was dreaded by every space-sailor in the System!

Joan Randall’s pretty face was pale and stricken, and little Kansu Kane stared bewilderedly, as Captain Future told them that their space-boat was being drawn into that deadly trap.

The space-boat was still being carried at frightful speed through the void by the ether-current gripping it. The Legion of Doom cruiser, recoiling from the danger, had vanished.

“It’s my fault,” Curt Newton said, his tanned face self-accusing. “I knew from the currents that we were getting near the Sargasso. But I thought I could escape it and shake off pursuit.”

“You were wonderful to get us out of that ship!” Joan cried loyally to the red-haired scientific wizard. “And you’ll get us out of the Sargasso — I know you will.”

“What is this Sargasso of Space you’re talking about?” Kansu Kane demanded. “I’m no space-sailor — I never heard of it.”

“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.