Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (14 page)

“If I take you to the place, will you get me some, Lifewater somewhere?” Thomas, Keene said desperately.

“Can’t promise that,” Curt answered, with his usual honesty.

“I’ll die without it!” raved the Earthman.

Captain Future looked at him in half pity.

“Simon, we’ve got to find some medical formula that will permit people to quit drinking the Lifewater, and yet not die.”

“Aye, lad,” muttered the Brain. “But we can’t devise such a formula without having some Lifewater first to analyze.”

“Rocket-car’s waiting,” called Ezra from the door. “Come on, Keen,” Curt ordered. “You’re guiding us.

The Planet Police rocket-car, with Curt at the wheel and Thomas Keene directing the route, drummed swiftly through the black, sleeping streets of Ops. Dawn was beginning to pale in the eastern sky. They flashed across the bridge over the Hyrcanian River, and into the shabby section near the spaceport. A big liner was taking off.

“There goes the Venus liner,” said Ezra, who sat in back with the brain “That young secretary must be on it, takin’ Zin Zibo back to Venus in his coffin.”

“This is the place,” Keene said.

It was a two-story building. Qarth’s shingle hung outside.

Captain Future went in with his proton pistol in his fist. Keene followed and Ezra Gurney brought in the Brain.

In the rear room of the building, on the floor, lay a cadaverous blue Saturnian with an atom pistol in his hand.

“His neck’s been broken,” Curt declared, examining him. Curt’s pulse jumped. “It was done by super-ju-jitsu twist of vertebra. The only person besides myself who knows that twist, is the one who taught it to me — Otho!”

“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!”

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 stretched 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.”