Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (15 page)

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 inner 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.

Already a few of the deadly spores were drifting inside!

Curt snapped on his aura and dashed to the window. He stood against it, his blue aura preventing the spores from entering. But he couldn’t leave the window or the deadly dust would enter.

The Life-lord had effectively prevented Curt from pursuing him!

EZRA GURNEY, Grag and Simon were in the offices of the dead Doctor Qarth, Which had been one of the Lifewater syndicate’s branches. The Brain spoke, after Curt Newton had departed.

“Curtis wants us to stay here while he’s searching the fungus forest. He thinks Thomas Keene may, have gone to some other of the syndicate’s secret outlets to try to get Lifewater. He wants us to recapture Keene.”

“So we’re to grab any people who come here to buy the Lifewater,” Ezra Gurney drawled. “We find out from ‘em’ where the elixir can be bought in the city. Then we raid any other outlet we learn of, to capture Keene.”

“That’s the idea,” Simon Wright said. “There must be more than one place, in a big city like Ops, where the syndicate sells the elixir.”

“But we won’t find Keene anywhere in Ops,” Ezra predicted. “Why? ‘Cause Keene himself is the Life-lord that Cap’n Future is after!”

“I do not think so, Ezra,” boomed Grag, the robot. “Martin Graeme, that Earthman ethnologist, is our man. Why else would Graeme disappear right after we reached Saturn and began to question him? It was Graeme who killed Zin Zibo in the Governor’s office. Then he shook off the shadow railing him, and vanished.”

“I wonder,” muttered the Brain thoughtfully. “That’ Martian author, Sus Urgal where does he figure in all this? And is there any real reason for suspecting Khol Kor, the Governor?”

“Hardly seems likely that a man of high office like Khol Kor could be the Life-lord,” dissented old Ezra Gurney.

“Domination of the System through the Lifewater traffic might tempt even a Governor,” the Brain retorted. “Remember how that Space Emperor on Jupiter turned out to be the vice-governor.”

Ezra nodded. He well remembered that terrific struggle in the Jovian jungles, in which Captain Future finally defeated the man who had unloosed a blight of atavism on Jupiter.

“Listen, I hear someone entering!” Grag declared.

The morning was by now far advanced, and an increasing bustle of traffic from the street had become audible. The bell of the televis-announcer rang sharply.

“You take it, Ezra,” directed the Brain. “Grag or I would scare anyone away.”

Ezra Gurney went into the front office of the late Doctor Qarth, and touched the door-release switch.

It was a pretty, youthful Saturnian girl who entered. She looked hesitantly at the weather-beaten old marshal. Ezra had thrown a cloak over his dark uniform, but the girl appeared suspicious.

“I want to see Doctor Qarth,” she said quickly.

“He’s not here,” Ezra told her. “If it’s the Lifewater you want, Doctor Qarth left me in charge of that.” The Saturnian girl seemed relieved.

“Yes, I want another vial of the elixir. They told me I’d have to have it by now. I’ve brought money to pay for it — all I could get together. Will it be enough?”

Ezra looked at the money she anxiously held out. Then be raised his voice.

“Grag!”

THE girl screamed in terror as the great robot stalked into the room from the rear.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” Ezra told her with, rough kindliness. “But we want you to answer a few questions!’ “You’re not Lifewater sellers! You’re the Police!”

“We’re that, but we’re not after you,” Ezra informed heir.

“Come back in here.”

He and Grag led the frightened girl into the rear office. She shrank in increased fear from the searching eyes of the Brain.

“You’ve been drinking the Lifewater?” Ezra said.

“Yes, I drank it once,” the girl faltered. “I was an actress, but I was getting middle-aged. I heard of the Life-water, and Doctor Qarth sold me it. Then, later, he said I must keep, drinking it or I would die!”

“The same pitiful story,” Ezra commented, and swore aloud. “Cerberus prison is too damned good for those cursed elixir vendors.”

“Do you know of any other place in Ops where the Lifewater can be bought?” the Brain asked the girl’

“This — this was the only place I knew of. A beauty-science shop sent me here.”

The Brain turned his strange eyes to Ezra.

“Nothing to be learned from her, Ezra. But maybe other customers can tell us something. You watch for them. We’ll hold this girl here for awhile.”

As the next few hours of the morning passed, a half dozen other people furtively entered Doctor Quarth’s offices to buy the Lifewater. Ezra Gurney and Grag instantly detained them as they came, and the Brain questioned them.

Two of them were aging men who had never drunk the Lifewater but had heard of it and come to buy it. The others were men and women, apparently youthful, who had drunk the elixir once and had then learned that they must continue drinking it or meet a terrible death.

These, like the girl, recoiled in the most frightful terror when they found themselves unable to purchase the elixir. They cried that they must have the Lifewater, pleaded frantically with Ezra Gurney for it.

“This is the rottenest, vilest traffic I ever heard of in the System!” Ezra burst out violently. “And to think it’s goin’ on right now in hundreds of cities, on all nine worlds. Thousands an’ thousands more every day, becomin’ hopelessly enslaved to that poisonous stuff!”

“That’s why Curtis is working so urgently to stop the poison from spreading, Ezra,” commented the Brain somberly.

“But isn’t there any way these addicts can stop drinkin’ the Lifewater without dyin’?”

“I’ve already tried to find an antidote for the insidious effects of the Lifewater. But until I have some of the Lifewater itself to analyze, I can’t find such an antidote.”

We’re gettin’ nowhere here,” Ezra declared. “None of these people we’ve caught knows of another syndicate branch in Ops.”

“And while we’re here, Master may be in trouble in the fungus forest,” Grag boomed anxiously.

BUT their next customer changed their luck. This was a foppish Saturnian youth who was really an elderly, rich man who had been rejuvenated by the Lifewater.

Terrified by the unhuman aspect of Grag and Simon Wright the Saturnian stammered an answer to their question.

“Yes, I know of another place in Ops that sells the Life water. One of my friends bought it there. Its on the Street of Ten Moons. A chemical shop there is the blind for the elixir sellers”

“That’s all we want to know!” Ezra declared jubilantly. “I’ll bet Thomas Keene is there now. I’m callin’ headquarters and we’re goin’ to raid that place right now.”