Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (18 page)

That was the boundary of the mysterious Mistlands, the eternally fog-shrouded lands of enigma in the far north of Saturn. Not a single man in the System had ever gone into, them and returned: Captain Future himself had never penetrated those cloudy lands of mystery.

“The Mistlands!” he whispered. “Does the Fountain of Life exist somewhere in there? But if it does, how, could anyone reach it? How could the Life-lord ever have found it?”

Then he came back to the immediate necessities.

“No use speculating,” Curt told himself. “I’ve got to stick to the lead I’ve got to find out what it was that Sus Urgal learned at Tobor.”

Curt Newton landed his flier at the spaceport of the town. The big ships parked here were all space freighters, designed to carry, in vacuum compartments, frozen meat to other planets.

Curt twisted his planet-jewel ring out of sight. Hitching up his belt to keep his proton pistol handy, he started into the town. He had covered his red hair with a space cap, to make it less conspicuous.

THE tall planeteer strode by the packing plants adjoining the spaceport. He passed the labyrinthine stock yards, in which the vicious blue Saturnian cattle milled and seethed and butted the heavy bars. He entered the roaring main street of the ranchtown.

This interplanetary frontier town boomed with life, even now at noonday. Tough, rangy, blue Saturnian herdsmen were riding in and out on their eight-legged black
stads.
A wild looking crew, all were wearing heavy atom pistols. Meat-buyers from many worlds, swaggering space-sailors from the nearby spaceport, merchants and gamblers and a few black uniformed Planet Police it was a motley throng that crowded the narrow, muddy street.

Captain Future had a definite aim in visiting this place. He meant to learn what Sus Urgal, the Martian author, had found out about the Fountain of Life legend. To do that, knew that he must first ascertain the Martian’s source of information.

“Better start at the drinking-places, I suppose,” the scientific wizard reasoned. He grinned. “Here’s where I become just another tough Earth adventurer on the loose.”

Drinking-places and gambling-houses abounded here, as in all interplanetary frontier towns, where hardy ram gather and wealth comes and goes easily. Curt Newton entered a noisy saloon.

Herdsmen, space-sailors and idlers lined the metal bar. Saturnian brandy, Martian desert-liquor, Venusian wine were flowing. Curt ordered Earth whiskey, and scrutinized two rangy blue Saturnian herdsmen who stood beside him. He offered to buy a drink — an offer which was quickly accepted.

“Space-sailor?” one of the herdsmen asked.

Curt nodded “Have been. I’m just wandering around now. Came up from Ops to look at these Mistlands that people all talk about.”

“Look at them is all you’d better do,” warned one of the Saturnians. “Lots of strangers think maybe they’ll go inside’ the Mistlands. A few of them do it but none of them ever come out again.”

“What do you suppose is in there?” Curt asked.

The blue herdsman shrugged.

“Nobody really knows. They tell plenty of queer stories, though, do the old-timers.”

“I’m interested.” Curt admitted. “Anybody around here who could tell me some of these stories about the Mistlands?”

The herdsman pointed to an aged, withered Saturnian. Sitting alone at a corner table, the old man was watching the crowd with bright, wrinkle webbed eyes.

“Old Nik Iro there knows every yarn ever told on Saturn. And if there’s anything he likes to do, it’s spin ‘em to strangers.”

Captain Future thanked the herdsman and strode over to the corner table. Nik Iro, the aged Saturnian, looked up at him shrewdly.

“They tell me you know just about every queer tale and legend ever told about the Mistlands,” Curt said to the old man.

Nik Iro uttered a wheezy chuckle.

“That’s right, Earthman. Nobody on Saturn knows more about this country than I do.”

“Did you, spin some of your yarns to a Martian writer who was here recently — a man named Sus Urgal?”

Nik Iro stared at him.

“That’s queer,” the old man said. “You’re the second Earthman who’s asked me that same question.”

Curt stiffened. “Who was the other Earthman?”

“Fellow who called himself Graeme, Doctor Graeme,” the aged Saturnian replied. “He also wanted to know what I’d told Sus Urgal.”

FUTURE’S mind considered that fact quickly. So Martin Graeme had been here, trying to trace Sus Urgal’s discovery!

“What did you tell the Martian?” Curt asked.

“Why, I told him lots of things,” wheezed the old Saturnian. “He was most interested in my stories about the Mistlands especially about the man who came out of the Mistlands once, a long time ago.”

“You say a man returned from the Mistlands?” Curt repeated sharply. “I thought no one who entered had ever returned.”

“That’s what people say, but it ain’t so,” Nik Iro asserted in his cracked voice. “I saw this fellow come out myself. It was near fifty years ago, when I was a young herdsman. I was riding up along the edge of the Mist-land thirty miles east of here, looking for some lost animals. There’s a kind of ravine comes out of the Mist-land at that point.

“I was riding past there when I saw this man stagger out of the Mistland along that ravine. He was a native Saturnian, like me. And he looked like a young fellow about my age. He’d had a pretty hard time and was near played out. I rode up to him, and gave him some water. He was kind of delirious and he babbled out a queer story.

“He said he’d gone into the Mistland hunting for the Fountain of Life that people talk about. And he said he’d found it! He said he’d been an aging man, but that drinking the Fountain’s waters had made him young again. He lived in there for awhile near the Fountain; in some place he called ‘The City of Eternal Youth.’ Then he said he got sick of it and wanted to get out into his own world again. He made his way out, in spite of the winged Qualus.”

“The winged Qualus?” Curt almost shouted.

Old Nik Iro nodded.

“That’s what he said. It seems like these Qualus had been after him for some reason. Anyway, he got out. But he said he was going to die pretty quick, now that he couldn’t drink the Fountain water. I told him he was crazy. But sure enough, he died soon after, queerest way you ever saw a man die. He just withered up and got terrible old and died in a minute. That’s the story I told that there Martian, Sus Urgal. He seemed mighty interested in it and said he was going to put it into a book. He bought me a drink for telling it.”

Curt Newton, with a grin, took the hint. He called for Saturnian brandy, which the old man quaffed eagerly.

Curt was sure now that he had discovered the legendary clue to the Fountain, which Sus Urgal had embodied in his manuscript, and which had caused his murder.

“And you say the ravine that man followed out of the Mistlands lies thirty miles east of here?” he asked.

“That’s where it is. According to this fellow who came out of the Mistlands, he followed the ravine straight to the outside. He said that was the only thing that made him able to get out.” Nik Iro added gloomily: “People have never believed me when I told ‘em all this, though. That Martian, and this Graeme fellow, are about the only ones who didn’t seem to think old Nik Iro was a liar.”

“I believe you, Nik Iro,” Curt assured him.

He thanked the old man. Rising, he hastily left the crowded drinking-place.

Captain Future was throbbing with excitement. He had tracked down the clue that had caused Sus Urgal to be murdered. Now if he could only follow it farther, into the Mistlands themselves —

HE WENT down the street of Tobor to an outfitting shop. Quickly he bought one of the
stads,
or Saturnian horses. A gaunt, black, eight-legged brute, its vicious red eyes in its elongated skull made Curt wonder at his choice.

“Don’t know whether you can ride him or not, Earthman,” said the seller dubiously. “Takes a Saturnian to control the damned beasts.”

Curt smiled. “I’ve ridden
stads
before. Give me a couple of thermos canteens and a saddle-bag of food.”

He vaulted lightly into the queer saddle. The
stad
reared up, squealing viciously at the unfamiliar smell of an Earthman.

Curt jerked back firmly on the reins, which were fastened to the animal’s sensitive ears. For some minutes there was a hot struggle between man and beast.

Then the
stad,
recognizing the Earthman’s mastery, suddenly became docile. Curt spurred out of town and rode north. The
stad’s
eight legs drummed the blue plain toward the distant, foggy wall of the Mistlands.

Curt munched dried Saturnian beef from the saddlebag as he rode, reveling in the freedom of the vast, sunlit plain. But after a few hours’ riding, the misty wall of the unknown loomed close ahead.

A barrier of solid looking white fog towered skyward for miles, hiding all within it. East and west marched the misty rampart reaching far out of sight. The Mistlands, Curt knew, covered much of northern Saturn.

The accepted theory was that the eternal fog of the Mistlands was caused by steaming water vapor. Exhaled from orifices in the ground, it was condensed into mist upon meeting the colder air above the surface. As, long as history recorded, the Mistlands of Saturn had existed and always they had been a mystery.

Curt Newton rode up to the very edge of the mist, then turned his
stad
eastward. He did not check the easy, tireless lope of the creature until he came to a ravine. Issuing from the Mistland, it ran from north to south.

“Must be the ravine old Nik Iro mentioned,” Curt muttered. “Hope it doesn’t peter out in there and leave me lost.”

“He urged the
stad
northward up the ravine toward the mist. The Saturnian mount began to buck and hang back as they neared the fog.

He forced the unwilling
stad
along the ravine and into the mists. At once they were lost in solid white fog. He could hardly see the head of the
stad
in front of him.

A man lost in this mist was doomed. Compasses would not work because of radioactive magnetic currents. But Curt pushed onward, following the ravine that ran almost straight north like a giant crevasse.

IT WAS deathly silent in the mists. No familiar life seemed to exist here. Day or night were little different. It was as though he had stepped out of the familiar Universe and into a strange new one. Did the Fountain of Life really exist in this foggy mystery?

Curt Newton estimated that he had followed the ravine ever deeper into the Mistland for two hours. Suddenly he heard the first sound since entering — a sound as of threshing wings swooping down toward him.

“What the devil, birds couldn’t live in here!” he exclaimed wonderingly. “They couldn’t see to —”

He broke off with a cry of amazement. Out of the mists above him, winged creatures were swooping down on him,
winged
men!

Curt glimpsed them as pale-skinned, hairless men with great, featherless white wings extending from their shoulders. Their eyes were strangely luminous, and seemed able to penetrate the mists. They wore tunics of woven fiber, and carried metal knives in their belts.

They were swooping straight down on him, with hand out-stretched, clawing. Captain Future drew and shot his proton pistol with the speed of light. But the
stad,
bucking in panic, made his aim go wide.

Next moment, he felt himself grasped by a pair of hands and torn from the saddle! One of the winged white men was carrying him up into the mists with the others.

Curt Newton struggled in the grasp of the winged man. He started to turn his proton gun on his captor. He realized that if he shot the winged man, he, too, would fall to death.

“They’ve got me, all right,” he thought grimly. “Nothing I can do but to stick it out till they put me down. Then maybe I can do something.” Abruptly another thought came to him. “The Qualus, the winged men who were supposed to guard the Fountain! These must be they!”

The winged men flew through the mists, rising constantly, for more than an hour. Finally they broke from the fog into a vast, clear area that was completely surrounded by the mists.

Curt glimpsed a round valley, ringed by precipitous, craggy cliffs. His winged captors were carrying him toward those jagged towers of rock.

WINGED human captors were carrying Curt up to the precipitous cliffs surrounding the hidden valley in the Mistlands. He glimpsed the small white town that lay at the center of the blossoming valley.

“A town, in here?” Curt marveled. He remembered something the old Saturnian, Nik Iro, had mentioned in his tale. “What was it he spoke of a City of Eternal Youth? It is possible —”

Curt’s speculations were interrupted. His strange winged captors were now approaching their destination.

The towering, perpendicular rock cliffs were honeycombed with round openings, he saw.