Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (4 page)

“Then we’ll spring our little trap on them, eh?” Otho said quickly. His slitted eyes sparkled. “Once we get our hands on some of those Lifewater vendors, we can work back to their headquarters.”

“That’s the idea.” Curt looked somberly at the withered body. “The men behind this hideous business will wish they’d never started it, if I can get my hands on them.”

“Won’t you need us, Captain Future?” Joan asked eagerly. “Don’t you want us to go to Venus, too?”

Curt shook his head. “I want you and Ezra to go to Jupiter. Make a great show of investigating there. The Life-lord will hear, of it and figure that I’m somewhere around Jupiter. It’ll throw him off guard.”

He turned to the Futuremen.

“We’re starting now. There’s no time to lose. Grag, take Simon. Otho, bring that corpse.”

A few minutes later, the Cornet hurtled out from Earth. Swiftly it headed toward Venus to set the trap for the mysterious Life-lord’s emissaries.

THE STREET of Scientists lies in the northern section of the great Venusian city of Venusopolis. The white cement avenue is bordered by soaring alabaster buildings. All those graceful arches, slender spires and gay, green file roofs show the esthetic leanings of the beauty-loving Venusians. Here are the offices and laboratories of many of the greatest scientists of the cloudy planet.

It was late morning. The perpetually clouded sky was softly bright when a polished rocket-car throbbed softly amid the leisurely traffic along the street. The car came from the eastern section, where parks, boulevards and magnificent estates fringed the shore of the great Eastern Sea.

The car drew up before a tall building, and two Venusians emerged. One was obviously a servant, a tall, stalwart, dark-haired young man in a livery of white synthesilk.

The servant solicitously assisted the other man in clambering out. His master was an old white-haired stooping Venusian, wrapped in a heavy cloak. His wrinkled face and senile, blinking eyes were peering around myopically.

“Be careful, you fool!” the old man shrilled angrily to the servant helping him. “Are you trying to trip me up? Want to murder me?”

“Yes, sir — I mean no, sir,” stammered the tall servant. “This way, sir. Doctor Zibo’s offices are in here.”

“I can see the sign for myself. I’m not blind, you know. Help me up that step. If you let me fall, I’ll break this cane over your thick head.”

“Yes, sir,” the servant answered hastily. As he bent to help him into the building, he whispered into the old man’s ear. “I’ll pay you back for all this browbeating later, Otho.”

Otho — for it was he who was disguised as the aged Venusian — chuckled under his breath at Captain Future’s threat.

“Look where you’re stepping, you blockhead!” he shrilled, thoroughly enjoying himself. “Do you want to trip me again?”

He and Curt entered the big building. Venusians lounging in the lobby curiously eyed them. The stooped old man and his servant approached the attendant at the televis-announcer board.

“I want to see Doctor Zin Zibo,” Otho shrilled to the attendant in crackled tones. “At once!”

“Sorry, you can’t see him,” the attendant replied.

“And why not, you young whippersnapper?” demanded Otho, with senile wrath. “I’m Ros Ovor, the shipping magnate from Kaubas. I’ve read about this Doctor Zibo’s attempts to rejuvenate animals. I want to see if he can make me a little younger. I can pay him —”

“But Doctor Zibo isn’t here, sir. He left Venus some months ago for a scientific research trip to several other worlds.”

“Left Venus?” Otho pretended deep disappointment. “What did the fool want to do that for? I’d have paid him more than he could make in five years, if he could have helped me.”

Muttering in wrath, Otho turned and hobbled out of the lobby, with his stalwart servant carefully helping him.

Curt Newton, in his servant disguise, opened the rear door of the rocket-car solicitously. Growling and muttering, Otho clambered painfully inside. Curt abruptly gave him a surreptitious kick that sent the disguised android tumbling in a heap inside.

“Hey, that’s a devil of a way to treat your employer?” Otho sputtered as he scrambled up.

Curt laughed and took the driver’s seat.

“That’ll teach you not to lay it on so thick next time.”

HE GUIDED the car away from the Street of Scientists. Through the leisurely traffic of the big Venusian city, he sped toward the region of parks and estates by the eastern shore.

“Do you think that little scene will lure the agents of the Lifewater syndicate to us?” Otho asked eagerly.

“I feel pretty sure it will,” Curt replied. “They seem to miss mighty few prospects for their unholy wares. If my bet is right, it won’t be long till the local branch of the syndicate hears about a rich old Venusian named Ros Ovor who’s interested in rejuvenation. Then they’ll come around to sell you the Lifewater.”

“And then we nab them and make them tell where the headquarters of the syndicate are. Hope it works, Chief. But we certainly could have been in a fix back there. What if that Doctor Zibo had happened to be there? Suppose he had agreed to see me?”

“You don’t think I failed to check that first do you?” Curt retorted. “That’s why I picked Zin Zibo’s lobby as the place to stage our little act. Zibo wasn’t on Venus, so he couldn’t see you.”

Curt drove across the Venusian metropolis at a sedate pace. He knew the city thoroughly, as he knew most planetary cities.

The air was soft and warm, laden with the damp breath of the vast swamps whose edge was only a few score miles to the west. Tail, graceful green fern trees and clumps of brilliant fireflowers lined the streets. Men and women in brilliant silks strolled the streets. The white-skinned, dark-haired men were unusually handsome. The women were all languorous beauties, the by-word of loveliness in the System.

Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry, for Venusians are a leisurely, easy-going race. Only from the riotous Swampmen’s Quarter and the bustling busy interplanetary docks did the two hear much sound of activity.

Captain Future drove the rocket-car into the grounds of an impressive shore estate he had temporarily rented under the assumed name. A grove of tall swamp-palms almost surrounded a beautiful oblong white mansion. From its broad porch, velvety lawns stretched down to the shore of the green sea.

Grag the robot came clanking hurriedly to meet them as the two disguised comrades entered the spacious hall of the mansion.

“Is Simon still in the
Comet!
Curt asked the robot.

“Yes, he has been examining that body,” boomed Grag. “I have been helping him.”

“Well, I’ll work with him now,” Captain Future told the robot. “You and Otho keep your eyes open. But I doubt if any of the Lifewater sellers will show up before dark.”

“I hate waiting around,” grumbled Otho. “It gets on my nerves to sit and do nothing.”

Even though it was unnecessary now, Otho spoke in the shrill, cracked tones of an aged man. He still maintained his stooped, senile appearance.

The android was the greatest master of disguises in the System. His plastic synthetic flesh could be softened and remolded by him into whatever new features he wished. Thus he could make himself into an exact double of any person alive, with the added aid of his stains, eye-pigments, false hair and other aids to scientific makeup. And once Otho assumed an identity, he played it to the hilt.

“While we’re waiting, we could play a game of dimension billiards,” Grag suggested to the android.

“You always win. That’s the reason you want to play. But I’ll play. According to the law of averages, I’m sure to win this time,” Otho declared.

CAPTAIN FUTURE left them and strode out into the grove of dense swamp-palms. The
Comet
was hidden in the grove. He entered the little ship.

The Brain was in the laboratory cabin, staring thoughtfully at the body of Wilson Webber which they had brought from Earth.

“Find out anything about the nature of the Lifewater, Simon?” Curt asked.

“Yes, I think so,” rasped the Brain. “But I want you to make independent analysis to check my finds, lad.”

“Okay. If we hadn’t rocketed from Earth in such a hurry, we could have done it on the way, as I planned.”

He began working silently and skillfully First he drew a sample of blood from the shriveled form. Then he commenced a painstakingly minute analysis of it in a bewilderingly complex chemical apparatus.

The laboratory of the Cornet was a miracle of completeness and compactness. Most scientists of the System would have given their right eyes just for a chance to inspect its instruments.

The super-powered electro-telescopes and spectroscopes that Captain Future had designed would have made an astronomer’s mouth water with envy. No observatory in the System had such a complete record of star and planet spectra, and atmosphere samples of different worlds, as one cabinet contained. No botanical museum could boast such rare plant specimens and vegetable drugs as the Futuremen had gathered from all the far worlds.

An ordinary surgeon would have been bewildered by the radically original fluoroscope, X-ray and atomic-dissector equipment he would have found here. Most physicists would have been baffled by the electrical and atomic apparatus in a single corner of the flying laboratory. Scientific librarians would have exclaimed with delight at the thousands of works of science recorded on super-compact micro-film.

Yet all their equipment Curt Newton knew, was little enough for the task at hard. Lifewater, which effected temporary rejuvenation with such magical speed, was something astoundingly new.

He finally looked up from his blood analysis, and spoke thoughtfully to the watching Brain.

“It seems our first guess was right, Simon. The Life-water tremendously accelerates the twin processes of building assimilated matter into new tissue and of consuming old tissue. The anabolism or tissue-building process is only temporarily stimulated. It dies down again when the Lifewater’s effect expires. So the renewed youth caused by accelerated anabolism vanishes then.

“But the katabolism, or tearing-down of old tissue is permanently accelerated by the Lifewater. It keeps on at the artificially increased pace even after the Lifewater’s effect passes. Thus the body rapidly burns itself out by its greatly hastened katabolism.”

“But what have you found out about the Lifewater’s nature and action, lad?” asked the Brain hopefully.

“There’s a small amount of disintegrated radioactive elements in this man’s blood. I’d say that shows for certain that the Lifewater is radioactive in nature. I can conceive of a radioactive liquid stimulant that enormously accelerates the metabolic processes. What do you think? Am I on the orbit?”

“That was my finding, too,” replied the Brain. “Though it took me longer than you to come to that conclusion.”

“What are you trying to do, make me vain?” grinned Curt. His smile ruefully disappeared. “But where could any radioactive fluid like this come from? That’s the big question.”

“That’s the question, indeed,” said the Brain dryly. “There’s a chance of checking its planetary origin by searching our file on radioactive compounds to learn what planets have similar compounds. But it’s a rather slim lead.”

FUTURE instantly seized on that possibility. “Try it, Simon,” he said earnestly. “I’m hoping the lifewater syndicate will contact us tonight. It would give us a chance to work back to their headquarters that way, but they may not come.”

He turned slowly and looked out the window.

“It’s night already,” he said. “I’d better be getting back to the house.”

When Curt entered the mansion, he found Grag and Otho in one of the rear rooms. They were intent on their game of dimension billiards.

The game was a popular one throughout the System, for it was a super-scientific adaptation of the ancient sport of billiards. The “table” was three-dimensional — actually a large cubical space whose edges were defined by walls of light. The spheres contained tiny gravitation-neutralizers so they could float in the air. Thus the player had three dimensions to contend with instead of only one. If he impelled one of the balls outside the cubed space, he lost a score.

Otho angrily threw down his metal cue as Captain Future entered.

“By all the laws of averages, I should have won this time!” the android shouted furiously.

Curt laughed. Otho was always playing some game or other with Grag, and always losing, for the robot’s patience and precision were superhuman. Yet Otho invariably came back for more.

“You ought to know by now that you can’t beat Grag at these games,” Curt told him.

Otho shook his head indignantly.

“It’s that moon-pup he keeps perched on his shoulder. Its squirming throws me off!”

Grag uttered a derisive, booming sound as he cuddled little Eek protectively in his big metal arm.

“You are a poor loser,” the robot accused. “Just because you have not enough mentality to win a simple game —”