Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942) (3 page)

Strangest of all the Solar System’s children was this vast wanderer. Its long, elliptical orbit carried it out beyond the orbits of even the outer planets, out beyond the frontier of the System to the shores of infinity.

There, as though obeying the call of its parent orb, the great comet always turned and rushed Sunward through the planetary orbits, gathering speed until it was racing in through the circling worlds at frightful velocity.

Curt Newton and his Futuremen gazed with a tinge of awe at the gigantic, glowing body as their ship approached it. They were now but a million miles from the coma.

“It’s like slapping a Venusian marsh tiger in the teeth to fool around with this thing,” muttered Otho. “That coma is pure electric energy. If we get too close to it, we’ll be blasted like a butterfly.”

Otho spoke more truly than he knew.

A giant, invisible hand seemed suddenly to seize their ship in an iron grasp. The racing craft, brought suddenly to a halt in space, stopped so sharply that only the cushioning anti-acceleration force-stasis to the control room saved them all from being crushed on the walls.

As it was, Curt’s brain blurred from the shock. He heard a loud yell of alarm from Grag. He shook his head violently to clear it.

Their ship, the
Comet
, was falling at nightmare speed toward the giant flaring comet that was its namesake!

“What happened!” Otho was yelling. “Chief, did the eyes fail?”

“No, they’re still going. We must have run into powerful ether current that’s sucking us toward the comet,” Curt said hastily.

As he spoke, he was jamming down the cyc-pedal and swerving the space-stick to bring the slip back on its course. The massive cyclotrons roared with full power, rocket tubes spouting tremendous blasts of flame backward.

But the ship continued to fall toward the flaring comet. All Curt’s efforts could not bring it out of that racing descent. And now he noticed with increased alarm that the instruments before him had gone crazy. Meteorometers, gravitometers and all the other instruments had either blown out or were showing erratic, impossible readings.

“This isn’t any ether current that’s grabbed us!” Curt exclaimed. “This is a powerful magnetic beam of some kind, that’s somehow projected from the comet and is sucking us in to it!”

A super-powerful magnetic force had seized the ship’s steelite hull and was dragging it at rapidly mounting speed toward Halley’s comet.

“Chief, something’s the matter with me!” bellowed Grag in evident panic. “I’m stuck against the wall here — I can’t move!”

Curt discovered the predicament of the robot. Grag was flattened against the wall of the control room nearest the comet. The great robot, with all his mighty strength, seemed unable to free himself. And Simon Wright, the Brain, was also pinned to the wall.

“It’s got me too, lad,” rasped the Brain, with unperturbed calm, “This is an effect of the magnetic force that’s seized us.”

CAPTAIN FUTURE understood. Both the great body of Grag and the case of the Brain were composed of metal alloys whose base was steelite. Thus they were pinned against the wall by the magnetic force.

The scene was one of desperate confusion. The speed with which the unseen magnetic beam was drawing them toward the ominous glowing coma was increasing by the second. Grag and Simon were helpless. Eek was cowering in a corner as he telepathically sensed his master’s alarm. The little meteor-mimic, Oog, had promptly turned himself into an exact imitation of Eek, in his fright.

“Take it easy, men!” Curt ordered sternly. “We’ll have to try the vibration drive. Go back and start the generators, Otho. Simon, you and Grag can’t help — just wait.”

Curt’s presence of mind brought order out of the momentary chaos. Otho raced back into the cabin to start up the powerful generators, which were the source of power for the
Comet’s
auxiliary vibration drive. This drive, whose mechanism could fling the ship at incredible speeds through the reactive push of etheric vibrations, was intended only to be used in the vast spaces outside the System. But Curt knew it was their only hope of breaking free of the remorseless magnetic grip that was dragging them to doom.

Captain Future discovered that he himself was being dragged by a persistent force toward the wall against which Grag and Simon were pinned. He found that the effect was due to the proton pistol at his belt whose steelite was tugged toward the wall by a powerful pull. Curt hastily took the weapon out of his belt and at once it flew toward the wall.

“Hey, look out!” Grag exclaimed. “That thing hit me right in the stomach!”

“You can hammer out the dent in your stomach later,” Curt retorted. “Otho, have you gone asleep back there?” He was answered by the thrumming roar of the vibration-drive generators, which soon were shaking the ship with their powerful drone.

“All ready, Chief!” Otho reported, tumbling back into the control room. He, too, had been forced to jettison his weapons.

“This will yank us out of the magnetic grip, if anything will,” Curt gritted. “Hold on, Otho!”

He flung in the switches of the vibration drive. The slip, still falling dizzily toward the comet, shuddered violently as the powerful propulsion vibrations were projected suddenly from its stern.

But it still continued to fall toward Halley’s Comet, still gripped by the relentless magnetic beam. Curt increased the power. The ship shuddered even more strongly, and an ominous creaking warned of tremendous stresses that were weakening its frame. Yet it still could not break free.

“We’re caught for good!” Curt exclaimed dismayedly. “Even the vibration drive can’t tear us loose. Fiends of Pluto, there must be a world of power in this beam that’s seized us!

“What are we going to do?” cried Otho. “We don’t have much time left. Holy sun-imps, look at that coma!”

The spectacle outside the windows was now an appalling one, as the ship hurtled toward the comet at incredible speed. The immense spherical coma of Halley’s comet filled almost all space ahead of them, a blinding sea of dazzling white light. It was not really light, at all, Curt well knew.

THAT coma was a vast shell of ions, electrically charged atoms whose tremendous potential was such as to destroy by an unearthly lightning blast any matter that touched it.

And their ship would strike that coma in a dreadfully short time. Captain Future felt, as he had never felt before, a sense of being trapped by forces that even the resourcefulness and scientific powers of the Futuremen could not contend against.

Yet it was characteristic of Curt Newton that even in this moment of frightful danger, he was not thinking of himself. It was of Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney that he was thinking, and of the others who had been lost in vanished ships.

“They were all drawn into the comet by a magnetic beam, the same as we,” he declared. “Simon, that beam was deliberately projected to seize us!”

“Aye, lad,” came the answer of the helpless Brain. “There’s intelligence and menace inside Halley’s comet.”

We’ve got about five minutes before we hit the coma!” Otho yelled. “This is the end of our space-trail. Good-bye, Grag, old pal — I’m sorry now I was always ribbing you about being a robot. You may be made of metal, but you’re a better man than I ever was.”

“No, Otho,” Grag boomed earnestly. “You were a swell guy but I didn’t appreciate you. I guess I was just jealous.”

Curt Newton, looking fearlessly ahead into that appalling sea of light, toward which they were being dragged, suddenly shouted.

“Before you two grave-diggers make your last farewells, look at this!” he cried. “I think we’re going to get through the coma!”

They stared unbelievingly. Their ship was now rushing straight toward the vast, flaring wall of electric force, the head of the comet. There was a round aperture in the glowing shell of the comet. And the ship was being sucked straight toward that hole!

“I get it now!” Captain Future exclaimed. “The magnetic beam that holds us is projected out through the coma to make that aperture. We’ll be dragged through that hole, perhaps without touching the coma!”

The moment was at hand as he spoke. The
Comet
seemed rushing headlong toward destruction in the flaring sea of electric force. One touch would destroy them as lightning might shatter a toy.

Straight as an arrow, the Futuremen hurtled toward that aperture in the coma. They entered it and Curt and Otho cried out and shielded their eyes. The blaze of force all around the ship was blinding in intensity.

When he uncovered his eyes, hurt perceived with a thrill of hope that they were
through
the coma! Their ship was inside the spherical shell of the comet’s head, was being dragged at unabated speed toward a little planet that hung at the center of this vast enclosed space.

A world here at the heart of Halley’s Comet! A little world that was the solid nucleus of this vast, mysterious wanderer of the void!

“We’re through — we’re in the comet!” Otho yelled hopefully. Then, remembering something he added hastily to Crag: “I hope you don’t think I meant it when I said you were a better man than I. I was just handing you another rib, you poor metal imitation of a man!”

“The same goes for me!” Grag bellowed angrily at the android. “I was just hoping to make death easier for you, when I told you what a swell guy you were — you offspring of a smelly retortful of chemicals!”

CURT ignored the verbal combatants. Simon the magnetic beam comes from that little world! That means Joan and Ezra must have been dragged here in the same way!” he said excitedly. “If they’re on that world —”

“We’ll never know if they are!” Otho groaned suddenly. “We’re going to be smashed to flinders when we hit that planet at this speed!”

Curt, too, had realized their peril. It seemed they had miraculously escaped the coma, only to meet an equally frightful end. Their velocity was suicidal as they plunged toward the mysterious planet.

The planet that poised here at the heart of the great comet was a small green world, blanketed by thick forests. It was drenched in the brilliant, unearthly glare of the glowing coma that completely surrounded it.

At one point upon this small green world, there was a star-shaped white city. And they were being dragged straight down toward that city, whose alabaster domes and towers and streets rushed up toward them with fearful speed.

Captain Future, nerving himself for the inevitable crash that meant annihilation, felt a sudden deceleration of their flashing fall. So sharp and swift was that slowdown that even through the cushioning stasis of force which protected them, they felt again a blurring of their senses.

“They don’t want us to crash!” choked Curt. “Whoever’s operating that magnetic beam wants us to land in one piece —”

“Chief, look at that!” Otho yelled, pointing unsteadily down.

In the fiercely flaring light of the coma, the strange white comet-city lay close beneath their falling ship.

Curt glimpsed a round court of spaceport size near the center of the ivory metropolis.

It was toward that court that the ship was falling. The court was several thousand feet in diameter, ringed by white towers crowned with massive copper electrodes. At the center of the round court was a circular, silvery disk five hundred feet across. Around the disk rested scores of spaceships of familiar appearance.

“That disk is the magnet that’s pulling us down!” Curt deduced. “I see people down there.”

“Here comes the crash!” Grag shouted.

It was not really a crash, their impact against the silvery magnet-disk. It was a jarring contest that shook them violently. But so greatly had their speed been decelerated in the last moments that the ship was not shattered.

An instant after they came to rest, Curt and Otho were picking themselves up. Grag and the Brain were pinned helplessly now on the floor.

“Help me get loose, chief!” the robot bellowed. “That cursed magnetic force is holding me —”

He was suddenly interrupted by a sound of hammering and prying outside the
Comet’s
airlock door.

“They’re forcing into the ship, whoever they are!” Otho cried His slant green eyes flared. “We’ve got a fight on our hands. These cursed comet pirates can’t kidnap us like this!”

Curt and Otho jumped to pick up their proton pistols. But the weapons were pinned against the floor by the powerful magnetism beneath.

The airlock of the ship burst open with a crash and a half dozen men charged into the cabin.

“Holy sun-imps!” screeched Otho. “They’re devils of the comet!”

EVEN Captain Future was for a moment petrified by stupefaction. These comet men who had entered did indeed seem utterly unearthly.

They were tall, fair-haired fellows who wore sleeveless shirts and shorts of silvery cloth. They also wore long swords at their belts, and two of them carried gunlike weapons with electrodes instead of barrels.

But these men glowed with dazzling light! From every inch of their bodies, from their hair, their faces, their arms and legs streamed a halo of brilliance that was like the corona of the awful coma itself.

“They’re men, even though they do shine with light!” Curt cried. “Clear them out of the ship! If we can wreck that magnet —”

He was plunging forward as he spoke, his fists flying toward the weird, shining invaders. Then as his fist hit one of the glowing comet men, Curt Newton felt a paralyzing electric shock along his arm.

His body stiffened in agony. He realized it was not merely light that glowed from these shining men, but electric force. These were electrically charged human beings! The body of each was invested with an electric potential that should have been enough to kill them.

“Get back — don’t touch them!” Curt yelled a warning to Otho.

As he shouted, one of the shining electric men extended a hand and touched Curt’s head. The full electric shock stabbed to Captain Future’s brain, and he was plunged into unconsciousness.