Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (2 page)

Upon the floor of the crater Tycho was a spot where there was movement and life. Three highly different individuals were engaged upon an engrossing activity. One of them, a tall young Earthman in a light space-suit and helmet, held a heavy metal bat in his hands and was facing one of his two companions.

"Thought I'd miss that last one, did you?" he jeered. "If that's the best you can do, you're sunk."

His space-suit embodied an audio-phone of short radius through which they were able to hear him. He swung the metal bat on his shoulder, waiting.

"Come on!" he invited. "This time I'll knock that ball clear to the wall of the crater."

Curtis Newton, the young Earthman planeteer famous the length and breadth of the System as Captain Future grinned to himself as he waited. He made a striking picture, tall, lithe and broad-shouldered even in his space-suit. Through his transparent glassite helmet, the green Earthglow lighted his mop of tousled red hair, his space-tanned, handsome face and clear, keen gray eyes.

He and his two comrades were playing rocket-ball, a game that was popular throughout the nine worlds, yet this was perhaps the strangest place in which it had ever been played. To Curt, though, it did not seem strange. The Moon was home to him. Near them in the crater floor was a big glassite window, beneath which lay the cavern chambers of his comfortable dwelling and marvelous scientific laboratories.

"Come on, Grag!" he challenged. "Let's have the pitch."

Grag had been fingering the controls of the rocket-ball. Now he prepared to let it go.

"This one'll get you sure, Chief," he boomed. "Here goes!"

Grag made an outlandish figure as he prepared to pitch the ball, for Grag was not a man. He was a metal robot. His massive metal body towered seven feet high. His great, jointed arms and legs hinted the strength that was unmatched in the whole System. His bulbous metal head swiveled on a neck-joint and from it shone his bright photo-electric eyes.

Grag did not throw the ball. He simply released it and it shot toward Captain Future of its own accord. The ball was powered by a tiny rocket-motor which enabled it to maintain a swift, free flight.

But it did not fly straight toward Curt. Its controls could be set by the pitcher for any desired course of flight. The only requisite was that the ball must actually cross the batter's plate. It sped toward Curt in a spiral, cork-screw path. It performed bewildering involutions, dipped almost to the ground and then zoomed like a streak of light across the plate.

Crack!

Curt's keen eyes had not erred in judgment. His bat met the rocket-ball and knocked it far off through the airless void. Laughing triumphantly, Curt started running around the circular base path. Six times he circled it before the catcher caught up with the ball and Sung it to Grag.

"Six more points for me," said Curt. "That puts me even with Otho. You're way behind, Grag."

The catcher advanced.

"Let me pitch, Grag," he proposed. "I'll send a ball over that the Chief won't even be able to see."

"No, I'm doing the pitching," Grag boomed angrily. "You get back to your place, Otho."

OTHO, the catcher, wore a space-suit like Curt's, but he was a much different figure, for Otho, like Grag, was not human either. He was a synthetic man, an android. His body, though human in appearance, had been constructed of artificial tissues. His head was hairless, the skin pure-white, with no brows or lashes. Slanted and green, sparkling with reckless deviltry, were Otho's eyes. He was the swiftest and most deft of all beings in the System and had the greatest propensity for getting into trouble. Even from his position as catcher, he was able to field and tag out the runner.

"With your pitching, he'll run up a score of a million against us!" Otho complained.

"You tend to your catching, my rubbery friend," Grag ordered majestically. "Watch me this time."

He set the controls of the rocket-ball and let it go again. It darted away to the left, then came in across the plate at a wide angle. Curt's bat slammed it unmercifully. As the ball shot high in the air, he started racing around the base path. But this time Otho fooled him. The android made an unbelievable leap of forty feet into the air and caught the speeding ball.

"That puts you out, Chief!" Grag boomed triumphantly. "It's my turn at bat now."

"Swell catch, Otho," Curt complimented. "I didn't think even you could leap that high."

"It was nothing," Otho answered in a tone of weary disdain. "You just watch my pitching put Grag out in a hurry."

Curt grinned as he took up the catcher's position. A game of rocket-ball with these two Futuremen was a perpetual row, he told himself, yet he had to do something to keep from getting bored.

For weeks he had been getting more and more restless. In the past, when he had felt that way, he had set out on a jaunt in the
Comet,
to explore the previously unknown south polar ice wastes of Pluto, or to visit his friends, the queer Thought Masters on Neptune's moon, or some similar half-purposeless trip. Now he no longer was satisfied with that. He knew the System's nine worlds, thirty-one moons and countless asteroids so well that there was little new about them to attract him.

Something new was what he wanted. He had been getting increasingly weary of the old and known, had felt a constant yearning of his adventurous spirit toward new frontiers of the Universe, new and unsuspected worlds. Other men might find a trip to one of the farther planets a wildly thrilling experience, but Curt Newton had been roaming those worlds since boyhood. He had, in fact, never seen Earth until he was almost mature.

The story of Curt's birth and boyhood was the strangest saga in the System's history. A generation ago, his parents had fled to the Moon to protect their scientific discoveries from an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. With them had come Simon Wright, the brain who lived in a box, but who had once been a living man. They had built their combination laboratory and home under Tycho. Here their experiments had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. And here, soon after Curt Newton's birth, Corvo killed his parents and was in turn killed by the Brain, robot and android.

The three unhuman, superhuman beings had reared and educated young Curtis. Their combined instruction had made him not only the most skillful planeteer in space, but also the System's greatest scientist. For some time, Curt had devoted his immense abilities to a war against the criminals of the System. In that war against crime he had been given the name of Captain Future.

NOW Curt's crusade to eradicate completely all interplanetary criminals seemed to have achieved its goal. His epic struggle against Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars, had finished off the last law breaker of major importance. He had no interest in smaller fry that the Planet Police could handle and the weeks of inaction had been making him restless. He had spent those weeks mostly in the deep scientific researches he loved, but now he was tired even of those. His adventure-loving soul felt a blind urge for new worlds to chart.

"Hang it, the trouble with me is that I don't know when I'm well off!" he told himself impatiently, trying to dismiss the oppressive feeling.

Otho had been elaborately setting the control of the rocket-ball and now was ready to release it.

"Here it comes, Grag," he warned. "This is my special double-reverse-bob-and-weave ball."

"Let it come," offered the big robot. "I'll
murder
it!"

Otho released the rocket-ball. It shot forward in bewilderingly erratic flight, but Grag's bat smacked it and knocked it whizzing. The robot started lumbering around the base path, his metal limbs clanking. Otho, however, made another superhuman leap and grabbed the ball.

"You're out!" he crowed, darting forward to pick up the bat.

"Wait a minute!" Curt Newton called. "Let me take a look at your gravitation equalizer, Otho."

Otho started to put up objections, but Curt grabbed him and examined the flat case strapped to his belt — the equalizer whose aura of force made its wearer's weight the same on any world.

"Just as I thought," Curt said witheringly. "You've set your equalizer to make you weigh only ten pounds. No wonder you could jump high enough to make those catches."

"Why, that's a dirty foul!" raged Grag. "Let me at that hunk of rubber. I'll wipe up the Moon with him!"

"Aw, it was only a joke," Otho said sheepishly. "I just did it for a laugh. Go on back to bat and quit your howling."

But Grag was still furious as he picked up the bat and again faced Otho. The android let the ball go again. Grag, now thoroughly enraged, swung with all the force of his mighty metal arms. A resounding
crack
followed and the rocket-ball whizzed upward. This time it didn't come down.

"Devils of space, Grag's knocked the ball clear off the Moon!" Otho exclaimed in dismay.

Curt laughed. The low surface gravity of the Moon had not been able to retain the ball against the robot's tremendous blow.

"That gives Grag the game," Curt said. "He can run around the bases a thousand times, if he wants to, but I'll concede it to him."

"I'll get another ball and we'll see who takes the next game," declared Otho angrily.

The android started toward the flight of steps that led down through the lunar rock to the airlock entrance of the underground Moon-home. He stopped.

"Here comes Simon and in a hurry."

Out of the Moon-home had emerged an astonishing figure. It was the third Futureman, Simon Wright.

Simon had once been a brilliant, aging scientist of Earth. When he was on the point of death, Curt Newton's father had surgically removed the living brain and installed it in a special serum-case.

That case was of transparent metal, containing the serum and pumps and purifiers that kept the brain alive. In the front of the case were Simon's glass lens-eyes, mounted on flexible stalks, and the aperture of his mechanical speech apparatus. From his case the Brain could shoot magnetic beams, which he was able to use as substitute hands to wield tools or instruments, or upon which he could glide swiftly through space in any direction.

THE Brain rarely showed emotion. His icy, bodiless mentality, so utterly absorbed in scientific research, was ordinarily aloof to all disturbance. But now, as his strange form glided swiftly toward them on his flashing traction beams, his metallic voice came with a sharp, urgent note.

"Lad, the automatic sura-warning just sounded!" he called to Curt Newton. "A ship is approaching the Moon!"

Instantly Captain Future's face hardened.

"It must be someone with an unfriendly purpose," the Brain continued in his rasping, metallic voice. "Only an enemy would try to come here. Everyone in the System knows that this is forbidden territory."

"We'll wait and see who these visitors are," Curt said quietly. "Get behind those rocks and make no move until I give the order."

Swiftly, with the efficiency characteristic of the supreme cooperation among the Futuremen in times of emergency, they melted from sight behind a clump of jagged, towering rocks. There Curt waited with them, loosening his proton pistol in its holster.

They soon glimpsed a flash of rocket-flame up in the starry sky. A ship was coming straight down to Tycho crater, firing its brake-blasts.

"A five-man Kalber cruiser," muttered Otho. "There can't be many in it. If it's an attack, it's a queer one."

"Shall I unmask our hidden proton cannon and blast it?" Grag asked.

"Not yet," Curt said, keenly eying the descending craft.

It came to a rather unskilful landing near the glassite window of the Moon-home. The ship's door opened and a man in a space-suit climbed out. He was a young Earthman whose thin, brown face showed uncertainty and apprehension in his transparent helmet. He looked doubtfully toward the window.

"Looks more scared than anything else," Grag muttered, "but it may be a trap. There may be others in that ship."

"I'll soon see," Curt said.

FROM his belt, Future took a flat, disklike device. He turned the switch on it. An aura of radiant force enveloped him. He began to disappear. This was one of the scientific wizard's most precious weapons. The little mechanism could make him invisible for a few minutes, by giving his body a charge of force that caused all light to be refracted around it.

Wholly invisible and in total darkness, Curt silently stepped past the young Earthman and into the youth's ship. Long training enabled him to move as confidently by hearing as by sight. He listened inside the ship. There was no one in it.

He went back to the newcomer. Standing in front of him for a few moments, Captain Future began to become visible again as the effect wore off. First he was a cloudy shape, then rapidly became completely visible.

The young Earthman started back with a terrified cry as he saw Curt materialize before him. He shrank even more when Grag, Otho and Simon emerged from their concealment. With awe in his eyes, he faced Curt Newton and the weird trio of Futuremen.