Captain Future 18 - Red Sun of Danger (Spring 1945), Page 2

Daniel gazed at Captain Future in distress. “Curt, you Futuremen can’t go to Roo,” he said. “These three men might not be suspected, but everybody knows that you four are the Government’s ace trouble-shooters. If you turn up on Roo, the men behind this thing will know your mission instantly.”

  “Don’t worry, I can dope out a disguise for myself and the chief that’ll fool everybody,” Otho boasted.

  “Yes, but how about Simon and me?” Grag demanded loudly. “You can’t disguise us with your make-up tricks.”

  Newton spoke to the President. “Don’t worry, sir — I have a plan by which we Futuremen can go to Roo without arousing suspicion.”

  “But I still don’t see —” Grag began to complain, puzzled.

  “I’ll explain on the way to Venus, Grag,” said Curt Newton.

  “Venus?” repeated Commander Anders, his hard face betraying surprise.

  Newton nodded. “The supply ships for Roo take off from Venusopolis, don’t they? Well, that’s where our trail begins.”

  He gave rapid instructions to Carlin, Zamok and Lin Sao. “You three will go separately from us to Roo, immediately. Take the first ship and announce you’ve come for research on certain vitron problems.”

  Carlin nodded. “But what do we do when we get there?”

  “Just fake some research until we get into touch with you,” Captain Future said. “You’ll hear from us, never fear. And — trust nobody.”

  The rest of their plans were swiftly laid. Newton gave no hint of his own intentions. But when the Futuremen left, Daniel Crewe voiced another anxious warning.

  “Captain Future, you seven will be on your own, there on Roo. We can’t send you help, for as I said, that would precipitate the rebellion. And you’ll find few there who aren’t with the rebels. It’ll be you seven against all Roo!”

  Newton smiled understandingly. “I know. But we seven know Roo, and we’ve all got a personal stake in this. I think we have a chance.”

  Later Carlin stood at the window with the two scientists and Commander and President, watching a small ship streak an arc of rocket-fire toward the zenith above New York. The Futuremen were on their way to Venus — and Roo.

  Roo, world of Arkar! His dismayed thoughts leaped out to that far, alien world in whose deadly and secret struggle he too was now involved.

  So distant from the familiar Solar System, and so strange, that foreign world. Its unearthly red sunlight and crimson jungles, its ocher seas and brazen sky, its weird night-dragons flitting beneath the dark moon — they rose in Carlin’s memory now.

  Yet, somehow, Philip Carlin did not feel as appalled as he would have expected. Somehow he felt a buoyant throb of excited confidence, communicated to him by the strange quartet who were to be his comrades in this secret struggle of seven against a world.

  Chapter 2: Night on Venus

  UNQUESTIONABLY, the great spaceport at Venusopolis is an epitome of the aspirations and limitations of man.

  Here, in breathtaking beauty, the shimmering traffic-tower rises into the night, pointing like a shining finger at the distant planets and the far more distant stars toward which the great ships take off with thunderous crash of rockets. Watching those ships go out, one can believe man is a god.

  But leave the spaceport and walk through the sordid huddle of shabby streets around it, and you see the god’s feet of clay. Beyond the ring of mountainous warehouses that hold the ores from Mercury and grain and frozen meat from Saturn, the machinery from nearby Earth and the precious vitron from faraway Arkar, lies the zone known as the. “Belt.”

  The Belt is a shabby slum battening upon spacemen, adventurers, merchants and less-identifiable characters who flow into Venus through the spaceport.

  It has seemed incongruous to more than one observer that men who have known the beauty and wonder of the starways should find relaxation in the tawdry drinking-places and amusements of this place.

  But human nature changes slowly, too slowly to match the swift, rising beat of a star-conquering civilization.

  Rab Cain had some such thought as he unobtrusively made his way along a thronged, mist-choked main avenue of the Belt.

  “An ugly, tawdry place,” he thought wryly. “Still, it’s lucky for me right now that there’s such a district as this on Venus.” Cain stiffened suddenly. Two planet Patrol officers approaching along the foggy street. One was a Martian, one a sharp-eyed Mercurian, and they were keenly eying passing faces.

  “If they ask to see my papers, I’m done!” Rab Cain started to sweat.

  He tried to look as inconspicuous, as law-abiding, as possible. But that was not easy for Rab Cain.

  His face was not the face of a law-abiding, commonplace citizen. It was a tough young Earthman’s face — the dark features subtly hardened and worn by time, and with a livid straight scar across the left cheek which was only too obviously an old atom-gun wound.

  Cain fervently hoped that the deadly little atom-pistol he packed in his jacket was not bulging enough to betray its presence. The two Patrol officers were looking at him very sharply as they closed in.

  Fortune favored him. A towering Saturnian spaceman further along the street chose that moment to come to blows with a Venusian whose girl he had been ogling. The small uproar drew the Patrol men forward in a run. Rab Cain uttered a breath of relief.

  “If they’d picked me up now, it would sure be tough!” he muttered.

  The streets were risky for him, he knew. But just ahead glowed the sign of his destination, the Inn of a Thousand Strangers.

  The resorts of the Belt ran to flowery names.

  Basically, they were all the same — shabby rooms choked with green rial-smoke, half-drunken patrons and the haunting wail of Venusian music.

  They were not as bad as they looked. Slumming parties from the sea-garden suburbs of Venusopolis might find them excitingly suggestive of outlaws and “planet-jumpers”. There were a few of these. But most of the patrons were simply space-weary men who craved a few hours fun.

  Cain pushed his way into the Inn of a Thousand Strangers, avoided the noisy crowd at the bar and took a small table in a shadowy corner.

  No one noticed him in the chatter of loud voices and throb of music.

  Four Venusians in the opposite corner picked at their cross-strung guitars and sang swampland songs in a muted undertone.

  “Ah, let’s have some real spaceman’s music instead of that wailing,” bellowed a merry, half-drunken Jovian spaceman. “Play ‘Wind Between the Worlds’!”

  Cain inserted a square coin into the automatic service-pump at the center of his table and turned the selector to “whisky.” A plastic tumbler of brown liquid popped out.

  As he drank, he kept his eyes on the door. Not too steadily, but he watched it with a furtiveness that made more than one casual observer put him down as a planet-jumper dodging the Patrol.

  “The wind that blows between the worlds Has carried me from home —”

  They were bawling it out, a dozen motley, merry spacemen who had bought the illusion of good cheer for a brief hour between voyages.

  “It never now will let me go And till I die I’ll roam.”

  CAIN smiled mirthlessly as he lowered his glass. The song was peculiarly appropriate in his own case, he thought.

  He stiffened to attention. He was looking at the door, and a gush of mist had just come in the door, and someone had come with it.

  It was not a Planet Patrol man. It was a tall, brown-faced young Earthman whose torch-red hair was bare, and whose gray eyes were keenly searching the smoke-fogged room.

  But behind that tall Earthman were two figures whom everyone in the Inn of a Thousand Strangers recognized at once, even though they had never seen them before.

  Not human, those two figures. One, a towering, steely robot, gigantic, awesome, his metal head swiveling, photoelectric eyes glaring.

  The other, a poised, floating box that had watchful lens-eyes.

  “The futuremen!” shrilled a voic
e, incredulous. “That’s Captain Future!”

  Rab Cain half rose from his chair, his dark face frozen, his glass dropping from his hand. The click of the plastic tumbler on the floor brought the eyes of Captain Future instantly toward him. Captain Future started across the room.

  A hundred pairs of eyes followed him, the gliding Brain, the clanking, towering Grag.

  This was an event almost without precedent, this was a thing a man would tell of for years. These people would have been less astounded had the System President walked into the tawdry establishment.

  Captain Future was a name, a legend of the starways. He was even more than that, to nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand.

  The distorted, magnified tales of the Futuremen and their exploits on far worlds and stars were told as of an adventurer of another age.

  And now, suddenly, here they were — Captain Future and two of his famous band, walking into this commonplace tavern of Venusopolis!

  Small wonder that the faces here watched him with intense interest, incredulous astonishment, and in some cases with fear.

  Fear! It was naked on Rab Cain’s dark face for all to see as the Futuremen came across the room toward him.

  Captain Future’s gray eyes bored into Cain’s face. “You’re Rab Cain? We want you.”

  Cain found his voice.

  “I’ve done nothing!” he said hoarsely.

  Captain Future’s lips tightened. His voice was a whiplash.

  “Nothing that the Patrol can hold you for, maybe. But I’m not the Patrol.”

  “You’ve no authority to arrest me!” Cain exclaimed.

  “Authority?” boomed the huge robot, in disgust, “If the little rat wants authority, I’ll show him some.” Grag started forward.

  Captain Future shook his head. He did not take his eyes off the cornered man in front of him. “Cain, you’re coming with us.”

  As he spoke, Captain Future started to draw the atom-pistol at his belt to enforce the command.

  Desperation, and raw terror, flashed into Rab Cain’s sullen eyes.

  “You’re not taking me, even if you are the Futuremen!” he yelled.

  Now the frozen throng saw Rab Cain do a mad, a suicidal thing. They saw him snatch out an atom-pistol from inside his jacket.

  He was crazed with panic to do such a thing, all knew. No man ever had matched blazing atom-guns with Captain Future and won. They knew that the scared young Earthman was good as dead already.

  Captain Future’s hand moved with blurring speed to bring up his own half-drawn weapon.

  More than human seemed the swiftness of the movement —

  Then the unexpected, the totally unprecedented, happened! It is said that even the most skillful fighting-man will find some day that the averages are against him, that in time he must make a slip.

  Captain Future’s clean, swift draw suddenly caught and dragged. Had his atom-pistol caught on the holster? Nobody could see. It was over too soon for that.

  Rab Cain’s atom-pistol flashed a streak of blinding energy. The redhaired planeteer had his gun only half raised. A thin scorching blast struck Captain Future’s side!

  THE redhaired planeteer uttered a choking cry, and fell with his weapon dropping from his nerveless hand.

  “Chief!” yelled Grag the robot, leaping forward to the side of the fallen leader, a note of awful anxiety in his tones.

  Rab Cain stood petrified, looking almost stupidly at the fallen man, as though he could not yet believe he had really done this.

  Nor was his astonishment greater than the incredulous amazement that stunned the watching crowd.

  “Gods of space, he’s dropped Captain Future!” yelled a wild voice.

  Then — mad confusion. The Brain rushing forward, and Grag leaping up from his fallen leader with a booming, unhuman cry of rage.

  Rab Cain jumped back, the gun in his hand spitting crashes of lightning. He was aiming at the big cluster of krypton-lights in the ceiling. The shattering of them clapped darkness on the room.

  Screams of women, hoarse, bawling yells, and over everything the heart-stopping, booming roar of the maddened robot. “Captain Future’s been killed!”

  Rab Cain plunged through the whirl of dark figures toward the door. He used the butt end of his gun to smack yelling, shadowy figures out of his way.

  He burst out into the misty, darkness of the street. Then he was running at top speed through the shrouding fog.

  He thanked the stars for the fog which was rolling in thicker from the swamplands as he ran. It blanketed the uproar behind him, made his running figure half invisible.

  He headed toward the spaceport. He had to get there, and get there fast before the Planet Patrol could stop him.

  Chapter 3: Secret Stratagem

  VENUSOPOLIS lies upon a long, wide ridge between the swampland and the sea. The Venusians, always the most aesthetic people in the System, have preempted its shore for their beautiful floating villas and “sea-garden” suburbs. Mere commercial structures are relegated to the swampward side. Among those structures stood one whose nature would have been instantly recognized by any citizen of the nine worlds. The stations of the far-flung Planet Patrol are always the same in appearance, from Mercury to Pluto. There is always a square, grim black two-storied synthestone building, and behind it a big landing-court for the cruisers that maintain the law in space.

  The Patrol station in Venusopolis showed lights from one upper window tonight. In that office, two people were working late. Both were high-ranking members of the Patrol. One was an old man, the other a girl.

  Joan Randall did not wear the Patrol uniform. Secret agents of the Patrol’s famous Section Four never do. She was wearing a plain white silk zipper-suit that made her dark young beauty incongruous in this place.

  Her brown eyes were tired as she looked up from the mass of papers on the desk. “The name of Lu Suur is not on any of these passenger-lists, Ezra.”

  “You’ve covered every ship he could have taken?” asked Ezra Gurney, white-haired veteran marshal of the Patrol.

  It was significant he spoke to the girl as to another man. The girl had served the great organization of law for a handful of years — the man for a lifetime. Yet in Joan’s soft features was the same intent look as in Gurney’s weathered face.

  “Lu Suur disappeared from Venus eight years ago,” she pointed out. “He vanished right after his attempt to create a vitron-monopoly here had been balked. I’ve checked the passenger-list of every ship that left here at that time. He was not on any of them, but he probably used an assumed name.”

  She looked disconsolately out the open window from whence came a lilt of gay music from the dance-palaces out in the sea-gardens.

  Ezra Gurney was watching her with wise old eyes. “Cap’n Future’s still home, isn’t he? Wouldn’t wonder he’d be droppin’ in at Earth, one of these days.”

  Her brown eyes met his, without attempt at evasion. “Yes, Ezra,” she said quietly. “That’s why I’d like to get back to Earth.”

  Ezra dropped his chaffing manner. His face showed contrition. “I’m sorry, Joan. Didn’t mean to tease you. You know how fond of you I am.” She smiled. “I know, Ezra.”

  “And because I am,” he continued with sudden feeling, “I wish you’d never met Curt Newton.”

  She looked surprised and hurt. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if you’d never met Cap’n Future, you’d be married by now to some nice young fellow and have a real home, instead of bein’ a number in Section Four of the Patrol, and, eatin’ your heart out for a man who’ll never marry and settle down like other men.”

  “Ezra, you’re talking nonsense!” she said hotly. “You must be out of your mind, to say that —”

  Joan stopped, ruefully. “I’m sorry, Ezra. I know you meant it for my own good. But it’s just no good talking. There’s never been anyone else for me since I met Curt. And I know he loves me. Someday he’ll stop space-roving, som
eday he’ll want a home on Earth like any other man.”

  “He would, if he were like any other man,” warned the old marshal. “But he isn’t, Joan. You know as well as I do what kind of an upbringin’ he had — an orphaned baby, raised there on the wild Moon by a Brain, a robot and an android. A boy who never even saw another man until he was nearly a man himself! He’s different from the rest of us. He’ll always be different.”

  “Is that any way for one of his oldest friends to talk about Captain Future?” demanded the girl.

  Her voice seemed to echo back and forth in the room, like a queer reverberation from walls and floor. “Captain Future —” it whispered.

  IT WASN’T an echo! It came from the telaudio loudspeaker down in the station office. Joan jumped to her feet.

  At that moment a breathless Mercurian lieutenant of the Patrol burst into the office.

  “Marshal Gurney — Agent Randall — a flash just came in from one of our cruiser-cars!” he cried. “Captain Future has been badly hurt in a gun-fight down in the Belt!”

  “Curt on Venus?” exclaimed Joan incredulously. “It’s impossible!”

  “No doubt about it — he and two of the Futuremen went into the Inn of a Thousand Strangers after an Earthman named Rab Cain,” rattled off the officer. “Cain shot it out, and Captain Future was hurt. Cain got away.”

  Ezra Gurney exploded. “Expect us to believe that a cheap crook could match atom-guns with Cap’n Future? It’s crazy!”

  “Ezra, come on!” cried Joan, urgently.

  As a Patrol rocket-car whirled them westward through the mist-shrouded streets of Venusopolis, Ezra was still muttering angrily.

  “Some fool officer must have got excited an’ lost his head to turn in a report like that. Cap’n Future losin’ a gun-fight?”

  So many times had he and Joan Randall witnessed Curt Newton’s phenomenal speed and efficiency in combat, that the old veteran could not conceive the possibility that the famous planeteer could be outmatched in a fight.

  But Joan’s first similar incredulity was giving way to a frightening foreboding. Always, that foreboding had been at the back of her mind. Always she had recognized the grim fact that even the most courageous and resourceful of men could not forever challenge risks without someday losing.