Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (11 page)

“We do not sell it here,” the Saturnian girl replied hastily. “Put I can direct you to a place where you can buy it. You will have to be discreet, however.”

EFFUSIVELY Joan promised. The girl gave her a card on which was printed an address in the northern section of Ops.

Joan left, thrilled with excitement. Now she was getting somewhere! She realized that the Lifewater syndicate must have planted “steerers” in beauty establishments everywhere, to encourage youth-hungry women to buy the elixir. She had guessed that was their method of operation.

Night had already fallen. Beneath the bland, brilliant glow of the Rings and the five hurtling moons, Joan made her way over a bridge across the somber black Hyrcanian River, into the northern section.

The address that had been given her was in the shabby and disreputable section near the spaceport. Here were ill-lighted streets of one and two story black cement structures. Many of them specialized in providing entertainment and liquor for the space-sailors who came drifting into Ops from all over the System.

Joan heard a babel of planetary languages as she hurried along. Martians, stalking Neptunians, lounging Venusians, even a few white-furred
Stygians
from Pluto’s third moon — the System’s races were represented here. Nobody noticed one Earthwoman more or less. The crash and clamor of weird music spilled from drinking shops. At frequent intervals the streets shook to the thunderous reverberation of great space slips, blasting skyward from the neighboring field.

Joan found the address belonged to a dark, two-story building. On its front was a battered sign:

DOCTOR QARTH

PLANETARY PHYSICIAN

She rang the buzzer of the televis-announcer. The door release clicked.

She stepped late a small, feebly lit hall. A cold-eyed blue Saturnian man of indeterminate age confronted her.

“Yes” he asked noncommittally.

Joan showed the card the beauty shop girl had given her. “I want to buy some of the Lifewater,” she stammered.

“This way,” he said shortly.

She followed him through a door at the back of the little hall. They entered a more brightly lighted room.

She saw a table, on which stood a rack of vials that contained a milky, opalescent liquid. Her heart leaped at sight of that glowing fluid.

Two other men were in the room. One was a wizened, yellow Uranian. The other was a big Jovian who, as she entered, was putting on a pair of thick-lensed spectacles.

Joan felt exultant. She had found one of the Ops outlets of the elixir syndicate! Now she could report it to Captain Future. And if she could take him a sample vial of the Lifewater too.

“How much will the elixir cost me?” she asked with pretended anxiety.

The Jovian answered, in a deep voice, staring at her through his curious spectacles as he spoke.

“It will cost you nothing, because you are not going to buy any. You are a spy. Grab her, Qarth!”

BEFORE Joan could flash out the atom pistol she had concealed in the pocket of her dress, the Saturnian seized her arms from behind. The Uranian jumped startledly to his feet.

“A spy?” Qarth exclaimed, holding the girl. “Are you sure?”

The Jovian took of the thick spectacles.

“Take a look for yourself. You’ll see that her aged appearance is just makeup. She’s a young girl masquerading as a middle-aged woman. Search her.”

The search discovered for them the little Planet Police emblem hidden in the sole of Joan’s slipper.

“A Police agent!” the Saturnian exclaimed.

“You’d have got away with it,” the Jovian told Joan mockingly, “if it hadn’t been for the X-ray spectacles.”

Joan understood then. Those curious spectacles were designed to permit their wearer to see through any makeup. Apparently the Lifewater vendors used them as a routine check on their new customers.

Her heart sank. She had accomplished nothing by her scheme to help Captain Future, except to get herself captured by the syndicate. And she had been so confident of success a moment ago!

Doctor Qarth, the Saturnian who seemed to be the leader of the three syndicate criminals, took command of the situation.

“This is serious. We’ll take this girl at once to Rendezvous One and hold her for the Life-lord to question. If the Planet Police have spotted our branch here, we mustn’t linger. You tie the girl and take her out to the car. I’ll gather up everything here.”

After the Jovian and Uranian hastily bound and gagged Joan, they carried her out of the room by a rear door. She glimpsed Doctor Qarth hastily gathering up papers, Lifewater vials, and money. Her two captors emerged with her into a dark court behind the building. Here a rocket-car was parked, a vague metal bulk in the shadows. The two criminals took her into the vehicle, tossed her on the floor. The Uranian started the atomic motors of the car, while he and the Jovian waited for their colleague.

Minutes passed, but Doctor Qarth did not appear. The two criminals became restless.

“Why is he taking so long?” hissed the Uranian. “This girl may have sent word to Police headquarters before she visited us. They may raid the place any minute.”

“Qarth will be here soon,” Joan heard the Jovian answer. “He’s taking care to clean up every clue in the place.”

A moment later, Joan Randall saw the Saturnian physician hasten from the building, out to the rocket-car. Carrying a bulging case in his hand, he seated himself beside the bound girl.

“All right, get going,” Qarth ordered. “I’ll watch this girl.”

The Uranian started without delay. The rocket-car hummed out of the court and into the noisy street. Then it started threading through the ancient streets of Ops, traveling speedily in an eastward direction.

Doctor Qarth bent over Joan, in the rear of the ear. Apparently he was making certain that her bonds were tight. To the girl agent’s amazement, the Saturnian whispered in her ear.

“Take it easy, Joan.”

The voice was that of Otho the android!

JOAN RANDALL was stupefied into astonished speechlessness. She baked up at the Saturnian who was bending over her. He didn’t look like Otho in the least, yet that hissing whisper was unmistakable.

As he kept whispering, the sound was effectively covered by the humming of the rocket-car’s motor.

“We reached Saturn a few hours ago,” Otho explained swiftly. “When Captain Future heard where you’d gone, he knew you’d be in danger and sent me after you. I trailed you through the beauty shops you’d visited. Finally I found you’d gone to this Doctor Qarth’s address, to buy the Lifewater. I came after, and realized they’d already discovered you were a spy. I saw them taking you out to this car.

“Doctor Qarth had stayed behind to gather up his papers and money,” Otho chuckled. “I jumped the cursed Saturnian, overpowered him, and then hurriedly copied his appearance. And these simple criminals are taking us right to the secret headquarters of the Life-lord. We’ll be waiting there when the Life-lord comes. It’ll be easy to grab him.”

Joan felt a surge of relief and new hope. The resourceful android’s plan was a real chance to capture the Life-lord!

The car had left Ops and was racing eastward over the rolling plain, beneath the’ brilliant moons and Rings.

“Where are they going?” Otho murmured puzzledly. “There’s nothing in this direction except the fungus forest.”

The disguised android stiffened in horrified amazement, “The Life-lord’s headquarters can’t be there! It’s death even to enter the fungus forest!”

BACK in the Governor’s office in the city Ops, Captain Future stared down with dangerous gray eyes at the frozen body of Zin Zibo, the Venusian bio-physicist.

Curt’s eyes lifted like a knife-slash to the faces of the appalled men in the lighted room. His voice sounded like a whiplash.

“Someone murdered Zin Zibo to keep him from revealing his killer’s name. The murderer tossed a darkness bomb. In the impenetrable obscurity, he jabbed Zin Zibo’s cheek with a needle tipped with Plutonian freezing venom.”

“What a horrible way to die!” breathed young Renfrew Keene, staring down at the body.

The famous “freezing-venom” of Pluto was such a ghastly poison that the very mention of it always produced a shudder. The venom was taken from a peculiar sea-snake found in the icy ocean of Pluto, the Sea of Avernus. It had never been successfully analyzed, but it was known to act as a chemical catalyst inside living blood, which it changed into an effective refrigerant compound that froze the whole body instantly.

There was revulsion, horror, fear, on every face that Captain Future scanned. Khol Kor, the tall, blue Saturnian Governor, had been trained to hardship, but he was shocked. Sus Urgal, the jovial Martian author, now looked far from happy. Martin Graeme, the sour-faced Earthman ethnologist, could not hide his horror. Blond young Renfrew Keene was pale with loathing. All seemed frozen themselves by the breath of alien terror that had entered the office.

Graeme found his voice first.

“You don’t think one of us is responsible for the murder, do you?” he demanded, his acidulous face anxious.

“Zin Zibo was about to reveal something,” stated Curt Newton. “Zibo said he believed the man who found the Fountain of Life, the man who is now the Life-lord was right in this room! He was starting to tell us about a set of records in the Museum archives that had been stolen by someone in this room. At that instant, the darkness bomb was thrown.”

Curt Newton knelt and examined the stiff, contorted body of Zin Zibo. Beside it lay a broken glass needle with a thin metal haft.

“Ezra, search every one in this room,” he ordered over his shoulder. “Grag will help you.”

By the time Curt had completed his examination of Zin Zibo, the search had been finished.

“Nothin’ on any of them, Cap’n Future,” reported old Ezra Gurney.

Curt spoke to Khol Kor, the Governor.

“Zin Zibo mentioned a secretary. You’d better notify him of this.”

The lanky Saturnian official went to the televisor on the desk and spoke a few words into it. Then he quickly returned.

Captain Future’s gray eyes swept over the men facing him. Curt felt that this tragedy had been engineered in his presence as a personal challenge to him — a challenge that was almost contemptuous. His voice was harshly accusing.

“The man who did this is someone who, like Zin Zibo, had been searching the Museum archives. Graeme, you admitted studying those archives.”

Martin Graeme, the sour-faced ethnologist, hastily replied.

“Yes. But Keene and Sus Urgal have delved into those archives too, remember! All of us were searching the journals and maps of old expeditions into the unexplored Saturnian lands. We were all looking for some clue to the supposed whereabouts of the Fountain.”

CURT knew that was true. Zin Zibo’s reference, just before the tragedy, might have applied to any of these three men.

“Danged if this ain’t a puzzle,” muttered Ezra Gurney to Curt. “One of ‘em’s lyin’, but which?”

“Shall I knock their heads together till they all tell truth, Master?” asked Grag helpfully in his booming voice.

The men paled at the robot’s suggestion Martin Graeme cried out hastily.

“You have no right to threaten us, Captain Future! Someone outside this room might have flung in the darkness bomb and then entered and killed Zin Zibo.”

“Yes, that may be it,” supported young Renfrew Keene. “Someone might have wanted to throw the blame on one of us in the room.”

“Whoever did it, I know it wasn’t me,” said Sus Urgal, the Martian author, nervously. He added emphatically: “I wish I’d never heard of the Fountain of Life legend.”

Simon Wright, the Brain, broke his brooding silence. His voice rasped to Captain Future.

“I don’t think it was anyone from outside the room, lad. I heard no door open, and my ears are sharper than human ones.”

They were interrupted by the hasty entrance of a young Venusian. He stopped and stared in honor at Zin Zibo’s frozen body.

“You’re Zibo’s secretary?” Curt Newton demanded.

“Yes, I’m Educ Ex,” the young man stammered shakenly. “Who killed Doctor Zibo?”

“We don’t know yet,” Curt answered decisively. “But I think we will, before long.”

“”This is frightful!” Educ Ex cried. “Doctor Zibo left a big scientific practice on Venus to follow this search for a rejuvenation method. He was eager to add the discovery to scientific knowledge. And it’s brought him only a horrible death.”

“Did Zin Zibo ever mention to you the theft of certain records from the Museum archives?” Curt asked.

“Never.” the pale secretary answered dully. Then, he addressed Future in a broken voice: “Can I take his body now? There’s a liner leaving for Venus tomorrow.

He — he would want to be buried on his native world.”

Curt nodded sympathetically. “I understand. You can take him.”

Silently they watched as the grieving secretary had the corpse removed. In that interval, Curt came to a decision. He looked at the Brain.