Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) (9 page)

“We’re rocketing for Saturn! The heart of this web lies somewhere near there. We’re going to find it.”

A few moments later, the
Comet
rose from the dark desert with a blast of rocket-tubes. Swiftly it screamed up into the stars on its way to Saturn.

SHROUDED in his concealing aura of blue force, the Life-lord sat in the secret metal room with the air-lock doors. The master of the Lifewater syndicate was receiving the report of Thorkul, the Martian criminal, and his crew.

“And so,” Thorkul finished, his red face anxious, “the robot escaped from us on our way here. We searched around when we found him missing, but we couldn’t find him. Some other ship had picked him top.”

“You blundered badly, Thorkul,” came the Life-lord’s harsh accusation.

“Still, there’s no harm done,” the Martian protested. “Captain Future certainly must have perished by now in that trap of transmutation-force in the Machine City.”

“I hope so,” brooded the Life-lord. “If not —”

The televisor on his desk buzzed sharply. He pressed its switch. On the screen appeared a Saturnian, who spoke excitedly.

Thorkul and the other criminals listened. Outside the hermetically sealed windows, thin sunlight trickled dawn on a grotesque, monstrous forest. The Rings were a pale sword of radiance in the sky.

“Life-lord, I’ve get bad news!” the man in the televisor was babbling. “One of our men spying on the Planet Police just reported. Captain Future and the Futuremen are headed for Saturn, to the city Ops.”

“”That red-headed devil didn’t perish at Mars, then,” the Life-lord muttered. His shrouded body tensed. “He’s striking like lightning, as usual. He’s the biggest danger our syndicate has yet faced. He’s got to be smashed before he can smash us!”

The Life-lord rose to his feet, a blue-shining figure of mystery. He spoke rapidly to Thorkul and the other criminals.

“I’m returning at night to the city Ops. Future will be there soon, and I have a plan for getting him. Listen —”

* * * * *

AT THAT very moment, Captain Future, the Futuremen, and old Ezra Gurney, whom they had picked up on Jupiter, were racketing toward Saturn.

Grag had the controls. Expertly the robot sent the Camel flying through the thronging moons, toward the sunward side of the giant sphere.

Soon they were cutting above the Rings. Under them stretched colossal whirling bands that were composed of millions of meteors and tiny planetoids. Forever jostling and crowding each other, they raced around the big world. From this close above, the Rings were an awesome sight.

“Head straight for Ops, the capital,” Curt Newton told the robot. “I want to see the Governor first.”

Curt and Otho were stripping off the disguises they had worn in the pirate stronghold. As Curt worked, he talked to Ezra Gurney.

“The center of the whole Lifewater traffic is somewhere on Saturn, Ezra. That’s certain. But it’s a huge planet. It’s going to take all our cunning to ferret out the heart of the web before millions of people in the System become addicts of the Lifewater.”

Ezra nodded his white head solemnly. “The syndicate is selling more of the cursed poison every day, on every world. Not that I can blame people too much for failing for it. They don’t know its fatal effects. I’d like to be young again myself, to tell the truth.”

Ezra’s faded blue eyes lighted a little.

“Yes, I’d like to be twenty years old again, with the wild interplanetary frontiers callin’ like they called me when I was a youngster. That was when space was new, and life was worth livin’. I can see how people are foolish enough to drink the Lifewater, all right.”

The
Comet
screamed down through tire deep atmosphere of Saturn at a speed no other ship would have dared. Presently they were rushing over the sunlit, tumbled valleys and scrubby forests of the equatorial regions. The plant life was of all shades of blue and purple.

The city Ops came into sight ahead — a sprawling black blot on the blue plain. It lay in the oblique rays of the little Sun setting at the western horizon. The great Saturnian metropolis would never lose its archaic look. It had been old long before the first Earthmen came pioneering through space to open up interplanetary commerce.

Ops covered nearly forty square miles of the blue plain. A vast mass of flat-roofed buildings of black cement, it was cut by crooked, narrow, old streets. Its central section rose to big, square, black structures of many stories. The black Hyrcanian River wound lazily through the city like an ebon snake, beneath many massive bridges.

Captain Future looked thoughtfully at the ancient, far-flung black city brooding in the sunset. Was the Life-lord, his antagonist in this great duel across the System, controlling the flow of insidious elixir from somewhere in this city?

“Land in the court behind the Government Building. Grag,” directed Curt. “I want to see Khol Kor, the Governor.”

“He’ll be mighty glad to see you,” Ezra drawled. “This Lifewater traffic’s gal him worried, same as all planetary officials.”

The looming black cement building, which housed the System Government’s offices on Saturn, stood in a small park of blue grass and pale-trunked trees with purple foliage. Rocket-cars and pedestrians flowed through the nearby streets. Twilight was quickly deepening.

Down through the soft Saturnian dusk, through tire swarming rocket-fliers of local city traffic, sank the
Comet.
It came to rest in a paved court behind the vast Government Building, where a number of small official space cruisers and filers were parked.

A Planet Police officer in black uniform came hurrying up as Curt Newton and Ezra emerged from the little slip.

“No landing permitted here except by official ships — “ the officer began. Then he glimpsed the ring on Curt’s hand. “Oh, Captain Future!” He stepped back respectfully. “I didn’t know.”

Curt turned puzzledly to the old marshal.

“Why isn’t Joan here to meet us, Ezra””

“I forgot to tell you, Captain Future,” Ezra said quickly. “Joan thought maybe she could get a line on the Lifewater traffic right here in Ops, by making herself up as are agin’ woman and goin’ into the city to buy the filthy stuff. She left me on Jupiter.”

CURT NEWTON felt sharp alarm. “The syndicate men would spot her as a spy in a minute, Ezra!” He told the old veteran about the X-ray spectacles used by the Lifewater vendors to inspect their clients. “Where was Joan going?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Ezra answered anxiously. “She said she’d start workin’ through the beauty shops first, to try contactin’ the Lifewater salesmen.”

Captain Future turned quickly to Otho who was emerging from the ship with Grag and the brain.

“Otho, slap on enough of a disguise to make yourself unnoticeable. Hunt through the city fur Joan. Bring her back at once!”

“Okay, Chief Otho cried, his eyes sparkling at the prospect of getting off on his own.

In an amazingly short while, the android resumed the Mercurian disguise he had used at the pirate hideout. He slipped away into the swarming streets of Ops.

Darkness had fallen. Lights were blinking from thousands of buildings all over the far-flung city. Other lights streaked along with soft humming through the upper darkness, as fliers passed. From the field north of the city, trails of shinning fire arched toward the zenith as vast space ships took off for other worlds.

The starry sky was a stupendous spectacle. Across it marched a royal procession of five large moons — Japetus, Titan, Tethys, Dione and Mimas. And dominating all, across the heavens just south of the zenith, soared the tremendous shining arc of the Rings. It was like a pathway laid down by the gods through the sky.

Curt Newton paused momentarily to look up at that wonderful spectacle.

“He who has not seen the rings of Saturn has not traveled,” he mused. His face hardened. “Come on. Somewhere under that sky are the men we’re hunting.”

A few minutes later, Cart, Ezra, and Grag, who carried the Brain, entered the office of the Governor. A brightly lit room it was, of course, on the first floor of the enormous building.

Khol Kor, Governor of Saturn, was a native of the ringed planet. Tall, lanky, blue-skinned, and with bristling black hair and pale, hard eyes, he looked so tough and wiry that he must have ridden studs across the Great Plains for thirty years.

He stuck out his bony hand and roared out his greeting in an explosive bass voice.

“I’m plenty glad to see you, Captain Future! And those are two of your Futuremen everybody talks about? Well, they’re damned queer to look at. But from what I hear, they’re worth fifty ordinary men.”

Curt Newton liked this lanky, rangy Saturnian, but he knew better than to trust superficial impressions.

“We might as well get right down to cases,” the red-haired wizard of science declared crisply. “You know about this illicit Lifewater traffic that’s going on, naturally.”

“I surely do!” Khol Kor replied in his explosive voice. “They’re selling the stuff secretly in every city of Saturn, the same as on all the other worlds. And we don’t seem to be able to break the traffic up.”

“The center of the Lifewater traffic is somewhere on Saturn,” Captain Future informed him. “The elixir is shipped from here to branches of the criminal syndicate all over the System.”

THE Saturnian Governor looked stupefied. “But who’s doing it?” he asked in bewilderment.

Curt smiled mirthlessly. “I wish I knew — I’d have him in Cerberus prison pretty quick. The job that brought us to Saturn is tracking down this Life-lord, as he calls himself. We must shut off the flow of Lifewater and smash the whole evil syndicate.” Curt continued quickly. “You’ve heard of the Fountain of Life?”

“Sure, everybody’s heard that myth.”

“I’m afraid it’s no myth. I think the Fountain exists here on Saturn, and that the Lifewater comes from it.”

Curt’s statement staggered the Saturnian.

“Name of the Ten Moons!” Khol Kor shouted. “I always thought that Fountain was just a story.”

“Tell me,” Captain Future went on. “Do you know, or can you find out, if two men have been here on Saturn recently. They are Doctor Martin Graeme, an Earthman ethnologist, and Zin Zibo, a Venusian biophysicist.”

Khol Kor scratched his bristling black hair, frowning as he pandered the names.

“Why, yes. Now I remember. Both of them called on me, at different times, some months ago. They asked for permission to study the old archives over in the Ops Museum. Each of them said that they were interested in the old Fountain of Life legend.” He stared at Curt. “You think one of them —”

“I think I want to question them, at once,” Curt Newton interrupted. “Has anyone else asked for permission to study the Ops Museum archives? Was anybody else interested in the Fountain of Life?”

Khol Kor looked up slowly.

“Yes, come to think of it, there were a couple of others some time ago. One was Sus Urgal, a Martian who said he was writing some kind of book and wanted data. The other’s Renfrew Keene, a young Earthman hunting for his lost father. He said his father was seeking the Fountain, and he wanted to trace him.”

“Can you have all four of those men brought here quickly?” Captain Future asked.

“Sure I can, and I will,” the lanky Saturnian replied emphatically.

He went to a televisor on the desk. He called Planet Police in the nearby building, and rapped out a series of sharp orders.

“They’ll fetch all four in,” the Governor told Curt. “Strangers on Saturn have to keep their addresses on file, you knew.”

Presently four men — the Venusian, Martian, and two Earthmen — were ushered into the office.

Curt’s eyes flickered over them quickly. Was one of these four the Life-lord behind the vast criminal syndicate”

“What is the matter, Governor?” Zin Zibo was asking anxiously. “I hope nothing’s wrong with my interplanetary passport.

Zin Zibo was a middle-aged man. Handsome in a dark way like most Venusians, Curt saw he was a studious looking, quiet-eyed scientist.

“Captain Future wants to ask you all a few questions,” Khol Kor replied curtly.

“Captain Future?”

Zin Zibo turned curiously. He and the other three men stared wonderingly at Curt, Grag and Simon.

“Is this really Captain Future?” Martin Graeme asked doubtfully. “He looks so young.”

Martin Graeme himself was not young. He was a sour-faced, graying Earthman with suspicious hostile eyes and thin lips.

Sus Urgal, the Martian author, was a jovial individual. Big-chested and stilt-limbed like all his race, his red-skinned bald head gleamed as his round eyes stared wonderingly at the Futuremen.

Renfrew Keene, the other Earthman, was clearly the youngest of the four men. Though a clean-cut blond youth of twenty, there were lines of haggard anxiety on his face.

“I’m Captain Future,” Curt said quietly. “And I need some information from you gentlemen. You can help me solve a problem.”

ZIN ZIBO, the Venusian bio-physicist, answered for all.