Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941) (2 page)

“Come on!” cried Ul Quorn, plunging toward the craft.

“Gods of Saturn, where did that ship come from?” gasped old Xexel, his filmy eyes bulging. “It just appeared out of nothing —”

Guards were sprinting to intercept the band before they reached the mysterious little craft. Quorn shot as he ran, with uncanny sureness of aim, and three of the foremost guards fell in scorched heaps.

The door of the little ship opened. A lithe Martian girl appeared in it, tense and beautiful, her dark eyes blazing excitedly.

“Good work, N’Rala!” Quorn cried to her. “Quick, you men!”

His criminal followers tumbled into the little ship after him. Searchlights and atom blasts directed themselves at the craft. But then, as magically as it had appeared, the little ship suddenly vanished!

The Planet Patrol cruisers that roared down over Interplanetary Prison began a frantic search. But though they searched all around the prison moon they found no trace of the mysterious little craft in which the fugitives had disappeared.

TWO nights later, the bitter night wind was screaming monotonously across the vast ice-fields of northern Pluto. Beneath the three moons of the arctic planet, the glittering frozen masses stretched endlessly to the horizons. Only at one place did the cheery beacon of lights suggest human existence.

That place was a domed, glassite building situated on a hillock. The structure was really an isolated engineering laboratory at which a great achievement was soon to be attempted. Inside its equipment-crowded interior, the four men of its staff were admiringly contemplating six super-massive cyclotrons which had been but recently installed.

The staff of engineers consisted of a young Earthman, a Venusian, and two tall, hairy Plutonians.

“These eyes will produce a world of power!” the Earthman was exclaiming. “Power enough to melt hundreds of square miles of the ice-fields by our electro-thermal radiation.”

“I hope our plan works,” said one of the Plutonians soberly. “It would mean much to my people, to have all that melted away.”

As he pointed to the guttering, moonlit ice-fields that stretched outside the glassite wall, he suddenly stiffened in surprise.

“Why, look at that!” he gasped. “A ship —”

The four men stood petrified by an incredible sight. Outside the laboratory, a small rocket-ship had suddenly appeared out of nothingness.

As the four engineers gaped, men who carried atom guns came running from the little ship. They burst into the laboratory. Their leader was a slender, red-skinned man with a smooth, handsome face. He wore a striped Martian turban and a long, yellow-sleeved purple Martian robe.

Alarm flashed in the eyes of the young Earthman as he recognized the leader.

“You’re Doctor Ul Quorn, the criminal scientist that escaped from Cerberus prison!” he cried. “The one they call the Magician of Mars!”

Ul Quorn bowed mockingly.

“I see that my fame has reached you.”

“What do you and your band want here?” demanded the Earthman.

Quorn looked at the six massive cyclotrons.

“We learned about those cyclotrons. We need them.”

“You can’t have them!” flared the Earthman. “It’s taken us years to have them built. We’ll not give them up!”

Ul Quorn shot him, his suave face impassive. The atom-blast from the mixed breed’s weapon dropped the Earthman in a heap.

The other three engineers stared unbelievingly. Then one of the Plutonians lunged toward the televisor and flung open its switch.

“Calling the Planet Patrol!” he yelled. “Quorn’s band is here at North Pluto Labor —”

The atom blast of Thikar, the Jovian, cut the Plutonian down before he could say more. Two more crackling, lightning-like blasts stopped the other two engineers before they could make a move.

“Now, get those cyclotrons out of here and into our ship at once!” Quorn ordered his followers.

“That’ll be a job,” grunted Thikar, eying the massive machines.

“You fool, we’ve got to have them!” Quorn lashed. “Without them, we haven’t the slightest chance of reaching the treasure I promised you.”

The mention of the mysterious treasure inspired the criminals. They began the heavy work of transferring the eyes to their little ship. Ul Quorn watched them. Beside him waited the lithe Martian girl he had called N’Rala. Presently they had the last of the six cyclotrons aboard their craft.

“Quick, out of here now before the Patrol comes!” Quorn ordered.

Their little rocket-ship rose from the ice-field. Then magically, it vanished.

The heaving blue sea that swept almost all the planet Neptune, gleamed in the sunlight. It washed against the rock cliffs of a small group of barren islands five hundred miles south of the Black Isles.

Upon one of these desolate islets were the metalloy shops and docks of Neptunian Oceanic Research Station. The pompous, gray-skinned, peaked-skulled Neptunian who directed the activities of a half-score scientists here was shaking his head.

“There’s a lot of money in those metal bars,” he declared.

HE AND one of his subordinates were eying a mass of long bars of blue-gleaming metal which lay in one of the supply-houses.

“Well, that alloy
is
expensive,” admitted his assistant. “But it’s about the strongest known to science. With it we can build a diving ship that will go down into even the greatest deeps of our ocean. Just think, sir, what that will mean! We can explore the great oceanic abysses for the first time,” he ended enthusiastically.

“Yes, I know,” agreed the older Neptunian impatiently. “But this stuffs so valuable it might tempt thieves. It’s only been a few days since Ul Quorn’s band raided that North Pluto laboratory, remember.”

The younger man scoffed politely at his superior’s apprehensions.

“Oh, well, Quorn’s criminals probably just wanted those super-powered cyclotrons to give their ship more speed. They wouldn’t want this alloy.”

The younger Neptunian was wrong. That evening a small rocket-ship appeared magically behind the research station. The staff of the station did not hear it, nor did they hear Ul Quorn and his men emerge from the ship.

“Take no chances of them giving an alarm this time,” ordered Quorn, his black eyes merciless. “Cut them down at once.”

The Neptunians had no chance. They were absorbed planning their new diving ship when the criminal band charged in upon them.

The hideous crackle of atom-gun blasts was brief. Then the Neptunian scientists lay on the floor in scorched, unmoving heaps.

“Good work!” approved Ul Quorn. “Now get those bars of alloy into our ship.”

Thikar, the Jovian, muttered protestingly to Gray Garson.

“First we stole the super-cycs and now it’s these metal bars. Why don’t we loot something worthwhile, like gold or radium?”

“Quorn knows what he’s doing,” Garson retorted. “He’s preparing to secure a treasure worth all the gold and radium in the System.”

“That’s what he says. But he doesn’t tell us what it is,” grumbled the Jovian. “He just says it’s something great.”

The bars of alloy finally loaded in the ship, the craft rose from the rocky isle into the gathering twilight. It poised for a moment, then vanished.

The quiet dusk deepened. One of the scorched Neptunian bodies stirred slightly. This man was not dead, but was dying. He feebly tried to write with his own bloody finger on the floor.
“Quorn did
—” But he was dead before he could finish his message.

HIGH in Government Tower, in the city of New York on Earth, was the center of the great web of the Planet Police. Here functioned the vast organization that maintained the law throughout the system. Here were headquarters of its four divisions — the planetary police, the colonial police, the secret service, and the famous Planet Patrol.

Halk Anders, Commander of the entire organization, paced his office restlessly. He was a stocky rock of a man, with a massive head and grim, scarred face.

He turned to face two other people, a girl and an older man. The girl was Joan Randall, ace secret service agent. The older man was Marshal Ezra Gurney, famous police veteran.

“We don’t need to do that!” Halk Anders told the girl angrily. “Ever since Quorn’s bunch escaped you’ve been deviling me to have the President call in Captain Future. I’m tired of it. Just because you and Ezra are on assignment to work with Future, you want him on every case.”

Joan Randall faced her irate chief calmly. She was a slim girl in gray silk space-jacket and trousers, with dark hair and liquid brown eyes.

“But, Chief, the Patrol can’t cope with Quorn!” she protested. “That mixed breed is the greatest scientist in the System — except one. This weird vanishing ship he’s using shows what he can do.”

“I think maybe Joan is right, Halk,” drawled old Ezra. “Remember, it took Cap’n Future to get Quorn the first time.”

Ezra Gurney was a white-haired, wrinkled-faced old man with faded blue eyes, who chewed
rial
leaf deliberately as he spoke.

“Well, well get Quorn this time ourselves,” boomed Anders. “He got away from Cerberus, and gave us the slip after his raid on the Pluto laboratory. But he won’t give us the slip this time!”

“What makes you so danged sure you’re goin’ to get him now?” demanded Ezra Gurney.

Halk Anders explained. “As soon as I got word of Quorn’s raid on the Neptunian research station, I had a net of Patrol cruisers flung around that whole sector of space to trap him. They’ve been closing in that net, and though Quorn may vanish in that queer way he’ll surely have to reappear somewhere inside their sector. I’m expecting a report that they’ve caught him at any moment.

“Ah, here’s the report now!” he continued as a Martian officer entered the office and saluted. “Did they get him, Mako?”

The Martian officer shook his head.

“Sorry, sir — Quorn must have slipped them again. I just got a flash that Quorn’s band held up the space-freighter
Eros
off Saturn. They looted the freighter of certain valuable atomic machine-tools. Then they vanished as usual in their own craft.”

“Well, Halk,” drawled old Ezra dryly, “it looks like Quorn and his vanishin’ ship gave the Patrol the slip again.”

Halk Anders’ face was purple.

“By all the space-gods, I give up! I can catch any ordinary criminal or pirate, but that slippery breed can vanish and reappear as he pleases, and that’s too much for me!”

“Then you’ll have the President call Captain Future?” Joan Randall asked eagerly, her dark eyes glowing.

“Yes, blast it, I will,” swore the enraged Commander. “Come along.”

James Carthew, the gray-haired President of the Solar System Government, had his offices in the topmost suite of Government Tower. He listened gravely as Halk Anders blurted out his request. The Commander concluded bitterly: “So I’m asking you to call Captain Future, though it’s an admission of my own failure.”

“No, Commander,” denied the President quietly. “You’ve done all anyone could do. The cold fact is that Ul Quorn’s distorted scientific genius makes him invulnerable to the ordinary Patrol methods. The System has only one scientist capable of combating that criminal.”

CARTHEW rose to his feet.

“Captain Future isn’t home on the Moon now. He and the Futuremen left weeks ago on a research expedition. They did not say where they were going. We will have to call them by the red torpedo!”

Carthew led the way up a small stairway to the little square deck that was the very topmost tip of Government Tower. Only two men were allowed to land their ships on this deck — the President and Captain Future.

It was magnificent up here in the darkness between the wind and the stars, the brilliance and splendor of the greatest city in the System spread far below. The great avenues were like rivers of blue-white krypton light, flowing northward to the space-port.

Carthew stepped toward a thing in a special cradle at the rail, a six-foot metal torpedo that looked like a miniature space ship.

“Captain Future left this here,” he explained to Anders. “He said that when he was not in his Moon-home and so could not be reached by our North Pole beacon, this thing would find him.”

He touched a button upon the side of the torpedo. Then he stood hastily back from it as red fire jetted from its lower end.

Swoosh!
With a bursting gush of crimson flame from its stem, the metal cylinder soared skyward at incredible speed. It blazed across the heavens like a tiny red comet. In a twinkling it was gone.

JOAN RANDALL looked after it with brilliant eyes.

“I wonder where it’s gone?” she murmured. “I wonder where Curt and the Futuremen are now?”

“Wherever they are, they’ll be zoomin’ back here soon,” muttered old Ezra confidently.

Halk Anders put a doubtful question to the President.

“Who
is
Captain Future, really? Oh, I know I’ve worked with him and his three Futuremen, the Brain and the robot and that android, in more than one case. But I’ve never yet learned just who he is and where he came from and how he acquired his mastery of science.”