Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) (18 page)

“Chief, look out!” bellowed Grag.

Raiders had spilled out of a door immediately beside him, and blue light disclosed Curt Newton and the big robot to them.

CAPTAIN Future spun around and shot — to kill. His crackling atom-blasts cut down the front ranks of them. With a bellowing, booming cry Grag leaped into the midst of the others.

“Go ahead, Chief — I’ll hold ‘em!” roared the robot.

Atom-blasts crashed blindingly farther along the court, and Curt Newton glimpsed Bork King, mad with fanatic desire for vengeance, triggering into the raiders charging him.

Grag was the center of a mass of raiders who were clinging to the mighty robot’s limbs, dragging him from his feet.

Captain Future had leaped up the first steps of the little stair when he heard a hoarse yell, jerked his head around and saw Kra Kol behind him. The Saturnian’s face was convulsed with hatred and his atom-pistol was leveled.

“You’re the one who tricked me on the
Falcon
!” he cried thickly as he pulled trigger.

Curt Newton aimed and fired in one lightning-like movement, and saw the Saturnian’s chest scorched by the crashing blast. But Kra Kol was pulling trigger as he died. The whole world seemed to explode in blinding light, to Captain Future...

He came to himself, to find the whole right side of his head aching with hot, burning pain. Numbly he understood that Kra Kol’s atom-blast had grazed his temple.

He opened his eyes. He was chained against the wall of a brightly lighted room as vast as the vault of a cathedral, its dome of black stone curved high over his head. Huge machines crowded the room.

Bork King and Grag were similarly chained. The Martian was wounded seriously, but Grag, though a little battered, was making furious efforts to break his chains.

“I was never taken like this in my life, before.” Grag roared wrathfully. “I’ll —”

The hated familiar voice of Ru Ghur interrupted him. “You will be quiet or I shall be forced to destroy your speech apparatus. You are only being kept alive because I later want to dissect you and find out if we should make any more like you.”

“Dissect me?” cried Grag. The indignity threatened left him speechless.

Ru Ghur stood, a fat and almost comic figure, surveying his captives with his bland, benevolent smile.

Armed raiders came hastening in, pushing ahead of them cowering Vulcanian slaves.

“We searched the whole place and no one else got in,” reported a ratlike Mercurian. “None of the slaves are gone, but the Randall girl is missing.”

Ru Ghur frowned. “She must have been frightened off by the fight, for she was too drugged by the Lethe-ray to have formed any premeditated plan of escape. Search the forest for her.” He turned back to Captain Future. “You’ve made me lots of trouble, Future. You and your friends here must be killed, of course. But I’ll keep you alive long enough for you to witness my final triumph.”

Bork King had said not a word. Hanging in his chains; the wounded Martian glared at Ru Ghur with a fanatic hatred burning in his eyes.

Curt Newton felt a deep bitterness at his own failure. He had lost a chance to smash this whole unholy nest of evil, once and for all.

He looked beyond the Uranian, at the gigantic machines colossal cyclotrons. Their fuel feed lines came from the great laden bins which he knew contained radium looted from all over the Solar System. Their massive power pipes led down into the floor, and he could guess that they connected with the rocket-tubes in the great pit.

“You’re all ready, aren’t you?” he muttered. “All ready to use the power of these cyclotrons to hurl Vulcan out of its orbit?”

Ru Ghur looked at him admiringly. “So you guessed my purpose when you saw the rocket-tubes in the pit? Yes, that is what we are going to do. We are going to make a huge ship of Vulcan — a pirate ship!” His small eyes glowed with a fire that revealed the true danger of this man, eclipsing his comic figure and fat face. “It will be the greatest adventure ever embarked upon by man! A prolonged blast of super-power will hurl Vulcan out of its orbit, and we can steer it at will through the Solar System like a planetary vessel of space.

“Do you realize what, we can do with this corsair planet? We can use it as a base from which to prey upon the disorganized outer planets. We will gather here in Vulcan all the outlaws and pirates of the System, under my command. We will loot the wealth of the demoralized System, and no one will be able to attack us, since we can hold out all the battle cruisers in the System by simply firing the great rocket-tubes.

“And when we’ve looted the System, then we leave forever! It will be easy to project Vulcan toward another star. There will be radium enough for atomic power to warm and light this interior world during the long traverse. The Vulcanians, whom it will be easy to subdue completely then, will be our slaves. And I will be sole master of this world-ship and all within it!”

GRAG uttered a cry of horror. “Chief, he can’t do that, can he? Has he got power enough to move Vulcan?”

“He has power enough,” Captain Future said somberly. “But there is one thing he has forgotten.” His eyes bored into Ru Ghur. “You don’t know celestial mechanics, and you haven’t realized the full effect of moving Vulcan from its bit. To do so will remove a gravitational influence that helps keep Mercury’s eccentric orbit from becoming too eccentric. The result would bring Mercury closer and closer Sunward until it finally plunges into the Sun. When a body of Mercury’s dimensions crashed through the outer layers of the Sun, it would cause a ‘blowout’ of imprisoned solar forces that would make the Sun explode into a nova. That would engulf all the inner planets in fiery death. You didn’t realize that when you drew up your great scheme, did you?”

“I am a better scientist than you believe. Future,” the Uranian answered coolly. “I have fully foreseen the cataclysm you describe.”

Curt Newton was staggered. “You know this catastrophe will happen, yet you’ll still go ahead with your plan?”

Ru Ghur wagged his head in assumed sadness. “It is deplorable that so many worlds and peoples will perish. It wrings my soul to think of such dreadful happenings. But I’m afraid that can’t be avoided.” He added cheerfully. “But there’s a brighter side. The catastrophe won’t affect the outer planets. But they will be so demoralized it will not be hard to loot them before we take this planet-ship away from the System forever.”

Only then, did Captain Future realize to the full the ruthlessness of this fat and flabby man. He had believed that Ru Ghur had overlooked the inevitably disastrous consequences of his scheme.

“We are going to start tonight,” Ru Ghur was saying. “In an hour, Vulcan will have rotated to a position in which its pit opening will point in just the right direction for the blast that will take it from its orbit.”

“Ru Ghur!” Curt urged hoarsely. “Think of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and maybe even Jupiter perishing, with all their millions, in the solar explosion. You can’t want that to happen!”

Ru Ghur shrugged his fat shoulders. “I’m sorry that it is necessary. But I can’t allow my sentimental side to overrule my practical judgment.”

As they stared at him in unbelieving horror, the ratlike Mercurian raider and a half-dozen of his men reentered with Joan Randall. She was still dazed, sunken in dreams. She looked at them without recognition, like a stunned child.

“We found her in the fern forest,” the Mercurian raider reported. “She was wandering back here.”

Curt Newton groaned inwardly. Something had happened to Otho on his way back to the
Comet
with the dazed girl. Whatever it was, Joan had found herself free and, in her drugged condition, had wandered back to the citadel.

Ru Ghur was snapping orders to the Mercurian.

“Future’s ship is somewhere out there, and the Brain is probably in it. Hunt it out, and destroy it.” He added warningly, “Get back here within forty minutes. For then we’re going to fire the first great blast, and that will rock this world.”

Curt felt a desperate hopelessness. What chance had they now to avert disaster? They were hunting the
Comet
, the raiders in the citadel were on guard, and no attack of the Vulcanians could hope to succeed.

And the minutes were ticking by toward the fateful moment when Vulcan would blast out of its age-old orbit, with all the appalling consequences to the life of the Solar System that would bring!

VAINLY struggling Captain Future shook to the apocalyptic vision of the dread disaster that rushed through his mind. Soon those colossal cyclotrons would start throbbing, and the energies they derived from radium fuel would rush through the underground power pipes to the rocket-tubes in the pits.

The awful blast would tear Vulcan out of its orbit — and this little world would become an Outlaw World in direst truth. A pirate planetoid, speeding out through the System to loot the civilized planets. Behind it, Mercury would be dislodged and spiral slowly into the Sun to cause the explosion that would wipe out half the System.

“I can’t let it happen!” Curt Newton thought wildly. “There must be some way to stop it!”

He made more desperate efforts to wrench free of his chains, but with no result except to further bruise his already bleeding wrists.

As though to mock his despair, Ru Ghur was at the tall switchboard inspecting chronometers, gauges and switches. Joan had gone to the Uranian’s side and was watching in a lackadaisical way.

“It will soon be time to start the big cycs,” Ru Ghur was saving. “They must be running full capacity when we fire the first blast.”

Suddenly all the krypton lights in the citadel went out. They were plunged into smothering darkness.

“The Randall girl tore out the wires of the light circuit!” Ru Ghur’s yell pierced the dark. “Grab her!”

There was a whirling confusion in the darkness — running feet, shouting raiders, wailing Vulcanian slaves.

Captain Future was thunderstruck. Had Joan’s ray-drugged mind already been brought back to normal by Simon out there in the
Comet
? No, that was impossible. She had not been away long enough for that.

Curt felt a hand suddenly jam an atom-pistol into his belt.

“Lean forward in your chains, all three of you!” a familiar voice whispered in his ear. “I’ll blast you free with my gun.”

“Otho!” Curt whispered back, but had no time to question the android’s mystifying reappearance. Here was the desperate chance for which he had hoped.

He leaned forward to the limit of the chains. A gun’s atom-blast crashed and he felt the chains part. As he tore them from his wrists, the atom-gun crashed twice again.

“Future and the others are breaking loose!” shrilled RuGhur. “Block the doorway! And find that girl and kill her!”

Captain Future faced a terrible choice there. His every instinct cried for him to find Joan and assure her safety. But if he did, and missed the chance to wreck Ru Ghur’s titanic and terrible scheme, he would be betraying his duty to the System. In a torturing breath that seemed an eternity, he made his choice.

“Otho! Grag! Bork! Make for the door! We’re crashing out!”

He heard Grag’s metal feet and the lithe stride of the android as they blundered through the dark doorway. They crashed into raiders swarming to block the door.

Grag’s mighty arms whirled and the vaguely glimpsed enemies went down like tenpins. Curt, Grag, and Otho burst out into the night.

Curt was wild with fear for Joan, whom he was leaving in deadly peril in that dark room. But he did not waver in his desperate resolution.

“The gun platform on the central dome!” he cried hoarsely. “If we can let the Vulcanian warriors in we’ve got a chance!”

The court was almost as dark as the room they had quitted. But, searchlights suddenly sliced white beams through the obscurity. The searchlights were on the raider cruisers, which had been about to take off on the search for the
Comet
.

“Get those lights!” yelled Captain Future.

He plunged across the court shooting at the ships. The streaks of blasting force from his atom-pistol smashed out two of the searchlights. He heard Otho’s gun crash, and the other two lights went out.

Raiders streamed out of the ships, running toward them, their guns blazing.

The fiery blasts crisscrossed in front of Curt as he reached the stair that led to the gun platform.

He went up the stair shooting, for he had glimpsed the two raiders now on guard there swinging around the heavy atom-guns. These two dropped lifeless beneath their weapons.

“Don’t use those heavy guns on the citadel!” Curt yelled to Crag and Otho. “Give the signal to Kah!”

The heavy atom-guns would bring the citadel crashing down on all within it. It was not only of Joan’s safety that he was thinking, but also of Bork King, and the pitiful Vulcanian slaves.

CURT was fumbling with the base of the big Lethe-ray projector. He counted on it being on a different circuit than the krypton lights, and he was right. For when his fingers closed the switch, he heard the generator of the deadly ray begin its deep hum.