Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) (3 page)

“No ordinary telaudio operator would be so clever,” Ru Ghur was murmuring. “Nor would he look so familiar to me.” Ru stopped suddenly, his black-eyes narrowed to pinpoints. “Ah,” he said, “I might have known.

“Old Ru Ghur’s wits must be wandering, or I’d have recognized him at once in spite of that dyed hair.”

A TWITCHING of his flabby cheeks alone betrayed his intense excitement.

“There’s blind justice in the universe, after all,” he said softly. “A justice that has brought into my hands the man who so cruelly wronged me.”

“Who is it, Chief?” asked the thin gray Saturnian who was holding Curt’s left arm.

“You’ll find out later, Kra Kdol,” said Ru Ghur. “Put a space-suit on him and take him over to the
Falcon
. The rest of you get out that radium.”

“Why bother taking a prisoner?” grumbled the Saturnian. “I can blast him right here, and save trouble.”

Ru Ghur’s voice rose to a whine. “If you do, I’ll cut you into ribbons — and soft-hearted old Ru Ghur would hate to do that.”

Curt Newton had heard their voices as though from a great distance. He was only dazedly aware of the raiders hastily putting a space-suit on him, and hauling him into Ru Ghur’s flagship.

When his sense cleared he saw that he had been taken into the main cabin of the raider cruiser, and bound in a recoil chair. His head aching violently, he looked around.

The cabin was almost a laboratory. Scientific instruments, some of them unfamiliar even to Captain Future’s trained eyes, crowded it.

Through the port-holes he glimpsed raiders hastily bringing aboard the square lead cases of refined radium ore.

And his dominant emotion was disgust with himself. His scheme to find the radium raiders had ended disastrously.

“A fine bright Planeteer I am, to fall into their trap while I was setting one of my own,” he muttered. “But how was anyone to know that Uranian devil was alive and mixed up in this thing?”

He ignored the peril of his own situation. He knew the depth of Ru Ghur’s hate, and realized that if the Uranian had not killed him instantly, it was because he had something worse in mind. But Captain Future lived by the fatalistic, fearless creed that had been bred into him by the Brain, the robot, and the android. Until death stopped him, no danger to himself would swerve him from a fixed purpose.

“One sure thing,” he muttered, “if Ru Ghur planned these radium raids, they’re far bigger than we feared. Why is he gathering all this radium?”

Ru Ghur and his Saturnian second-in-command now entered the cabin.

“Get going before the Patrol boxes us in, Kra Kol,” snapped the Uranian leader, “Follow the course I plotted and hurry!”

The
Falcon’s
cyclotrons throbbed, its rocket-tubes roared, and it and the other three raider cruisers darted off into the abyss away from the floating wreck of the
Orion
.

Ru Ghur divested himself of his helmet and suit, came over and looked down at his bound prisoner with a beaming smile on his moonlike face.

“I’m too fat and old to be skittering around space like this,” he puffed. “I ought to be in my villa in Uranopolis — and I’d still be there if you hadn’t driven me out of the System, Captain Future.”

“Where is this Outlaw World of yours, Ru Ghur,” asked Curt coolly.

The Uranian’s small eyes twinkled. “Ah, that’s my secret, a secret the Planet Patrol would give much to know. You thought I would perish out there in the starry abyss. But I found a refuge of whose existence none of you have dreamed. Aye, a strange and fearful place is Outlaw World, as you call it.”

His fat cheeks quivered in pretended self-pity. “But it’s a sad thing for a poor, unoffending old scientist to be driven out of his home into such terrible, unknown regions. It was a wicked persecution that you Futuremen visited upon me.”

“We should have killed you,” Curt Newton said bleakly. “You deserved it for operating that Lethe-ray traffic.”

Ru Ghur shook his bald yellow head reproachfully. “You were always bigoted about my great contributions to humanity. The Lethe-ray was a blessing to many poor souls. It allowed them to achieve all their hopes and desires, in dreams.”

“And in time made them, ready to rob or kill to pay you for the ray,” rapped Newton.

“Ah, I see that you’re still intolerant,” replied the fat scientist. “And that means that I must take steps to prevent your working against me again.”

“Why not say straight out you mean to kill me?” Curt said disgustedly.

Ru Ghur looked shocked. “Why, lad, poor old Ru Ghur is far too chicken-hearted to murder you, especially when you can be useful to me.”

CAPTAIN FUTURE looked at him sharply. “Just what do you mean?”

The Uranian’s small eyes glistened. “I have planned a great enterprise, the greatest any man ever conceived. And I don’t want to be interfered with while I am making the necessary preparations for it. You will be a valuable hostage, Captain Future. If those Futuremen of yours should get too troublesome, or even if the Planet Patrol should get close on my trail, I can bargain with them for your life.”

“Just what is this great enterprise of yours?” Captain Future asked. “Why are you going to such lengths to amass great quantities of radium?”

“You’ll soon find out,” promised Ru Ghur, with a benevolent smile. “Yes, the whole Solar System will find out, to their cost.”

Captain Future speculated swiftly. “You’re going to your Outlaw World base now?”

“Yes, but first we are going to stop and pick up some more radium from certain wicked outlaws who tried to forestall poor old Ru Ghur. They are a bunch of Martian outlaws headed by one Bork King and are connected with the Companions of Space, as the pirates are called. A few days ago, Bork King’s band held up the Pluto-Venus liner and took a valuable shipment off it.”

Ru Ghur shook his head as though at the wickedness of men.

“Bork King’s ship is now lying in hiding on Leda, one of the smaller moons of Jupiter, waiting for the Patrol hunt to die down so that they can make another foray,” he went on. “They think themselves safely hidden, but won’t they be surprised when old Ru Ghur swoops down on them, and takes that radium away from them!”

The Uranian’s moonlike face beamed in a smile of happy anticipation.

“How do you manage to trace every ship that has radium in it, as you do, Ru Ghur?” Captain Future asked.

Ru Ghur smirked. “Poor old Ru Ghur has his little scientific secrets, lad. You’ll learn all about them when you get to Outlaw World.” His small bright eyes glinted with mirth as he went on, “I can see what you’re thinking, Captain Future. You think that long before we get to my base you’ll find a way to escape from this ship. I know how clever and resourceful you can be. But you’re not going to make any effort to escape. You’re going to Outlaw World as peaceable as a lamb. And you’re going to be happy, so happy that you won’t even think of trying to get away from us.”

The Uranian went across the cabin and wheeled over to the side of Curt’s chair a tall and complicated instrument, whose most striking feature was a quartz-lensed projector like a small searchlight. This projector hung from a tall standard and was linked by cables to electrical apparatus in the base of the machine.

Ru Ghur adjusted the projector so that its quartz lens was just above Captain Future’s skull. As he arranged the apparatus and touched a graduated intensity control, he talked in his unctuous, mocking way.

“This is what’s going to keep you happy and contented while you’re on my ship, Captain Future. It’s the great boon and blessing that old Ru Ghur’s science gave to the unhappy worlds, my Lethe-ray that brings such joy to the soul.”

CURT NEWTON twisted angrily in his bonds, as he understood the intention of the Uranian. He strained convulsively but could not break the bonds. No man could.

“You can’t keep me under the influence of that accursed ray all the way!” he shouted furiously.

“Of course I can, and I shall,” Ru Ghur beamed. “And you’ll be so happy in your dreams come true that you won’t even know you’re on the ship and won’t be bothering us by attempting to escape.”

Curt shrank as from something unclean. There had always seemed something unholy to him about the Lethe-ray. And he knew that exposure to it for too long a period could wreck the mind, could send it down into a drugged darkness from which it would never return.

Ru Ghur had started the machine humming. He twisted the intensity control knob a notch higher, and his hand rested for a moment on a switch.

“You understand the principle of the Lethe-ray, of course,” he said. “It blocks off all those main portions of the brain concerned with real sensations, facts and memories. Thus it releases the hopes and dreams that live in the imagination, to dominate the whole brain. You lose all touch with the world around you because your brain is no longer in contact with it. The only reality becomes those secret hopes and wishes which you cherish in your inmost mind.”

He turned the switch. From the quartz lens of the machine, an invisible force streamed down on Captain Future’s head. He felt himself instantly whirled through a rushing, howling darkness — and was suddenly in a wholly new environment.

He stood upon a small asteroid whose parklike green forests were wrapped in a golden haze. A soft wind stirred perfume from large, pastel-colored asteroid-orchids that grew in profusion. Flame birds cut like flying fires through the branches overhead.

He knew that little asteroid. He had seen it in his dreams many times since he once had chanced to land on it. It was uninhabited, away from the main trade routes, a golden, forgotten little world. And he had always hoped that some day when the lawless days in the System were no more, he could make that world his home.

Now that day had come! Curt Newton felt a bursting, vibrant joy that the long struggle was over. There was no more need for the Futuremen to blaze their grim trail between the worlds, there was no more need for them to maintain their vigilant watch on the harsh, wild Moon. The dangerous days in the System were over, as he had dreamed they might be some day. Captain Future, the personification of avenging law throughout the civilized universe for so long, was no more. He was just Curt Newton now, and this was his home.

Curt walked on through the golden forest to a clearing gay with brilliant flowers. There was a small house here, a shimmering white plastic cottage drowsing in the sunshine, lapped by the unbroken peace of this unvisited little world.

A dark-haired girl came out of the cottage and came happily into his arms.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Curt,” she murmured. “It’s just as we always dreamed it would be.”

“I still can’t get used to it, Joan,” he confessed smilingly.

“I still think I’ll suddenly get a call from the System Government and that it will all start over again.”

She shook her head. “The Patrol will never need you again, Curt.”

He went into the house with her. Simon Wright, the Brain, was there, in the little laboratory where at last he was able to continue his abstruse researches without interruption.

From behind the house came the voices of Grag and Otho raised in one of their perpetual arguments.

Curt Newton felt a deep happiness. “I almost think that I’ll wake up and find that I’ve been dreaming,” he murmured to Joan.

“Dreaming yet, Captain Future?”

That soft, mocking voice suddenly shattered the whole fabric of golden happiness.

Curt Newton found his head rocking dizzily, and opened his eyes to find himself in the cabin in Ru Ghur’s speeding space-ship. That hours had passed, he could guess from the altered positions of the planets he could glimpse through the port-hole windows.

RU GHUR’S moonlike face beamed down at him.

“Did you like it, Captain Future? Did you like the Lethe-ray?”

“You devil!” flamed Curt Newton, stricken to the heart by the sudden fading of that golden dream that had seemed so real. “No wonder people have sold their souls for that infernal ray!”

“So you saw your dreams come true?” taunted Ru Ghur. “And then you had to leave it all and come back here? Ah, that’s too bad. But you can go back to them. We just turned off the ray for a few minutes to feed you, Captain Future. People lose strength quickly under too much of the Lethe-ray. And you’re too valuable a hostage to lose.”

Curt Newton mechanically drank down the nutrient fluid they raised to his lips. His bonds were not loosened.

“And now we’ll let you go back to your happiness, lad,” crooned Ru Ghur. “Why, I envy you.”

He switched on the Lethe-ray, and swiftly Curt Newton felt himself whirled back into that golden world of his dreams. Dreams — dreams... He knew nothing but those cherished visions made real. It was the old life of struggle and danger that seemed a dream. Curt knew that many hours must have passed when again he found himself coming back from that dream world into the reality of Ru Ghur’s raider ship. Kra Kol, the thin gray Saturnian who was Ru Ghur’s lieutenant, had turned off the Lethe-ray and was again holding the glass of stimulant for Curt Newton to drink.