Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) (10 page)

Captain Future groped at his enemy’s belt and found one of the weapons that threw glares of light. With its help he found the gun Ul Quorn had dropped. Now he turned to the guard, who was getting up weakly.

“That light — agony!” muttered the fellow. He hid his great dark eyes with his palms.

“Not a false move or I’ll dissolve you into atoms,” warned Future. He pointed the other weapon. “I am Captain Future, a name you may not know.”

“But I do!” The guard was up, still hiding his eyes. As Captain Future had glimpsed before, here was a man of such human proportions as obtained in the Solar System, with none of the grotesque semi-brutishness of Ul Quorn’s fungus-complexioned aides. “And I thought Ul Quorn said you were here, Captain Future. Thank the gods of your dimension and mine that you have come to us.”

“No tricks,” warned Captain Future, more sharply still.

“I mean none. And there is little time for explanation — but let my heart speak. All our people do not want this war against your world. Others of my race must tell you and convince you — in a less dangerous place than this. Do now as I bid you.”

“What?”

“My tendril-gun, here at my belt. Quick!”

WITHOUT regarding the pointed pistol, the guard drew the device and extended it, butt-first, to Captain Future.

“Use it to bind me, and Ul Quorn. Tear pieces of his robe to gag us. That will keep him safe, and free me from suspicion. Then, in my cloak —” he wore one, and now shrugged it off — “My cloak, drawn up to hood your head, go out as I direct.”

Future had seen the tendril-guns work, and one demonstration was enough. He quickly spun loops of the metal wire around the guard, making him helpless, then did the same to the still unconscious Ul Quorn.

“Beyond this is a dark corridor,” the guard was telling him. “You come from bright worlds, and will have to grope past three doors. Enter the fourth, and say these words: ‘Attention, now, Rroda kun!’ Those within will know you are a friend to us. Then drop your robe, and identify yourself for who you are.”

Future snapped off his light.

“What is your name?”

“Thai Thar.”

“I will remember that. You may be speaking truth, in which case you will know what gratitude and reward can be. If you lie, you will live to be sorry — and no longer. That’s a promise from Captain Future.”

“Good. I ask no more. Now the gags.”

Captain Future muffled the mouth of the guard, then that of Ul Quorn. He picked up the robe.

He had been thinking hard and furiously of what this creature had told him. It simplified to another chance he must and would take. After all, he could retreat at the first sign of treachery, with a good hope of dimension shifting back to Ul Quorn’s quarters on the Moon. Holding the pistol in one hand, he used the other to drape himself in the cloak. He felt his way to the door and went through it.

As he had been told, he was in a dark corridor, and his questing elbow found the jambs of three doors as he moved along the wall. The captured guard had spoken truth so far. Outside the fourth door he paused, ear to the panel.

A voice inside, not of the timber of Solar System voices, but not as twittery as the pale gnomes, was speaking.

“Language of the Solar System,” it said. “We must practice as commanded by the Overlord. Also the language makes our conversation secret from most listeners.”

“If the Overlord himself came, we’d be punished,” answered another voice.

“Space-fates forefend!” broke in the first speaker.

That was enough for Captain Future. He entered. The room beyond was dim, but he could make out three pale figures at a table, dressed in snug sleeveless mail shirts, with cloaks flung on the backs of their chairs. Weapons hung on the walls, giving the place the aspect of a guard-room.

“Rroda kun!” said Captain Future.

One creature faced him.

“Thai Thar? Who relieved you? Speak the Other-System language because —”

“I’m Captain Future,” said the red-haired giant, and dropped his cloak, letting it fall in folds over his hand that held the gun.

At once the three were on their feet.

“Careful!” warned one of the guards, “He may be a spy of Ul Quorn’s.”

“I’m not. Ul Quorn, if you wonder about him, lies stunned and bound just this side of the dimension-shift. Your friend Thai Thar is there, and will identify me.”

A guard started toward the door, but paused, gazing at Captain Future in perplexity. Captain Future spread his arms, still keeping the cloak swathed around his pistol hand.

“Can’t you see I’m unarmed? Here,” and he threw the glare weapon on the floor. “Go ahead.”

The man left hurriedly.

“You’re different, you men, different from other Dimension-X people I’ve seen,” Future said.

“Because the advance guard is of our low orders. We ourselves are what you call nobles or aristocrats. Because the Overlord doesn’t like us, we’re being used here as guards. Later, he’ll probably see we’re killed in the invasion we abhor.”

“Why does the Overlord dislike you?” persisted Captain Future. “And why do you dislike the invasion?”

“Hold your questions until we’re sure of your identity,” bade one of the two.

The man who had left returned.

“Thai Thar identifies him. He’s Captain Future, and he can be told the truth.”

“But when will Thai Thar be discovered helpless?”

“Shortly,” said the man who had brought the message. “By one of us who goes to relieve him.”

“And meanwhile I’ll get you out of here,” joined in another. “You will want to know about an invasion at another point of your universe.”

“Where?” demanded Captain Future.

“I have a star-map to show you. Come, wrap yourself in that cloak. We can talk on the way to — to where we’re going.”

Captain Future opened the folds around his hand.

“Gentlemen, I’ll confess that I mistrusted you, too. Look at this weapon. It would have blasted you all at the first sign of danger, but it’s falling to powder!”

“Of course,” said the man who had risen to accompany him. “Weapons of our make are safe in the protective ray-field around this guardroom. But yours was made harmless. A little device of my own, which I framed to guard against a possible piece of violence by Ul Quorn. You will see that fate must work in all universes, and that in this case fate directs us to trust each other.”

He held out a hand, like an Earthman.

“My name is Lai Thar, the brother of Thai Thar. Let’s be friends and allies. Follow me.”

LITTLE Oog, the meteor-mimic, was alone and miserable.

Only the news that Luna and all that satellite contained and recalled and stood for could have made Otho forget his tiny pet. But it had turned out that way. When Joan brought the news of the unthinkable vanishment, the Futuremen had trooped to the
Comet’s
telaudio for their own eyes to be convinced.

Then, with the grim knowledge that seconds would count in this new adventure, they had sailed away. And Oog, who had been mimicking a bit of sad-colored stone on the floor of their grotto, was left behind on Asteroid No. 697

His little mind, simple and material but shrewd, was almost as keen as Otho boasted. He could, and did, realize that he was forgotten and abandoned. He was full of woe. Turning back into a doughy little toddler of a beast, he made sad grimaces and trotted here and there in search of his friends.

He found the remains of Captain Future’s sandwich, and momentarily turned himself into a doll-like figure of the Futuremen’s chief. Sniffing around the place where Otho had lolled, he remolded his molecules into a slender, high-craniumed figurine of the android. Finally he went to where the
Comet
had lain careened, and changed himself into a miniature image of that.

Oog’s hyper-adaptable species runs rather to physical changes, but change in the brain stuff can take place. It was true, as Otho had said, that the meteor-mimic’s mind was able to appreciate some aspects of human affairs. When Oog became himself once more, he sighed almost like a lonesome child.

Scant hours had passed since he had been deserted on Asteroid No. 697 — hours that had been crammed with danger and adventure for the Futuremen, with loneliness and depression for little Oog. He waddled here and there about the tiny world, nosing and sniffing the tracks of his friends, which grew fainter in impress and odor as time went by. His brain grappled with the future, that most difficult of things to comprehend. If he was indeed marooned here, he would live alone, unseen of any other living thing, but he would never forget Otho who had loved him and forgotten him. He turned again into a miniature Otho.

“Ghosts of Ganymede!” half-choked a rough voice in the brush. “Look there, on the ground!”

Still mimicking Otho, Oog looked up. A burly Earthman in unkempt space-suit had come into the open and now stared at him with bloodshot eyes that seemed ready to spring from their sockets.

A moment later, the Earthman turned his head away.

“Don’t let me look — don’t let me look!” he quavered. “It’s that double-power Venusian liquor. No Earthman ought to touch it!”

Oog’s impulse for hiding caused him to change at once into a replica of a grassy clod. As he did so, another figure emerged. A Martian this time, rather slackly handsome and high-skulled, with on his wrist the scar that could come only from radio-manacles — bonds of the incorrigible criminal.

“I don’t see anything, you fool! What scared you?”

Without daring to look, the Earthman pointed to where Otho was. The Martian followed the gesture with his eyes, sneered, and turned his back.

“Nothing there,” he said.

With both strangers facing away, Oog turned back into a little Otho. At this moment the Earthman plucked up courage to steal another look. He howled as if caught in a blister-ray.

“I see it again!” he cried, and clapped his hands over his eyes.

The Martian also looked, but Oog was the clod again. The Martian laughed aloud.

“You’d better lay off mixing your planetary drinks hereafter,” he advised. “Now pay attention to me. We’re to make this place ready for Ul Quorn’s invasion, like on the Moon.”

“I only half-understood what’s up,” grumbled the Earthman. “Why can’t he do as he did with the Moon, and gobble it right out of the Solar System?”

“Because he needs an asteroid out of that other dimension to bring here and fit into and around and over this one,” the Martian said, in an impatient tone that suggested he was tired of explaining to his more obtuse companion. “Those pale people are jockeying one into position — loads of fuel and machinery go into a space-operation of that sort — but we have to keep guard here to make sure that nobody is on the lookout. The Futuremen have been meddling around here, it’s one of the few habitable asteroids, you know.”

THE Earthman grimaced.

“The Futuremen are all prisoners, I hear,” he said. He sat down, close to Oog’s position. At his hip, within a foot of Oog, hung a holster with an atomic pistol.

The Martian went into an explanation of how Ul Quorn had communicated, by secret radio, with members of his old crime group who would do key assignments to prepare for the invasion. The trans-dimensional seizure of the asteroid had a twofold purpose, as he explained — to experiment on a small scale with machinery that later might operate against even major planets, and to seize a base at a convenient point from which to observe and move anywhere against the Solar System.

His companion asked for many explanations of astronomy, dimension-engineering and general strategy, and both were too busy to dream of what a creature like Oog might be doing.

Oog half-forgot his forlorn position at sight of the big pistol.

He was fascinated by such things, but the Futuremen took pains to keep them out of his way. Now he became Otho again, and stealthily drew near, hoisting the weapon from its holster with an effort. It was too heavy for him to examine easily, and he dropped it. A whim made him scramble into the holster, and then to become an image of the pistol.

“All I get out of it,” the Earthman was saying, “is that some sort of bad-dream people are coming from another dimension to this one, and that Ul Quorn, being hated and hunted through the Solar System, figures to profit by helping them. He’s making sort of dimensional stepping-stones at the Moon and here, and later maybe on Jupiter and Uranus. His friends are a little sick when the light shines on them, so he wants Solar System lieutenants, like us, to do the spade-work.”

“That’s it, in a nutshell,” said the Martian. “I refer to the thick shell of that nut you call a head.”

“Will you stop those insults,” grumbled the Earthman, getting up, “or I’ll —”

“You’ll consider yourselves under arrest,” said a voice that both men knew, and the Pseudo-Otho, too.

Captain Future came forward out of the undergrowth.

They stared. “How did you get here?” gasped the Earthman.

“Out of Dimension X, one jump ahead of that little world that’s supposed to come and coincide with this one,” said Captain Future. “You’re both my prisoners. You’ll come back to New York, in your own ship, and you’ll tell us some things we want to know about Ul Quorn’s plans.”