Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) (3 page)

He clanked out into the open. Five faces turned to stare at him.

“Here comes one of the Futuremen!” cried the man with the Martian clothes, and his voice struck a responsive chord in Grag’s memory.

“I know who you are!” roared Grag in return challenge. “Aren’t you —”

“It’s Grag, the robot!” interrupted the speaker. “He’s strong but stupid. Trap him!”

A ray from somewhere played. There was a clang and a vibration. Darkness enveloped Grag as if dark water had closed over his body. The ray caused five plane surfaces of metal to close around him — four as walls and a fifth as a roof above. He was like a very large and grim rabbit caught in a box trap.

He stood still, great metal legs braced, huge spading-forks of hands doubling into fists at his sides. After a moment, his photo-electric eyes gauged the small chamber which had clamped around him. He moved — and opposite him something else moved.

Grag peered at it. This thing in the trap with him was as big as himself, a burly, oversized human shape, as tensely cautious as himself. Plainly it was an enemy, a guard, sent to subdue him.

“Huh!” grunted Grag. “The champion, are you? Bully of the gang? I’ll fix you quick!”

He shifted his feet, lifted his left hand and cocked his right, assuming the boxing stance.

At once the stranger fell into a like posture of defense.

“So you’re left-handed!” said Grag. “A professional, eh? All right, come out punching and I’m going to knock your head off into your own lap.”

He sprang and the stranger sprang to meet him.

Grag drove his left at the stranger’s head. It landed with a solid ringing bang as he shifted and threw his right. Both punches scored, and he jumped backward, expecting to see his opponent, down and helpless in a crushed heap.

But the burly figure opposite him was bobbing and weaving without the slightest sign of injury. Grag’s fiercest blows had not won!

“That was only the overture before the main performance,” Grag taunted. “What’s the idea, dodging around like that? Come on and fight.”

He rushed, and his enemy met him halfway. Grag threw a dozen battering-ram blows. It was an attack that should have battered down a brick wall but he felt no wilting under his smashing knuckles. Winding up with all his metal-muscled strength, he planted a final super-robot blow. He landed, and the impact of his own blow sent him reeling back out with a resounding clangor of metal joints. Then he raised up, glared, and whooped for joy.

This time his giant adversary was down!

“That does it!” boomed Grag.

He scrambled to his feet.

BUT as he did so, the other figure also was getting up, a little unsteadily.

“Hey!” Grag thundered. “Don’t you know when you’ve had enough?”

He moved forward cautiously. So did the stranger. Grag peered — and flinched. The stranger flinched, too.

“It’s my own reflection!”

And so it was. For the first time since the fight had begun, Grag paused to study what he saw. The burly metal figure was an exact duplicate of himself.

“It’s a mirror!” he cried. “No, not a mirror — a surface of gleaming metal! I’ve been fighting my own image!”

“The farce is over,” said a twittery voice above him.

He glanced up. A small port was open in the ceiling-plate of the trap. Several pallid faces, with large glowing eyes, were peering down at him.

“The gas,” said another twittering voice.

“Grag is a metal robot,” said the man in Martian clothes. “Use the magnetic beam. It will lock his iron arms and legs.”

A pale light stabbed down from above. Before Grag could dodge the beam struck him and the robot became helpless as though frozen in ice — a silent gleaming statue.

From above two of the pale men swung down. Grag, whose brain was not affected by the ray, heard them call to their companions overhead. Coils of wire were flung down.

Deftly the two strangers wound this stuff around Grag, and he was soon swaddled like an insect in the web of a mighty spider.

“Turn off the ray,” called one of his captors.

It blinked off. Grag felt his powers return.

He strove against his bonds, but they were strong and snug, and beneath them he was helpless.

“Take away the trap,” was the next order, and the walls fell away. Grag saw the dim upper wing of the corridor, and several more pale people ringing around him. But the man whom he had recognized was not present.

“Forward march,” a captor bade him. “Your legs aren’t tied.”

Grag decided to act as Captain Future would have acted — pretend submission, watching meanwhile for a chance to escape. He obediently clumped up the stairs, through an airlock door to the outside — the outside which he knew so well.

But Grag did not recognize it now. He had expected to step out into the familiar great expanse of rocky floor, its great central pinnacle of sky-aspiring stone, its horizon-ringing crater wall.”

And this was all changed. He had emerged upon soil, crumbly and a little damp. The lock-door of the laboratory was familiar, but it opened into a little clearing among weird, fleshy plants that must make a jungle of immense extent — he could not tell, for things were dim here, too.

The sky was of a greenish gloom, and around him hung what the Moon had not known for eons — air, heavy air, with a slight warm breeze swaying the plants. He heard a distant trilling that might be insects or birds.

Far off a mighty movement crashed among the jungle growths.

“Why,” he stammered. “This isn’t the Moon — not our Moon!”

“Right, and wrong,” said one of the twittering pale captors. “It’s the Moon, yes, but it is not your Moon. We’ve taken it for ours. And you’re looking at a very few of the alterations we have achieved.”

BY THE time the Futuremen and Joan Randall were back in the
Comet,
which still remained parked on the landing-stage atop Government Tower, Curt Newton had mapped out a plan of procedure. With their Moon laboratory gone, their best remaining equipment and files of experimental data were in the workshop of the trim-lined little space-craft. They were grouped around a table, littered with papers from a huge folder marked. “Extra Dimensions.”

“You talk as if Grag was still alive,” said Otho hopefully.

“I think they’ll keep him captive, whoever they are,” said the Brain. “He’s a masterpiece of scientific construction, and only scientists would be able to steal a whole satellite. As scientists, they’ll want to use him for their own purposes.”

Otho got up from where he sat. “Simon Wright, are you suggesting that Grag would turn traitor?” he asked fiercely.

“I said nothing like that, Otho,” said the Brain soothingly. “I know Grag better, even, than you do. I helped make him and train him.”

“Why should they grab the Moon?” inquired Joan.

“I think I know,” said Captain Future. “We Futuremen would understand and resist. So they moved to take away the Moon, and all of us with it. As it turned out, they got only Grag.”

“But we’ll get him back,” said Otho sternly.

“We have some data to help us,” resumed Curt, assembling papers. “Here are the researches of Harris Haines, who penetrated the fifth dimension and who lost his life there. Remember how we followed him? Here’s our report, too, of going into the dimension and returning. It’s something with which to work.”

“If we only had the benefit of Ul Quorn’s research and experience,” mused the Brain, dropping down to rest his crystal case on the table while his eyes on their flexible stalks studied the paper.

“Ul Quorn is dead, and better so,” said Joan, very grimly for so pretty a girl. “We all saw him blow into fiery nothingness as his ship fell into the sun.”

“But he was a master scientist,” the Brain said. “He had only one rival in mind, imagination and daring — Curt Newton. Even Ul Quorn admitted it.”

Curt Newton ignored the compliments. His gray eyes stared into space, as he remembered the conflict with his mightiest enemy.

“I recognized his powers, too,” he said. “Ul Quorn was brilliant and brave. Pity he wasn’t a good man, too. Well, as Joan says, he’s dead and disintegrated. We’ll take up this dimensional study again.”

“You think we’re attacked from the fifth dimension?” asked Otho. Curt shook his rumpled red head.

“No, what we explored of the Fifth Dimension didn’t show any science capable of stealing a world the size of our Moon.”

“Which, then?”

“We’ll find out. We still have that fifth-dimensional machinery — remember? And Simon’s been working on it for months.”

“Right, lad.” The Brain floated to where, against a wall, were set strange controls and gauges, with attached fabrics of machinery, the whole bolted to a small section of flooring.

It was more compact and intricate than when it had served to plummet them into a new universe and a decisive conflict with Ul Quorn, the mixed-blood son of Captain Future’s ancient enemy.

“Dimension travel,” amplified Simon’s flat-sounding resonator voice, “is only a matter of extension of the dimension-spanning power and observation of the space-time-dimension quotient at all times. This modification may not switch whole worlds, not even a ship the size of the
Comet.
But it can carry a smaller load — our life-rocket.”

“Which will hold one observer,” said Curt.

“I’ll be the observer,” put in Otho quickly. “I want to rescue Grag.”

“No, me!” begged Joan. “You’re all needed here to plan —”

“Sorry,” went on Captain Future, in the voice of authority he used to settle such arguments. “I’m commander. I go. Think I’d let one of you head into such a danger while I hung back?” He turned to the panel that led to the life-rocket chamber.

THE BRAIN had a suggestion to make. “There’s about a cubic foot of extra space, lad,” Simon Wright reminded him. “I speak for that. Something says this dimension-jumping will need both of us to observe.”

“Come, then,” granted Curt. “Otho and Joan, stay and observe here.” He paused at a stand, pulling into view a volume of notes. “Follow these. Perhaps you can develop even better gadgets, and we’ll be back and incorporate them into a real trans-dimensional counter invasion.”

He looked at Joan silently, tenderly. She was pale, but she smiled bravely. He started to say something, and did not trust himself. He strode into the life-rocket hold, with the Brain hovering close at his heels.

Joan looked at the notes, her eyes strangely bright.

“These say that the
Comet
must fly near the selected point — which means the point where the moon would be swinging in her orbit if there were a Moon — about three thousand miles off, and follow the path.”

“Thirty-seven and a half miles a minute,” amplified Otho. “That’s Moon’s speed in her journey around Earth. ready?”

They went together to the controls, and within minutes were seeking the indicated position in space. The
Comet
fell into the designated course and speed.

“Now,” said Joan, “what about Curt and Simon? Will — will we ever see them again?”

The android shook his high-craniumed bald head.

“It’s been swifter than light, this realization of what happened, and what must be done to fight it. That’s Captain Future for you. Only he could have puzzled it out. We’ve all gone with him into other dimensions, traveling in time — all the experiences that should have pointed the way. But he knew. Listen! The space-rocket’s cleared!”

Inside the tiny craft Curt and Simon had set up the dimension-shifting machinery. Curt steered, Simon observed and operated with his traction-beams.

“As before, no hint of gravity-pull to where the Moon should be,” he reported.

“Try fifth dimension — we’re fairly familiar with it,” said Captain Future, and he threw a lever.

There was a moment of blackness and physical convulsion; then their brains cleared. Simon’s flexible eye-stalks sought the gauges.

“No gravity reaction to indicate a satellite, or even a little lump of rock close to us,” clipped out the Brain’s resonator. “This point in the fifth dimension shows nothing but space.”

Curt threw over the lever further, further, further...

“No indications,” the Brain was saying. “Work back, lad, and not so fast. Remember how small a difference there is between dimensions. Again. Again... just a little click of the lever — hold it!”

Curt paused, hand on the lever.

“Yes?”

“Gravity indications strong,” the Brain reported. “I get evidence of a large body in this space. Distance, about two thousand miles. Pull shows a mass comparable to —”

“That’s enough — we’ve found the Moon!” cried Captain Future. Still gripping the controls, he bent to glance out of the forward port. “Look, Simon! there she is!”

They had found their lost home in space. But how different was the appearance of the Moon!

Gauge marks and gradations on the glassite pane of the port enabled Captain Future to compute quickly that here was a world spherical in shape, and approximately 2,000 miles in diameter — the size and shape of Luna, where his home was located. All else seemed different, however.