Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) (6 page)

She fairly dragged him to the
Comet’s
controls, and before he could frame another question, she and Otho were into the ketch and dropping down.

As they expected, a small plummet-way showed among the towers. The
Comet
could never have dropped into it, but the ketch could. They slid, like a bullet down the muzzle of a gun, to a small private landing stage, surrounded by dingy structures. Out they jumped.

“There’s the life-rocket,” said Joan, pointing. “Its hatch is open, the raft is empty. Where did he — or she, or whoever was in there — get to?”

“We’ll find out,” said Otho. “Look — half a dozen doorways to dives and bars. The trail may lead into, and through, any of them. I’ll start one way and you the other, unless you’re afraid.”

“When was I ever afraid?” demanded Joan.

She strode from the stage into a dingy establishment with a sign promising drinks from all the planets.

But there were only stupid barmen and more stupid customers inside, not the remotest sign of excitement or other evidence that a fugitive might have come in. Flashing her police badge on the proprietor, Joan made him conduct her through the little office, the kitchen and several rooms. She found no trace.

IN THE bar next door was only a pudgy half-breed Uranian, who had been drinking too much of his own wares. He happily allowed her to search, and was almost too admiring until Joan dropped her hand to the hilt of her proton gun.

The third bar had half a dozen customers. The big green Jovian who was serving them looked up at her as she entered. One of the customers leered and giggled. Another cursed.

“That’s one of them,” said the man who cursed, a brutal-faced Earthman. “I’ve seen her. A friend of Captain Future.”

“To be sure I’m a friend of Captain Future,” replied Joan, walking toward him. “And I’m here on his business. What —”

“Grab her,” said the Jovian, and closed his green paw on her elbow before she could draw the proton gun.

She strove frantically and with science, for from Captain Future Joan had learned many a grip and twist of wrestling, but these creatures were too many for her. They had forced her into a corner, and one of them was opening a door, when a hoarse voice hailed them from the entry.

“All of you roughing a lady! Is that the way you do things in this dive? I have a notion to bust yuh!”

The newcomer swayed a little on his feet, as if he had been drinking. His flying-clothes were disarranged, his face flushed, his mop of gingery hair disordered. Only Joan could recognize him as Otho, hastily disguised with makeup from the little kit he always carried. He came toward them, feigning a drunken truculence.

“I never did like fighting women,” he told the group.

One of them covered him with a proton pistol. Otho’s own weapon was out of sight. He lifted his hands warily, but watched his chance.

“Brave, aren’t you?” he jibed. “About six of you, but you need proton artillery against one man and a girl!” He spat on the floor in contempt.

“You don’t look hard to handle,” boomed the big Jovian, who seemed to head the party. “Get out of here!”

“Wait,” said one of the others. “He’s seen us grab her — and we’ve drawn guns. If he goes blubbering to any police, we’re finished.”

“I’ll bet you’re afraid of the police,” snarled Otho. “Afraid of the little boys of the junior space-scouts, too, even the babies in the orphanage! I came around here looking for life, tough specimens, real live bars, and I find sissies!”

“You’ll find a lump on your head,” threatened the Jovian.

Otho swung around to face him, still rocking on his feet as if unsteady.

“Oh, oh, what a big brave hero!” he taunted. “Loud-mouthing it, with all his gang of gunmen around him! I could deflate you down to an asteroid-dwarf in about six seconds if I wanted.”

The Jovian clenched a fist and darted it. Otho appeared to stumble just then, out of its way. He chuckled thickly.

“Let’s grab him,” said the brute-faced Earthman, and three of them advanced toward Otho. But the Jovian lifted a huge muscular hand.

“Wait! This space-tramp is saying things to me that I’ll take from nobody! He thinks I need a gang of helpers, does he?” Out darted a long arm, throwing open a door. “Come into the back room, you! I’ll hammer a little sense into that drink-drenched head of yours!”

“Drink, did you say? Sure!” And Otho lurched into the room beyond. The Jovian followed, closed the door and turned a key. He faced Otho again.

“Now —” he began, and scowled.

The drunken stranger was suddenly sure of himself, standing lightly and springily on his feet, fists lifted and ready for action. But the Jovian was twice Otho’s size. He thrust out his own left arm, long and muscle-knobbed. He had several inches the reach of this boaster, and was almost twice as big.

“All right, let’s start this battle!” he growled, and moved in, jabbing.

But Otho’s head whipped back. Otho’s elastic neck momentarily lengthened and writhed. The fist darted past, and Otho’s arm, equally elastic, shot out and seemed to grow about six inches. The Jovian growled as Otho’s knuckles barked his chin.

“Owww!” yelled Otho, as if he had felt the punch, and from outside came a laugh.

“Give it to him,” called one of the men in the bar. “You’d better grind him to meal, because if you don’t, we will.”

“Don’t worry!” bawled the Jovian, and advanced again.

BUT again Otho hit him. The Jovian blinked and snarled. How did this strange customer manage to outreach him. And Otho emitted another cry, as of pain.

More applause from outside, where the Jovian’s friends apparently foresaw the pulverization of Otho; and the huge green man, throwing all caution to the winds, rushed and grappled.

It was like grappling a dragon-eel of the Venusian marshes. The mighty Jovian arms clamped around Otho’s middle, which readily yielded to them, shrinking and writhing. Otho’s legs grew long and snaky, twining in turn around his enemy’s middle.

Otho’s sharp elbow drove under the spadelike chin, bruising the throat and driving the head back. Otho’s long, lightning fingers were everywhere at once, gouging, twisting, probing nerve centers.

The giant let go — he had to — and Otho, rallying his android sinews, put all he had into a roundabout smashing swing, not greatly inferior in power to Captain Future’s own prize punch. It smacked the point of the great green jaw, and the Jovian went down, cold and senseless, to quiver on the floor.

At once Otho whipped out his pocket transmitter.

“Ezra Gurney!” he called softly into it. “Drop down carefully, now — outside the window where I’m sending you a beam.”

He waited seconds, watching from the window. Gingerly the
Comet
lowered itself into view. A hatchway opened, and Ezra peered out.

“Quiet!” warned Otho. “Reach out, help me drag this man into the ship!”

They hustled the unconscious Jovian in.

“Strip him,” commanded Otho. “I want his clothes. Quick! And leave me in my own quarters.”

He pulled a variety of strange objects from lockers — make-up pigments, padding, a pair of boots with lifts that would give him height to approximate that of the giant he had felled. His hands, outdoing their own bewildering swiftness, rubbed chemical oil into his features, molding and altering.

Otho’s clear-cut profile vanished under cunning self-sculpture, took on the aspect of the stunned Jovian. Then a quick, smooth coat of green pigment, padding of body, arms, legs. He hustled himself into the garments taken from the captive.

“Take that specimen to your most secret cell,” he told Ezra Gurney. “Work on him with everything — arguments, truth-rays, everything. He’ll talk. He must talk. He’s one of the subordinate rats that threaten us.”

“But you and Joan,” protested the marshal. “Are you going to be safe?”

Otho shook his disguised head.

“When are the Futuremen ever safe? When did they ever try to be safe? Holy sun-imps, man, we’re fighting to get our Moon back!”

He turned his back on Ezra’s mystification and sprang through the window again. The men outside the door were pounding and yelling.

Slumping and puffing as though in semiconscious agony, Otho opened the door. “He — that stranger-beat me almost to death!” he moaned.

“So?” taunted a silky voice he remembered. N’Rala came into the room among the unsavory wastrels who held Joan a prisoner. “I’m glad I came back. It’s easy, from what the others tell me, to guess what happened. While your friends were taking every precaution to secure this aide of Captain Future — Joan Randall — you let Otho, in one of his disguises, make a sorry fool out of you!”

“It couldn’t be,” mumbled Otho. “He had hair and looked entirely different.”

“Otho is the greatest disguise artist of all the worlds,” snapped N’Rala, her beautiful eyes flashing. “He fooled you, beat you, and escaped. Thank the gods of space I returned. Ul Quorn is going on, but I return to advance headquarters with reports, and I’ll take this prisoner and you, too. You’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

Otho congratulated himself on not staring, gasping, or asking what strange cosmic freak had brought back Ul Quorn as an adversary. There was much he could not understand, but one thing was clear — he would be taken to the very root of the mystery, as one of the conspirators in disgrace.

“Go, one of you, to the life-rocket,” ordered N’Rala. “Bring the dimension-shifting apparatus. We’ll modify it to take a larger craft over.”

Otho faced Joan. She was bound and guarded. He attempted to cheer her by a stealthy wink, but she drew herself up, glaring at him contemptuously.

She mistook him for the Jovian who had gone into the room with Otho and locked the door. Again Otho fore-bore to show by his face the thoughts in his head. But he accepted Joan’s contempt as the greatest compliment his power of disguise had ever received.

EEK ate his way through the bonds of Grag first. Then he attacked the swaddling of Simon Wright’s brain-cage while Grag’s huge finger fumbled and pulled at the metal cordage that bound Captain Future.

“No knots,” reported Grag dolefully. “It’s all stuck together, with some quick-setting solder or flux. Here, Eek, have you set the Brain free? Then eat a third helping!”

He held his pet to the strands that crossed over Captain Future’s broad chest. Eating more slowly, for he was almost satisfied, Eek finally gnawed Captain Future to freedom.

“Now what?” demanded Grag, as Captain Future stretched and flexed his freed muscles. “Eek’s too full to nibble a way out through the bulkheads, even if he hadn’t had it drummed into him that he must never make a meal off of our furniture, tools or habitations. And the door” — Grag caught the handle and shook it experimentally — “I might be able to smash it, but that would bring them all around us.”

“We ought to get just one or two of them in here,” said Curt with a nod. “If we could conquer them separately, that’d help a lot.”

“Hsst!”
warned Simon Wright, hovering near the traplike window through which Eek had been dropped. “Already you’ve made a little too much commotion. I hear steps coming along the corridor.”

At Captain Future’s gesture, Grag drew himself up against the metal partition at one side of the door, while Future took the opposite side. They heard the lock-tumblers falling, the door opened, and one of the pallid guards peered in.

Like a flash Grag’s hand caught him around the throat, stilling at once his attempt to cry out. Lifting the creature by the scruff, as he would have handled a kitten, Grag whirled the body around his great round head as if to dash it to the floor.

“Don’t kill him, Grag,” said Curt quickly. He pushed the unlocked door shut while Grag lowered his captive. Curt eyed the captive.

“If you speak above a whisper, or even then without our permission, this robot will squash you to pulp. Understand?”

Gasping wretchedly for breath, the pale man made a gesture that he understood.

“Give him air, Grag,” ordered Captain Future. His own hand seized the misshapen shoulder of the prisoner, drawing him close.

“Now, answer truthfully — don’t stop to think of any lies. Who else guards out in the corridor?”

“Two more,” chirruped the pale man shakily.

“Armed?”

“Like me.” A three-fingered paw lowered toward a belt of weapons.

“Hold it.” Captain Future rapidly unbuckled the girdle and whipped it away around his own waist. “Now, what about the floor above? The way to the open?”

“Several there,” was the reply. “No guards, though. They’re waiting for a report back from Ul Quorn and his party, that went into the Strange Dimension to prepare.”

“Strange Dimension?” echoed Grag. “Where you came from?”

The grotesque head shook.

“No. Where you came from.”

“Of course, it’s the Strange Dimension to them,” offered the Brain, hovering near. “What now, lad?”

“Bind and gag this one.” Curt thrust a wad of the flexible metal cordage into the prisoner’s mouth. Grag helped bind the bony wrists and ankles with other lengths. Meanwhile, Simon Wright floated to the door, nudged it open a crack, and thrust forth an eye-stalk.