Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) (8 page)

“Don’t whirl around suddenly, N’Rala,” warned the flat voice of Simon Wright from just above her. “If you disobey me, I’ll have to drop my case on your head — un-gentlemanly but effective. Let that gun drop.”

For one starkly furious moment N’Rala thought of firing into the face of helpless Joan Randall. But a movement of the big green body she thought was Thikar distracted her. Her prisoner was silently extending his manacled hands, stretching the links between them as if for a target.

N’Rala aimed and sent a crackling spit of atomic force. The manacles broke apart.

“Jump them, Thikar!” she cried. “I’ll forgive you then.”

But the green giant stepped quickly and coolly forward. One of his hands snatched the weapon from her. “That completes this little scene of the comedy,” he said, in Otho’s voice. “How was my disguise, Chief? It had both N’Rala and Joan fooled.”

N’Rala uttered a most unladylike Martian curse, and her lovely shoulders drooped in an attitude of surrender.

“Stand back against the ship,” Captain Future ordered her. “Things are reversed — you’re our prisoner. Otho, you’re a genius of makeup.”

“Because he’s a natural, instinctive trickster,” rumbled Grag. “I knew who it was all the time.”

Otho paused in the midst of tearing off the padding that had made his lithe body seem gigantic. “So you’ve developed the mental ability to make second guesses, have you?” he snarled. “Some day I’ll make up as a robot and see if I can act as stupid as you really are!”

Captain Future, who had taken N’Rala’s belt and tool-pouch, was divesting Joan of her handcuffs. He looked up at the hovering Brain, and chuckled in genuine amusement.

“Like old times, eh, Simon?”

“Right, lad,” and the Brain’s resonator achieved something like a chuckle. “Each of them was as close to tears as an artificial life-form can get, while he thought the other was in danger or destroyed. Now they’re quarreling again! But Joan doesn’t look as if she wants to quarrel.”

“I don’t,” said Joan softly. “Curt, I didn’t doubt for a moment that you’d save me but I never thought it would be so prompt as this.”

“You’re not getting away,” said N’Rala, who had recovered her mocking smile and her self-possession. “If I don’t follow within ten minutes, they’ll be back to look for me.”

“The ship?” said Grag, taking a ponderous step as if to enter.

“If it should try to sail without clearing with the officer of the guard inside, it would be blasted before it was well above the ground,” said N’Rala. “I tell you that because I wouldn’t want to be blasted with it.”

“That’s probably true,” nodded Captain Future. “Here, Otho, put these bracelets I took from Joan on N’Rala. If you and Grag really want something to battle about, see which of you can keep closest watch on her. We’re getting out of here — on foot — in this jungle.”

HE TURNED to lead the way, but N’Rala hung back between her two guards.

“If I refuse to come?” she suggested mockingly. “Will you kill or punish me, Captain Future? Or am I right in diagnosing a weakness in you — hesitancy about rough treatment of women?”

“That’s easily fixed,” spoke up Joan Randall. From N’Rala’s weapon-belt, now worn by Captain Future, she took the atom gun. “I’ll be your guard,” she told N’Rala. “And I’m no gentleman to be taken advantage of. As a woman, N’Rala, I have no qualms about blasting you with this pistol. March!”

N’Rala marched.

Captain Future led the way, with the Brain soaring high above him, to spy over the blunt-boughed tops of the jungle. Next came N’Rala, guarded by Joan. Grag followed, and Otho, sensitive of ear, held the rear-guard position. The little cavalcade moved along a narrow trail, winding here and there, past the resting place where the Futuremen had paused to watch the landing of N’Rala’s ship. At last they came to a little stream, narrow but swift and apparently deep.

N’Rala chuckled despite herself, and Captain Future paused on its very brink. He stooped, and sniffed.

“Taint of acid,” he announced. “Don’t step in it, anyone. Thanks, N’Rala, for warning me by that chuckle.”

He flexed himself suddenly and sprang across. The two women were not such jumpers, but Simon Wright dropped down, and used his traction beams to help first one, then the other, to make the leap safely. Otho bounded over like a rubber ball, and the heavier, clumsier Grag ripped up treelike stems to make himself a bridge.

At Captain Future’s order, he tossed those bridge-poles into the stream itself. They floated only briefly. The liquid of the stream crumbled and dissolved the growths, like sugar lumps in water.

Joan, watching, gave a little shuddering shrug.

“I saw those plants wriggle, as if they were alive. What an awful world, with deadly acid for its natural liquid! We’ll die of thirst.”

“I doubt it,” said Captain Future. “N’Rala doesn’t seem parched. Come, draw into the clearing yonder. Simon can watch if any pursuit comes, and that stream will delay it. I have some questions to ask of N’Rala.”

“Think I’ll answer?” challenged the Martian girl, sitting on a little hummock of mosslike fibers.

“You’ve already told us some things,” said Otho. “One, when you thought I was that big Jovian and suggested that you’d operate on my brain for your own purposes, not Ul Quorn’s.” He glanced at Captain Future, “Chief, I don’t think that N’Rala and Ul Quorn are quite as closely allied as they used to be.”

“I don’t think so, either,” contributed the Brain, from his overhead position of hovering sentry. “Remember that Ul Quorn was a little savage when we mentioned N’Rala to him.”

“How clever!” sneered N’Rala. “You don’t seem to need to ask questions. You deduce so much.”

“Which is half an admission that we’re right,” commented Captain Future. “I take it that there is more than one viewpoint about this conquest of the Solar System, then.”

“Why worry?” she flung at him. “You’ll not survive the conquest, so it won’t make any difference to you.”

“I wish that N’Rala would try to escape,” said Joan rather dreamily. The gun stirred in her hand, and N’Rala lost her smile.

“Captain Future, Joan Randall has always hated and resented me,” N’Rala said to Captain Future in tones of appeal. “I remind you that I’m a prisoner of war, and deserve certain considerations. Don’t let her find an excuse to torture or kill me.”

“I thought that she was so sure Ul Quorn would come and
get
her back,” put in Grag.

“Not Ul Quorn,” snapped N’Rala, still nervous. “Someone bigger and more terrible than Ul Quorn ever dreamed of being. The Overlord.”

She paused, aghast at what she had told. Now it was Captain Future’s time to chuckle.

“I gather from that remark that this Overlord is a new friend and ally of yours, closer than Ul Quorn,” he said. “I get a hint of attraction — even romance. Maybe through you we’ll reach the heart of this riddle, and pierce that heart through.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” N’Rala whispered, deadly and chill.

A moment of silence; then, from overhead came a movement.

“Look out!” shrilled Simon Wright’s resonator.

QUICKLY Captain Future was on his feet and looking up. He had acted even before Otho, who is generally called nimble beyond all human creatures.

Future looked up into a canopy. From somewhere in the surrounding thickets broad-trunked, blunt-boughed growths had sprouted from a hundred places. Long, lean, upshooting tendrils, interlaced at the top, were writhing at them. It was like a sudden assault of sky-climbing snakes.

Within the conical pen thus whipped together, fifteen or twenty yards overhead bobbed the gleaming rectangle of Simon Wright’s brain-box. He stabbed upward and outward with his traction-beams, holding at bay the latticework of tendrils, that sought to close in upon those caught inside.

“I’m an idiot,” groaned Captain Future. “While worrying about human enemies, I didn’t foresee sub-human enemies.”

Joan blasted at the living, constricting lattice with the atom pistol that had belonged to N’Rala. The charge tore a momentary glowing hole. Then other tendrils whipped across, larger and thicker and closer twining.

“Useless,” said N’Rala, the calmest of them all. “I’m a worse idiot than you, Captain Future. I’d heard of this, and I clean forgot, because I was captured. Now we’re all captured.”

Grag had rushed at the network where it sprang from the ground. His mighty metal paws seized and tore away stem after stem. But other plants sprang into being, from the ground or from other stems, bigger and tougher, closing the hole he made. Otho caught his shoulder and hustled him back.

“You’re only making it stronger,” he scolded. “It — or they — can sense prey where there’s resistance. Look how it closes in.”

The Brain dropped down to hover at Curt’s shoulder. The other four humans also clustered close. The entire party seemed to be in a wickerwork tent or teepee, closing in from all sides.

“You knew about this thing, N’Rala?” said Captain Future. “Tell me about it. Quickly!”

“It’s a parasite growth, springing from spores,” replied N’Rala. “The natives know how to avoid or defeat it — I don’t. Ul Quorn made several laboratory tests. When proper prey — flesh, living flesh — is in the vicinity, the tendrils spring up on all sides and close in. Then,” and the thought evoked in N’Rala a shudder that neither capture nor threats had produced, “they feed and give off spores for a new attack.”

Otho was frowning. His long forefinger tapped his high temple.

“They eat flesh, crush and absorb it,” he summed up. “And a violent defense only makes them grow stronger. But to get around them might be possible.”

“They’re too close-woven for that,” Grag began to say, but Otho had darted toward one segment of the fast-shrinking tent where no attack had been made. The living mesh showed loosest and coarsest here.

“Maybe he will get clear!” exclaimed Curt. “He’s thinner than any of us — and he’s synthetic, not organic — well done, Otho!”

The android had dived, head first, at the widest opening left. It seemed little more than a foot square, yet at the moment of diving he elongated and shrank his elastic tissues. His head and shoulders were through on the instant. There was a quick curving of tendrils to seize the rest of him, but he writhed like a serpent, slenderized his waist and legs, and kicked clear on the outside.

“Deserting us,” groaned Grag.

“Don’t say that about Otho,” commanded Curt sternly. “He’s escaping. And if the rest of us perish, he may still defeat Ul Quorn and these invaders. But look at that mesh!”

The cone had narrowed to a scant dozen feet across and a height of about the same extent. But as Otho escaped, it seemed actually to grow more spacious at that point.

“It’s trying to catch him,” said Grag. “He’ll be gone, though, before they can expand sufficiently.”

That part suddenly glowed, as if caught with cold fire. The tendrils writhed, shrank, made wider gaps in their mesh.

“Grag!” Otho was bawling. “Let Grag tackle it there!”

The big robot needed no second bidding. He charged bull-like at the weakened spot, and at his blows the strands broke and crumbled as if charred. In a moment he was struggling free. His companions rushed after him in thankful haste.

Otho stood beyond, playing the powerful glowing light of a captured weapon on the tendrils. They wilted under the beams.

“I remembered that we were in the twilight,” he said quickly to Curt. “N’Rala said that the natives — those pale people — could cope with the tendrils, and I counted on their tools or weapons being workable. And they are. It was like scorching grass with fire.”

“Light is deadly to anything in this dim dimension,” added Simon Wright. “Look how the jungle growths have been marred by it.”

“Stay with us, N’Rala,” bade Joan, pointing her atom gun at the Martian girl, who had edged apart from the rest.

For answer, N’Rala hurled something, the manacles, from which she had managed to slip her lithe Martian hands. They struck Joan, staggering her for the moment, and the atom pistol missed its mark. N’Rala ran in among the squashy growths, with Joan after her.

“Come on!” snapped Curt, and sprang in pursuit. Simon Wright soared above and ahead of them. Otho, nimble and intent, sped at Curt’s elbow and stayed there. Grag, huge and heavy, brought up the rear.

They had not far to go. Ahead showed a clearing. At its very edge, Joan had caught up with N’Rala. The Martian girl fought furiously, but Joan was subduing her with a clamping wrist-and-shoulder lock that had been taught her by Captain Future himself. The Futuremen hurried up, surrounding the two girls.

“Set the manacles tighter,” began Captain Future, and got no further.

For the solid-seeming ground of the clearing suddenly seethed and churned. The footing gave way, like a rug whipped from under. They all fell, splashed into liquid, and found themselves swimming for their lives — all but Grag, the last to come.

He stood among the fringe of jungle, and was able to see what had happened. The clearing was a pool or lake, thirty or forty yards across, and its surface had been masked by a light coating of soil particles. But now it churned and seethed, and not only with the swimming forms inside.