Captain Future #10: Outlaws of the Moon E-Book

Edmond Hamilton

• Herausgeber: Thrilling
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Curt Newton leads his valiant band of Futuremen in the thrilling campaign to preserve a priceless Lunar heritage! The Captain Future saga follows the super-science pulp hero Curt Newton, along with his companions, The Futuremen: Grag the giant robot, Otho the android, and Simon Wright the living brain in a box. Together, they travel the solar system in series of classic pulp adventures, many of which written by the author of The Legion of Super-Heroes, Edmond Hamilton.

Leseprobe

Outlaws of the Moon

Captain Future book #10

by

Edmond Hamilton

Curt Newton leads his valiant band of Futuremen in the thrilling campaign to preserve a priceless Lunar heritage!

Thrilling

Copyright Information

“Outlaws of the Moon” was originally published in 1942. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Chapter I

Lunar Secret

“CAPTAIN FUTURE is dead!”

The rumbling voice of the big green Jovian space-sailor rose above the laughter and chatter and clink of goblets, in this crowded Venusopolis spacemen’s café. He eyed his little knot of companions at the bar, as though challenging them to dispute him.

One of the hard-bitten spacemen, a swarthy little Mercurian, shook his head thoughtfully.

“I’m not so sure. It’s true that the Futuremen have been missing for months. But they’d be a tough bunch to kill.”

“I’ll say they would!” chimed in a lanky, blue Saturnian rocketeer. “Why, Captain Future and those three queer pals of his knew the whole System like the back of your hand.”

“Yes, but this time they went outside the System,” rumbled the big Jovian. “Out into uncharted interstellar space, God knows for what reason. And they’ve never come back.”

He drained his goblet of black Venusian swamp-grape wine, wiped his lips and delivered his final word.

“They’ll never come back, now. Everybody’s given up hope for them. Somewhere, somehow, they met their deaths out there among the stars.”

“I tell you, Captain Future is dead!” Albert Wissler said with vehement emphasis to the pilot of the little space-cruiser, bearing the two Earthmen toward the Moon.

It was almost as though Wissler was trying to convince himself. The thin, middle-aged scientist had a faint uneasiness in his bony gray face and blinking eyes. As he sat there in the co-pilot’s chair, his fingers were knotted together nervously in his lap.

“There’s no danger in this with the Futuremen gone for good. Strike,” he repeated to the pilot.

Gil Strike, the pilot, a hawk-eyed young fellow with a mean face, shifted the space stick slightly before he answered.

“If those four devils did come back, and found us fooling around the Moon—” he began.

“Oh, you’re dodging shadows,” retorted Wissler impatiently. “The Futuremen may have been something to fear when they were alive. But their ghosts can’t hurt us!”

“I still wish I hadn’t let you talk me into this,” muttered the pilot, staring ahead with an uneasy frown.

Framed in the bridge window of their little craft, the Moon bulked big ahead. Most of its earthward face was in shadow, but the western limb was a dazzling scimitar of light. Upon that narrow illuminated sector stood out boldly the black blot of the Mare Crisium and the towering ringed peaks of Langrenus and Petavius.

Their ship fell toward the shadowed sphere. This nighted face of the great satellite was bathed in an uncanny green glow. It came from the great green globe of Earth, hanging in the starry heavens overhead. The iridescent light lent an added weirdness to the lunar landscape over which they flew.

The pilot’s hawk like eyes narrowed suddenly. “Just what do you expect to find there that’s so valuable, Wissler?”

“I’ve told you—the scientific secrets of the Futuremen!” exclaimed Wissler. “Future wasn’t just a mere space fighter and adventurer. He was a scientist, too, perhaps the greatest in the System. There’s been more than one rumor of his discoveries and inventions. If we found them—”

“We would appropriate the credit for them and get rich, eh?” said Strike sardonically. “Don’t spend the money yet, Wissler. I don’t see much chance of finding what you’re after, in all that.”

HIS thumb jerked toward the lunar landscape over which they were flying. Fifty miles below lay one of the wildest regions of the Moon, the tumbled, rocky wilderness of the great southwest crater region. In the green glow, the closely clustered craters were a forbidding spectacle.

And everywhere the lunar plains and deserts were cracked by deep fissures. It was known that far beneath them, the Moon was honeycombed by labyrinthine caverns and hollows caused by its unequal cooling ages ago. But daring men, who had attempted to explore the chasms on the surface of this dead world, had met death in the lunar landslides that were so fatally easy to cause.

Other early explorers, seeking to solve the baffling mystery of the perished Lunarian civilization, had themselves died on the glaring plains when their air supply became exhausted. The riddle of the Moon’s past seemed insoluble. There were apparently no valuable mineral deposits. So, from the earliest days of space travel, Earth’s wild satellite had been avoided and was still almost unvisited and unknown.

Strike muttered discouragedly.

“The Futuremen would have their home here well hidden. No one has any idea where it’s located.”

“We’ll find it,” declared Albert Wissler.

He had brought a delicate-looking instrument from a case. It had a needle mounted on a quadrant.

“This is a radioscope,” he told the pilot. “It’s extremely sensitive to the emanations of any radioactive substance. The thing is a recent invention.”

Strike frowned.

“What’s the good of prospecting for radium here? Everyone knows there’s no radium on the Moon. Future himself said so.”

“That’s just the point!” exclaimed Wissler. “There’s no natural radium deposit on the Moon. So if there’s any radium here, it must be in the Futuremen’s laboratory. They’d have some there for experiments.”

Strike looked at him with more respect.

“I get it now,” he muttered. “Wherever that instrument shows radium to be present, we’ll find the Moon laboratory?”

“That’s the idea,” nodded the thin scientist, blinking rapidly. “The radiograph is sensitive over a two-hundred-mile range. We’ll quarter back and forth over the surface till it shows something.”

He had brought a large Moon chart. Using it as a guide, the two men began their search of the lunar surface. The little cruiser flew northward at steady velocity, over the green-lit wilderness of craters. Clear to the northern pole of the satellite they flew, without the radiograph needle stirring.

Strike turned the little ship and flew south again on a more easterly course. Over the giant ranges of the Caucasus and Apennines they sped, close past the towering ramparts of Copernicus, on southward until they had passed over Tycho’s numerous battlemented peaks.

Wissler had watched the radioscope with nervous intensity, but its needle had not once moved upon the quadrant.

“Your idea’s good—except it doesn’t work,” came Strike’s sour comment. “How do you know Captain Future wouldn’t have rayproofed his place, so nobody could use this plan of yours to locate it?”

Wissler’s face fell.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “Maybe he did do that. But we’ll go on looking, anyway. We’ll try the other side.”

The pilot flew on southward past Tycho and they passed around to the other side of the Moon, the side that men had never seen until the beginning of space travel. This other side lay bathed in the blazing glare of the full lunar day. Its peak and plains and craters reflected the intolerable brilliance of the unsoftened face of the Sun.

“Fly north and we’ll quarter over this side in the same way,” Wissler said doggedly.

But the result was negative.

“Not a quiver of the needle,” murmured Wissler, blinking discouragedly at the radioscope.

“Your plan’s a washout—Future’s Moon laboratory must be rayproofed,” muttered Strike. He looked uneasily across the scorching, savage wilderness. “Let’s get away from this devilish world!”

“Not yet,” pleaded Wissler. “There’s Great North Chasm ahead—let’s try it. The Moon laboratory might be hidden down in it.”

The tough young pilot’s uneasiness increased.

“I’m not going to fly down into that ghastly hole! I’ve heard old stories—”

“Just superstitious legends,” sniffed the scientist. “All right, fly over it from this height, if you’re scared.”

The greatest wonder of the Moon was coming into view ahead. From east to west, for eight hundred miles across the barren lunar plain, extended a colossal, yawning chasm. It was forty miles wide. Its sheer rock sides dropped down into a darkness of unguessable depths.

Twenty miles, Wissler knew, was the average depth of Great North Chasm. Its bottom was a realm of perpetual, freezing darkness. But long ago the first space pioneers had explored it, and had found in it those remnants of strange and ancient lunar civilization that had given rise to so many superstitious tales.

“Good Lord, look at that!” yelled Wissler suddenly, his eyes bulging at the radioscope.

The needle of the instrument had begun to jerk in ever more agitated fashion on its quadrant dial, as they flew toward the great canyon.

“That means radium somewhere down there ahead!” exclaimed Strike excitedly. “Then we’ve found the Moon laboratory’s location?”

“No—we haven’t,” blurted Albert Wissler, through lips stiff with amazement. “No small amount of radium such as Future’s laboratory might contain could cause this on the radioscope!”

He stared at the pilot, his pale eyes blinking rapidly. “Only a great natural deposit of radium down under the lunar crust could cause this!”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Strike, startled. “Captain Future himself always said there was no radium on the Moon.”

“Future said that, and made the System believe it, but he was either lying or didn’t know about this deposit!” Wissler cried.

His thin face was flushed with overpowering excitement.

“Stay circling over the chasm—I’ll take directional readings to locate the deposit exactly.”

For almost two hours, the small space-cruiser droned in widening circles back and forth over the yawning blackness of the great canyon. Wissler feverishly noted each reading of the radioscope needle.

“That’s enough,” he breathed finally. “It won’t take me long to calculate it now.”

The pilot kept the cruiser circling idly on throttled rockets while Wissler made his excited calculations. Finally the scientist raised his head.

“One of the biggest radium ore deposits in the System’s history!” he choked. “But it’s deep under the lunar crust—more than fifty miles deep. There must be thousands of tons of it, to register so strongly.”

GIL STRIKE wet his lips.

“Thousands of tons?” he whispered. “Why, that much high-percentage radium ore would be worth billions!”

“More than that!” retorted Wissler exultantly. “This is the last big, virgin radium deposit in the System. And all the planets are clamoring for more radium now, to provide even cheaper atomic power.

Strike’s avid excitement faded.

“But what good will finding it do us? The System Government won’t let it be mined. They never give anybody a concession on the Moon, without Captain Future’s consent.”

“Ah, but Captain Future has been given up for dead now,” reminded Albert Wissler. “Besides, the people of the System aren’t going to have so high an opinion of Future when they learn of this radium he hoarded.”

The scientist’s blinking eyes gleamed.

“We’re going to take this discovery to Larsen King, the big planetary promoter. His corporation has power and influence. He’ll force a concession for us out of the Government.”

The pilot frowned.

“Perhaps King could, but he’d cheat us out of our share. I’ve heard how ruthless and tricky he is.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll see that King doesn’t trick us,” Wissler assured him. “And when his publicity machine gets through, the people of the System are going to have so low an opinion of the late Captain Future, the Government will be glad to throw the Moon open for exploitation.”

He flushed exultantly.

“Then we’ll not only share in the radium profits, we’ll also be able to search out Future’s Moon laboratory at leisure. Now hurry back to Earth, Strike, and we’ll start the ball rolling!”

The little cruiser darted up into the starry vault of space and roared urgently back toward the great, hanging globe of Earth.

The Moon brooded on in unbroken silence, unaware that a fateful, climactic chapter of its dark history had begun.

Chapter II

Star Rover’s Return

FAR, far out beyond the limits of the Solar System, billions of miles out in the shoreless sea of space that stretches toward the fixed stars, a small ship was racing Sunward. It moved at a speed approaching the velocity of light, yet in these great deeps it seemed only to be crawling.

Tears stood in Curtis Newton’s eyes as he sat in the pilot chair of the little Comet, gazing ahead at the bright yellow star of the Sun. He felt a warm, tremulous happiness that was choking. His tall, redheaded figure strained forward as though to go even faster. The glow of his quivering emotion lighted his tired brown face and haggard gray eyes.

“It looks so good,” he said unsteadily. “Just to see our own Sun again, after all these months—”

Months of danger and hardship were rushing through Captain Future’s memory now. Months in which he and his three comrades had quested beyond the stars themselves for a cosmic scientific secret.

They had risked the perils of uncharted outer space to find that secret, because it alone could make possible the supply of a new atmosphere to the withering little planet of Mercury. And they had found the secret! They were bringing back new life and hope for the System’s smallest world.

“It was worth all the toil and risks!” Curt Newton told the Futureman beside him. “Just for the blessedness of coming home again!”

Otho, who occupied the other chair in the little control room, exhaled a relieved sigh of agreement.

“I’ll say it is, Chief. I feel now like I’ll never want to go outside the System again!”

His heartfelt emotion was as human as Curt’s, even though Otho himself was not an ordinary human. For that matter, none of Captain Future’s three loyal Futuremen were completely human.

Otho was a man. But he had not been born of human parents. He had been created in the laboratory, long ago. A synthetic man—an android, showing that deep-buried strangeness only in the extraordinary litheness and speed of his rubbery white body, in the sensitive mobility of his colorless face, in the slant of his brilliant green eyes.

“I’ll bet the whole System’s wondering what happened to us!” he chuckled. “It’s been a long time. And we never did tell them just why we were going.”

Curt nodded thoughtfully.

“I thought it best not to raise the hopes of the people of Mercury. Though perhaps I should have told the President, and Ezra Gurney and Joan.”

The other two Futuremen were entering the control room. Two strange figures—stranger even than Otho—were Grag and the Brain.

Grag was a massive, manlike metal robot. A robot, not an automaton. His strength lay not wholly in his seven-foot body and mighty metal limbs. Behind the gleaming photoelectric eyes of his immobile face, inside his bulbous metal skull was a sponge-metal brain of high intelligence.

The Brain was different. He was not a man, either. But once he had been a man. Once, long ago, he had been Simon Wright, brilliant, aging Earthman scientist. He had been about to die, when his living brain had been taken from his body and placed within the square, transparent serum-case that was now his body.

He could move that strange body at will, gliding upon magnetic traction beams. He could emit other tractor rays that served him, as arms and hands. His microphone ears gave him the sense of hearing; and his lenslike glass eyes endowed him with keenest vision.

THE Futuremen—the three strangest individuals in the System! To another man, they might have seemed frighteningly alien. But to Captain Future, they were the most loyal of comrades. Their differing capabilities dovetailed with his own brilliant intelligence and skilled strength, to make them the most formidable quartet of adventurers alive.

The Brain’s rasping, metallic voice asked a question.

“Shall we inform the System of our successful quest at once?”

“I want to get home first,” Curt Newton admitted, flexing tired shoulders. “It’ll be good to be back on the Moon again. Its loneliness and silence and peace are what we need.”

Curt felt in familiar territory now. He drove the little ship between the planets with a skilled, sure hand in the following hours. Earth and the Moon grew at last into a gleaming, unbalanced dumbbell ahead. The bright face of the wild satellite was the focus of all four pairs of eyes. It tugged nostalgically at Captain Future’s heart. It had been his home all of his life.

Curt Newton had been born on the Moon. His father, a famous young scientist of Earth, had fled there with his bride and with the Brain for refuge from ruthless enemies. They had built their laboratory-home beneath Tycho crater. In it, their experiments had created Grag, the robot and Otho, the android. And in it, the young husband and wife had met tragic death soon after the birth of their son.

Cradled in the shadow of lonely lunar peaks, the orphaned infant had been guarded by the faithful robot, the android and the Brain. They had watched over and loved the growing boy. They had given him marvelous scientific education and training, which had fitted him superbly for the hazardous life of crusading space-adventure he had followed since manhood.

Softly, on throttled rackets, the Comet dropped toward the Moon. Half of its Earthward face was in shadow. The little ship scudded low over the peaks of the Taurus Range, heading southward toward Tycho.

“There’s the Moon laboratory!” Otho exclaimed, eagerly peering.

The Comet was slanting into Tycho crater. At the center of the great crater’s floor gleamed an almost unnoticeable crumb of glassite. It was the glassite ceiling window of the underground laboratory.

Curt dropped the little ship to a spot near the camouflaged window. Disguised doors automatically unfolded upward, to disclose a roomy underground hangar. He brought the ship to rest inside it. The doors closed, air hissed in. The Futuremen were home at last.

Curt Newton stretched mightily as they emerged from the ship.

“First I’m going to sleep a week,” he grinned tiredly. “Then I’m going to doze a while.”

“Sure is good to be home again,” rumbled Grag, as they strode along a subterranean passage from the hangar. “I wonder where Eek is.”

They entered the main chamber of the Moon laboratory. It was a circular room of large size, illuminated by the flood of sunlight that came through the ceiling window. It was crowded with the scientific paraphernalia of the Futuremen, with telescopes, spectroscopes and the like. This main laboratory was surrounded by a ring of smaller chambers.

OUT of one chamber scampered two queerly different little animals—the pets of the Futuremen. Oog, who was Otho’s mascot, was a meteor mimic—a fat, doughy little white beast with strange powers. Eek, Grag’s pet, was a moon-pup, a gray, bearlike little animal with chisellike teeth and claws and bright, black eyes.

The moon-pup belonged to a species native to the Moon, the so-called Moon Dogs, which were, almost the only known life on the dead satellite. Those fierce and much feared Moon Dogs could exist on the airless world, for they did not breathe. Their strange bodies extracted nutriment from the metallic ores they dug for food, their bodies being of inorganic silicate flesh. They haunted certain gorges and mountains of the Moon.

Grag solicitously cuddled this little gray Moon Dog pup, which he had caught and tamed.

“Did you miss me, Eek?” the robot rumbled fondly.

Captain Future chuckled.

“Those little pests wouldn’t miss you in a century, as long as their automatic feeding mechanism here kept functioning.

“That’s not so,” Grag said indignantly. “Eek gets lonely when—”

A bell rang sharply across the laboratory. Curt Newton stiffened at the sound.

“That’s the ship-detector’s alarm!” he exclaimed to the Brain.

He strode toward a tall mechanism in a corner, whose front was a panel of telltale dials. It was an ingenious device long ago installed by the Futuremen to give warning of any spaceship that approached the Moon. Curt studied the intensity and directional dials with keen eyes. They indicated by an aura-effect, just where upon the Moon any ship landed.

“It shows two ships landing inside Great North Chasm, over on the other side of the Moon,” Curt said, puzzled. “Now why in the world would any ship land there? Nothing’s there but those old Lunarian ruins.”