Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941) (14 page)

Otho comprehended what had happened. Oog had seen a space-compass in the window of the supply shop and, with his usual desire to mimic everything he saw, had transformed his unique shape-shifting body into an exact duplicate of the instrument.

But howls of derisive unbelief greeted the Earthman’s story from the other space sailors along the bar.

“You were plenty drunk, to imagine a thing like that!” they jeered.

The big Earthman mopped his brow.

“I guess I must have been, at that. But look — the critter has disappeared!”

The Earthman reached a shaking hand toward one of the wine jugs.

“I do need a drink now!” he said hoarsely. “When a fellow sees a thing like —”

He suddenly emitted a yell of surprise. The “jug,” as he touched it, had changed back into Oog. A babel of amazed cries went up in the room.

Otho grinned.

“It’s all right. This is a meteor-mimic.”

That explained it. Nearly all these far-ranging space sailors had heard of the rare asteroidal creatures with the power of mimicking anything.

“For a minute, I thought I was space-struck!” declared the big Earthman relievedly. “The drinks are on me for that one, boys!”

THE Venusians called for the swamp-wine of their native world, and the Mercurians for rock-brandy.

“Good old Earth whisky for me,” ordered the Earthman, and then turned to Otho. “What’s yours, Uranian?”

“Jovian fire-liquor,” Otho ordered nonchalantly.

They stared at him.

“Say, that stuff’s bottled lightning,” protested the big Earthman. “One ounce of it, and you think a meteor’s hit you. Two ounces, and you think you’re a meteor yourself.”

Otho nonchalantly took the glassite bottle of the colorless, most potent liquor in the System. He tilted it to his lips and drank until the bottle was empty.

“It’s kind of weak, but has a nice flavor,” he said blandly.

They gaped, waiting for him to collapse. Nobody had ever heard of a man drinking more than a few drops of the stuff without dropping. But the android’s synthetic body was designed to possess super-normally high metabolism. He could drink almost anything without harmful results. In fact, Otho preferred a diet of pure inorganic chemicals to ordinary food.

“You think that’s
weak?”
gasped the Earthman. “Name o’ the Sun, what would yon call a real drink?”

“Well,” Otho answered judicially, “a glass of wine with a strong shot of radium chloride in it makes a nice beverage.”

“Radium chloride?” gulped the Earthman. “I’ll be blasted!”

Otho was enjoying himself. The android loved to mix with human beings while in disguise, to be accepted as one of them.

The Earthman was speaking to the waiter.

“Give my Uranian friend what he wants. A shot of radium chloride in wine.”

The waiter goggled, then obeyed. The whole crowd of hard-bitten space-men watched in awe as Otho raised the concoction to his lips.

Otho had a few doubts, himself. He’d never tackled anything so strong in the chemical line, and maybe even his metabolism couldn’t handle it.

“Your health, gentlemen,” he announced, and drained the glass.

“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it,” muttered a Venusian.

Otho felt a queer glow inside him. It seemed that for once he had taken on something that was having effect on him. He found himself a little unsteady on his feet, for the first time in his life. But he also felt a sensation of extreme warmth and well-being.

A quarter-hour later, after two more radium-chloride highballs, Otho was wobbling at the bar with his arm around the big Earthman’s neck. They and the other sailors were lustily but uncertainly rendering a space song, roaring out the choruses at the top of their voices.

A hand whirled Otho around. His misty vision discerned that it was old Ezra Gurney who stood there.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a space-struck kiwi!” swore Ezra. “We wait for you to come back with those sextants, an’ you’re here gettin’ crocked. It’s a good thing Simon sent me after you!”

“Hello, Ezra, old pal!” cried Otho. “Have a radium-chloride highball with me. Bes’ drink in the universe!”

“Radium chloride?” cried Ezra. “Holy sun-imps, is that what you’ve been drinking? You come with me!”

He dragged Otho out, the android calling back farewells to the crowd. The cool night air cleared the mists from Otho’s brain as he and Oog followed Ezra back to the Planet Police station, and into the
Comet.
And he was normal enough to hang his head when Ezra told the Brain and Joan where he had been found.

“You’ve disgraced yourself, Otho!” stormed the Brain. “Curtis and Grag may be in danger, and you delay our going after them by this idiocy.”

“I guess you’re right,” Otho muttered. “But I didn’t dream the stuff would affect me like that, or I wouldn’t have touched it. I was just trying to show off by drinking it. I’ll never do it again.”

It was a chastened and penitent Otho who helped the Brain make the finishing touches on the dual space sextant.

“If everything’s ready, let’s start for that radite cavern at once,” begged Joan anxiously. “We don’t know what’s happened to Curt.”

“We’re going to start — we’d have been gone a half hour ago if it hadn’t been for Otho,” rasped the Brain.

OTHO meekly took the controls of the
Comet,
while the Brain poised beside the dimension-shifter.

“I’m shifting right over into the co-existing universe now,” Simon called. “All clear on the sextants, Otho?”

“All clear,” the android called back.

“Stand by for a shock, then,” muttered the Brain. “Here goes.”

Projecting a tractor-beam from his case, the Brain flung the switches. At once a terrific shock of force tingled through them all.

Their senses cleared. The
Comet
was now floating in an empty abyss of space, with nothing in sight but distant, burning stars.

“The other universe!” Ezra Gurney whispered awedly. “It don’t seem real!”

“Start her moving, Otho,” ordered the Brain. “Bring us to position 16-443 — 57-398 — 135-40 on the sextants.”

Otho obeyed. He sent the
Comet
flying through some few miles of space, then stopped it at the indicated position.

“We’re now at a spot coincident with the radite cavern of our own universe,” announced the Brain. “I’m shifting back over.”

Again they felt the terrific shock of the dimensional-thrust forces that hurled them back across the fifth-dimension gulf. Then they found the
Comet
poised inside a big, gloomy cavern.

It was the radite cave, deep in Uranus in their own universe. They saw a foaming river rushing through the center of the cave, and beside the river a small collection of metal shacks among which krypton-lights were still burning.

“That’ll be Quorn’s workshop!” the Brain exclaimed. “Head right down on it, Otho. Ezra, stand ready to use that proton cannon.”

The
Comet
swooped down, ready for action. But the place appeared deserted. There was a big, empty ship cradle, but no one around it. Beyond it lay a small space ship.

“Quorn’s gone!” rasped the Brain as they emerged from their craft. “We’re too late to stop his treasure expedition into the other universe!”

“Isn’t that Quorn’s little ship over there?” Ezra demanded.

“Yes, but that’s only the small ship stolen from Skal Kar, which he’s used up till now,” Simon retorted. “You can see that Quorn’s been building a bigger dimensional-ship here, as we figured he would.”

“Look, there’s Grag and young Johnny!” cried Otho.

Out of the little ship which they were discussing had emerged two figures — the great metal robot and the tough Earth youngster.

“Where’s the chief?” Otho cried to the robot.

“Gone into the other universe with Quorn’s men, disguised as one of them!” groaned Grag. He told of the hazardous journey of Captain Future and himself down through the caves, and of Curt’s stratagem. Grag continued, “Quorn’s big new ship, the
Nova,
took off and vanished into the other universe before I could run out from hiding! I’d have done something even though the chief had ordered me to stay hidden, but there wasn’t time. I’ve been inspecting Quorn’s older, small ship to see if Johnny and I couldn’t use it to follow into the other universe. But Quorn had taken the dimension-shifter out of it to put into the
Nova.”

“Curtis took a long chance, disguising himself as one of Quorn’s men,” muttered the Brain. “I don’t like it. The Magician of Mars would be hard to fool for long.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Joan cried anxiously. “Why don’t we get started into the other universe after them?”

“I’ve heard of girls chasing after men,” drawled Ezra, “but I’ll bet you’re the first that ever pursued a man into another universe.”

Joan paid no attention, in her anxiety and dismay. The Brain was speaking in his metallic, incisive voice.

“We’ll have to stock the
Comet
with radite before we go. The fact that Quorn fueled his ship with radite argues that it is a vast distance in the other universe to the treasure. We’ll need super-power.”

Grag and Otho labored intensively in the next hour, digging out masses of radite from the outcrop of blue shining mineral. Johnny Kirk valiantly toiled to help carry it into the
Comet.
Finally, the bins of the ship were crammed with the super-powered radioactive fuel.

“All right, we’re starting,” declared the Brain as they gathered again inside the ship. “Stand by, everybody.”

He operated the dimension-shifter. As its force hit them, they passed again through a brief interval of reeling darkness.

Then, again, they found the
Comet
floating in the abysmal starry spaces of the co-existing universe. They stared at the distant, glowing stars that blazoned the firmament in an unfamiliar diadem. A dismaying fact was entering their minds forcefully.

“Now that we’re in the other universe, we don’t know where to go to follow Quorn and the Chief!” blurted Otho.

The crushing realization had borne home upon them that they had no idea where Ul Quorn and his band had gone in this vast and alien universe.

CAPTAIN FUTURE realized his peril, as the World of Frozen Life began to revive around him. He was alone and without weapons, hopelessly marooned by Ul Quorn on this dangerous planet. And as it grew sunnier and warmer with the passing of the eclipse-night, all the weird creatures and plants around him were emerging from their frozen hibernation.

Already the two enormous green reptilian monsters between whose frozen bodies Curt had hidden were stirring ominously. Hastily, he leaped out from between them. He darted back into the concealment of a thick grove of the green tendril-trees. The trees and the grass and moss beneath his feet were also regaining life and were no longer brittle and frozen.

Curt Newton glimpsed the two eight-legged reptiles he had just fled from rising to their feet and yawning cavernously. To his great dismay, the scaly beasts began to sniff around the ground.

“Scented my trail!” Captain Future thought sinkingly. “And here they come!”

The two crocodilian-headed monsters were lumbering rapidly forward, on his trail. They emitted a hissing, blood-chilling roar.

Curt immediately leaped for a low branch of the towering tree under which he stood. Barely in time, he pulled himself up into its foliage. The two green monsters reached the spot where he had just stood, turned their ophidian eyes up at him. They snarled, showing appalling fangs.

Curt looked around him. Frozen birds that had been perched amid the tendril-like foliage of the tree were now coming to life also, flying off with screaming cries. The whole uncanny forest of this strange planet was waking to life with an increasing clamor of cries.

To add to Captain Future’s dismay, he discovered that he shared the tree with a giant climbing snake. Its — boa-like, oily black body had a dozen pairs of very short legs, and its head was round and bulldog-shaped. Its sluggish blood apparently made it slower to awake than most life here, for it was just beginning to writhe and stir on the branch opposite Curt where it had slept.

“This tree is going to be a pretty crowded place in about five minutes,” Curt thought with grim humor.

He looked sharply around. There was no other tree near enough for him to reach by jumping. The hissing, snarling green monsters below prevented escape by the ground.

Hot white sunlight now flooded the whole weird forest. The black climbing-snake had opened filmy eyes, and was regarding Captain Future with an unwinking stare. Then the creature began to slide its massive, oily length across the tree toward him.

“If I only had my proton pistol, or an atomic bomb,” Curt wished futilely. “A bomb? Say, that’s an idea!”

He yanked out of his belt-kit the little fluoric hand-lamp he always carried there. Its current was produced by a tiny atomic battery. Curt began hastily working to “short” the battery.