Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) (12 page)

AS CAPTAIN FUTURE’S disabled rocket flier plunged down toward the ice-fields after being hit by the Legion cruiser that had attacked them, the red-haired adventurer’s brain was working with lightning rapidity. The blast of the cruiser’s atom-guns had not completely destroyed the ship, thanks to Curt’s swiftness of reaction in dodging. But the whole tail and rocket-tubes were shorn off, and icy air was screaming into the wrecked flier as it tumbled toward destruction, turning over and over.

Curt saw just one chance to avoid death in crashing impact below. While Tharb the Plutonian howled in panic, and Grag clutched amazedly to a stanchion to keep from being thrown out, Captain Future took the one chance left him.

He threw himself back to the stern of the falling flier. The single cyclotron that powered it was still there, unharmed. Clinging to it, Curt tore away the output power-tubes that had led to the now vanished rockets. Then the young wizard of science scrambled back to the controls.

“Master, we’re going to strike!” yelled Grag.

Turning over and over, they were now very close to the gleaming ice. All that had happened had taken but seconds.

Curt’s tanned hands grabbed the throttles. He waited an instant until, in its turning, the falling flier’s stern was downward. Then he opened all throttles wide.

From the cyclotron, down out of the blasted tail, raved an uncontrolled blaze of atomic energy. That terrific fan of force, hitting the ice-field only yards below, checked the fall of the flier by its reactive push.

Next moment the crippled craft, turning on over, lost the braking effect. But it had been enough to slow their fall. They hit the ice with a crashing impact that stunned Curt Newton partially, but that did not destroy them as it would have except for his stratagem.

Curt got to his feet. Still a little groggy from the experience, he saw the hairy Plutonian and the big metal robot staggering up likewise.

“The Legion cruiser is gone!” Curt announced, peering up through a shattered window of the wrecked flier. “They thought we were as good as dead when they saw us fall.”

“We are as good as dead!” yelled Tharb, the hairy Plutonian’s big phosphorescent eyes dilated with terror. “Listen to that!”

Curt became aware of a thunderous, cracking, crashing sound that seemed growing louder and nearer by the minute.

“The Marching Mountains!” Tharb howled. “We fell right in their path!”

Captain Future’s heart skipped a beat. He sprang out of the tangled metal wreck, the other two following.

In the brilliant moonlight, he stood petrified for a moment on the rough ice, staring northeastward. He and his companions looked frozenly up at an awful peril thundering down on them.

The Marching Mountains! The vast thousand-foot high range of icy hills that was but one of similar glacier-ranges which perpetually moved around the planet!

THE forefront of the appalling walking ice-range was a towering, gleaming cliff that was only a few hundred yards from them. And the whole cliff was advancing on them, moving at an incredible speed of many yards a minute, pushed forward by the vast glacial masses of ice behind it. From the icy moving cliff fell great bergs and masses of ice, over which the main range moved crushingly as it came on.

“Out of here!” Captain Future yelled, “We’ll have to run for it — this way!”

“There is no use running from the Marching Mountains,” cried Tharb hopelessly. “We cannot get out of their path and they will soon overtake us.”

Yet the hairy Plutonian joined Curt and Grag as they started in a dead run away from the crackling, crashing glacial range.

It was characteristic of Captain Future that even as he and the robot and the Plutonian fled over the moonlit ice-fields from the pursuing death, his keen mind was trying to solve the problem of how that Legion of Doom cruiser had come to attack him.

It must be, Curt thought tensely, that Legion cruisers had been in hiding somewhere near the city Tartarus. And Doctor Zarro had ordered one, perhaps by televisor, to follow Captain Future and destroy him and his companions.

But how had Doctor Zarro even known that he was here on Pluto? No one in Tartarus had known it except Ezra Gurney, and the three men he had called in to ask for information — Victor Krim, the Charon fur-magnate, Rundall Lane, the warden of Cerberus prison, and Cole Romer, the government planetographer.

Could one of those three be Doctor Zarro? None of them had looked like the dark, burning-eyed prophet. But Curt, remembering the mysterious, baffling way in which the white-furred creature had been disguised as an Earthman, wondered flashingly if Doctor Zarro’s impressive appearance was not a similar strange disguise.

“The ice gains on us, Master!” Grag’s booming voice yelled over the ominous crackling roar from behind.

“Faster, Grag!”

“It is useless!” cried Tharb a moment later. “See — we can go no farther!”

Captain Future’s heart chilled as he saw what lay ahead in the moonlit ice-field.

It was the salt river Phlegethon, which they had been following northward when the attack bad come. A wide, deep racing torrent whose roar could be heard even above the deafening thunder of advancing ice from behind.

They reached the icy shore of the torrent. One glance showed Curt that to swim that wide, raging deep flood was impossible.

Tharb turned to them, and there was a certain fatalistic dignity in the hairy Plutonian’s bearing.

“This is our end,” he said, and stood gazing dully back at the oncoming glacial cliffs.

“Our end — nothing!” Curt yelled, his gray eyes flashing in the moonlight. “Grag, help me push one of these ice-cakes into the river! If we get one of these cakes into the river, we can float down on it and maybe get out of the path of the glacier-range before it reaches the river! That current is terrific — it will take us miles in a few minutes!”

THARB, spurred out of his despair by the thin chance suggested, sprang with Curt toward a great flat ice-cake that lay partly in the water. They pushed with all their strength to slide the mass into the river.

Grag’s physical strength was almost unlimited. Beneath his tremendous push, and that of Tharb and Curt, the big cake began to slide slowly into the water. Then it moved faster.

“Jump onto it before it floats clear!” Curt yelled. “Hurry, Grag!”

The flat ice-cake was already swirling out into the super-swift current, as the three comrades leaped.

Curt Newton and Tharb landed in a heap on the frozen surface. Grag, following, sprang a little short. The big robot’s metal body began to slide over the edge of the cake.

Curt gripped his metal wrists, and pulled mightily. He just dragged back Grag’s great figure in time.

“Dig hand-grip holes out of the ice!” Captain Future yelled to his companions. “It’s going to be hard to hang onto this thing!”

“See — the Marching Mountains come on!” Tharb cried fearfully. “They will reach the river before we are past them!”

“Maybe not,” Curt gritted. “Though it’s going to be close.”

The scene was like one of nightmare. The three great moons of Pluto, looking down upon the silver-lit, frigid world. The wild salt river raging northward through the ice-fields. The gigantic, portentous range of glacial white cliffs advancing thunderously and inexorably toward the river, from northeastward.

And in the center of the racing, whirling river, the big ice-cake riding the current at dizzying speed, and bearing on it the clinging trio — the fur-clad form of Captain Future, the crouching, hairy shape of Tharb, and the huge, gleaming metal robot.

The icy range of the Marching Mountains was now within a hundred yards of the river, bordering it like a towering white cliff, for many miles. Curt could see, far ahead, the end of the walking range. Would they pass it before it stamped over the river and crushed them?

His ears were deafened by the combined roar of maddened waters and thunderous crashing of the advancing glacier. The crazy pitching of the ice-cake they were riding threatened each moment to dislodge them from the precarious hand-holds they had scratched out of the ice.

Now the advancing cliffs were within a few yards of the river. They towered over the racing current in ominous, on coming precipices. Great masses continually fell from them, and were crushed under by the main advancing glacial bulk.

Curt glimpsed the end of the looming cliffs, a little ahead. The current, as though sensing their dire peril, leaped faster. The ice-cake shot past the end of the moving range, at the moment that great white chunks were already falling on them from it.

“We’re safe from the Mountains, anyway!”

Curt cried encouragingly.

“Master, look at that — the ice mountains conquer the river!” Grag cried wonderingly, staring back.

CAPTAIN FUTURE glanced back and saw that the vast glacier was grinding on across the river, marching steadily on.

“Don’t those Marching Mountains fill up the river every time they cross it?” he cried to Tharb.

The Plutonian shook his head.

“No, for most of the river’s real current runs in deep underground channels, and as soon as the mountains have passed, the current clears away the ice left above.”

They were soon out of sight of the appalling walking ranges. But the thunder of waters in their ears was still loud, their speed still slowly increasing.

“We can’t get off this ice-cake until the current slows down,” Captain Future shouted.

“It will not slow down — it will rush faster, in the great rapids that flow into the icy sea!” Tharb cried.

“The icy sea? The Sea of Avernus?” Captain Future shouted. “That’s right — this river Phlegethon does flow into that ocean. And your people live beyond that sea, you said?”

“They do, but I doubt now that we will ever see them!” yelled the fearful Plutonian.

The river rushed them on. And presently Curt Newton glimpsed that ahead there was a sheer brink beyond which he could see nothing.

“Here’s the rapids! Hold tight!” he yelled.

The ice-cake was to the brink in seconds. For a moment it seemed to hover there, terrifyingly poised.

Curt had a glimpse in that moment of what lay beyond. A long, icy slope, down which the river rushed in foaming rapids toward a great, moonlit, heaving ocean that stretched far out into spectral, shrouding mists.

“Here we go!” cried Captain Future, with a reckless laugh.

The ice-cake plunged down into the rapids. The next moments were a jumble of overwhelming sensations, of foaming white waters seeking to wash them off their precarious raft, of a dizzy spinning around and around, of a sickening sense of falling into thunderous abysses.

Then as they clung, they became gradually aware that the whirling and pitching of the ice-cake was dwindling, that the roar of waters was rapidly lessening.

Drenched and half-frozen, Curt raised his head. They were out on the moonlit ocean — their ice-cake had been borne out onto the heaving waves with unbelievable quickness by the rapids. Now their forward motion was slowing down.

“We had better get to shore quickly,” said Tharb apprehensively. “This ocean teems with monsters who would have us at their mercy on this clumsy mass of ice.”

They started paddling with their hands in the icy water, urging their makeshift raft back across the moonlit ocean to the nearest shore, from which the river had ejected them.

Their progress was painfully slow, but Captain Future’s hopes were mounting elatedly. If Tharb’s grandfather, old Kiri, could tell the dwelling-place of the queer, white-furred Magicians, it was almost sure that the secret base of Doctor Zarro and his Legion would be found in that same place.

GRAG suddenly stopped paddling. “Look, master!” The robot’s metal hand pointed toward a ripple that was approaching them through the moonlit water — a ripple that was ominously deliberate and steady in its advance.

“It’s a bibur — one of the greatest and most terrible sea-monsters of our world!” yelled Tharb. “Paddle away!”

But their attempt at retreat was too slow to be of any avail. That rippling came closer, and they could clearly see it was caused by an enormous body swimming beneath the surface.

Then out of the moonlit sea a huge living thing broke surface. It was of brontosaurus bulk, its immense, sleek, wet, furry body urged forward by webbed paws, its snaky neck ending in a snarling head of great fangs and blazing red eyes.

Captain Future’s proton-pistol flashed into his hand. He set it at highest power with a flick of his finger, then leveled it, pulled trigger.

The thin, pale beam hit the base of the bibur’s neck and a sizzle of smoke rose from the wet fur. But the creature, not seriously hurt, came on with a hoarse shriek of rage that sounded like a steam-whistle.

“You can’t kill it!” Tharb cried wildly. “Their hide is too thick for any weapon to penetrate!”

The enraged bibur was coming on through the water at express-train speed. Curt shot again, this time at one of its eyes.

The blazing right eye of the monster vanished as the ray hit it. The furred terror uttered another terrific shriek, and stopped to claw furiously at its head with a giant webbed paw.

“Some of my people are coming!” Tharb suddenly screamed, pointing back out across the moonlit ocean. “They’ll help —”

Curt turned for an instant, saw a small fleet of boats of some kind hastening toward them, flaring torches at their bows. Then a booming cry from Grag made him swing back around.

The bibur was resuming its interrupted charge. The monster, its small brain enraged to the last pitch by the pain in its eye, foamed through the water and reared up above the ice-cake and its three riders.

Captain Future loosed his beam, driving it steadily into the empty eye-socket of the creature. And what he had hoped for, happened. The potent beam pierced through bone into the brain.

The upreared bibur fell forward, dying. But its out-flung paw hit the ice-cake and tipped it. In an instant, all three of the companions were in the icy water.