Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) Read Free

them out of this building now. I’ve had calls from headquarters on the other planets, and the people there are rioting too, calling for Doctor Zarro to be given full emergency authority.”
    Carthew’s lined face whitened.
    “Haven’t you been able yet to locate this Doctor Zarro?” he cried. “If we could arrest him and stop those inflammatory broadcasts of his —”
    The stocky commander shook his head.
    “We’ve been unable to find Doctor Zarro’s headquarters. His broadcasts are on a new-type wave that we can’t track down. We’ve tried to trail the ships of his Legion of Doom, but they always manage to give us the slip in space.”
    “What about Jons and Gellimer and all the other scientists who vanished?” Carthew asked. “Have you learned anything?”
    “No, sir.”
    North Bonnel turned haggardly to his superior.
    “What are we going to do, sir? If the public terror increases like this, the Government will be in Doctor Zarro’s hands in a week!”
     
    JAMES CARTHEW’S pale face set. He looked out through the eastern window of the tower room, at the fun moon that was rising majestically in the heavens like a great silver shield.
    “There is one man who can smash Doctor Zarro’s plot, if anybody can,” he muttered. “I did not want to call upon him before this, for he is not the kind of man to be annoyed with matters the regular authorities can handle —”
    The secretary stiffened. His lips trembled.
    “You mean — Captain Future?”
    “Yes, Captain Future,” the President said, his eyes still fixed on the rising moon. “If anybody can stop Doctor Zarro and his Legion, Captain Future and those three weird comrades of his can do it.”
    He turned abruptly, desperate determination written on his kindly, bewildered face.
    “Televise an order to have the North Pole signal-flare set off at once, Bonnel!”
    A half hour later, amid the frozen wastes of eternal ice at the North Pole, there blossomed a huge flower of flame as a great, dazzling magnesium flare was detonated.
    Far out in space that brilliant beacon was visible. Throbbing, winking and blinking, it cast its beams out through the void in silent, urgent appeal.
    “Calling Captain Future!”
    Calling the great, glamorous foe of evil, to a struggle with the mysterious Doctor Zarro’s plot against misled humanity!
     

     
Chapter 2: The Futuremen
     
    A BARREN, deathly white waste stretched across the surface of the Moon. Beneath the glare of the blazing sun, the lunar plains rolled in eternal silence toward the colossal craters that towered like menacing jagged fangs. Upon this desolate world there was no air, no sound, and no human life — except in one place.
    Upon the floor of Tycho Crater glittered something like a round crystal lake. It was a big, glassite window set in the lunar rock. Underneath that window, excavated out of the soft rock, was the artificial cavern that was the laboratory and home of the most famous man in the System — Captain Future.
    The big laboratory of the cavern home was bathed in light from the window above it. Here loomed mechanisms and racks of instruments in bewildering array. Giant generators and condensers that could furnish limitless atomic power. Big telescopes and spectro-telescopes whose tubes protruded through the lunar surface.
    Chemical and electrical apparatus of bewildering complexity and design. All the crowded equipment of the System’s supreme master of science!
    The two individuals working tensely in a corner of the laboratory could be heard over the throbbing of a machine.
    “Time to shift the electron-flow, Simon?” the deep, clear voice of one was asking.
    “Not yet, Curtis,” answered the other’s voice, a rasping, metallic, unhuman one. “Transmutation is not complete yet.”
    These two were working with a spherical machine into which the great atomic generators were pouring vast power.
    One of the two was a big, red-headed young man in a gray synthesilk zipper suit. His