Captain Future 04 - The Triumph of Captain Future (Fall 1940) Read Free Page B

microphone ears.
    Once he had been a famous Earth scientist. His brain had been removed from his dying body. Now it lived and thought in that square case, yet only Captain Future was a greater scientist than the Brain.
    “We may be able to slip through an opening in the coma,” he rasped to Curt. “But if the coma touches our ship, it means sure death.”
    “Okay, we’ll try it,” Curt Newton declared. “Once we’re inside, we can land on that solid nucleus and explore. I’ll tell Otho.”
     
    THE young, red-haired scientific wizard shouldered forward from the main laboratory cabin to the control room in the bow. Otho, the android, manipulated the control throttles. Grag, the robot, was playing with a small gray animal perched on his metal shoulder.
    “I’ll take the throttles, Otho,” Curt announced. “We’re going to try to slip inside the coma.”
    “Devils of space!” swore Otho. “That coma’s heavily, charged. If it touches us, we’ll be blasted into electrons!”
    Otho was an android, a synthetic man, who had been constructed artificially in a laboratory years before. His body was made of rubbery white synthetic flesh, yet completely manlike. His head and face were hairless but definitely human, and his slitlike green eyes sparkled with a reckless light. Craziest of all daredevils, swiftest and most agile of all men alive, was Otho.
    “Last time we went meddling too close to a comet, we almost got scragged by those electric things inside it,” he reminded Curt.
    Grag, the robot, spoke in his booming voice.
    “If Otho is afraid, we can leave him here, Master.”
    “Afraid?” Otho sputtered furiously at the robot. “Why, you perambulating junk-pile —”
    Grag sprang erect at that remark. The robot was huge — a manlike metal figure seven feet high, with mighty arms and legs, and a bulbous metal head. His metal face was made especially strange by his luminous photoelectric eyes and mechanical speech apparatus.
    Grag the robot was the strongest being in the whole System, but he was also intelligent. He keenly resented Otho’s scoffing reference to the fact that he was made of metal. That was the one thing Grag couldn’t stand being chaffed about.
    “I’ll stretch your rubber neck out ten feet and tie a knot in it,” he boomed angrily at Otho. “I’ll —”
    “Cut it, you two!” commanded Captain Future. “Isn’t it dangerous enough hanging onto that comet, without you two feuding again? I’m damned if I know why I’m crazy enough to go careering through the System with a space-nutty outfit like this bunch.”
    Curt’s voice was stern, but there was a glimmering humor in his gray gaze as he severely eyed the robot and the android.
    The little gray animal on Grag’s shoulder was glaring at Otho with bright, hostile eyes. Eek, the little moon-pup from Earth’s satellite, was a siliceous, mineral-eating, non-breathing creature which Grag had adopted as a pet. Eek could see thoughts telepathically. Now it echoed its master’s anger with Otho.
    Captain Future had taken the throttles. He depressed one, steering the little ship closer to the flaring comet.
    “Hang on, you two,” he commanded over his shoulder, as the rockets blasted louder. “We’re heading for that coma.”
    The comet was an appalling spectacle as the ship of the Futuremen drew nearer to it, with rockets throbbing steadily. The whole firmament before them seemed a sheet of glowing electrical flame.
    Even through their ship’s super-insulated walls, the radiant electric force penetrated, Curt’s red hair suddenly bristled. A violet brush of sparks sprayed from the walls, and particularly from Grag’s metal body.
    “Look at the electrical potential Grag’s working up!” exclaimed Otho, shouting with laughter. “We’ll be able to stand him up in a corner and use him for an electrostatic battery.”
    “I don’t like this, Master,” complained the robot. “And Eek is scared.” He patted the cowering little