Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941) Read Free Page B

reappear as he pleases, and that’s too much for me!”
    “Then you’ll have the President call Captain Future?” Joan Randall asked eagerly, her dark eyes glowing.
    “Yes, blast it, I will,” swore the enraged Commander. “Come along.”
    James Carthew, the gray-haired President of the Solar System Government, had his offices in the topmost suite of Government Tower. He listened gravely as Halk Anders blurted out his request. The Commander concluded bitterly: “So I’m asking you to call Captain Future, though it’s an admission of my own failure.”
    “No, Commander,” denied the President quietly. “You’ve done all anyone could do. The cold fact is that Ul Quorn’s distorted scientific genius makes him invulnerable to the ordinary Patrol methods. The System has only one scientist capable of combating that criminal.”
     
    CARTHEW rose to his feet.
    “Captain Future isn’t home on the Moon now. He and the Futuremen left weeks ago on a research expedition. They did not say where they were going. We will have to call them by the red torpedo!”
    Carthew led the way up a small stairway to the little square deck that was the very topmost tip of Government Tower. Only two men were allowed to land their ships on this deck — the President and Captain Future.
    It was magnificent up here in the darkness between the wind and the stars, the brilliance and splendor of the greatest city in the System spread far below. The great avenues were like rivers of blue-white krypton light, flowing northward to the space-port.
    Carthew stepped toward a thing in a special cradle at the rail, a six-foot metal torpedo that looked like a miniature space ship.
    “Captain Future left this here,” he explained to Anders. “He said that when he was not in his Moon-home and so could not be reached by our North Pole beacon, this thing would find him.”
    He touched a button upon the side of the torpedo. Then he stood hastily back from it as red fire jetted from its lower end.
    Swoosh! With a bursting gush of crimson flame from its stem, the metal cylinder soared skyward at incredible speed. It blazed across the heavens like a tiny red comet. In a twinkling it was gone.
     
    JOAN RANDALL looked after it with brilliant eyes.
    “I wonder where it’s gone?” she murmured. “I wonder where Curt and the Futuremen are now?”
    “Wherever they are, they’ll be zoomin’ back here soon,” muttered old Ezra confidently.
    Halk Anders put a doubtful question to the President.
    “Who is Captain Future, really? Oh, I know I’ve worked with him and his three Futuremen, the Brain and the robot and that android, in more than one case. But I’ve never yet learned just who he is and where he came from and how he acquired his mastery of science.”
    James Carthew hesitated before replying.
    “That’s a story known only to Ezra and Joan and myself — and one other. But I don’t think Captain Future would mind if I told it to you.”
    The President looked off into the windy darkness as he spoke.
    “A generation ago there was a brilliant young scientist here on Earth. His name was Roger Newton. He had made certain valuable scientific discoveries that were coveted by an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. To escape Corvo’s plots, young Newton fled to a refuge on the barren, lifeless Moon. With him went his young wife and his colleague, Simon Wright.”
    “Simon Wright?” echoed Halk Anders in surprise. “You mean the Brain?”
    “Yes, the Brain,” nodded Carthew. “Wright had been a famous, aging scientist here on Earth. Newton removed his living brain from his dying body and placed it in the serum-case which it still inhabits.
    “Roger Newton and his wife and the Brain built a laboratory-home on the Moon under Tycho crater,” he continued. “There they created two intelligent living creatures — Grag, the metal robot, and Otho, the synthetic android. And there was born Newton’s son, Curtis.
    “But Victor Corvo pursued them to