Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) Read Free

plate at a wide angle. Curt's bat slammed it unmercifully. As the ball shot high in the air, he started racing around the base path. But this time Otho fooled him. The android made an unbelievable leap of forty feet into the air and caught the speeding ball.
    "That puts you out, Chief!" Grag boomed triumphantly. "It's my turn at bat now."
    "Swell catch, Otho," Curt complimented. "I didn't think even you could leap that high."
    "It was nothing," Otho answered in a tone of weary disdain. "You just watch my pitching put Grag out in a hurry."
    Curt grinned as he took up the catcher's position. A game of rocket-ball with these two Futuremen was a perpetual row, he told himself, yet he had to do something to keep from getting bored.
    For weeks he had been getting more and more restless. In the past, when he had felt that way, he had set out on a jaunt in the Comet, to explore the previously unknown south polar ice wastes of Pluto, or to visit his friends, the queer Thought Masters on Neptune's moon, or some similar half-purposeless trip. Now he no longer was satisfied with that. He knew the System's nine worlds, thirty-one moons and countless asteroids so well that there was little new about them to attract him.
    Something new was what he wanted. He had been getting increasingly weary of the old and known, had felt a constant yearning of his adventurous spirit toward new frontiers of the Universe, new and unsuspected worlds. Other men might find a trip to one of the farther planets a wildly thrilling experience, but Curt Newton had been roaming those worlds since boyhood. He had, in fact, never seen Earth until he was almost mature.
    The story of Curt's birth and boyhood was the strangest saga in the System's history. A generation ago, his parents had fled to the Moon to protect their scientific discoveries from an unscrupulous man named Victor Corvo. With them had come Simon Wright, the brain who lived in a box, but who had once been a living man. They had built their combination laboratory and home under Tycho. Here their experiments had created Grag, the robot, and Otho, the android. And here, soon after Curt Newton's birth, Corvo killed his parents and was in turn killed by the Brain, robot and android.
    The three unhuman, superhuman beings had reared and educated young Curtis. Their combined instruction had made him not only the most skillful planeteer in space, but also the System's greatest scientist. For some time, Curt had devoted his immense abilities to a war against the criminals of the System. In that war against crime he had been given the name of Captain Future.
     
    NOW Curt's crusade to eradicate completely all interplanetary criminals seemed to have achieved its goal. His epic struggle against Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars, had finished off the last law breaker of major importance. He had no interest in smaller fry that the Planet Police could handle and the weeks of inaction had been making him restless. He had spent those weeks mostly in the deep scientific researches he loved, but now he was tired even of those. His adventure-loving soul felt a blind urge for new worlds to chart.
    "Hang it, the trouble with me is that I don't know when I'm well off!" he told himself impatiently, trying to dismiss the oppressive feeling.
    Otho had been elaborately setting the control of the rocket-ball and now was ready to release it.
    "Here it comes, Grag," he warned. "This is my special double-reverse-bob-and-weave ball."
    "Let it come," offered the big robot. "I'll murder it!"
    Otho released the rocket-ball. It shot forward in bewilderingly erratic flight, but Grag's bat smacked it and knocked it whizzing. The robot started lumbering around the base path, his metal limbs clanking. Otho, however, made another superhuman leap and grabbed the ball.
    "You're out!" he crowed, darting forward to pick up the bat.
    "Wait a minute!" Curt Newton called. "Let me take a look at your gravitation equalizer, Otho."
    Otho started to put up