Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) Read Free

frighteningly alien. But to Captain Future, they were the most loyal of comrades. Their differing capabilities dovetailed with his own brilliant intelligence and skilled strength, to make them the most formidable quartet of adventurers alive.
    The Brain’s rasping, metallic voice asked a question.
    “Shall we inform the System of our successful quest at once?”
    “I want to get home first,” Curt Newton admitted, flexing tired shoulders. “It’ll be good to be back on the Moon again. Its loneliness and silence and peace are what we need.”
    Curt felt in familiar territory now. He drove the little ship between the planets with a skilled, sure hand in the following hours. Earth and the Moon grew at last into a gleaming, unbalanced dumbbell ahead. The bright face of the wild satellite was the focus of all four pairs of eyes. It tugged nostalgically at Captain Future’s heart. It had been his home all of his life.
    Curt Newton had been born on the Moon. His father, a famous young scientist of Earth, had fled there with his bride and with the Brain for refuge from ruthless enemies. They had built their laboratory-home beneath Tycho crater. In it, their experiments had created Grag, the robot and Otho, the android. And in it, the young husband and wife had met tragic death soon after the birth of their son.
    Cradled in the shadow of lonely lunar peaks, the orphaned infant had been guarded by the faithful robot, the android and the Brain. They had watched over and loved the growing boy. They had given him marvelous scientific education and training, which had fitted him superbly for the hazardous life of crusading space-adventure he had followed since manhood.
    Softly, on throttled rackets, the Comet dropped toward the Moon. Half of its Earthward face was in shadow. The little ship scudded low over the peaks of the Taurus Range, heading southward toward Tycho.
    “There’s the Moon laboratory!” Otho exclaimed, eagerly peering.
    The Comet was slanting into Tycho crater. At the center of the great crater’s floor gleamed an almost unnoticeable crumb of glassite. It was the glassite ceiling window of the underground laboratory.
    Curt dropped the little ship to a spot near the camouflaged window. Disguised doors automatically unfolded upward, to disclose a roomy underground hangar. He brought the ship to rest inside it. The doors closed, air hissed in. The Futuremen were home at last.
    Curt Newton stretched mightily as they emerged from the ship.
    “First I’m going to sleep a week,” he grinned tiredly. “Then I’m going to doze a while.”
    “Sure is good to be home again,” rumbled Grag, as they strode along a subterranean passage from the hangar. “I wonder where Eek is.”
    They entered the main chamber of the Moon laboratory. It was a circular room of large size, illuminated by the flood of sunlight that came through the ceiling window. It was crowded with the scientific paraphernalia of the Futuremen, with telescopes, spectroscopes and the like. This main laboratory was surrounded by a ring of smaller chambers.
     
    OUT of one chamber scampered two queerly different little animals — the pets of the Futuremen. Oog, who was Otho’s mascot, was a meteor mimic — a fat, doughy little white beast with strange powers. Eek, Grag’s pet, was a moon-pup, a gray, bearlike little animal with chisellike teeth and claws and bright, black eyes.
    The moon-pup belonged to a species native to the Moon, the so-called Moon Dogs, which were, almost the only known life on the dead satellite. Those fierce and much feared Moon Dogs could exist on the airless world, for they did not breathe. Their strange bodies extracted nutriment from the metallic ores they dug for food, their bodies being of inorganic silicate flesh. They haunted certain gorges and mountains of the Moon.
    Grag solicitously cuddled this little gray Moon Dog pup, which he had caught and tamed.
    “Did you miss me, Eek?” the robot rumbled fondly.
    Captain