Captain Future 16 - Magic Moon (Winter 1944) Read Free

were highly busy. In these mammoth metal buildings were made the stereofilm dramas that were televised to receivers all through the nine worlds. And busiest of all this morning was the studio devoted to the preparations that were being made for the epic “Ace of Space” expedition.
    Big cameras, krypton spotlights, powerful sun-arcs, and other highly complicated equipment of all kinds, was already being transferred from the studio to the space-ship which lay docked in the nearby spaceport. That ship, the Perseus, was a small liner which had been literally converted into a flying studio for this far-flung location trip. Sam Martin, the weary-looking head “prop” man, prodded his men as they trucked anti-heat equipment, special space-suits, and all the other paraphernalia to the ship. Before it was taken away, each item was alertly inspected by Lo Quior, the little, spectacled Martian technical director who was one of the industry’s greatest wizards in creating special effects.
    Jim Willard, cynical-looking young assistant director, strode across the shadowy, noisy main studio and entered a room in which a crowd of nearly forty young men were nervously waiting.
    They were all Earthmen, and all of them were tall and red-haired, the shades of their hair ranging from dark rust to flaming auburn.
    “All right, Mr. Lewis will look you over now,” Willard told the eager crowd. “Just walk past his desk and turn to face him.”
    Nervously, the crowd of young men followed him out into the noisy main studio. There they formed into single file and slowly walked past the producer’s desk. Jeff Lewis, director and producer of some of the most thrilling space-epics in telepicture history, was a middle-aged, stocky Earthman with a tight, wise face and brooding eyes. He dourly inspected the faces of the eager applicants.
    A chance to break into telepictures, to star in the biggest space-film ever made! No wonder Jeff Lewis’ talent-search for a young actor who looked like Captain Future had evoked such a great response. Every day, for the last fortnight, eager, redhaired applicants had come.
    Lewis curtly turned down one after another of the hopeful young men as they reached his desk.
    “You’re too short — height can’t be altered by make-up. And you won’t do because your skull’s the wrong shape — that’s another thing that would show. No, not you. Nor you.” One by one, the crestfallen rejectees filed away. The others still in line obviously were losing hope at this merciless weeding-out.
    But finally Lewis stopped one of them, a tall, pleasant-faced, shy-looking young fellow with dark red hair.
    “What’s your name?” the producer demanded.
    “Chan Carson,” replied the young man with trembling eagerness. “I haven’t had any acting experience, Mr. Lewis, but I hoped —”
    “We can teach a man to act, at least enough for this picture, but we can’t teach him to look like Captain Future if he doesn’t have a strong basic resemblance,” barked Jeff Lewis. “You have it, in a way.”
    The producer compared the photographs of Captain Future on his desk with Chan Carson’s face and profile. Jim Willard also eyed them.
    “The color of his hair and eyes are a little off, but makeup can fix that,” muttered Lewis.
    “His nose isn’t aquiline enough, but that too can be remedied. Skull-shape, weight, height and features are otherwise the closest we’ve come across yet.”
    “Who are you, anyway?” the producer asked Chan Carson. “What do you do for a living?”
    The tall, hopeful young man answered timidly. “I’m a clerk over in the Interplanetary Department Store.”
    “Good gosh,” muttered Jim Willard under his breath. “Are we going to use a clerk who’s never been off Earth to play Captain Future?”
     
    THE film director smiled. “Didn’t I take a big, dumb doorman from a hotel and use him as Black John Haddon in ‘Star Pirate’?” retorted Jeff Lewis. “I can teach a man to act,