Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) Read Free

them to the Moon. The young scientist and his bride were slain. And the infant, Curtis Newton, had been left in the care of the strange trio, the Brain and the robot and the android.
     
    THEY had given him the wonderful education which had made Curt Newton not only a wizard of science but also the most daring and resourceful Planeteer who had ever taken the spaceways. The whole System had come to know him as Captain Future, a laughing, red-haired young Earthman who made it his mission in life to crush interplanetary criminals, and attempt to expand human empire to the stars.
    Joan’s brown eyes were eager. “There’s Tycho crater ahead — we’re almost there.”
    Old Ezra looked at her with a quizzical grin. “Sort of anxious to see Cap’n Future, ain’t you? Now in my time, women didn’t go followin’ their sweethearts all over space.”
    Joan made no retort, busy bringing the cruiser down into the giant ring of Tycho crater.
    Upon the sun-scorched floor of the mighty crater glittered a circle of smooth glassite. It marked the underground laboratory of the Futuremen. Joan landed close by it.
    Hurry, Ezra,” she urged, as she got into her space-suit.
    “Don’t rush,” drawled Ezra. “The Futuremen already know were here. They got devices that let ‘em know when any ship lands.”
    The veteran and the girl emerged from the cruiser and tramped toward a cement stairway that led down beneath the lunar surface into a large airlock. Startlingly, a giant metal figure suddenly loomed up to confront them.
    “It’s Grag,” Ezra said. “Didn’t I tell you they’d know we were here?”
    Grag was, to them, a familiar figure. To unexperienced eyes, he would have seemed awesome — a massive, manlike figure of metal, seven feet high. His giant legs and arms plainly hinted at the prodigious strength that was unmatched in the System.
    But Grag had more than mere strength. In his metal head was a complex mechanical brain that made him more than a robot. Intelligence shone from his two glowing photoelectric eyes. His mechanical voder-voice boomed in glad greeting.
    “Joan and Ezra! I thought it must be you when the alarms went. Nobody else would dare land on the Moon without permission.”
    They had passed through the airlock and now could take off their helmets, for they had entered the air-filled laboratory, the heart of an underground citadel of science.
    It was a big, round room, lit by a flood of sunlight from the glassite ceiling window. Towering machines and instruments crowded it. Doors led to store-rooms, living quarters, and the underground hangar of the Futuremen’s famous space-ship, the Comet .
    But the only occupants of the laboratory were the two queer little animals scuffling playfully in a corner — Eek and Oog, the pets of the Futuremen.
    “Where’s Curt?” Joan asked the big robot.
    “The Chief’s not here right now,” Grag answered. “But here’s Simon and Otho.”
    The other two Futuremen had just entered — Otho, the android, and Simon Wright, the living Brain.
    Otho was the most human-looking. Indeed, he was a human in almost every sense of the word except that he was an artificial man, one created synthetically in this very laboratory.
    He was of middle height, lithe and agile, with a pale white face whose sensitive and intelligent features were most remarkable for the slanted, jade-green eyes that always had sparks of deviltry and recklessness in them.
    “Nothing’s wrong is it?” Otho asked the girl and the old marshal quickly.
    Joan nodded soberly. “Something’s very wrong, Otho. It’s why we’re here.”
    “What is it, Joan?” the Brain asked in his metallic voice.
    The Brain was the strangest of the three Futuremen. Yet he had once been an ordinary human. He had once been Dr. Simon Wright, a renowned, aged master of science who had been dying when a miraculous operation had been performed. His living brain had been transferred into a serum case, in which it had dwelt,