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

your deaths.”
    “Can’t you just leave us here in the wreck?” Captain Future asked, as he kept up his surreptitious tapping.
    The Uranian shook his head sorrowfully.
    “No, no, it wouldn’t be wise to leave you alive, possibly to give information to the Patrol. I’m surprised... Get your hand away from the microphone!” He had detected the signaling.
    Curt Newton realized the game was up. There was just one chance left, and he took it. His hand reached for the proton-pistol inside his jacket with blurring speed.
    Too late! Ru Ghur, whose atom-gun was already in his hand, had too big an advantage for even Curt’s phenomenal draw to overcome.
    But the fat Uranian didn’t shoot. He merely struck with viper-swiftness, his weapon’s barrel crashing against Curt’s skull.
    “Grab him — no, don’t kill him yet!” Ru Ghur was shouting to his men. “I want a look at him first.”
    The Uranian’s followers were men of almost every planetary race — brawny green Jovians, thin Saturnians, wizened, swarthy Mercurians, vicious-looking Earthmen. Pirates, outlaws, all of them.
    Curt Newton felt them pinion his arms, without being able to resist.
    “Hold his face to the light here,” ordered Ru Ghur. “I want to know who this chap is who’s so clever in trying to trick poor old Ru Ghur.”
    His small, bright eyes ran over his prisoner, from head to foot. He saw a six-feet-four young Earthman whose lean body was that of a fighting man; dark, curly hair, a space-browned, handsome face; and gray eyes that now were dazed and clouded.
    “No ordinary telaudio operator would be so clever,” Ru Ghur was murmuring. “Nor would he look so familiar to me.” Ru stopped suddenly, his black-eyes narrowed to pinpoints. “Ah,” he said, “I might have known.
    “Old Ru Ghur’s wits must be wandering, or I’d have recognized him at once in spite of that dyed hair.”
     
    A TWITCHING of his flabby cheeks alone betrayed his intense excitement.
    “There’s blind justice in the universe, after all,” he said softly. “A justice that has brought into my hands the man who so cruelly wronged me.”
    “Who is it, Chief?” asked the thin gray Saturnian who was holding Curt’s left arm.
    “You’ll find out later, Kra Kdol,” said Ru Ghur. “Put a space-suit on him and take him over to the Falcon . The rest of you get out that radium.”
    “Why bother taking a prisoner?” grumbled the Saturnian. “I can blast him right here, and save trouble.”
    Ru Ghur’s voice rose to a whine. “If you do, I’ll cut you into ribbons — and soft-hearted old Ru Ghur would hate to do that.”
    Curt Newton had heard their voices as though from a great distance. He was only dazedly aware of the raiders hastily putting a space-suit on him, and hauling him into Ru Ghur’s flagship.
    When his sense cleared he saw that he had been taken into the main cabin of the raider cruiser, and bound in a recoil chair. His head aching violently, he looked around.
    The cabin was almost a laboratory. Scientific instruments, some of them unfamiliar even to Captain Future’s trained eyes, crowded it.
    Through the port-holes he glimpsed raiders hastily bringing aboard the square lead cases of refined radium ore.
    And his dominant emotion was disgust with himself. His scheme to find the radium raiders had ended disastrously.
    “A fine bright Planeteer I am, to fall into their trap while I was setting one of my own,” he muttered. “But how was anyone to know that Uranian devil was alive and mixed up in this thing?”
    He ignored the peril of his own situation. He knew the depth of Ru Ghur’s hate, and realized that if the Uranian had not killed him instantly, it was because he had something worse in mind. But Captain Future lived by the fatalistic, fearless creed that had been bred into him by the Brain, the robot, and the android. Until death stopped him, no danger to himself would swerve him from a fixed purpose.
    “One sure thing,” he muttered,