Captain Future 24 - Pardon My Iron Nerves (November 1950) Read Free

gone I felt a reaction. Such angry emotion was not good for me in my present state. Again I thought I was feeling faint.
    “Thanks, Curt,” I said. “If you don’t mind — I think I’d like to sit down.”
    “But you’ve never sat down to rest in your life —” he began and then said, “All right. But don’t use a chair. This motor-support table will hold you.”
    His face had a queer strained look as though he were suppressing his emotions. I realized how deep must be his concern.
    “Don’t worry about me,” I reassured him weakly. “It’s just that psychoses like these react on the nervous system.”
    Simon Wright had remained, hovering silent and motionless as is his way, those cool lenslike eyes of his surveying me. His rasping metallic voice was unsympathetic when he spoke.
    “This is all foolishness,” he said. “I know your nervous system and brain better than you do and the idea that you could get such a derangement is nonsense.”
    It was like Simon to say that. He has a great and brilliant mind but I’m afraid he lacks the ordinary human sympathies that the rest of us have.
    “Better let me handle this, Simon,” said Curt. “Grag is really upset.”
    He went with Simon toward the Brain’s private laboratory. His low voice floated back down the corridor to me.
    “— imitativeness, really — long association with humans — cure him by —”
    It was evident that Captain Future at least had a keen anxiety about my condition. That was a comfort to me.
    And when Otho presently returned into the main room he seemed to have come to a realization that it was no laughing matter. For he came over and looked at me closely.
    “Grag, it’s true that you don’t look so well,” he said. “I didn’t notice it before but I can see it now.”
    I mistrusted Otho’s sudden solicitude. I said warily, “Yes?”
    “Yes — it shows up in your face,” he said, shaking his head.
    “My face is rigid metal, so how can anything show up?” I demanded.
    “It’s your eyes I referred to,” Otho said. “They’re sort of dull — as though their photoelectric circuits were disarranged. And your voice has a timbre I don’t like.”
     
    THIS news dismayed me. I felt even worse and weaker than before. “You should protect your mental circuits from these terrific temperature changes you subject them to,” Otho said earnestly. “I know heat and cold mean nothing to you usually but in a condition like this —”
    He dashed out and came back with a thick blanket. “Here, this will insulate your head-circuits a little. Let me tuck it around you, Grag.”
    He put it over my head like a shawl and wrapped it around me. Then he insisted on taking my temperature.
    “I can do it by a thermocouple unit of high calibration put into your fuel-chamber,” he said.
    I admit that I was a little touched by Otho’s anxiety. “Don’t worry about me, Otho,” I said weakly. “I’ll get over it. Don’t you bother.”
    “Nothing’s too much bother for my old pal Grag!” he insisted. “I wish I could cheer you up a little. Wait — I’ll have Oog do his new trick for you.”
    Now if there was one thing I didn’t want to see it was Otho’s pet Oog. That repulsive little beast is a meteor-mimic, an asteroidal species with a horribly uncanny ability to assume any desired bodily form.
    But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I made no objection. He whistled and Oog came lolloping in — a fat doughy little white creature with vacant staring eyes.
    “Do the new trick I just taught you, Oog!” ordered Otho.
    Oog’s body changed shape, flowed, twisted and suddenly had assumed a new form.
    He was now a manlike little figure, sitting with a cape of his own tissues wrapped around him, rocking back and forth and holding hands to his middle.
    Otho suddenly went off into a roar of laughter. “That’s it, Oog!”
    A suspicion seized me. I looked more closely at Oog. The manlike, sitting figure he was imitating —