Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940) Read Online Free PDF Page A

science can I find any hint of how that ghastly method of causing this strange doom — this atavism — could be achieved.”
    “Yet it has been done — it is being done now,” Curt muttered. “And that means that this time we are up against an antagonist who somehow has gone far beyond known science — further than we ourselves have gone!”
    With brooding, unseeing eyes, the red-haired adventurer stared around the cabin, his mind far away.
    The cabin was a marvel of compactness, with facilities for research in all fields of science. There was a chemistry alcove, with containers of every element known to science; an astronomical outfit, including an electro-telescope, electro-spectroscope, and a file of spectra of all planets, satellites, and stars above the fifth magnitude.
    There were samples of the atmosphere of every planet, satellite and asteroid. And a botanical division contained specimen plants and vegetable drugs from various worlds.
     
    BESIDES this equipment, there were many instruments which Captain Future and Simon Wright had devised, unknown to conventional science. A small locker contained every valuable scientific book or monograph ever published, reduced to micro-film. It was one of these micro-film spools the Brain had been consulting.
    “I know of every biologist of note in the System today,” the Brain was saying. “Not one of them could have discovered the secret of reversing evolution.”
    “Could such an epochal discovery have been made by a wholly unknown scientist?” Curt demanded.
    “That seems unlikely,” the Brain replied slowly. “There is some great mystery about this which I cannot understand, lad.”
    Curt’s tanned face hardened. “We’re going to understand soon,” he affirmed. “We’ve got to, to stop this thing.”
    Thoughtfully, he reached into a locker for a little hemispherical musical instrument. Absently, he touched its strings, bringing forth queer, shivering, haunting tones.
    The instrument was a twenty-string Venusian guitar, two sets of ten strings each strung across each other on a metal hemisphere. Few Earthmen could play the complicated thing, but Captain Future had a habit of plucking haunting tones from it when he was lost in thought.
    Wright’s eye-stalks twitched annoyedly.
    “I wish you’d never picked up that thing,” the Brain complained. “How can I concentrate on reading when you’re making that dismal whining?”
    Curt grinned at the Brain.
    “I’ll take it into the control-room, since you don’t appreciate good music,” he said jestingly.
     
    TWENTY hours later saw the little teardrop ship decelerating in velocity as it hurtled toward the world now close ahead.
    Jupiter now loomed gigantic before them. It was a huge, spinning white sphere, attended by its eleven circling moons, belted with the clouds of its deep atmosphere, and wearing like an ominous badge the glowing crimson patch of the Fire Sea which men had once called the Great Red Spot. A world that was hundreds of times larger than Earth, a world whose fifty great jungle-clad continents and thirty vast oceans were still almost wholly unexplored.
    Only on the continent of South Equatoria, Curt knew, had Earthmen settled. There they had cleared the steaming, unearthly jungles enough to build towns and operate plantations and mines, using the Jovian inhabitants for labor. But only a small part of even South Equatoria was known to them. The rest was unexplored, brooding jungle, stretching northward to the Fire Sea.
    Curt Newton held the controls, and his three unhuman comrades were in the control-room with him as he expertly fingered the throttles. They flashed close past the gray sphere of Callisto, outermost of Jupiter’s four biggest moons, and plunged on toward the giant planet.
    “You’re going to land at Jovopolis?” rasped Simon Wright inquiringly.
    Captain Future nodded.
    “That’s the capital of the Earth colony, and there, I think, must be the heart of this