Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) Read Online Free PDF Page B

proton-pistol in its holster, and waited. Time passed slowly. But Captain Future had learned patience from Grag the robot, who could sit for a week without moving his metal limbs. The red-haired scientific wizard remained concealed, watching and waiting.
    Presently Phobos set. The night became pitch dark, except for the thin rays of the great hosts of stars shining down upon the age-old deserts. A little wind moaned through the night.
    Curt noticed a small black object circling high against the stars. At first, he thought it was a Martian owl. Then his super-keen hearing caught the dim throbbing of muffled rocket — tubes.
    “The Legion of Doom ship!” he muttered. “Coming for Gatola —”
     
    NOW the ship was swooping down in a wide spiral toward the observatory, swinging down out of the stars without lights and with its rocket-tubes almost silent, a black, phantom craft — its attached space boats and grim batteries of atom-guns vaguely outlined. It came to rest near the observatory, and Curt saw its door opening.
    A dozen men emerged, soundlessly as shadows. Two took up their places as guards outside the ship’s door, the starlight glinting on their atom-pistols. The others moved silently and rapidly toward the observatory.
    Captain Future crouched lower in the shadow as they passed. In the starlight, they appeared as Earthmen wearing a gray uniform, on each shoulder the black disk of the Legion of Doom. Led by hulking, heavy-treading giant, they entered the building.
    “Damn those guards!” Curt thought, peering at the two Legionaries standing outside the ship door.
    He drew out a disklike instrument from his tungstite belt. “Annoying, but necessary,” he muttered. “I’ll have to resort to invisibility, if I want to avoid their giving an alarm.”
    One of the greatest secrets of the red-haired scientific wizard was his power of making himself invisible. He did it by giving his body a temporary charge of force which refracted all light around it, making him completely unseen. The effect lasted only for ten minutes — but that should be time enough, Curt thought.
    He held the disklike instrument over his head, and pressed its stud. An unseen force streamed down through his body, tingling through every fiber. Looking down at himself, he saw his body becoming rapidly translucent, misty. At the same time, darkness seemed to close around him.
    He heard an uproar from inside the observatory — Otho shouting in Gatola’s voice, a clatter of feet and banging of furniture. Otho was doing his part to hold up the Legion men in there.
    Curt found himself in utter darkness. He knew that be was now completely invisible. All light was being refracted around him — and that left him entirely without power of vision.
    But Captain Future had spotted the exact direction and distance of the door of the Legion ship. Now he moved toward it.
    Curt, from long practice, and because of his super-keen sense of hearing, could move without sight almost as well as an ordinary man who saw. He crept hastily forward, and as he neared the ship he could bear the breathing of the two guards outside its door.
    He passed right in between them, stepping up through the air-lock of the ship and into a metal corridor. He heard voices, throbbing cyclotrons. He stood, waiting tensely for the invisibility to pass — he must have sight, to find Joan in this ship. The uproar from inside the observatory was louder. Otho was doing nobly in the job of making trouble for his abductors. Curt could imagine that the android was having a wonderful time in there. The darkness enveloping Captain Future began to dissipate. His invisibility was passing. In a moment, he could see.
    He stood in a corridor leading toward the stern of the Legion cruiser. Back there were the droning power-cyclotrons, and the voices of the men who tended them. Curt, from his encyclopedic knowledge of space craft, concluded the prisoners would be forward.
     
    THE big red-headed