Captain Future 06 - Star Trail to Glory (Spring 1941) Read Online Free PDF

emerged onto the lunar surface. They stood on the glaring plain at the bottom of Tycho. The horizon all around them was walled by the fanglike crater peaks that were silhouetted against the black, airless sky.
    "Be careful, Simon," warned Curt. "Remember, you mustn't lose control of your beams or you'll hurtle out into space."
    The Brain could hear despite the vacuum, for Curt was touching him.
    "Wait here," Simon answered. "I'll soon be back."
     
    THE Brain jetted a powerful magnetic beam downward. It sent him flying upward with amazing speed. The floor of the crater dropped rapidly, and Captain Future and Grag became two pygmies. Simon was now so high that he could look far across the parched surface of the Moon. Off to the horizons stretched the desolate plains, studded here and there with enormous circular craters whose jagged walls rose like giant fortresses. In the black sky overhead bulked the green Earth and the blazing Sun.
    The Brain remembered the directional readings Curt had given him. He had already reached the correct height, four miles above the Moon. After hanging in space while he mentally computed the other directionals against the time element, the Brain began to rocket northwestward. He had a cold, utter confidence in the correctness of his calculations. A man might have doubted, but not the Brain. He lived for science and was a master of every branch of it, second only to Curt.
    "There it is," Simon told himself a few minutes later. "Now to shut the thing off."
    A small black rocket was approaching him, flying around the Moon by an occasional blast of its tubes. It was only a few feet long, the type of rocket used for sending small objects in space. The Brain guessed that the ether-jamming generator was inside the rocket.
    "Have to board the thing, I suppose," he thought dubiously.
    He drove himself abreast of the rocket, flying beside it in space. Gradually the Brain closed in on it, until he was only inches away. Maintaining his position relative to the rocket, Simon jetted two thin blue beams at the side of the rocket. It took him a moment to open the door there. Inside the hollow cylinder he glimpsed a squat little generator. A flick of his beams shut it off. Another movement stopped the automatic fire-control of the rocket itself, and it dropped toward the lunar plain.
    The Brain glided back down toward Tycho in a long, thrilling swoop that brought him to the side of Curt and Grag in moments.
    "It's done," he reported. "They had taken a televisor generator, set it to emit a continuous untuned wave, and put it inside a message-rocket. The rocket was adjusted to keep circling the Moon."
    "Smart thinking on their part," Curt admitted. "Come on. We'll get a call through now to Earth."
    They returned hastily into the Moon laboratory. Captain Future set their powerful televisor transmitter to the official wave of the Planet Police.
    "Calling Planet Police headquarters on Earth!" he said.
    The face of a uniformed Police officer appeared in the view screen. He looked startled.
    "Captain Future!" he exclaimed.
    He disappeared and in a moment appeared a face that the Futuremen knew well. It was the grizzled visage of old Ezra Gurney.
    "What the devil?" gasped Ezra. "I thought you'd be blasting for Earth in the Comet by now. Didn't you see the North Pole signal?"
    "The Comet's been stolen," Curt explained. "Get here in the fastest Planet Patrol cruiser you've got, Ezra."
    "Sure will!" cried the veteran. "But the Comet stolen? Devils of space, I can't understand it!"
     
    IT WAS hours later before the fast cruiser arrived. During that time, Captain Future and the Brain had rechecked the course of the stolen Comet by the electroscopic finder. It was still heading for Venus. Curt, Grag and the Brain were waiting on the surface of the lunar crater when the fast Patrol cruiser roared down to a landing. It was one of the few times any outside ship had ever landed upon this barren world which all the System knew was