Captain Future 11 - The Comet Kings (Summer 1942) Read Online Free PDF Page A

first of all, of a strange, tingling sensation through his whole body. He felt as though he were lying beneath a super-powerful generator that was flooding every fiber of his being with electric force. “He is coming around now, Grag,” a familiar, metallic voice was rasping. “So stop your worrying.”
    Curt forced his eyes open. Grag and Otho and the Brain were hovering anxiously over him. The pets, Oog and Eek cowered close by.
    He lay on the floor of a small, cell-like room of white synthestone. There was a single heavy metal door, and a high, tiny window through which flooded a brilliant white light.
    “Simon, what happened in the ship after I passed out?” Curt cried.
    “I know what happened to me!” Otho burst out furiously. “One of those cursed shining men grabbed me the same as you, and I felt a shock that knocked me silly. I woke up here just a few minutes ago.”
    “And we couldn’t help you,” Grag boomed angrily. “Simon and I were pinned against the ship’s floor by that devilish magnetism from beneath.”
    “That is the truth, lad,” the Brain told Curt. “After stunning you and Otho, the shining men secured Grag and me with chains. Then they turned off the magnetism outside, and dragged all four of us, even the two pets, to this prison.”
    “Did you see anything of Joan Randall as we were brought here?” Captain Future demanded anxiously.
    “No, lad,” murmured the Brain. “She may be imprisoned like us somewhere in this cursed city.”
    Curt strode with nervous quickness! to the window. He drew himself up to it and stared out at the amazing city.
    Graceful alabaster buildings of white synthestone, crowned by bubblelike domes and slender towers, rose in his field of vision. He was looking across the great central plaza of the magnet-disk He could make out his own ship and other captured ships parked out there. On the other side of the plaza bulked a large white palace with one huge, looming dome.
    Curt saw that in the white streets and green gardens moved many of the natives of this comet world, afoot and in six-wheeled power vehicles. They were all fair-haired folk, beautiful women, stalwart men. And all of them glowed with that dazzling, uncanny radiance of electric force. They seemed like angels of light inhabiting some strange celestial metropolis.
    Down upon the alabaster city poured a flood of white brilliance from the sky. For the sky of this comet world was the flaring aura of the comet’s nucleus. Completely enclosing this hidden world, this nebulous coma arched across the heavens like a firmament of scintillating white fire.
    “Who’d have dreamed that all this existed inside Halley’s comet?” muttered Otho, peering out with awe from over Curt’s shoulder.
    Curt’s gray eyes narrowed.
    “These comet folk are enemies of our System. They must be, or they wouldn’t have devised that great electromagnet which sucks distant ships in here by means of its beam.”
    “But what are these people?” Grag demanded puzzledly. “They shine just as though they were highly charged with electricity.”
    “By all the imps of Uranus!” Otho swore. “If you’d have touched one of them, you’d know that they really are electrically charged!”
    Curt Newton nodded quickly.
    “There’s no doubt about it. All these people possess physically an electric charge that should destroy them — but doesn’t. Simon, what do you make of it?”
    “It is strange,” muttered the Brain. “Yet life is electrical in nature. Even back in the twentieth century, Crile showed that the living cells of a body are tiny batteries which produce the electrical current we call life.”
    “Theoretically, all life may be electrical. But nobody ever saw electric people like these before,” objected Otho. “And why did they drag our ship in here? What are they going to do with us?”
    “More important what have they done with Joan and Ezra?” Curt interrupted. His eyes flashed. “If they’ve harmed