Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) Read Online Free PDF Page A

reach the little control panel with his face.
    He fastened his teeth on the knob of the intensity control. With swift turning movements of his head, he turned the knob so that its pointer reached low on the intensity scale.
    “If you’re too dizzy yet to drink this stuff, you’ll go without it,” Kra Kol said angrily, coming back to him. “It’s all foolishness keeping a prisoner alive, anyway.”
    Captain Future had jerked his head back just in time.
    He maintained a numb, dizzy look as he drank the liquid. Immediately, Kra Kol switched the Lethe-ray and hastily went out of the cabin.
    Captain Future felt the Lethe-ray strike his brain. But its intensity now was nearly zero and it had not nearly so powerful an effect. It merely brought a certain vagueness, but did not make him incapable of thought and action.
    “Now if I could just get loose and get my hands on a weapon!” he thought grimly.
    He could do nothing while he was bound in this chair, a typical space-ship recoil chair, supported by a pedestal that slid up and down in a pneumatic sleeve. The raider ship shook to brake blasts, making it evident that it was nearing Jupiter’s moon. And these brake blasts gave Captain Future an idea.
    He twisted his bound feet under the chair until they found the safety dog that locked the sliding pedestal into the sleeve. He kicked until he had forced the dog out.
    “Now for a good, hard bump,” he thought ruefully.
    A few minutes later came another brake blast. The pressure of deceleration, as usual, threw Curt’s recoil chair upward.
    But this time, without the safety dog in place, the movable upper part of the chair was thrown clear out of the sleeve. Curt Newton, and the chair frame into which he was bound, were hurled with a crash to the floor. He had been expecting it and ducked his head to avoid being knocked unconscious.
     
    WHEN his head cleared, he began to make calculated movements that enabled him after many efforts to roll clumsily toward the base of a tall electrical mechanism that was part of Ru Ghur’s elaborate scientific equipment.
    He had spotted that machine as having a base with sharp metal edges that would serve his purpose. He twisted until he could bring his bound hands against that sharp edge, and then began rapidly rubbing his bonds to and fro.
    “There’s not much time,” he thought tightly. “Unless I’m much mistaken, there’s going to be battle and sudden death in a few minutes.”
    His head was clear, now that he had completely escaped the influence of the Lethe-ray. And Captain Future, as he worked urgently at his bonds, was remembering what Ru Ghur had told him.
    The Uranian had said that they were going to Leda, one of Jupiter’s smaller moons, to make a surprise attack on Bork King’s Martian outlaws who had forestalled the raiders in robbing a radium shipment from a liner.
    “A case of wolf eat wolf,” Curt Newton thought grimly. “But the important thing is that Ru Ghur is the particular wolf I’m after above all others.”
    He knew that Ru Ghur had been able to find Bork King’s hiding place on Leda by somehow tracing the radium shipment the Martian outlaws had stolen. But how, he could not guess.
    “There’s something unearthly about the way that Uranian devil can trace radium at any distance,” he thought.
    He finally got his hands free. As he tore at the rest of his bonds, he heard a whistling roar outside the ship.
    “That’s atmosphere!” he muttered. “We’ve reached Leda!”
    In a moment he was on his feet, searching the cabin. He soon found an atom-pistol amid Ru Ghur’s private arsenal of weapons. He sprang to open the cabin door.
    At that instant, he heard from forward in the raider ship the sharp cry of Ru Ghur.
    “That’s Bork King’s ship down there in the glade! Don’t use the guns! Give them the sleep-gas!
    Captain Future sprang to the port-hole windows. He looked down on the nighted jungles that covered this side of Leda.
    Those weirdly