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

running at all! That means —”
    Captain Future cursed himself for a fool. He should have turned the machine back to normal.
    Ru Ghur had darted out of the Falcon .
    “Men, this way!” he yelled. “Our prisoner is loose in the ship!”
    Curt Newton bounded out into the corridor. He triggered his atom-gun at Kra Kol, but the Saturnian darted out in time to escape.
    Curt rushed past Bork King to the door of the ship. Scores of armed raiders were running toward it. Captain Future was trapped.
     

     
Chapter 5: Space Trail to Danger
     
    A SMALL space-ship, shaped oddly like an elongated tear drop, screamed at highest speed from Earth’s Moon toward the spaces beyond Jupiter. It was the Comet , famous ship of the Futuremen. And in it, Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney shared tension with Otho and Grag and the Brain.
    “We’ll be there in another hour!” Otho called back from the space-stick he had held for long hours of the flight.
    “We’re too late — away too late,” muttered old Ezra discouragement in his wreathed face.” Look how long it’s been since the Orion was attacked.”
    Grag drew his giant metal form grimly erect.
    “If that devil Ru Ghur has harmed the Chief, he’ll pay!”
    “Ru Ghur couldn’t know that the Orion ’s telaudio operator was Captain Future,” Joan said hopefully.
    But her fine eyes were dark with apprehension. They had all felt that chilling premonition since their discovery that the very ship upon which Curt Newton had gone disguised was the one last attacked by the radium raiders.
    Grag paced the cabin restively, frequently peering ahead. The big robot paid no attention even to his pet. Eek, the gray, bearlike little moon pup which usually claimed so much of Grag’s attention, pawed unheeded now at his metal feet, then disconsolately retired to curl up beside Oog, the fat little white animal that was Otho’s grotesque mascot.
    Only the Brain showed no perturbation. It was not that Simon Wright felt no anxiety. But he had known a lifetime of cool self-control.
    “We’re close to the sector in which the attack took place,” Simon murmured, for he knew the solar spaces as an ordinary man knows his back yard. And the bucking of the ship meant it was plowing through some of the powerful ether currents that are frequent between Jupiter and Saturn.
    “There isn’t a sign of the wreck,” commented Grag, peering anxiously through the magnifying lookout-lens.
    Two cruisers suddenly drove into sight ahead of them, rushing toward the Comet . They bore the insignia of the Planet Patrol.
    “Patrol, ahoy!” Ezra spoke quickly into the telaudio, after sliding its tuner to the Patrol wave length. “Marshal Gurney speaking from the Comet . Did you corner the raiders?”
    “No, sir,” an officer’s downcast voice replied. “They got away again. We boxed this whole sector as soon as the alarm came through, but they had slipped past somehow.”
    “What about the Orion ’s crew?” Joan asked quickly.
    “The radium raiders never leave witnesses,” came the answer. “Everybody on the wreck was dead.”
    “Everybody?” whispered the girl.
    “The Chief can’t be dead,” Otho hastily reassured her. “It’d take more than Ru Ghur and all his devils to kill him.”
    “Where is the wreck?” Ezra Gurney demanded of the Patrol captain.
    “We let it drift and called Jupiter base to send out salvage tugs for it,” was the reply. “We’re combing this sector for the raiders.”
    “You let the wreck drift?” Simon Wright exclaimed sharply. “Don’t you realize that the ether-currents will suck it into the Sargasso Sea of Space?”
    “Good grief, that’s right!” exclaimed Grag, dismayed. “The Sargasso’s only ten or twelve degrees counter-sunwise from here.”
    “I guess we overlooked that,” admitted the Patrol captain.
    “Simon, we’ve got to reach that wreck!” Joan Randall said quickly. “Curt may be on it, hurt!”
    “We may be able to catch it before the