Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online

again.”
    “You two men can run now, and you can easily keep away from the crystals here,” Curt told Orris and Skeel. “I’ll notify the Planet Police at Jovopolis and they’ll send a ship out to pick you up.”
    His eyes flamed.
    “If I did what I’d like to, I’d let the crystals have you! You’ve helped to spread a horror that’s blacker than murder!”
    The two criminals stared wildly at the clicking, advancing flood of crystals now only fifty feet away, and then broke into a crazy run in an opposite direction, stumbling frantically away across the drab gray desert.
    “Quick, to the Comet before those things cut us off!” Curt cried.
    Grag snatched up the handle of Simon Wright’s square brain-case. He and the disguised Otho and Captain Future ran hastily toward their ship.
    The clicking crystals were only yards from them as they passed the head of their cataract. Tumbling inside the Comet, Curt leaped to the control-room, and in a moment had the little teardrop ship zooming upward with a muffled roar of tubes.
    He looked back down and saw the baffled crystals flowing over the disabled black ship, smothering it until it seemed encrusted with blazing diamonds, searching its interior for any living thing. The two criminals who had fled were already far away across the rocky surface of Callisto, and would be safe until the Planet Police came for them.
    Captain Future had an eager gleam in his gray eyes as he steered upward.
    “Now for Jovopolis,” he said tautly, “and the Space Emperor!”
     

     
Chapter 5: Power of the Space Emperor
     
    JUPITER, like all the other outer planets, had once been considered impossible as a habitation for Earthmen. Before interplanetary exploration actually began, it had been thought that the giant world would be too cold, its atmosphere too poisonous with methane and ammonia, its gravitation too great for human life.
    But the first Earthmen who visited Jupiter found that the great planet’s interior radioactive heat kept it at tropical warmth. The methane and ammonia, they discovered, existed only in the upper atmospheric layers. The lower layers were quite breathable. And the invention of the gravity equalizers had solved the problem of the powerful gravitation.
    Down through the darkness toward the night side of this great world, splitting the deep atmosphere with a shrill, knife-edged sound, plunged the Comet.
    Captain Future held the controls, with Grag and the disguised Otho and Simon Wright beside him. And the red-haired adventurer was tense with fierce hope as he peered downward.
    “Here we are,” Curt muttered finally, easing back a throttle. “We’re west of South Equatoria.”
    “Not far west, I think,” rasped Simon Wright, from the special pedestal upon which his brain-case rested.
    Beneath them lay a vast, heaving sea, bathed in silvery light by the three moons now in the sky. It was one of the thirty tremendous oceans of the monarch planet, and endless watery plain whose moonlit surface heaved in great billows toward the sky.
    Curt had leveled off, and now the Comet screamed eastward low above the tossing silver ocean. Under the brilliant rays of Ganymede and Europa and Io, the waste of waters stretched to the far horizons in magnificent splendor.
    Moon-bats, those weird Jovian birds that for some mysterious reason never fly except when the moons shine, were circling high above the waters. Their broad wings shone in the silver light with uncanny iridescence, due to some strange photochemical effect.
    Schools of flame-fish, small fish that glowed with light because of their habit of feeding on radioactive sea-salts, swam just under the surface. The triple head of hydra, a species of big sea-snake always found twined in curious partnerships of three, reared above the waves. Far northward a “stunner,” like an enormous flat white disc of flesh, shot up out of the moonlit sea and came down with a thunderous shock that would stun all fish immediately