Captain Future 21 - The Return of Captain Future (January 1950) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online

diabolic — for his ironic, twisted mental outlook occasionally leads to strange results.
    The skeleton around which the synthetic man’s flesh was molded is composed, not of rigid bones, but of artificial bones that are many times stronger and so flexible that they can be bent double without breaking.
    This fact, and the great strength of his artificial muscle-tissues, gives Otho his wonderful agility and speed. The fact that he is a superman has alienated him from normal beings, and at times, through sheer loneliness, the android will assume a human disguise and visit Earth incognito.
    The android can run faster, jump higher, and move more quickly in an emergency than almost any other creature in the System. It was Otho who taught Captain Future speed and skill in the days when Curt Newton was a boy upon the moon.
    It was he who taught Curt the method of super ju-jitsu which he had evolved, and which enables him to overpower an ordinary man in a twinkling. But, though Captain Future is capable of faster action than any other human in the System, he can’t quite match the unhuman Otho.
    Otho’s body requires both air and food to maintain its metabolism. He must breathe — but his lungs are capable of breathing air that is so poisonous it would kill the average human.
    While he can eat ordinary human food, the android prefers to take his nutrition in the elementary form of simple chemical elements. It saves time, and Otho is always in a hurry about something.
     
    POWERS OF DISGUISE
    Most famous of Otho’s accomplishments is his power of disguise. By softening and re-setting his synthetic flesh, and changing the stature and posture of his flexible-skeletoned body, Otho can make himself up to be an exact double of anyone in the System, no matter what planetary race he belongs to.
    Otho’s power of assuming disguises has been of vital aid to Captain Future many times. Perhaps Otho’s greatest feat of make-up was disguising himself as one of the Mind Men of Saturn.
    That strange race who inhabit a legendary land hidden far in the endless Great Plains of Saturn are mere immobile and featureless balls of flesh outwardly, though they possess minds of incalculable power and can use mental force as a powerful weapon.
    Otho, by his wizardry of make-up, succeeded in the incredible feat of passing himself off as one of the Mind Men for a whole day, in a desperate emergency.
    The unhuman Otho loves danger for its own sake. He is soon bored when there is a lack of excitement. For the android has neither the superhuman patience of Grag, the robot, nor the cold, austere detachment of the Brain.
     
    LOYALTY TO CAPTAIN FUTURE
    Otho would go through fire and water for Captain Future. To him, as to the other two Futuremen, the chief purpose of life is loyalty to the young wizard of science whom they three reared from a helpless infant.
    But while he would carry out any mission that Curt Newton ordered, Otho will generally, through sheer boredom and recklessness try to stir up a little excitement on the way, and that often gets him into trouble.
    Once, while on a mission for Captain Future, Otho went too far off his course to pursue a fleeing enemy, and got himself wrecked and marooned on an asteroid with a poisonous atmosphere. A human would have been asphyxiated there, but Otho’s impervious lungs breathed the lethal air without great harm. But he had tramped the little world for a month before Grag finally found him. Otho had passed the time by constructing an underground hide-out which later proved invaluable.
    The unhuman android’s queer, mocking humor is one of his strongest characteristics. He never tries chaffing the Brain — Otho has too vast a respect for that brooding, icy-minded being. But Grag is the great butt of his gibes. He long ago found out that Grag has no sense of humor, and he has been deviling the great, simple-minded robot ever since.
     
    OTHO’S FEUD WITH GRAG
    The chief subject of his taunts is Grag’s