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

unhuman-ness. The big, naive robot would like more than anything else to be thought human. Nothing so pleases Grag as the idea that he is almost as human as other people.
    But Otho denies that Grag is human with sly, deceptive casualness, he keeps pointing out that humans breathe, and eat, and have flesh instead of metal bodies, and that Grag has none of these abilities. This invariably excites the indignation of the robot, and makes him deny vociferously that Otho is human, either.
    And that always provokes an argument, for Otho loses his temper easily. Grag’s customary retort is that humans can’t remold their bodies and faces as Otho does, and that therefore Otho isn’t human. The two have disputed the question all over the System from Mercury to Pluto — usually they get so bitter about it that Captain Future or the Brain has to interfere.
    Yet neither Grag nor Otho are as serious in their quarreling as they seem. They may be shouting at the tops of their voices, but let any danger suddenly come up, and robot and android will instantly stop their dispute and work side by side in perfect co-operation. Each knows that the other has special abilities which cannot be matched, and that are often needed in the dangerous adventures into which Captain Future leads them.
     
    SEEKS EXCITEMENT AND DANGER
    It is when they are outward bound in space with peril and new scenes ahead that Otho is happiest. On the other hand, when they spend a long period in Captain Future’s laboratory-home on the moon, Otho finds it boring. While Curt and the Brain are engaged in their abstruse scientific researches, and while Grag busies himself in the simpler work of the cavern-dwelling, Otho will saunter discontentedly among the lunar craters in his space-suit, and look up disconsolately at the starry spaces and wish something would happen.
    High-tempered and impatient, fierce and gay by turns, excitement-craving and utterly fearless and absolutely loyal, Otho the android is one of the most striking of the three Futuremen who companion Captain Future in his perilous quests through solar spaces.
    One very human attribute of the android is that he can dream, and in his dreams he is always on Earth, for which he has a fierce loyalty, outwardly he can scorn or mock anything in the Universe — but inside his shell of impervious irony is a mind more sensitive and sometimes more unhappy than any Earthman could possess.
     

     
    The Living Brain
    From the Fall 1940 issue of Captain Future
     
    SIMON WRIGHT, known by repute to all the peoples of the System as the Brain, is the oldest and perhaps the strangest of the Futuremen. His queer history goes back many years in the past.
    In that past time, he was a normal man, Doctor Simon Wright of a great Earth university. Acclaimed as the greatest biologist who had ever lived, Simon had as his goal the creation of intelligent life by artificial means. He worked on it for decades, with all the brilliant power of his intellect.
    Simon was already old when he discerned at the university a young student who gave great promise of a biological career. This young man was named Roger Newton — he was to be the father of Captain Future.
    The aging Simon Wright took the young student as his assistant, then as his colleague in the researches to create artificial life. Newton had already made some brilliant discoveries. The old scientist and the young one now prepared to attack this supreme problem.
    Then tragedy struck the elderly scientist. Simon Wright discovered he was the victim of an ailment that would definitely cause his death within a few months — a blight contracted by a too reckless experiment with microscopic creatures. He would die, and his mind would perish without ever completing his great attempt to create life.
     
    THE BRAIN IS REBORN
    Simon Wright decided that even though his body must die, his mind, his brain, must not die. He proposed to Roger Newton that his brain be transferred into a special