Captain Future 22 - Children of the Sun (May 1950) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

FRONTIER POLICE
    There are four chief divisions, or Sections as they are called, of the Planet Police. Section One is the one covering all police activities and posts in ordinary civilized regions of the nine planets. The Planet Police officers you see striding along the streets of New York, or Venusopolis, or Syrtis on Mars, or Tartarus on far Pluto, all belong to Section One. Their duties are essentially local law enforcement.
    Section Two is known as the “Frontier Police.” This takes in law-enforcement in wild, uncivilized planetary regions where there is no structure of local government. Boom towns like Jungletown on Jupiter and Karies on Saturn are ruled by officers of Section Two of the Planet Police.
    Such officers must be picked with great care, for they are legislature, judge, jury and police all in one. Their verdicts are final. And since all such boom towns and uncivilized regions swarm with hard-bitten characters, the job is no sinecure.
     
    THE SPACE PATROL
    Section Three of the Police organization is by far the least known of all. It is the Secret Service of the Planet Police. The number of its men and women operatives is unknown. They embrace natives of every world, many of them people of importance, who serve in this most thankless and difficult branch of the service. Joan Randall is technically still a member of Section Three.
    Section Four is far and away the most famous and glamorous branch of the Planet Police. It is the renowned Space Patrol whose armed cruisers keep the law of the Solar System Government from Pluto to Mercury. The men who staff those ships are some of the finest space-men in the System.
    They have a great tradition of the glories of their service, of countless battles against pirates, rebels and bandits in space. To become an officer in this service requires a ten-year course in the famous Patrol Academy, a course in every branch of space-navigation, piloting and gunnery.
    Technically, the correct name of Section Four is “The Space Patrol of the Planet Police.” But popular usage has shortened this to “Planet Patrol.”
    There is an old rivalry between the officers of the Patrol and the Rocketeers. The Rocketeers, the ace civilian pilots of the System, are inclined to sniff scornfully at the Patrol men as a “lot of mechanical calculating-machines who couldn’t fly a mile without a slide-rule and do everything in space by the book.” The Patrol officers, in turn, generally refer to the Rocketeers as “that crazy bunch of space-struck racing and test pilots, who never heard of discipline.”
    As has been noted, Joan Randall technically belongs to Section Three of the Planet Police. Joan entered that dangerous secret service division as the result of family tradition. Her father had been a captain in the Patrol, and had been killed in an encounter with the famous Falcon, the greatest space-pirate of the old days.
    Joan lived her childhood on nearly every world in the System, because of the constant shifts of her father’s post in the service. Thus she learned an extraordinary number of the different planetary languages and gained a wide knowledge of planetary customs.
    Steeped in the tradition of the Planet Police, and possessing excellent capabilities, it was natural for Joan to enter the service. The one branch of it open to a woman was, of course, Section Three. So she went into the secret service and spent the next few years in dangerous assignments that took her from one end of the System to the other. On one case she would be impersonating a rich young woman of fashion, on another she would play the part of a dancing girl in a roaring Martian boom town. And so on.
     
    RANDALL JOINS THE FUTUREMEN
    It was on Jupiter that Joan first met Captain Future. Posing there as a nurse, in an effort to help solve the hideous Space Emperor mystery which had unloosed an atavism blight on the hapless Jovians, Joan gave valuable help to Curt Newton and the Futuremen. Together, they