Captain Future 24 - Pardon My Iron Nerves (November 1950) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

different matter.”
    But, up in headquarters of the Patrol in Government Tower, Commander Anders was not feeling as triumphant as he had felt at first.
    “I can’t understand this!” the commander told Captain Future. “We checked that fellow’s papers, just as a matter of routine — never doubting they were forged. But they’re not forged. Apparently, this man has a solidly-established identity as Norman Thaine, Earth inventor.”
    “Of course, I’m Norman Thaine!” insisted the prisoner. “This is all nonsense about me being the Chameleon.”
    Curt was unconvinced. “You’re the Chameleon, and we both know it,” he asserted. “And I’m going to prove it.”
    But, in the following days, Curt found that he could not shake the identity of Norman Thaine. Thaine was identified by several people, in particular, by the president of the space-ship factory to whom he had sold an invention a few years before.
    “Yet he is the Chameleon, beyond doubt!” Captain Future declared. “I see it all now. He’s been clever enough to establish two or three different identities, through the past years, in preparation for just such a situation as this.”
     
    RELEASE!
    “But we can’t prove he’s the Chameleon,” Halk Anders said helplessly. “None of the Chameleon’s former victims can positively identify him. Yet he’s not using make-up or disguise — apparently the only disguise he uses is cunning alterations of expression, and posture. We can’t prove he’s the Chameleon, or even that he intended to rob you of the sun-stones that night. And he can prove he’s Norman Thaine.”
    “And he’s hired a lawyer who’s demanding his release under the habeas corpus clause of interplanetary law,” put in an official.
    “We’ll have to release him, then,” groaned Halk Anders. “By law, we can’t hold him longer when we have no proof of his guilt.”
    “But we know he’s the Chameleon!” Curt Newton exclaimed.
    “Sure we do, but we’ll have to let him go anyway, and admit to the System that we didn’t catch him after all,” Halk said unhappily.
    Norman Thaine was brought into the Commander’s office, and handed his release. Not by an iota, did he display any exultation.
    “I’m going to charge you all with false arrest,” he declared indignantly.
     
    THE DOOMED SPACE-LINER
    Curt Newton knew that even as he spoke, the master-thief was laughing to himself behind that indignant mask.
    “Get out of here, before I lose control of myself!” Halk Anders blazed at Thaine. “If there was just one shadow of proof —”
    At that moment, there came an interruption. The captain of the Mars station of the Patrol appeared, in the televisor-screen nearby.
    “Calling GHQ!” he was exclaiming. Then as Halk Anders snapped a switch, the officer continued hastily, “Just picked up SOS from the liner Starmaid! She was running through Sector 16 of the asteroid zone when an uncharted meteor-swarm caught her.”
    “The devil!” groaned Halk Anders. “I told the shipping companies not to start going through Sector 16 again until it had been freshly charted!”
    “The Starmaid was hard hit, sir,” the other reported tautly. “She telaudioed information that the ship was completely crippled, that its passengers and crew were abandoning her in the life-rockets, but that they had only four life-rockets — the rest were smashed. Crowded in like that, they haven’t air enough for more than twenty hours.”
    “Good God!” muttered the Commander, appalled. “They’re doomed, then. We can’t get a relief cruiser from Mars station to that sector in less than ninety hours.”
    “Isn’t there any habitable ‘toid in that sector where they can land?” asked the Martian officer tensely. “I could advise them —”
    “You know there isn’t — nothing but those meteors and a couple of airless asteroids,” groaned Anders. “Not a place in that whole sector with air enough to keep them alive that long