Free Captain Future 02 - Calling Captain Future (Spring 1940) by Edmond Hamilton Page A

approached the front end of the cylindrical ship. There was a control board there, with levers, dials and switches of unfamiliar aspect — fruit of an alien science and mechanics.
     
    A GLOW of colored light broke out around the control board as Captain Future and Joan approached it! Their nearness had actuated some delicate mechanism amid those tangled devices.
    Then Curt noticed that the purple lamps over the two octopus-creatures nearest the control-board had gone out. And that those two creatures were stirring.
    “I understand now!” he cried, leaping forward, alarm in his eyes. “They ran out of food — blood — and so they put themselves into suspended animation. But they set a detector to wake their two leaders whenever any warmblooded creature entered this ship —”
    He was pawing desperately at the grotesque controlboard, seeking to smash the detector, wherever it was.
    “If those two wake completely, they’ll wake all the others by turning off the lamps — our lives won’t be worth anything. They need our blood!”
    “Captain Future!” screamed Joan. Curt whirled around, and at the same moment was gripped by scaly tentacles.
    The two octopus-creatures had awakened more rapidly than he had dreamed possible! One had seized him, sliding a tentacle around his knee, another around his throat, two others around his chest.
    The other creature was scrambling toward the glowing control-board, to wake all the others lying in suspended animation!
    Joan Randall, her face ghastly white inside her space suit helmet, was trying to tear away the tentacles around Curt. Captain Future, by a fierce effort, got his arm free and snatched out his proton-pistol.
    He fired point-blank at the octopus-creature who was reaching his four tentacles to the switches of the control-board. The proton-beam dropped the grotesque creature in a scorched heap.
    The thing holding Curt whirled him up to dash him against the floor. But Curt shot again, down at the thing whose tentacles held him aloft.
    The proton-beam tore into the scaly body, and Captain Future tumbled to the floor as the octopus-man slumped dead.
    Curt staggered up and looked around wildly. None of the other octopus-men sleeping under the purple-lamps had stirred. The detector which had been set off by Joan and himself had been designed only to awaken the two leaders of the alien crew, who had then meant to awaken all the others.
    “That was close!” Curt panted. “Food was what they wanted — blood. Where in the Universe could they have come from? Intelligent creatures, immune to cold of space and airlessness, but requiring vital blood-elements —”
    “Let’s get out of here, Captain Future!” pleaded Joan shudderingly. “This place is unclean, unholy!”
    Curt Newton would have given a year of his life for the opportunity to study and analyze the products of an unhuman science which were all around him. But he recognized that it was impossible, with time and danger pressing upon him as they were.
    Reluctantly, he left the gloomy, mysterious vessel. Once outside, he wished that the door would close. And silently, the aperture shut.
    “Those others in there they’ll sleep on, perhaps forever now,” he said, staring at the strange ship.
    Explorers from far off in the Universe, sleeping on eternally at the heart of the graveyard of space ships!
     
    CURT looked around at the jumbled ships of the wreck — pack, at whose center they were.
    “We’ll work back to the space-boat,” he decided, “and search the newer ships out at the edge of the pack. We ought to find more good cyclotrons out there.”
    And so it turned out. As Curt freed each cyclotron, he dragged it out of the wreck and hauled it along the edge of the wreck-pack to their little space-boat.
    Hours passed as Captain Future toiled. Finally he had ten cyclotrons crowded into the stern power-compartment of the space-boat, and bolted precariously to its floor.
    He was panting as he finished the task