Free Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940) by Edmond Hamilton Page A

do not know the land here in the north?” Otho asked doubtfully. “I have never been this far toward the Fire Sea before.”
    Guro reassured him.
    “You will have no trouble finding it, for we shall take you there ourselves. We are returning northward now, and you can come with us. Two nights hence you can go with us to the Place of the Dead, and deliver your message to our leader when he appears.”
     
    OTHO thanked him quickly. It was apparent that Guro and the other two Jovians had completely accepted him.
    “We leave now,” Guro told him. “The mission that brought us here is finished. Our lopers wait in the jungle beyond this city.”
    Otho shuffled with the three Jovians, following Otho’s lead through the rowdy, noisy streets of the interplanetary colonial city. They were not molested, and presently they were out of the metalloy streets of Jovopolis, and moving along the road that led between the great grain fields of the Earthmen.
    The android’s mind was racing. He must notify Curt Newton of what he had learned and where he was going. But though he had his pocket televisor concealed inside his leather harness, he dared not try to use it while Guro and the others were so close to him.
    The three Jovians and the disguised android shuffled on along the road between the mingled brilliance of the two moons now in the sky. Soon they reached the end of the grain fields, and entered the moon-drenched jungle whose wilderness stretched unbroken toward the Fire Sea.
    Just inside the jungle waited another Jovian, with four “lopers,” as the Jovians called their queer steeds. The lopers were large, lizardlike creatures, with scaled, barreled bodies supported by four bowed legs that gave them incredible speed. Their necks were long and snaky, ending in reptilian heads from whose fangless mouths ran the leather reins by which the rider controlled his mount.
    “We need your loper for this stranger. You will stay here until we send back another,” Guro told the Jovian who had waited with the animals. Then he told Otho, “Mount, Zhil.”
    Otho had never ridden one of the lizardlike creatures before, but the android, afraid neither of man nor devil, swung up unhesitatingly into the rude leather saddle.
    The creature turned and hissed angrily at him, its small eyes flaring red. Otho saw the other Jovians kick their mounts to quiet them, and he did the same. The creature calmed down.
    “Now, northward!” Guro called in his deep bass voice, and uttered a loud cry to their mounts.
    Next moment, Otho was clinging for his life. It was as though the creature had exploded forward.
    All four of the lopers were rushing at a nightmare pace along a dim trail through the moonlit jungle. Their speed was incredible, yet the motion was so gliding that Otho soon adjusted himself to it.
    Guro and the other Jovians were riding around him. There was still no chance to call Captain Future on the pocket televisor, so the android gave up the idea for the time.
    “It is a long ride,” Guro called to him over the rush of wind, “but we shall be with my people by tomorrow night, and you will go with us to the Place of the Dead.”
    “I am eager to see the Living Ancient again,” Otho called back, and reflected that he was not lying about that.
    The moonlit jungle through which they rode along narrow, dim trails was dense and wild. Huge tree-ferns reared their glossy pillared trunks nearly a hundred feet. Big stiff brush-trees towered almost as high. Slender “copper trees” whose fibers contained a high copper content gleamed metallically in the light of the moons.
    Snake-vines hanging from the tall trunks swayed blindly toward the quartet as they sped past. Sucker-flies swarmed around them, and deadly brain-ticks were visible on leaves. Somewhere off in the jungle, a siren-bird was charming its prey with weird song. Now and then a tree-octopus flitted hastily through the fronds above like a white ghost.
     
    OTHO was enjoying this wild,