rocket-tubes, the ship lurched skyward. Still on the floor, he glimpsed the Jovian’s hands reaching down.
“I’ll fix this cub for what he did!” snarled the giant green man.
“No, Thikar!” cried the throaty voice of the fat one. “We can use him alive. Throw him in that locker.”
A heavy hand grabbed the half-dazed youngster, and he was slammed into a crowded little locker whose door clanged shut. Johnny groggily gathered himself up into a sitting position.
“I let them take me like a little sissy,” Johnny thought wrathfully. “I ought to have blasted them down, instead of ordering ‘em to stop. Well, anyway I got one — and Captain Future will get these others.”
THE boy’s tremendous confidence in Captain Future was unshaken. He wasn’t afraid. Sooner or later, Captain Future would rescue him.
He could hear Thikar, the big, brutal Jovian, yelling to the man at the controls of the little ship.
“Faster, Xexel! There comes the Comet after us!”
“Can’t go faster!” whined a cracked voice. “Future’s ship can fly rings around us. We’ll have to make the dimension-shift now or they’ll have us!”
“All right!” Thikar bellowed. “Brace yourselves — here goes!”
Johnny heard Thikar start some mechanism whose powerful hum rose swiftly to a penetrating, tingling vibration. Then the lad suddenly felt a ghastly shock. He seemed thrust into a bellowing blackness in which each atom of his body was wrenched by supernal forces. Finally the awful sensation passed, leaving him quivering and shaken.
“What in the devil was that?” Johnny wondered bewilderedly.
He could see nothing, locked as he was in the dark metal cabinet. But he heard Thikar’s coarse laugh.
“We’re safe now,” the Jovian criminal exulted. “Captain Future can’t follow us here. How I’d like to have seen his face when we disappeared in front of his eyes!”
Johnny Kirk’s bewilderment increased. What had that awful shock of strange force meant? How had this craft escaped the Comet?
“Head back to base, Xexel,” Thikar was ordering. “Keep over on this side until we’re in the right spot — then shift back over.”
“All right, all right,” quavered the cracked voice of the old pilot, Xexel. “But I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when we do get back. Quorn’s going to be plenty angry with you for bungling the thing.”
“Was it my fault?” roared the Jovian. “How could we know that they’d have that brat watching their ship? Who is he, anyway?”
“We’ll find out when we get to our base,” answered the voice of the fat Earthman, Lucas Brewer. “By taking at least a hostage back to Quorn, we’ll be able to placate that devil a little for our failure.”
Indifferent to this peril, Johnny Kirk became drowsy from the close air and monotonous drone of the rocket-tubes. He did not know how much time had passed before he was aroused by the sound of Thikar’s bull voice.
“The dual sextant shows we’re there, Xexel. Hold her steady while I shift back over.”
Once more Johnny heard the penetrating vibration begin. He braced himself. And, as he expected, there came again the mysterious, rending shock of uncanny force which seemed to plunge him into a black abyss.
His consciousness swam up out of the blackness a few moments later. Presently the locker door was unlocked and opened. Johnny Kirk, who had braced himself for this moment, plunged out like a mad wildcat. His small fists flailed right and left at the criminals. He beat a devil’s tattoo on the paunch of the Earthman before the hand of the towering Jovian grabbed his collar and shook him to a state of limpness.
“Try that again and I’ll snap your neck,” roared Thikar.
“Aw, go chase a meteor, you big greenie,” gasped Johnny, shaken but unterrified.
They hauled him out of the ship. And Johnny Kirk momentarily forgot his belligerence in the amazement of the scene.
The little ship was resting on the floor of a