Read Online Captain Future 07 - The Magician of Mars (Summer 1941) by Edmond Hamilton - Free Book Online Page A

angles to follow on this thing. One, we’ve got to see if we can’t locate the secret base where Ul Quorn is building his bigger ship. Two, we must equip the Comet with dimension-thrust apparatus so we can follow Quorn into the other universe.”
    “How’re we going to fit up the Comet like that when we don’t have Skal Kar’s plans for the apparatus, as Quorn does?” Otho objected.
    “Simon and I know the principle of the dimension-thrust,” Curt told him. “Don’t you remember our experiments back home on the Moon last year? We can build apparatus that will shift the Comet across dimensions. But first, we want to locate Ul Quorn’s secret workshop and base.
    “It must be on Uranus,” Curt went on keenly. “Quorn will need a lot of radite to power his treasure-search in the other universe. And in the whole Solar System, radite’s found only on Uranus. We’re blasting there at once, to hunt around the radite sources for Quorn’s base!”
     
    SOON the Comet was zooming up from Ariel and roaring toward the vast, greenish globe of Uranus.
    “Head for Lulanee, the capital city,” Curt ordered Otho, who had taken the pilot-chair. “It’s on the night side now.”
    Presently their ship was screaming down into the deep atmosphere of the seventh world. Beneath lay the moonlit, mountainous landscape of Uranus. It was well named the Mountain World, for it was ragged with labyrinthine-linked ranges of lofty peaks. Some of the ranges, like the Mystery Mountains that loomed far in the north, actually towered more than twenty miles into the clouds.
    The Comet screamed southward over the equatorial Endless River that belts the mid-section of the planet. It was a foaming river that roared ceaselessly around the planet in the titanic canyon it had eroded for itself, its current being the result of tidal pull of the four moons. Then they, came within sight of the Shining Sea.
    Towering black mountains cupped a great sea whose waters glowed like an uncanny ocean of curdled white light. Those shining waters held in suspension a large amount of glowing radioactive minerals, causing a radiance. Their luminous waves lapped against the encircling black cliffs, breaking into showering sprays of living light.
    Amid the mountains on the northern shore of the Shining Sea brooded the ancient capital city of Lulanee. It was a monolithic metropolis whose black-domed buildings and streets and docks had been carved from the solid rock. Its lighted streets and arcades were thronged with the pleasure-seeking population. Out on the glowing sea drifted the pleasure-barges of the richer Uranians, like dark boats on a fairy ocean.
    “I always did think Lulanee was the most beautiful city in the System, at night,” commented Otho, drinking in the weird beauty.
    Curt Newton nodded.
    “Land at the Police station,” he ordered.
    The luminous shooting-star emblem on the domed roof of the Planet Police station identified its location. The Comet dropped on its keel tubes into the landing-court behind the building. Here were parked fast cruisers of the Planet Patrol, swift Tarks and Rissmans.
    A vice-marshal of the Planet Police, an alert young Venusian, came running out to meet Curt and the Futuremen as they emerged from their ship into the krypton-lit court.
    Curt held out his identifying “nine-planet” ring. The young officer smiled eagerly.
    “As though I didn’t know your ship and the Futuremen without that, Captain Future! What can we do for you here?”
    “I’m after someone who needs a lot of radite,” Curt stated crisply, “and I hope to trace him in that way. The man I’m after is a criminal. He wouldn’t dare negotiate for the radite with the mine companies here. Is there any other source of radite on Uranus besides the established mines?”
    “No reachable source,” the Venusian replied. “Radite is known to exist at one point far down in the great caves below the surface, but nobody has ever been able to obtain it from