Read Online Captain Future 20 - The Solar Invasion (Fall 1946) by Manly Wade Wellman - Free Book Online

yours.”
    “Tell that to Otho,” said Grag. “Otho! I miss him. Where is he, do you suppose?”
    “Waiting for us to rejoin him, and thinking kindly of you,” replied Curt. “With our dimension-shift machine gone, we’ll have trouble seeing him again.”
    “At least we’re on the surface of the Moon,” observed Grag.
    “Yes, on the surface of Luna,” agreed the Brain. “Luna gone crazy! Now which way do we go in this jungle?”
     

     
Chapter 8: N’Rala
     
    IT WOULD have been suicidal, of course, for N’Rala to fly back in the life-rocket. She realized that. Ezra Gurney’s men would be watching for that very craft, even if it were not so small — barely big enough for Ul Quorn and N’Rala to come to New York, and not sufficiently spacious for the two prisoners and the two seedy-looking Earthmen who had been Ul Quorn’s henchmen in previous shady adventures. These men Ul Quorn wanted as mechanics and lieutenants.
    So a new craft was provided — fetched in sections from a dozen hiding places in the slums beneath the dock district, fitted together on another dingy landing-stage, and equipped with the dimension-shift.
    “Step up the power,” N’Rala kept saying to the two mechanics. “Captain Future’s modifications are good — better than Ul Quorn’s, but don’t say that I said so. They can carry the load of this bigger rocket easily.”
    “Please,” said a mechanic. “Where do we come in, N’Rala? I mean, in this new game? We’re both wanted badly by the police almost everywhere. It’s dangerous.”
    “If and when we finish what we’re beginning,” said N’Rala cryptically, “there won’t be any Solar System police to want you any more. Will you trust me?”
    They looked at her, and trusted her. N’Rala was beautiful, and most masculine creatures trusted her before they knew her.
    “All set?” continued N’Rala. “Then march Joan Randall into that hold we’ve sealed off for her special benefit. And get Thikar, too — that big green Jovian fool who had Otho right in his paws and let him get away. He may ride in the control room with us, but watch him. If he was left alone with the girl, maybe she’d find some way to escape from him, too.”
    The two captives were produced and stowed aboard, manacled and silent. N’Rala also ordered the loading of a various cargo — plans, assorted machine parts, and certain weapons which had been stolen from Government armories. Finally she took the controls and headed upward.
    “What’s going to happen to me?” asked Otho, in the heavy tone he had heard used by the Jovian he impersonated.
    “I’ll leave that to your imagination,” N’Rala started to say, and then thought of a better taunt. “Oh, I forgot. You don’t have any imagination do you, Thikar? Thick — Thikar — I might make a pun about your name, but you’d be too stupid to understand. Maybe we can use your big green carcass without your substitute for a brain.”
    “You mean — that operation?” Otho prompted. “Remote brain control?”
    “Exactly. We may embed an instrument in your brain’s nerve centers, so that you’ll be an automaton working at a distance by the operator’s voice and will. We might let Gurney get you, and put you in jail, so that you could organize criminals for an uprising.”
    “Ul Quorn will do that?” suggested Otho shakily.
    N’Rala shook her head and smiled a dazzling, cruel smile.
    “No, Thikar. Not Ul Quorn. Me.”
    Otho stored that away, without fully understanding.
    They nosed close to where the moon should have been, and at N’Rala’s order one of the mechanics threw the switch of the dimension-shift. There was the moment of dizzy strain and blackness, then they were spiraling over the strange landscape in the green twilight that now overlay what had been Luna.
    “There’s our landing field below,” pointed out N’Rala. “Captain Future blasted it for his life-rocket when he came down, and we’ve enlarged and improved