The name of Captain Future, the supreme foe of all evil and evildoers, was known to every inhabitant of the Solar System.
That tall, cheerful, red-haired young adventurer of ready laugh and flying fists was the implacable Nemesis of all oppressors and exploiters of the System's human and planetary races. Combining a gay audacity with an unswervable purposefulness and an unparalleled mastery of science, he had blazed a brilliant trail across the nine worlds in defense of the right.
--Edmond Hamilton; Captain Future And The Space Emperor (1940)
This is the true story of how Captain Future died.
We were crossing the inner belt, coasting toward our scheduled rendezvous with Ceres, when the message was received by the ship's comlink.
"Rohr..." Rohr, wake up, please."
The voice coming from the ceiling was tall, dark, and handsome, sampled from one of the old Hercules vids in the captain's collection. It penetrated the darkness of my quarters on the mid-deck where I lay asleep after standing an eight-hour watch on the bridge.
I turned my head to squint at the computer terminal next to my bunk. Lines of alphanumeric code scrolled down the screen, displaying the routine systems-checks and updates that, as second officer, I was supposed to be monitoring at all times, even when I was off-duty and dead to the world. No red-bordered emergency messages, though; at first glance, everything looked copasetic.
Except the time. It was 0335 Zulu, the middle of the goddamn night.
"Rohr?" The voice was a little louder now. "Mister Furland? Please wake up..."
I groaned and rolled over. "Okay, okay, I'm awake. What'dya want, Brain?"
The Brain. It was bad enough that the ship's AI sounded like Steve Reeves; it also had to have a stupid name like The Brain. On every vessel on which I had served, crewmembers had given their AIs human names--Rudy, Beth, Kim, George, Stan, Lisa, dubbed after friends or family members or deceased shipmates--or nicknames, either clever or overused: Boswell, Isaac, Slim, Flash, Ramrod, plus the usual Hals and Datas from the nostalgia buffs. I once held down a gig on a lunar tug where the AI was called Fughead--as in Hey, Fughead, gimme the traffic grid for Tycho Station--but no one but a bonehead would give their AI a silly-ass moniker like The Brain.
No one but Captain Future, that is ... and I still hadn't decided whether or not my current boss was a bonehead, or just insane.
"The captain asked me to awaken you," The Brain said. "He wants you on the bridge at once. He says that it's urgent."
I checked the screen again. "I don't see anything urgent."
"Captain's orders, Mr. Furland." The ceiling florescents began to slowly brighten behind their cracked and dusty panes, causing me to squint and clap my hand over my eyes. "If you don't report to the bridge in ten minutes, you'll be docked one hour time-lost and a mark will be entered on your union card."
Threats like that usually don't faze me--everyone loses a few hours or gains a few marks during a long voyage--but I couldn't afford a bad service report now. In two more days the TBSA Comet would reach Ceres, where I was scheduled to join up with the Jove Commerce, outbound for Callisto. I had been lucky to get this far, and I didn't want my next CO to ground me just because of a bad report from my previous captain.
"Okay," I muttered. "Tell 'em I'm on my way."
I swung my legs over the side and felt around for where I had dropped my clothes on the deck. I could have used a rinse, a shave, and a nice long meditation in the head, not to mention a mug of coffee and a muffin from the galley, but it was obvious that I wasn't going to get that.
Music began to float from the walls, an orchestral overture that gradually rose in volume. I paused, my calves halfway into the trouser legs, as the strings soared upward, gathering heroic strength. German opera. Wagner. The Flight of The Valkyries, for God's sake...
"Cut it out, Brain," I said.
The music stopped in mid-chord. "The captain thought it would help rouse you."
"I'm roused." I stood up and pulled my trousers the rest of the way on. In the dim light, I glimpsed a small motion near the corner of my compartment beside the locker; one moment it was there, then it was gone. "There's a cockroach in here," I said. "Wanna do something about it?"
"I'm sorry, Rohr. I have tried to disinfect the vessel, but so far I have been unable to locate all the nests. If you'll leave your cabin door unlocked while you're gone, I'll send a drone inside to..."
"Never mind." I zipped up my pants, pulled on a sweatshirt and looked around for my stikshoes. They were kicked under my bunk; I knelt down on the threadbare carpet and pulled them out. "I'll take care of it myself."
The Brain meant nothing by that comment; it was only trying to get rid of another pest which had found its way aboard the Comet before the freighter had departed from LaGrange Four. Cockroaches, fleas, ants, even the occasional mouse; they managed to get into any vessel which regularly rendezvoused with near-Earth spaceports, but I had never been on any ship so infested as the Comet. Yet I wasn't about to leave my cabin door unlocked. One of the few inviolable union rules I still enjoyed aboard this ship was the ability to seal my cabin, and I didn't want to give the captain a chance to go poking through my stuff. He was convinced that I was carrying contraband with me to Ceres Station, and even though he was right--two fifths of lunar mash whiskey, a traditional coming-aboard present for my next commanding officer--I didn't want him pouring good liquor down the sink because of Association regulations no one else bothered to observe.
I pulled on my shoes, fastened a utility belt around my waist and left the cabin, carefully locking the door behind me with my thumbprint. A short, upward-curving corridor took me past the closed doors of two other crew cabins, marked CAPTAIN and FIRST OFFICER. The captain was already on the bridge, and I assumed that Jeri was with him.
A manhole led to the central access shaft and the carousel. Before I went up to the bridge, though, I stopped by the wardroom to fill a squeezebulb with coffee from the pot. The wardroom was a disaster: a dinner tray had been left on the table, discarded food wrappers lay on the floor, and small spider-like robot waded in the galley's sink, waging solitary battle against the crusty cookware that had been abandoned there. The captain had been here recently; I was surprised that he hadn't summoned me to clean up after him. At least there was some hot coffee left in the carafe, although judging from its odor and viscosity it was probably at least ten hours old; I toned it down with sugar and half-sour milk from the fridge before I poured it into a squeezebulb.
As always, the pictures on the wardroom walls caught my eye: framed reproductions of covers from ancient pulp magazines well over a hundred years old. The magazines themselves, crumbling and priceless, were bagged and hermetically sealed within a locker in the Captain's quarters. Lurid paintings of fishbowl-helmeted spacemen fighting improbable alien monsters and mad scientists which, in turn, menaced buxom young women in see-through outfits. The adolescent fantasies of the last century--"Planets In Peril," "Quest Beyond The Stars," "Star Trail To Glory"--and above them all, printed in a bold swath across the top of each cover, a title...
CAPTAIN FUTURE
Man Of Tomorrow
At that moment, my reverie was broken by a harsh voice coming from the ceiling:
"Furland! Where are you?"
"In the wardroom, Captain." I pinched off the lip of the squeezebulb and sealed it with a catheter, then clipped it to my belt. "Just grabbing some coffee. I'll be up there in a minute."
"You got sixty seconds to find your duty station or I'll dock your pay for your last shift! Now hustle your lazy butt up here!"
"Coming right now..." I walked out of the wardroom, heading up the corridor toward the shaft. "Toad," I whispered under my breath when I was through the hatch and out of earshot from the ship's comnet. Who's calling who lazy?
Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow. God help us if that were true.
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