Read Captain Future 24 - Pardon My Iron Nerves (November 1950) for Free Online Page B

of Captain Future’s brilliant exploits, someone sooner or later is sure to say: “Well, after all. Captain Future met his match once. The Chameleon beat him.”
    The whole System knows that as the one major defeat on the record of the Futuremen. But the System does not know all the story of that famous occasion when Captain Future was bested by the Chameleon.
     
    AN INTERPLANETARY ROBBER
    The Chameleon was the most daring and notorious interplanetary robber in the System. He was not one of the space-pirates who infested the wild moons of the outer worlds. He preferred almost always to work alone, and his depredations were carried out with a smoothness and skill and lack of bloodshed far removed from the vicious raids of the brutal corsairs.
    He was not a killer — he was a thief of genius.
    It was the Chameleon who single-handed held up a space-liner, by gaining mastery of its control-room and then forcing the passengers to deposit their valuables in a life-rocket in which he later vanished.
    It was the Chameleon who stole the fire-emerald eyes of the Venusian swampmen’s god, though that idol was at the center of a cage of ferocious marsh-tigers.
    It was the Chameleon who impersonated an Earth official come to Mars to collect the Government revenues, and walked coolly off with the immense sum.
     
    THE CHAMELEON LAUGHS
    The Chameleon seemed to laugh at the attempts of the Planet Patrol to catch him. Always, when they were hottest on his trail, his little, swift black cruiser would vanish as though space had swallowed it up.
    It always vanished in a certain section — Sector 16 — of the asteroidal zone. The implication was clear that the Chameleon’s base was somewhere in that sector, but the Patrol searched for it in vain. So great became the Chameleon’s reputation, that merchant-ships plying through the zone made long detours to avoid that sector.
    It was this development which caused Halk Anders, commander of the Patrol, to swallow his pride and ask for Captain Future’s help in catching the arch-thief of the System.
    “He’s got us stumped!” swore the commander. “And ships are having to make that long detour around Sector 16, just because of one criminal. We’re becoming the laughing-stock of the System.”
     
    A SUBTLE TRAP
    Captain Future, who wanted to get back to his Moon home, was not interested in chasing slippery thieves and said so.
    “It’s your job, Halk,” he grinned. “You’ll have to search Sector 16 until you find out where the fellow has his hidden base.”
    “I tell you, we’ve been over every inch of that sector a hundred times!” exclaimed the frustrated commander. “There’s some dangerous meteor-swarms in it, and there’s Mazzatarra and Ferronia, a couple of small, airless asteroids. But there’s no place where a man could have a base. Yet the Chameleon has one there, somewhere.”
    Curt Newton became more interested. “The fellow must be clever. But why waste more time hunting for his base. Why not make him walk right into your arms?”
    “You mean, set a trap for him?” asked Halk Anders. “It wouldn’t work. We’ve tried it, and the Chameleon’s too smart for that.”
    “You haven’t set a subtle enough trap,” Captain Future told him. “The Chameleon would be clever enough to investigate before making his play. I’ll set a trap for him that he can back-trail without having his suspicions aroused — and he’ll come walking into it.”
     
    PROSPECTOR’S LUCK
    A short time later, the telenews headlined the sensational discovery of an Earth prospector on Mercury. The prospector, John Willison, had found a dozen sun-stones, the most valuable gem in the System, near the edge of the Hot Side.
    Captain Future was the lucky prospector, of course. He had gone to Mercury and, well-disguised, had actually unearthed the rare sun-stones from a deposit which the Futuremen had long known about.
    As Willison, the lucky, newly-rich prospector, Curt came to Earth. He