Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) Read online

  #13 Winter 1943

  Introduction

  A Complete Book-Length Scientifiction Novel

  The Face of the Deep

  by Edmond Hamilton

  Carried far outside the solar system, and wrecked on a volcanic planetoid in company with a shipload of condemned criminals, Captain Future faces the supreme test of his courage!

  Radio Archives • 2012

  Copyright Page

  Copyright © 1943 by Better Publications, Inc. © 2012 RadioArchives.com. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form.

  These pulp stories are a product of their time. The text is reprinted intact, unabridged, and may include ethnic and cultural stereotyping that was typical of the era.

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  ISBN 978-1610818438

  Introduction

  The original introduction to Captain Future as it appeared in issue #1

  The Wizard of Science! Captain Future!

  The most colorful planeteer in the Solar System makes his debut in this, America’s newest and most scintillating scientifiction magazine — CAPTAIN FUTURE.

  This is the magazine more than one hundred thousand scientifiction followers have been clamoring for! Here, for the first time in scientifiction history, is a publication devoted exclusively to the thrilling exploits of the greatest fantasy character of all time!

  Follow the flashing rocket-trail of the Comet as the most extraordinary scientist of nine worlds have ever known explores the outposts of the cosmos to the very shores of infinity. Read about the Man of Tomorrow today!

  Meet the companions of Captain Future, the most glamorous trio in the Universe!

  Grag, the giant, metal robot; Otho, the man-made, synthetic android; and aged Simon Wright, the living Brain.

  This all-star parade of the most unusual characters in the realm of fantasy is presented for your entertainment. Come along with this amazing band as they rove the enchanted space-ways — in each issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE!

  The Face of the Deep

  A Complete Book-Length Scientifiction Novel

  by Edmond Hamilton

  Carried far outside the solar system, and wrecked on a volcanic planetoid in company with a shipload of condemned criminals, Captain Future faces the supreme test of his courage!

  Chapter 1: Prison Ship

  SHE had been a proud ship once, a splendid, shining liner rocketing between the planets with laughter and music and happiness aboard. But that had been years ago. Tonight she lay grim and black in her dock at New York spaceport, somberly waiting to carry damned souls to their place of punishment.

  Her name was the Vulcan and she was the famous prison-ship of the Planet Patrol. Once a year, she went out through the worlds upon a fateful voyage. At each world, criminals sentenced to life imprisonment came aboard her. The end of the voyage was at the grim, gray Interplanetary Prison on Cerberus, moon of Pluto.

  Men in purple-striped convict dress were shuffling now under the krypton lights’ blue glare toward the looming black hull. They were a motley crew of vicious, hardened criminals — mostly hard-faced Earthmen, but a few green-skinned Venusians and red Martians.

  They were guarded by vigilant, armed officers in the black uniform of the Planet Patrol.

  A girl who also wore that black uniform stood under the lights near the ship, shaking her dark head at her tall, redhaired male companion.

  “I have to go, Curt,” she was protesting. “The Patrol is short-handed because of that trouble on Mercury. And these criminals must be well-guarded, for they’re the most dangerous lot in the System.”

  “But to send a girl as a guard-officer on that hell-ship!” exclaimed the tall, redhaired young man angrily. “Your Commander must be crazy.”

  Joan Randall, slim and dark and youthful in her black jacket and slacks, was distractingly pretty in her resentful denial.

  “You talk as though I were a simpering debutante who had never been off Earth before,” she said indignantly. “Haven’t I been working for the Patrol for four years?”

  Curt Newton objected. “You’ve been in the Secret Service section of the Patrol. That’s different from guarding a lot of hellions on a prison ship.”

  His lean, space-bronzed face was sober with anxiety, and his clear gray eyes had a worried frown in them as he expostulated with the girl.

  He did not often worry about danger, this brilliant adventurer and scientific wizard whom the whole System knew as Captain Future. To him and his three comrades, the famous Futuremen, danger wore a familiar face. They had met it countless times in their star-roving quests to far worlds, in their ceaseless crusade against the master-criminals of the System.

  BUT danger to himself was to Curt a very different thing than a danger that threatened this girl he loved. That was why the tall, redheaded planeteer bent toward her in a final earnest appeal.

  “I’ve got a premonition about this voyage, Joan. A hunch, you can call it. I don’t want you to go.”

  Her brown eyes laughed up at him. “You’re getting jumpy as a Saturnian shadow-cat, Curt. There’s no danger. Our criminals will be tightly locked up until we reach Cerberus.”

  There came a startling interruption. It was the sudden shrieking of one of the convicts who were being marched into the ship.

  He was a middle-aged Earthman, with a mass of iron-gray hair falling disorderedly about his haggard white face and terror-dilated eyes.

  “You’re taking me to death!” he was screaming wildly, struggling with the uniformed guards. “There’s death on that ship!”

  There was something peculiarly disturbing about the wild face and crazy screams. But the alert Planet Patrol officers guarding the line of shuffling convicts quickly hurried the struggling prisoner aboard.

  Joan Randall’s fine eyes had pity in them. “That’s Rollinger — you remember, Doctor John Rollinger of American University.”

  Captain Future nodded thoughtfully. “The biophysicist who killed his colleague last month? I thought his attorneys pleaded insanity?”

  “They did,” the girl answered. “They claimed Rollinger’s mind was wrecked by an encephalographic experiment he carried too far. But the prosecution claimed he was shamming. He got life on Cerberus.”

  “And you’re going on a voyage of weeks with scores of others like that homicidal maniac!” Curt Newton said, with deepened dismay. “Some of them worse! I’ve seen the prisoner-list. Kim Ivan, the Martian space-pirate, Moremos, that poisonous Venusian murder-ring leader, Boraboll the Uranian, the wiliest trickster in the System — and dozens more. Joan, I won’t let you do it!”

  Joan shook her dark head stubbornly. “It’s too late to argue about it now. All the prisoners are aboard. We take off in five minutes.”

  A voice came from the darkness behind them — a sightly hissing voice that was oddly alien in timbre.

  “What’s the matter, Chief?” it asked Curt. “Haven’t you talked reason into her yet?”

  It was Otho, one of the three Futuremen. He and Grag and the Brain were advancing into the circle of light.

  The three Futuremen made a spectacle so strange that many people would have recoiled from them in terror. But Joan was too well acquainted with these three loyal comr
ades of Curt to see any strangeness about them.

  Otho, the android, was perhaps the most human-looking of the three. He looked, indeed, much like an ordinary man except that his lithe body had a curiously rubbery, boneless appearance, and his chalk-white face and slanted green eyes held a superhuman deviltry and mocking humor. Otho was a man — but a synthetic man. He had been created in a laboratory, long ago.

  Grag, the robot, had been created in that same laboratory, in the long-dead past. But Grag had been made of metal. He was a gigantic, manlike metal figure, seven feet high. His metal torso and limbs hinted his colossal strength. But the strange face of his bulbous metal head, with its gleaming photoelectric eyes and mechanical loudspeaker voice-orifice, gave no sign of the intelligence and loyalty of his complex mechanical brain.

  The Brain, third of the Futuremen, was by far the strangest. Yet he had been an ordinary human, once. He had been Simon Wright, brilliant, aging Earth scientist. Dying of an incurable ailment, Wright’s living brain had been removed from his human body and transferred into a special serum case in which it still lived, thought and acted. The Brain now resembled a square box of transparent metal. Upon one face of it were his protruding lenslike eyes and microphonic ears and speech apparatus. From compact generators inside the case jetted the magnetic tractorbeams that enabled the Brain to glide swiftly through the air and to handle objects and tools.

  “I THOUGHT,” Otho was saying to Captain Future, “that we came on this rush trip to Earth to stop Joan from going on this crazy assignment.”

  “We did, but we might a well have stayed at home on the Moon,” Curt said disgustedly. “She’s as mule-headed as — as —”

  “As a mule,” Joan finished for him, with a laugh.

  Grag stepped forward. The giant metal robot suddenly picked up Joan in his mighty arms as though she were a doll.

  “Do you want me to keep her here, Chief?” he asked Captain Future in his deep, booming voice.

  “Grag, you put me down!” stormed the girl. “Curt, if you try to keep me here by force —”

  “Put her down, Grag,” growled Captain Future. “You can reason with a Jovian marsh-elephant or a Uranian cave-bear — but not with a woman.”

  An elderly officer in the black uniform of the Patrol was hurrying toward them from the black ship. His grizzled face and bleak old eyes lit with pleasure as he recognized Curt and the Futuremen.

  “Come to see us off, Cap’n Future?” he asked. “Where’s your Comet?”

  Marshal Ezra Gurney, veteran officer of the Planet Patrol, was referring to the famous little ship of he Futuremen. Curt answered by waving his hand toward the distant, lighted pinnacle of Government Tower.

  “The Comet’s up there on the tower landing-deck. And we didn’t come to see you off. I came to dissuade Joan from going.” A bell rang sharply from the big black ship that loomed into the darkness nearby.

  “Nearly take-off time!” warned Ezra Gurney. “Better say your goodbyes, Joan.”

  Joan’s brown eyes danced as she kissed Curt quickly. “For once,” she laughed, “it’s I who am going to space while you stay behind and worry, instead of the other way around.”

  Curt Newton could not smile. He held her, loath to let her go.

  “Joan, won’t you listen —”

  “Of course I’ll listen — when I get back from Cerberus!” the girl cried gaily, slipping out of his detaining grasp and running after Ezra toward the ship. “See you then, Curt!” She and the white-haired old marshal reached the gangway. A final wave of her hand, and she disappeared into the black vessel. “Why didn’t you let me hold her back, Chief?” demanded Grag. “You’ve got to treat women rough.”

  “Listen to Grag — now he’s setting up to give advice to the lovelorn!” exclaimed Otho witheringly.

  Curt Newton paid no attention to the argument that instantly developed. Grag and Otho were always arguing, usually about which of them was the most nearly human. He didn’t even hear them, now.

  His eyes were upon the Vulcan. The last officers were going aboard. The bridge-room up at the nose of the long hull had sprung into light. Dock-hands were hastily knocking out the holding-pins.

  The vessel, with it freight of scores of dangerous criminals, was about to take off on its long voyage. It would zigzag out through the Solar System for weeks, stopping at each planet to pick up more sentenced men. It would be a long time before it returned from the somber voyage.

  There was nothing to worry about, Captain Future told himself earnestly. The ship had made this voyage to Cerberus many times before, and nothing had ever gone wrong. Surely, nothing could go wrong now.

  But Curt couldn’t expel foreboding from his mind. The Vulcan this time was carrying the largest and most desperate cargo of convicts it had ever taken. There were men aboard it who would kill merely for pleasure, let alone to prevent their being taken out to the grim living death of Interplanetary Prison. And Joan Randall was one of the guards of those human tigers!

  CURT NEWTON reached a decision, swiftly as he always did. He wouldn’t let Joan take such chances. If she insisted on going, then —

  “I’m going, too!” Captain Future said suddenly. He plunged toward the gangway of the ship. Over his shoulder he called to his astonished comrades, “Take the Comet back to the Moon and wait for me!”

  The gangway was already being drawn in. But the Patrol officers inside halted it as they saw Captain Future racing toward them.

  The rangy, red-haired planeteer raced up the metal gangway and stood pantingly inside the airlock. The Patrol men looked at him amazedly.

  “It’s all right,” Curt laughed. “I’m going with you, this trip. There’s no objection, is there?”

  “Objection?” The swarthy young Mercurian lieutenant flushed with pleasure. “Objection to you coming along? I’ll say there isn’t!”

  His eyes were sparkling with excitement. To this young lieutenant, as to most space-men, Curt Newton was an idolized hero.

  “I’ll inform Captain Theron that you and the Futuremen are aboard, sir,” he told Curt eagerly.

  “That I and the Futuremen?” Curt repeated, turning swiftly. In the airlock were Otho and big Grag and the calmly poised Brain.

  “What the devil!” exploded Captain Future. “I told you to go back to the Moon with the Comet.”

  “The Comet,” Otho answered coolly, “is safe enough, locked up atop Government Tower. We’re going with you. You’re not going to leave us sitting on the Moon, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for you.”

  “This is what women get you into,” growled Grag gloomily. “Now we’re stuck on this craft for weeks.”

  “It is certainly annoying that I shall have to spend all that time in a ship that does not even have a decent research laboratory,” said the Brain sourly in his rasping, metallic voice.

  Captain Future was not deceived by their grumbling. He knew that it was loyalty to himself that had made the Futuremen instantly follow him.

  The tie between himself and the three strange comrades was old and deep. It went back to his infancy. For when his own parents had met death in their laboratory-dwelling on the lonely Moon, it was these three strange beings who had become his foster-parents.

  The Brain, who had been his dead father’s colleague in research; the robot, who had been created as an experiment by the two colleagues; and the android, who had been similarly created — these three had first been Curt’s tutors and guardians, and then his comrades in the crusading adventures which had won him the name of Captain Future. They had followed him faithfully to far stars and worlds. They were following him now.

  “Oh, all right,” Curt said, dissimulating his feelings. “But you’ll find this a pretty dull voyage.”

  “I wonder?” replied the Brain, his strange lens-eyes fixed thoughtfully on Curt’s face.

  The Vulcan suddenly lurched upward with a roar of bursting rocket-tubes. They clung to stanchions as the ship took off. Swiftly, it screamed up through
Earth’s atmosphere into the vast and shoreless sea of space.

  The young Mercurian lieutenant started with them through the ship toward the bridge-room. As they left the airlock, they met Joan Randall. Her jaw dropped ludicrously at sight of them. Then her eyes grew stormy.

  “You came along! As though I were a baby who needed watching over! Curt Newton, I won’t stand for it!”

  “Afraid you’ll have to, darling,” grinned Curt. “We’re already at least ten thousand miles away from Earth.”

  She was still protesting indignantly as they went forward through the mid-deck of the ship. This was the prison-cell deck. Along its main corridor were the barred doors of scores of cells. From behind the bars, convicts glared like caged wolves as they passed.

  A SQUAT, evil-faced Jovian in one of the cells set up a roar as he saw Curt and his comrades pass.

  “It’s Captain Future, mates!” he shouted. “He’s aboard!” A raging tumult instantly arose. Threats, maledictions, oaths, were hurled at the Futuremen as they passed along the corridor.

  Not a criminal in the System but had good reason to hate the name of Captain Future. He had sent many an evil-doer out to the gray inferno of Interplanetary Prison to which these men were destined.

  The tumult rose. The senseless shrieks of the madman Rollinger added weirdly to it. Captain Future’s bronzed face was coolly imperturbable as he strode along. He seemed unaware of the raging voices. Then, as he glimpsed a sudden flash of movement beside him, he yelled a warning.

  “Look out — your pistol!” he cried to the Mercurian lieutenant.

  A Venusian convict in one of the cells had hurled out through his barred door a little noose improvised from his belt. The loop had settled around the hilt of the Mercurian lieutenant’s belt-weapon. The Venusian tugged hard, snatching the atom-pistol toward himself as Future shouted.