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

  He was seating himself in the pilotchair and grabbing the space-stick as he talked. “If we crash on that planetoid, everybody in the ship dies. I don’t care a curse about you pirates. But I’ve got friends aboard. There’s a chance I can make a safe landing.”

  “Go ahead and try, then!” exclaimed Kim Ivan. “Get back and give him room, the rest of you!”

  The Vulcan was turning slowly over and over in space as it fell at appallingly increasing speed toward the mystery planetoid. Captain Future’s eyes tensely estimated the distance of the little world, by the graduated scale etched in the glassite window. The hundred-mile sphere now filled most of the firmament. The edges of its dark green mass were rimmed by a haze that told of a thin atmosphere.

  Superhuman tension gripped the watching criminals as the ship fell on toward doom. Curt’s brown face was like rock, his hands holding the space-stick in the rigidly upright position that would fire the tail rocket-tubes when he depressed the cyc-pedal.

  “We’re going to hit in a minute!” quavered fat Boraboll.

  A wild scream came to their ears from the lower part of the ship. The mad shriek of John Rollinger.

  “Are you going to let us crash without even trying?” roared Grabo to Captain Future.

  The falling Vulcan was only miles above the surface of the uncharted planetoid. They were rushing down toward a convexity of green jungle in the center of which glowed the evil red volcanoes and lava-beds.

  Air whistled outside the plunging ship, in a rising roar. It was still turning over, as it fell. Captain Future waited for one more turn.

  “Do something, you fool!” yelled Boraboll in terror.

  “We’re falling toward those volcanoes!” shouted another of the mutineers. The iron-nerved Kim Ivan silenced them. “Shut up and let him alone!”

  The volcanic region of the mystery planetoid stretched only a few miles beneath the plummeting ship. The center of the infernal activity was a double row of huge black craters separated by a stupendous chasm. From the craters flowed lurid crimson cataracts of molten rock that crept sluggishly down toward vast black beds of solid-crusted lava.

  Curt Newton was estimating their speed of fall by split-seconds. He knew that the tail-tubes upon which all depended would stand but a few moments of firing before their strained walls exploded. It required all the superb spaceman’s nerve to wait for the Vulcan to turn once more. Yet he waited, till the instruments showed its tail pointed straight down.

  Curt’s foot instantly jammed the cyc-pedal to the floor. The roar of raving power that lanced downward from the tubes flung him deep in the pilot-chair and jammed the others against the wall. The hull of the crippled ship grated and screamed from the shock of deceleration.

  “We’re going to land in that lava!” cried Grabo.

  CAPTAIN FUTURE saw the glowing red river that flowed from two volcanoes rushing up toward them. It was straight beneath the slowing ship.

  His hands flashed desperately to the bank of individual rocket-tube throttles. He cut the tubes on the starboard side of the tail.

  The off-balance thrust of the remaining tubes sent the falling Vulcan lurching to port. It sagged down toward the black lava beds beyond the fiery river. Instantly, Curt cut in all the tail-tubes again.

  Crash! Crash! The flaming tail of the ship came to rest upon the solid crust of lava. In a flash, he cut all tubes. The ship toppled over on its side and lay still.

  “Good God, what a landing!” choked old Tuhlus Thuun, hoarsely.

  Curt Newton, his face haggard and dripping with perspiration from superhuman strain, suddenly raised his hand. “Listen!”

  The momentary silence that had followed the landing of the Vulcan was broken by ominous cracking sounds beneath the ship. The prostrate vessel shuddered violently as the cracking sounds became louder.

  “We’re sinking into the lava!” yelled a mutineer’s wild voice. “The ship’s weight is cracking the solid crust — its going to sink into the molten rock beneath!”

  With the cry came a louder cracking, and a sharp lurching of the ship. There was a screech of rending metal plates. Scorching, superheated air laden with choking sulphurous fumes flooded up through the ship.

  “She’s going through the crust now!” bellowed Kim Ivan. “Out of the ship, everybody!”

  The mutineers scrambled madly down toward the space-door of the cyc-deck. All else was forgotten in the wild instinct to escape.

  Curt Newton fought his way down the companionway with the scrambling convicts. But it was toward the mid-deck he was struggling.

  He paused briefly outside its door to fling the switch of the master electro-control. Then he plunged into the cell-deck corridor. The guard in it had already fled.

  “Joan! Ezra!” Curt cried chokingly through the swirling smoke. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Figures were stumbling out of the unlocked cells, slipping upon the tilted floor, gasping as they breathed the scorching sulphurous air.

  Curt found the staggering figure of Joan and steadied her with his arm. Ezra Gurney’s grizzled face appeared through the smoke, a big bruise upon his cheek and his faded eyes wild.

  “Name o’ the Sun, what happened?” he was crying.

  The Brain’s weird form flashed like a flying cube through the swirling fumes to Curt’s side, hastily followed by Curt and Otho.

  “Young Rih Quili was stunned by the shock — he’s lying in his cell!” cried Simon.

  “I’ll get him!” Captain Future yelled. “Ezra, get Joan to the space-door! Otho, see to McClinton and the crew-men!”

  He plunged back to Rih Quili’s cell and picked up the unconscious young Mercurian. A sharper lurch of the settling ship staggered him as he did so.

  The sulphurous air was choking him. As he fought up the tilted floor toward the door, he glimpsed the dazed McClinton and other crewmen being rushed by Otho toward the exit. Grag was coolly waiting for Curt. Through the mad uproar, a shrieking of mad laughter smote their ears.

  “Rollinger’s back there!” Curt gasped. “Grag!”

  THE great robot, who did not breathe and was not affected by the overpowering fumes and heat, was already clanking back to the madman’s cell. He returned quickly, clutching the insanely struggling scientist.

  They tumbled down to the space-door. As they reached it, a violent downward movement of the sinking Vulcan threw them out.

  Curt hit a surface of rough lava that was so searingly hot that he cried out. He staggered up with Rih Quili. Blinded by swirling smoke, scorched by almost unendurable heat, he glimpsed crevices cracking open in the solid crust around the ship. Fiery red lava gushed from beneath.

  “This way, Chief!” boomed Grag’s tremendous voice.

  Captain Future struggled forward. The vague figures of his friends and of the fleeing mutineers were dimly visible in the smoke ahead.

  Crack! The crust of lava shook violently under their feet. Curt turned and through the smoke he glimpsed the Vulcan’s black hull sinking swiftly into the hissing molten rock beneath the solid crust.

  He stumbled on, choking, scorched, half-blinded. Presently the air seemed a little purer. And then it was no longer hot, jagged lava under his feet, but black soil. He had reached the edge of the lava-bed and was standing upon ground that sloped gently in the dusky light toward a distant wall of weird jungle.

  Kim Ivan and the mutineers who had escaped were standing here, but they paid no attention in this moment to Captain Future and his group. The convicts were staring strickenly out across the smoking lava-field.

  Curt Newton turned and looked. Out there in the smoke, he saw the curved black hull of the Vulcan finally disappearing beneath the cracked crust. A pool of molten lava glowed redly where it had been.

  “She’s gone,” muttered the big Martian pirate.

  A heavy silence followed, unbroken for long minutes. The appalling enormity of the disaster was coming home to them all.

  Captain Future felt an iciness in h
is heart that he had never before experienced, as he realized their situation.

  They were marooned here on an uncharted island of space, more than four billion miles outside the Solar System. A mere unknown speck in the void, to which no other ship would ever come.

  They were utterly without tools or weapons. And, worst of all, he and his friends and the girl he loved had as fellow castaways more than a hundred of the most dangerous criminals of the nine worlds, every one of whom cherished a bitter enmity toward him.

  Chapter 6: Mystery Planetoid

  NIGHT was creeping across the little world, the dusky day deepening into complete darkness as the bright star of the distant Sun sank beneath the horizon. From the brooding black jungle in the distance, an uncanny babble of weird animal or bird calls came to the ears of the stricken castaways.

  Their faces were drawn and haggard in the lurid red light from the volcanoes. From those towering black craters in the east, evil-glowing rivers of molten lava crept constantly downward like crawling snakes of fire. Showers of burning ashes shot up ever and again from the seething craters, and there was a low, continuous growling and quivering of the ground beneath them.

  Curt Newton felt a cold chill, despite the sulphurous warmth of the air. It was so terribly isolated from the universe of man, this drifting speck of land in the vast, shoreless sea of outer space. And they were so utterly unequipped to deal with whatever alien perils it might hold.

  He felt Joan shiver inside the protecting circle of his arm, and looked down anxiously at her.

  “You’re all right, Joan? That shock jar you when we crashed?”

  “It didn’t hurt me.” Her face was very pale, her eyes dark and wide as she looked up at him. “I’m just scared, I guess. This weird, forbidding place — that we’ll never get away from.”

  “Never is a long time,” Curt said quickly. “Don’t worry about it now, Joan.”

  “Oh, Curt, you know we’re marooned here permanently!” Her voice broke in a sob. “We’ve no ship, no weapons, no tools.”

  Captain Future could not answer that. His arm tightened almost fiercely around her, as though in protection against what was to come. The Futuremen and their allies, like the mass of Kim Ivan’s mutineers, were still staring frozenly at the lava-beds in which the ship had perished.

  “Did anyone manage to salvage anything from the ship?” Curt asked them.

  George McClinton, the lanky young engineer, was the only one to answer. He pointed hesitantly down at a fiber case at his feet.

  “I g-g-grabbed that up as I r-r-ran out of the ship,” he stammered.

  “What is it? A tool-kit?” Curt Newton demanded quickly.

  McClinton’s spectacled face looked abashed in the red light. “N-no, it’s only a c-c-case of p-prunes. I j-just happened to see it in the s-s-supply-room door as I went past.”

  “Blast me down!” swore old Ezra Gurney furiously. “Of all the crazy, useless things to snatch up, that’s the limit!”

  A burst of laughter rose from the others at McClinton’s shame-faced admission. It came from the mutineers as well as the Futuremen’s party, and it was hysterically loud. It was a reaction on the part of all from their own terrifying thoughts, their realization of the appalling situation in which they stood.

  It eased that frozen tension a little. Men relaxed enough from their stunned rigidity of mind and body to inspect their burns and bruises. And Kim Ivan strode out and turned to face the mutineers.

  “Did any of you bring atom-guns out of the ship with you?” the big Martian pirate demanded.

  Curt stiffened. He realized instantly what was in Kim Ivan’s mind.

  BUT none of the mutineers answered in the affirmative to the question. Grabo, the Jovian, growled the explanation of the lack of guns.

  “You wouldn’t let any of us wear atom-pistols in the ship,” he snarled, “for fear we’d kill each other in brawls. And there wasn’t any time to go digging them out of the arsenal-room when the ship crashed.”

  Kim Ivan’s voice rose to a roar. “Don’t take that sulky tone with me. I’m still boss here! There may not be an atom-gun on this world, but I can beat the ears off any pair of you with my bare fists!”

  None of the mutineers took up the redoubtable Martian’s challenge. But Grag’s big metal figure moved clankingly forward.

  “Do you think you can beat the ears off me?” rumbled the great robot.

  Kim Ivan faced the robot with an unflinching scowl. “I know you’re stronger than any four of us,” he admitted belligerently to Grag. “But there’s more than a hundred of us, remember that. We can pull you down, big and tough as you are.”

  New tension sprang into being, as the mutineer’s hatred and antagonism toward the Futuremen’s party came again to the fore. Curt Newton realized that it would not take much to precipitate a struggle.

  “It seems to me,” his cool voice cut in, “that we’ve had enough for one day without trying to kill each other right now.”

  Kim Ivan roughly agreed. “We’re groggy and tired, and some of us are hurt. And there’s nothing to be gained by a scrap now. We’ll get some rest, and see how things stand in the morning.”

  The tension diminished. With little further talk, the castaways dropped to the warm ground and stretched out exhaustedly.

  Curt and his friends kept at a little distance from the mutineers. He noticed that Kim Ivan himself was not sleeping, but was keeping vigilant watch from where he sat.

  Captain Future pillowed Joan’s head on his knee. “Try to get some sleep, Joan.”

  “M-m-maybe I could g-g-get some moss or leaves from that jungle, to m-m-make a bed for her,” suggested George McClinton anxiously.

  “No, it’s bad business to go blundering into an alien interplanetary forest by night,” Curt answered. “You never know what queer kind of creature is waiting for you.”

  Silence and darkness held the makeshift camp of survivors. No one felt like talking, and most were already exhaustedly sleeping. The only sounds were the medley of uncanny calls from the starlit jungle, and the low rumbling of the distant volcanoes. Now and then, the ground quivered slightly under them, with a low, muted growling.

  Captain Future looked down at Joan’s dark head, upon his knee. She was sleeping, her face white in the starlight. He perceived that Grag, who never slept, was standing watch nearby like an immobile metal statue.

  John Rollinger was not sleeping. The crazed biophysicist was looking toward the distant jungle in an attitude of intent listening.

  “Rollinger, what’s the matter?” Curt asked in low tones.

  The Earthman turned dazed eyes toward him. “I hear voices talking, inside my head. I’m afraid. There is somebody on this world.”

  “There’s no one here,” Curt soothed. “Go to sleep. You haven’t anything to be afraid of.”

  The Brain had been brooding silently nearby. Like Grag, Simon never slept. Now he glided to Captain Future’s side, and whispered.

  “Lad, I’ve been thinking about this planetoid,” he said. “There’s something puzzling about it. I mean, all this volcanic and seismologic activity. There shouldn’t be volcanism on a world this small.”

  Curt was grimly amused. “Same old Simon! All our predicament means to you is just an intriguing scientific problem.”

  THE BRAIN’S metallic whisper was cold and annoyed. “If my reasoning is right, this particular scientific problem has an important bearing on our present predicament. Lad, you saw the meteorometer readings on this planetoid before we crashed on it. Can you remember its approximate mass, direction and speed of drift, and distance from the System?”

  Captain Future was puzzled. “I think I can, thought I don’t see why it’s so important. The mass of it is two-thousands-Earth, position is slightly over four billion miles from the edge of the System, and its drift is almost straight toward the System at ten miles a second velocity —”

  Curt stopped suddenly, as his keen scientific mind abruptly realized t
he significance of the data he was quoting.

  “Good Lord, Simon, I didn’t see it before! This planetoid is approaching the Limit!”

  “Yes, lad,” rasped the Brain. “And that accounts for its volcanic activity.”

  Curt Newton was appalled. The ominous fact to which the Brain had called his attention made their predicament vastly more menacing.

  In taut whispers, he and Simon Wright discussed it with feverish intensity as the night hours passed. Between these two master-scientists sped whispered formulae, equations and corrections, as they sought to solve mentally a problem which was of direst import.

  The sky in the “east” began to lighten at last. A growing pallor crept across the starry heavens. And with it came a sharper, more violent tremor of the ground beneath them. The shock and the grinding roar brought the sleeping castaways into alarmed wakefulness.

  “Curt, what’s happening?” Joan’s small hand clutched his sleeve as she awakened.

  “It’s only a stronger seismic tremor,” he reassured her. “But it’s sun-rise now, Joan.”

  The Sun came up as a bright, tiny disk hardly larger than a very brilliant star. It cast a feeble daylight across the alien landscape of smoking volcanoes, black lava-beds, and distant green jungles.

  Kim Ivan stood, looking grimly around the unfriendly vista. The other mutineers were getting to their feet, staring about in dismal silence.

  “This is a devil of a place to be marooned in,” muttered Grabo, the squat Jovian.

  Kim Ivan shrugged. “It’s better than Interplanetary Prison, anyway. There’ll be fruits and meat-animals in that jungle. We can live here indefinitely.”

  Captain Future grimly contradicted the big pirate. “We can’t live here indefinitely. This little world isn’t going to exist indefinitely.”

  The big Martian frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that in a little more than two months, this planetoid will be shattered and destroyed,” retorted Curt.