Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (10 page)

Grag asked uneasily, “What do you suppose he’s raving about? He gets on my nerves.”

“He’s just delirious,” Curt said. “It’s a pity — a fine mind like that, irretrievably wrecked.”

Captain Future stretched out tiredly on the ground nearby. The night air was growing chill, and he wrapped his zipper-jacket more tightly around him.

As he dropped off to sleep, the low, babbling mutter of the crazed Earthman scientist was the last sound in his ears.

CURT awakened suddenly. It was still dark, and everything was drenched with a cold dew. But by the shifting of the starry sky, he perceived that he had slept for several hours.

He soon discovered what had awakened him. Rollinger’s ravings had become louder and shriller, were ascending to a frenzied pitch. Curt quickly rose and went over to the spot where Grag was standing watch over the madman.

“No, do not make me!” Rollinger was gasping.

“I can’t do it — I can’t!”

The man’s face was frantic in the starlight, and his body was writhing and shuddering.

“Chief, he’s been getting worse by the minute!” Grag reported. “He keeps talking to somebody he calls the Dwellers.”

Curt knelt by the bound madman, and spoke earnestly in an effort to reach that dimmed, distorted mind.

“Rollinger, what are you afraid of?”

The man’s wild eyes looked up at him, as though dimly recognizing him.

“The Dwellers!” gasped the madman. “The hidden lords of this world, whose powers are strange and mighty! They have been speaking to me in my mind, have been commanding me to do that which I cannot do.”

Captain Future frowned. There was something uncanny about the raw, shuddering terror of the crazed scientist.

“Chief, do you suppose there could be malign creatures on this world that he can sense but we can’t?” Grag asked in a low voice. “There’s scientific proof that an unhinged mind is more sensitive to outside telepathic influences than a sound mind,” muttered Grag.

Curt felt definitely uneasy. He straightened and looked around the starlit, sleeping camp.

“There don’t seem to be any intruders here. You didn’t see anything strange, did you?”

Grag shook his head. “No, nothing at all. And everyone else has been sleeping, except for that Neptunian mutineer, Luuq, I saw moving around a little bit ago.”

“Maybe Luuq saw something,” Captain Future murmured. “I’ll see if he did.”

He went through the camp, searching the sleepers for Luuq. To his surprise, he could not find the Neptunian anywhere in the camp. The ex-bandit had disappeared.

Kim Ivan awoke with catlike alertness as Curt renewed his search for the missing man. The big Martian, instantly got to his feet.

“What’s the matter? Something wrong?” he demanded.

“I’m afraid so,” answered Captain Future. “Your friend Luuq is missing. Grag saw him moving about, but now he’s gone.”

Others were awakening, aroused by the Martian’s loud voice. They looked at each other uneasily.

“See if anyone else is missing,” ordered Kim Ivan, frowning.

They soon discovered that one other of the mutineers had also disappeared, a little Mercurian ex-thief.

“Maybe the two of them just went out into the jungle and will come back,” suggested Boraboll, the fat Uranian, hopefully.

“They wouldn’t go prowling around in that jungle by night,” Kim Ivan said emphatically. “If they left the camp, it was because they were dragged out of it.”

“Future seems to know more about it than anyone else,” said Moremos insinuatingly.

The gathered mutineers understood the Venusian’s veiled accusation. They turned hard eyes upon Curt Newton.

“I know no more than you do,” Curt said quietly.

“Future couldn’t have made away with Luuq and the other,” Kim Ivan said loudly. “Not without some sound that would’ve roused us all.”

“I don’t know,” muttered old Tuhlus Thuun.

JOHN ROLLINGER interrupted. The crazed scientist, still lying bound under Grag’s guard nearby, was sobbing hysterically.

“We must leave this world!” he screamed. “Unless we leave, the Dwellers will kill us all!”

“What’s he talking about — the Dwellers?” Kim Ivan asked puzzledly.

“The hidden ones — the mighty lords — they watch us now and they wait!” raved Rollinger.

Grabo, the Jovian, stirred uneasily, his dark face nervous in expression. “I don’t like this place. It’s as spooky as the Place of the Dead, on Jupiter.”

“Do you s’pose there could be critters of some kind on this planetoid cunning enough to steal into the camp and carry away them two men?” asked Ezra Gurney.

Surely we’d have seen any creatures as intelligent as that,” objected Joan, eyes bright with concentration.

“I don’t know,” Curt muttered. “Everything about this planetoid is alien, different from the life of our own System. It comes from remote regions of the galaxy, and during its ages of isolation, its evolution has taken different paths.”

There was an uneasy silence. The night suddenly seemed pregnant with mysterious menace. The low calls of small animals and the squeak of birds from the dark surrounding jungle fell upon tensely listening ears.

Had some formidable beast of prey actually entered the camp and slain the Neptunian and Mercurian, it would not have have been so terrifying as this baffling disappearance of the two men. It was the unearthly mystery of it that chilled them. Their minds conjured pictures of malign and alien creatures lurking out there in the dark, watching and waiting.

“The most intelligent-lookin’ creatures we’ve seen on this planetoid are the Cubics,” drawled Ezra. “Do you s’pose they’re the Dwellers?”

“They didn’t look of high intelligence,” Curt said doubtfully. “Besides, how could they enter the camp and make off silently with two men?”

“Luuq and the Mercurian must have went sleepwalking into the jungle and got grabbed by some beast,” Kim Ivan growled.

“Just the same, I propose we post our own guards at night to prevent any more ‘sleepwalking’,” said Moremos, glancing toward Curt Newton.

For the remaining few hours of that night they sat around the fire, talking in low voices. All realized more completely than ever before the alien nature of this wandering worldlet from outer space. What dark riddle was it hiding?

The coming of day was a relief to strained nerves. Almost cheerfully, they breakfasted on fruit and berries. Then Captain Future got to his feet and incisively addressed them.

“We’ve got to organize our operations, if we’re to get anywhere with the task ahead of us,” he declared.

He was a confidence-inspiring figure as he stood, his tall, rangy figure and red head silhouetted against the pale sunrise, his keen gray eyes sweeping their faces. But he was not nearly so confident as he looked. He was a little overwhelmed by the audacity of what they were about to attempt.

“First, we’ve got to complete the stockade around this knoll and build some huts,” he stated. “Others of us have to form regular foraging parties to supply fruit, roots, and small meat-animals if possible.”

KIM IVAN spoke up. “I’ll superintend the building of the stockade and huts. And Grabo can take care of the food-supply. He says he knows how to set traps for the animals whose traces we saw in the jungle.”

Curt nodded. “I’ll leave all that to you, then,” he told Kim Ivan. “The Futuremen and I will begin an exploratory survey for the metallic ores and other materials we’ll require. That’s our first step toward a ship.”

The big clear knoll soon was buzzing with activity. Kim Ivan’s stentorian voice bellowed orders, supervising a large party of the mutineers in hauling fern-poles from the jungle and setting them up in a stockade and in framework for huts.

Grabo had chosen a dozen of the men and had gone into the fern-forest to set the animal-snares he had improvised from strips of clothing. Other of the men were already bringing in fruits and roots.

Curt asked Ezra Gurney, “Will you stay here and keep an eye on Moremos? I don’t think he’ll try to make any real trouble until we have built a ship. But I don’t want to take any chances.”

“I understand,” nodded the veteran marshal. “I’ll watch that varmint.”

Captain Future and Grag and Otho and the Brain set forth eastward upon their quest for ores, accompanied by George McClinton and Joan. The girl had insisted upon going.

Curt headed toward the nearby region of volcanic activity. All around that region were chasms and crevasses that had been split by the recent seismic disturbances.

“Our best chance of finding surface deposits of iron, beryllium and the other ores we need, is in those chasms,” he pointed out. “We have to find the stuff in easily worked surface deposits at first, for as yet we have no tools for mining.”

“When I think of all the work ahead of us, I wish I was back home on the Moon,” Otho said gloomily.

They approached the black fields of solidified lava. Beyond that crusted expanse lay the smoking valleys through which came the sluggish red rivers of molten rock that flowed down from the towering volcanoes. The sulphurous fumes half-veiled the forbidding vista.

Curt Newton turned to the Brain. “Simon, will you reconnoiter as many of the chasms and gorges as you can? See what deposits of ores you can spot. We’ll be working northward, from here.”

The Brain glided off upon his mission, looking like a glittering flying cube as he shot away through the pale sunlight upon his traction-beams. He was quickly out of sight.

George McClinton, to whom Simon was not as familiar as to the others, looked after the Brain with marveling wonder.

“If the Brain can f-f-fly like that so easily, w-w-why couldn’t he f-f-fly back to the System for help?” he asked.

Curt shook his head. “Simon derives the power for his beams from a tiny atomic generator inside his case. It holds a charge of fuel sufficient for many hours’ activity, but not enough for a long flight in space.”

“That reminds me,” Grag said dismayedly, “I’ll be needing copper and other elements for fuel for my own generators pretty soon. Otherwise, my power will run down.”

Otho told the robot, “That’s all right — when your power runs out, we can make some swell tools out of you. Yes, sir, you’re going to come in mighty handy, Grag.”

“Chief, will you make Otho quit threatening me!” demanded Grag angrily. “He’s getting on my nerves by his talk of using me for metal.”

“He can use up some of his wind climbing down into this crevice and prospecting for iron,” Captain Future said acidly as they started forward.

They had been moving northward and had come to a deep crevasse driven in the rock of the planetoid by quakes. It was quite narrow and its jagged walls were almost vertical.

OTHO’S rubbery figure went down the walls as though he were a fly. Presently his voice echoed hollowly up to them.

“Yes, there’s nickel-iron down here. Looks like the core of Astarfall.”

“That’s what I was hoping for,” Curt declared. “I figured from its mass that Astarfall would have a nickel-iron core like most planetoids and planets, and that its rock crust could not be a thick one.”

They went back to the jungle and secured a quantity of tough vines from which they fashioned a strong, flexible ladder. Curt and Grag went down this into the gloomy depths of the crevasse.

Glittering outcrops of nickel-iron ores were plentiful in the bottom of the chasm. But digging out the ore without tools was another matter. Here Grag’s great strength came into play. With a few chunks of hard rock for hammers, the big robot loosened small masses of ore.

Joan and McClinton had woven wicker baskets which they let down by a vine rope. Thus the masses of ore were hauled to the surface. It was slow, toilsome work. The day was waning when they finally had enough of the ore for Captain Future’s immediate purposes.

The Brain had returned and made his report. “I investigated a good many of the chasms. And I found indications of copper, manganese, chromium and several other of the ores we need.”

He listed them all, and Curt Newton listened intently. He asked then, “What about the beryllium, calcium and lead? They’re vital.”

“I’ve not found any of them yet,” admitted the Brain. “There are signs of possible beryllium: and lead deposits in that huge gorge between the double range of volcanoes. But I didn’t risk going far down into it, for, that abyss is highly dangerous. The terrific air-currents, heat and fumes from the lava at its bottom make it a veritable canyon of chaos.”

“The Canyon of Chaos sounds like a good name for that place, at that,” remarked Otho.

“It’s hardly worth while naming places on a world that’s going to blow up two months from now,” grumbled Grag.

The Sun was sinking when they returned to the camp. The transformation there proved that Kim Ivan and his men had been at work.

The stockade around the knoll was roughly complete. A spring had been dug. The framework of a dozen huts was up, and several had already been thatched with flat fronds. The huge, barrel-shaped cacti in the clearing had been left untouched, since to attempt to cut down those giant growths would have entailed immense labor for no particular reason.