Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (11 page)

“Not bad,” Kim Ivan admitted when Curt complimented him on the day’s work. “It won’t take us long to finish up the huts now.”

GRABO and his trappers soon returned from the jungle. “We eat tonight, and not just fruit,” proclaimed the Jovian complacently.

They had snared four plump, rodent-like animals as big as small pigs. And they had brought several new varieties of edible fruits.

“But that jungle is a devilish place.” swore the Jovian. “Beside those cursed tangle-trees, there’s smaller plants that eat insects and birds in the same way. I never saw such evil plant-life as this world has.”

Nevertheless, the animals made a palatable sort of stew. Although he didn’t eat, the Brain passed upon the flesh as being harmless and containing nutriment. He waved his eye-stalks questioningly when Captain Future thoughtfully fished a couple of bones out of the stew and offered them for his inspection.

“What is it, lad?” he asked.

“Note the glazed appearance of these bones,” said Curt. “Just an interesting side problem, but do you make the same thing I do of the skeletal structure of mammals here?”

“Siliciferous compounds!” ex-claimed the Brain at once. “The bony structure of creatures on Astarfall are built up from silicon. Altogether different from Earthly specimens. It’s unmistakable.”

“Exactly,” said Captain Future, nodding. He turned to speak to one of the cooks.

“Save the skins of those animals for me,” he requested. “I’ll need them tomorrow.

“To build the space ship?” sneered Moremos, who had returned with the Jovian.

“Yes, to build the ship,” Curt nodded, with a calm smile.

He and Grabo scraped and cleaned the hides that night, and he used strong fiber threads and a thorn needle to sew two of them together into a rude but effective bellows. This he mounted in a rough wooden frame.

It was late when he finished this work by the firelight. Joan had retired to the smallest hut, which had been assigned for her use. Most of the mutineers and others were also already asleep.

Grag had taken up his tireless and sleepless watch. And old Tuhlus Thuun and Boraboll were remaining awake and watchful tonight, too.

“I’m going to turn in,” Curt yawned, straightening. “How’s Rollinger?”

“Muttering a little, but not as noisy as he was last night,” Grag replied. “I think he’s quieting down.”

The crazed scientist was now confined in one of the other small huts. He had been subdued and silent all during the day.

CURT slept heavily. When he awakened and went out into the sunrise, he found Kim Ivan swearing.

“There
is
something cursed spooky about this place,” declared the big Martian. “I had queer dreams all night — as though somebody was talking inside my mind.”

Boraboll spoke nervously. “Nothing happened all night. And nothing came near the camp that we could see or hear.”

That day, while most of the mutineers resumed the work of building the huts and replenishing the food-supply, Captain Future and his party began the next step of their task.

“We’ve got iron ore, and now we’ve got to smelt it out for steel,” Curt stated. “Since we don’t have any atomic smelter, we’ll have to go back to ancient ways.”

He supervised the bringing of massive stones, and the building of them into a small furnace. They had no coal with which to fire this, but the Brain had located a deposit of combustible peat in one of the swampy sections of the jungle.

Curt Newton attached his rude bellows to the stone furnace. He used its draft to fan the peat fire he kindled inside. Then he arranged a mass of the nickel-iron ore inside the furnace. When the ore became molten, he forced air through it by hard pumping on the bellows.

“This arrangement goes back to primitive times,” he commented. “It’s crude, but we’ll have to use crude ways until we have some tools.”

When the forced air had reduced the ore to a mass of molten iron, Captain Future added a small quantity of carbon.

“Hey, that isn’t the way you make steelite,” objected Otho.

“We can’t make a modern steelite alloy without beryllium and other elements which we haven’t got yet,” Curt retorted. “We’ll have to be satisfied at first with this old-fashioned steel.”

The product of his labors for the day were two chunks of solid steel. One, which was much larger than the other, was roughly shaped to serve as an anvil. The other Curt attached to a limber wooden handle, converting it into a crude but heavy forging-hammer.

Joan looked a little disappointedly at these two unlovely products of their day’s toil.

“It’s wonderful that you’ve been able to make them, but they seem a long way off from a big, complex space ship,” she murmured.

“They’re the seeds of a space ship,” Curt old her. “You have to crawl before you can walk. Remember that we’re starting here completely empty-handed. That means that we’re forced to retrace a lot of the steps by which thousands of generations of men ascended from the discovery of fire to the building of space ships.”

All during the next two days, he kept their improvised furnace and forge at work. McClinton was his chief helper, while Otho untiringly pumped the bellows and Grag utilized his huge strength in bringing fresh masses of ore from the surface working they had discovered.

Kim Ivan had detailed a party of the mutineers to dig that ore and help transport it to the camp. The Brain was away from dawn till dark each day, searching the face of Astarfall for the other needed elements. He had already managed to locate deposits of several of them.

The first thing which Captain Future beat out upon their forge was the steel framework for a larger and more efficient smelter. When that was going, a larger amount of better quality steel began to result.

“We’re still only in the first stages of tooling up,” Curt declared. “We can’t really make any start on ship-building until we have atomic power and an atomic smelter for turning out high-grade light alloys.”

“Why don’t you start on that right away, then?” Joan wanted to know.

“Be reasonable, woman,” pleaded Captain Future. “An atomic power set-up requires certain chemicals which we can’t dig out until we have strong steel tools for mining.”

THEY were concentrating now upon making tough steel picks, bars and other tools for mining operations. Each tool had to be beaten into shape upon their forge. The camp rang with the clangorous hammering.

By now, the huts had been completed and a routine system of gathering and preparing food set up. These last few nights had brought no recurrence of the mysterious disappearances, although several others beside Kim Ivan had complained of uncannily oppressive dreams. The stockade gate was guarded each night by a couple of the mutineers.

“Now,” said Captain Future on the fourth morning, “we can start mining copper and the other elements we need for the next step.”

“I told you of the copper-ore deposit I found,” said the Brain. “But I’ve still not located any calcium, beryllium or lead.”

“Let me scout for those and the other elements we still lack,” begged Otho. “I can maybe find them where Simon would miss them.”

“All right, you can prospect the chasms northwest of the volcanic area,” Curt acceded. “The rest of us will start copper-mining today.”

Otho departed upon his prospecting mission. Captain Future, Grag, McClinton and Rih Quili gathered their new tools and started out for preliminary work upon the copper deposit the Brain had located. Joan was ready to accompany them, but Curt firmly overruled her this time, leaving her standing rebelliously outside the stockade. But before they had gone far through the jungle, he stopped.

“I thought I heard Joan calling,” he said. “Listen!”

They heard Joan’s voice raised sharply again, in an exclamation that had more of anger than fear in it.

Instantly Curt plunged back through the jungle the way they had come. When he came into sight of the stockade, a sudden tide of red fury pulsed through his brain.

Joan was struggling angrily in the arms of Moremos. The green-skinned Venusian was laughing as he drew her toward him.

“You
are
a little wildcat,” he chuckled.

In all the years, Captain Future had killed more than one man. But always he had slain as the personification of stern, icy justice. He had almost never before felt the hot, raging desire to slay that now flung him forward.

Moremos thrust the girl away and recoiled startledly. Next moment Curt had him by the throat. The Venusian fought furiously, a savage hate flaming in his eyes as he sought a deadly swamp-man’s grip.

“Curt, wait!” Joan pleaded appalled by the terrible expression upon his face, one she had never seen there before.

Captain Future did not even hear her. The raging desire to kill had momentarily made him forget all his own skill in super ju-jitsu. He broke Moremos’ deadly grip by sheer strength, and slammed the Venusian down to the ground like a doll. His fingers tightened on the man’s throat.

Then big hands gripped Curt’s collar and pulled him back off the Venusian. Grabo and a score of the other mutineers had come running from the camp.

Moremos staggered up, his face livid, his voice a choking gasp. “Future. I’ll pay you for this, too. It adds to an old debt.”

“Let go of the Chief!” roared a new voice. Grag had followed Curt back and now charged on the scene, ready for battle.

“What the devil’s going on here?” bellowed Kim Ivan. The big Martian was pushing his way through the crowd.

“Future was trying to kill Moremos!” squeaked fat Boraboll.

Curt made no explanations. But his voice was a throbbing whisper as he spoke to the Venusian.

“If ever you so much as touch Joan again, nothing will stop me from killing you.”

A growl came from the mutineers. Their deep and ancient feud against Futuremen and the Patrol flamed quickly to the surface.

At that moment came a low, grinding roar from far beneath their feet. The ground quivered slightly under them, and then shook wildly.

The powerful and unexpected shock threw them from their feet. They heard the crash of some of the huts collapsing, and a section of the stockade near them fell inward.

The fat Uranian mutineer uttered a screech and there were cries of alarm from others. Curt Newton, scrambling to Joan’s side, felt the ground rolling and heaving sickeningly under them. Then the shocks subsided, and the grinding roar of diastrophism died away.

“Gods of space, that was the worst tremor yet!” gasped Grabo.

They looked at each other in a tense silence. All realized that the quakes were now growing stronger as Astarfall approached near the critical distance from the System at which it would be shattered and destroyed.

OTHO had set out in high spirits upon his prospecting expedition that morning. The restless android, always impatient of monotony had been chafing during the last few days of steel-making.

He swung eastward through the jungle and then started around the rim of the great region of earthquake-riven chasms and smoking black lava-beds whose center was the towering double range of active volcanoes. As he moved along, he mentally listed the raw materials they still lacked.

“Cobalt, beryllium, lead, calcium, and about a dozen others,” Otho thought ruefully. “We might do without a few of those in a pinch. But there just can’t be any space ship without beryllium and calcium.”

Beryllium was important, for it was the chief ingredient of the metallic alloy whose strength and lightness were necessary for the construction of a space ship hull.

Calcium was even more vital. A small amount of it was an absolute necessity before a ship’s cyclotrons could operate to produce atomic power. For calcium was the only inhibitory catalyst that could control the production of atomic power from copper, and prevent a disastrous explosion.

“So it’s up to me to find the stuff,” the android told himself determinedly.

The Brain had sketched for Otho a rough diagram of the chasms around the volcanic region.

Many of these Simon had not closely explored.

Otho began a systematic exploration of them. The rubbery android could climb like no other being in the System.

He went down into the first chasm by imperceptible holds on the jagged wall.

His keen, scientifically trained eyes strained in the dusk to inspect the rock formations.

With the small steel hammer he had brought, he tapped loose samples here and there. A streak of bluish ore he uncovered at one spot proved to be cobalt, one of the necessary materials. But he found none of their other requirements in that chasm.

He clambered back up out of it and stood panting upon its rim, looking a little dashedly across the wilderness of lava and crevasses.

“No wonder Simon couldn’t explore all these cracks,” he thought. “I’ve picked myself a job.”

He resolutely went on to explore the next chasm. But in it, he found nothing at all. Otho felt increasingly worried about the lack of beryllium and calcium as he climbed back to the surface.