Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (17 page)

“I can hear a lot of activity from somewhere far ahead,” finally reported the robot. “It sounds like rock being shattered.”

“You’re crazy!” Otho jeered. “Who the devil would be pounding up rock here in the jungle?”

“The Cubics wouldn’t be — or would they?” Kim Ivan wondered. “Come to think of it, they’re always carrying rock when you see them.”

Captain Future imperatively enjoined silence, and led the way on along the path toward the west. Presently he and the others could also hear the distant sound of clashing rock that had reached Grag’s ears.

A FEW minutes later found them crouching at the edge of the jungle and looking out at the starlit little city of the Cubics, with incredulous astonishment. The stone beehive structures, the hordes of Cubics engaged in crushing rock ores, the towering heaps of crushed ore behind the village, all stunned them as they had so recently dumfounded Ezra and Joan.

“Why, those Cubics are grinding out ore!” Otho gasped. “And look, when they get it crushed out, they simply carry it over to those big heaps and dump, and then go get more. They’re balmy as Martian fool-monkeys!”

“I’ll be blasted!” Kim Ivan was swearing in a whisper. “Why would the little creatures crush out all that ore when they haven’t any use for it?”

“I see Joan and Ezra!” Grag announced. “Look, Chief!”

With sharp relief, Curt Newton perceived that Joan and Ezra were sitting on the ground in front of one of the little stone beehive buildings. A ring of Cubics surrounded them, guarding them. Obviously, the Cubics had taken the girl and the old marshal prisoner but had not harmed them.

“They’ve not been hurt,” exclaimed Otho in a low voice. “Now all we’ve got to do is to crash in there and bring them out.”

The android raised his steel weapon, as he and Grag and the others prepared to follow Captain Future in a sortie into the community. “Wait a minute,” ordered Curt Newton. There was a strange, frozen look on his face.

Curt’s eyes had been traveling over that bustling, inexplicable scene. And a possible explanation of it had entered his mind, one whose implications were paralyzing.

The possibility that had occurred to him sent through him an icy horror such as he had almost never before experienced. He seemed to see behind this half-comic, purposeless activity of the Cubics, a ghastly story.

“Good God!” he choked. “If I’m right, we’re looking at the most awful scene our eyes have ever rested on.”

“Chief, what are you talking about?” whispered Otho. “I can’t see anything awful about those Cubics breaking up ore for metal they don’t know how to use. It seems funny, to me.”

“Yes, and look at the big heaps of it they’ve piled up,” chuckled Kim Ivan. “They must have been doing this for hundreds of years.”

“Yes, for hundreds of years,” muttered Captain Future. His face was pale in the starlight. “For hundreds of years.”

They stared at him, completely perplexed by the emotion of horror that seemed to have overwhelmed him.

“Listen,” he said after a moment. “If my guess is right, we won’t have to fight these Cubics to get Ezra and Joan away. I want you to refrain from making a single hostile move toward them when we go out there. Let me talk to them.”

“Talk
to them?” echoed Otho incredulously. “But they won’t understand you. They’re only queer, clever little animals.”

“Maybe they will understand me,” Captain Future muttered. “Though I almost hope they don’t.”

Completely without understanding, the four followed him out of the jungle as he stepped straight into the starlight of the open clearing.

Instantly they were glimpsed by the Cubics. At once the noisy crushing and carrying of ore was broken off, and the creatures came gliding toward the five newcomers.

They approached menacingly, in the form of huge, semi-manlike figures with upraised, threatening arms. Curt Newton waited until they were quite near, and then he spoke loudly to them. He used a queer language.

The Cubics stopped short! They froze where they were, every eye of the grotesque little cubical creatures staring at Captain Future.

“What’s he saying?” murmured Kim Ivan wonderingly.

“He’s talking to them in the Antarian tongue!” Otho said dumfoundedly. “I don’t get it.”

BUT Captain Future’s speech seemed to be having a paralyzing effect upon the Cubics. Curt was saying to them, in the Antarian language:

“We come from the home world, from Antares.”

He waited. Had his appalling guess been right? It seemed that it had, for the Cubics were now betraying the wildest excitement.

The creatures had not the intelligence or memory to understand the meaning of his
words,
Curt divined. But the
language
in which he spoke was striking some deep, buried chord of memory in their queer minds.

For the creatures had broken up their menacing formations and were rushing forward and swarming around Curt in a swarm of swirling cubical bodies. Their little eyes were fixed upon his face, and from their tiny mouths came little, piping sounds indicative of immense excitement.

Captain Future advanced toward the little city, with Otho and the others amazedly following. The Cubics continued to swarm around Curt eagerly. All work had ceased, and every Cubic was gathering.

Joan and Ezra saw them coming. Relief and astonishment were both in the girl’s face as she greeted Captain Future.

“Curt, how did you win over the Cubics? They took us prisoner and they’ve been holding us here.”

“Joan, you and Ezra speak to the Cubics,” he ordered. “Say a few words to them in Antarian. You know I taught you a few phrases of it.”

Wonderingly, the old marshal and the girl agent obeyed. No sooner had the words left their lips, than the attitude of their captors changed. The Cubics who had been guarding them now clamored pipingly around them as well as around Captain Future.

“What in the name o’ the Sun does it mean?” Ezra Gurney exclaimed. “How come just hearin’ Antarian spoken has such an effect on these critters?”

Curt answered solemnly. “Because these Cubics are Antarians. At least, they’re the remote descendants of human Antarians.”

It was too staggering a statement for the others to take in immediately. They looked uncomprehendingly at the weird little creatures swarming by the hundreds around them — the tiny cubical bodies, the queer, clawlike little limbs, the twinkling eyes and piping mouths.

“These critters human once?” gasped Ezra, “you must be jokin’.”

Joan paled. That horror which had so shaken Curt Newton was invading her mind as she began to realize what he meant.

“Oh, Curt,
no!
You can’t mean that the human Antarians who once colonized Astarfall, who left that inscribed tablet, changed into —”

“Into these Cubics, yes,” Curt finished somberly. “We wondered what had become of those human colonists. Well, here they are.”

A stunned silence held his companions, while the unearthly little creatures continued their mad dance of excitement about them.

“Every species of life upon this worldlet suffered tremendous evolutionary development when Astarfall passed long ago through that region of cosmic radiation,” Curt continued. “But evolution can work in a
downward
direction as well as an
upward
one. Some of the species on this world evolved upward, notably its plant-life. But others, like its human species, were subjected to a progressive degeneration by the mutational changes.

“The Antarians here mutated gradually into unhuman form. We know from that inscription that it was so. They mutated into a form in which they had lost the intelligence and memory that had been theirs. Their former telepathic method of communication developed prodigiously, to compensate for the diminishing of their size and strength. By necessity, they developed an uncanny ability for physical and mental cooperation. That ability is all that has even kept them surviving, when intelligence and size and strength were gradually lost.”

HORROR was on the face of every one of Captain Future’s companions, now. The little Cubics were no longer comic, but tragic.

These tiny, semi-intelligent creatures — the descendants of men! The ghastliness of it shook them all.

“But why have they kept mining metals, all these centuries?” cried Kim Ivan. “They no longer have the intelligence to use it.”

“Racial memory,” Curt answered somberly, “persists in a species long after intelligence is lost. In these Cubics has persisted the tradition of their human ancestors who upon this world mined metal which the ships of Antares came to get.”

“Good God!” whispered George McClinton horrifiedly. “All these c-c-centuries, the c-creatures have been faithfully m-massing ores because of that tradition.”

Captain Future nodded. “That’s why I spoke to them in the Antarian tongue. I hoped it would strike a chord of racial memory. And it has. They have a dim idea that we are those who have come for their gathered metal.”

Tears glistened in Joan’s eyes. There was something terribly poignant about the excited happiness of the simple little creatures swarming around them.

The Cubics eagerly led Curt and his companions toward the giant ore-heaps behind their community. There was a quality of pride in their excited, meaningless piping.

“There’s almost all the metal here that we’ll need for our ship,” Curt said after a quick examination of the great heaps. “Everything except calcium.”

“Blast it, why is it we can find everything on this world except the few pounds of calcium that are the most vital of all?” Otho muttered.

“Say, this will save us the work of mining ores, if the Cubics will let us have what we need of these metal piles,” Grag declared.

Captain Future nodded. “And we need to save all the time we can, for we’re far behind schedule on the ship. I’m sure they’ll let us have it.”

He stepped forward, and gathered up an armful of sample chunks from the great pile of beryllium ores. Instantly, as though comprehending his purpose, the Cubics rushed forward toward that pile.

The creatures swiftly formed themselves into several dozen of the big centipedal figures whose formation they took for carrying purposes. Other Cubics became octopoid figures who rapidly loaded the centipedal ones with masses of the beryllium ore. They they stood, eyeing Curt expectantly.

“They’re going to carry the stuff wherever we want it,” Captain Future guessed. “Poor devils — they have some dim traditional notion that we’ve come in ships to this world to get it.”

He and Joan and the others started back through the jungle, in the direction of the camp. Quickly the Cubics carrying the masses of ore swung into the jungle behind them and followed them along the path.

IT WAS a weird procession through the dark fern-forest, the eager piping of the Cubics sounding incessantly as they followed the humans.

But when they were still a few miles from the camp, the attitude of the Cubics changed. They began to move more slowly, to show an extreme reluctance toward going farther in this direction. Finally they stopped altogether, putting down their loads and clustering with dismayed pipings around Captain Future.

“They won’t go any farther!” said Otho surprisedly. “I wonder what they’re afraid of?”

“I believe,” Curt said thoughtfully, “that they know of something dangerous in the area in which our camp is located. That would explain why the Cubics have never come close to the camp.”

“The Dwellers!” cried Kim Ivan. “Future, they’re scared of the Dwellers!”

“Say, that’s right,” Grag rumbled. “We thought the Cubics might be the Dwellers, but we know now they’re not. Who are the Dwellers, then?”

“They’re somewhere in the area around our camp, whoever they are,” Curt Newton murmured. “If the Cubics could only tell us.”

He tried to get into intelligent communication with the little creatures. But it was impossible. Their only method of communication was the weird sixth-sense of cooperation by which they interlocked their own minds and bodies. Their piping sounds were utterly without meaning.

The only definite thing that could be gathered from the actions of the Cubics was that the area around the castaways’ camp held danger, and that the creatures would not enter it. And the creatures set up a distressed piping when Curt and his comrades finally strode on and left them.

“We can have our own men come this far and sledge that metal ore to camp,” Curt planned as they went on. “And the Cubics will let us have all the other ores we need from those great heaps. It’ll save precious time!”

Joan looked at him soberly. “When Astarfall is destroyed, those little creatures will all perish?”

“Yes,” said Captain Future heavily. “There’s no possible way in which they could be saved. And would you
want
to keep alive those pitiful descendants of a once-human race?”

UPON the next morning, Curt’s improvised organization began the work of casting the scores of great beams that would form the frame of the ship. The atomic smelters throbbed and hummed, the molten alloy hissed into the cement molds, the shining beams were later broken free of the molds and the same routine was immediately repeated.