Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (18 page)

During the next days, a mass of numbered beams and struts rapidly accumulated near the towering, giant cacti at the center of the camp. Grag and McClinton operated the smelters under Curt Newton’s direction, while Otho, Kim Ivan and most of the mutineers hauled the loads of ore to camp.

The Brain still ranged out over the surface of Astarfall in vain search of calcium. So far, they had not found a grain of the vital catalyst. And so far, the Brain had not been able to translate the gaps in the ancient inscription, which might have given them a clue to the identity of the Dwellers.

“The Dwellers are somewhere within a few miles of our camp,” Curt reasoned. “We know that from the actions of the Cubics. But what and where are they? We’ve seen no creatures of high intelligence in all this area.”

“It’s possible, I suppose,” murmured the Brain, “that that fellow Boraboll’s suggestion had truth in it, and that the Dwellers are subterranean or invisible creatures. Rollinger’s ravings indicate they’re somewhere near.”

Captain Future shook his head wearily. “It’s a hideous riddle. And two more men disappeared last night, despite our new system of guards.”

Curt had instituted a regime of guards designed to halt the disappearances. It was evident that the Dwellers only made their hypnotic attacks upon sleeping men.

So Captain Future had posted guards over all the sleepers, each night. He had instructed them: “If you see any man get up and start sleep-walking, it means he’s in the hypnotic grip of the Dwellers. But don’t awaken him.
Follow
him.”

“Follow him?” the others had said startledly. “But the Dwellers will draw him right to them!”

Curt nodded. “Which means that by following their victim, you’ll be led right to the Dwellers themselves. At last we’ll find out what they are and where they lurk, and can take measures against them.”

But here, again, the unearthly cunning of the mystery Dwellers showed itself. So long as Curt’s guards remained wakeful and watching the sleeping men, not one hypnotic attack was made upon them.

It was obvious that the Dwellers were
aware
of the watchers, and were too crafty to give themselves away by drawing victims to themselves while anyone was watching.

“Anyway, it seems to have stopped the attacks and that’s something,” Captain Future said. “We need every man, now!”

For as these short days passed, the stark necessity of accelerating construction of the ship was terribly evident. Time was flying — and each day meant Astarfall was nearer to the System and to destruction.

Curt Newton soon began fitting the growing pile of beams into the framework of the ship. The stout metal girders, the curved ribs, were attached solidly to the massive keel by means of their atomic welders. The torpedo-shaped framework of the vessel took definite form.

“Let’s call it the
Phoenix,
” Joan suggested. “In a way, it’s rising out of the ashes of the old
Vulcan.”

“We’ll start tomorrow casting plates, and making the refractory alloy for the rocket-tubes,” Captain Future said haggardly. “We’ve got to go faster than we have.”

THAT night two men disappeared from camp. The Dwellers had struck again. Curt’s alarm-signal around the stockade had failed. And his guards had failed, for they admitted they had slept.

Curt had not the heart to blame them, for the men were all now nearing exhaustion. Yet their sleep had cost two lives, and had increased the terror of the Dwellers. Rollinger’s shrieking was now incessant.

“I’ll watch tonight myself,” Captain Future declared.

All that day he sweated at the labor of producing the plates which would be welded onto the torpedolike framework of the
Phoenix.
But he insisted on keeping his watch that night.

“You’re too exhausted yourself,” Joan pleaded. “Grag or Simon —”

“Grag is at the Cubics’ city with the party transporting ore, and Simon is searching night and day for calcium,” he answered. “I’ll be all right.”

But for once, Captain Future had overestimated his iron strength. Fagged by the superhuman strain under which he had been laboring, he fell asleep before midnight as he sat listening to John Rollinger’s babbling.

In his sleep, he dreamed. He dreamed that out of depths of swirling darkness, a cold, vast, unseeable intelligence was approaching him.

He felt the icy grip of it upon his dazed mind. And deep within Curt’s subconscious, an instinct shouted frantic warning.

“The Dwellers — they’re seizing you!”

He
knew
in his subconscious that that was what was happening. But he could not wake, he could not struggle. The tremendous power of the hypnotic grip upon his slumbering mind and body was now complete.

Curt dimly felt himself rising and moving forward. That helpless, unconquered corner of his mind told him that he was being drawn as a hypnotized victim toward the Dwellers. But still he could not wake nor do anything to break the hold of those vast, icy intelligences upon him.

There came a sudden violent shock! Curt suddenly found himself lying on the ground,
awake.

He staggered to his feet. He had fallen to the ground near the pile of metal struts beyond which towered the giant cacti. And the ground was rocking and rolling violently under him like the waves of a sea.

“My God!” choked Curt Newton. “The Dwellers, had me, but a sudden ground-quake knocked me awake and saved me.”

The quake was not subsiding. It was growing every minute more violent, and everyone in the camp was awakening in wild terror.

They were all flung off their feet, onto the ground that rolled sickeningly under them with a dull, tremendous roar of diastrophism. The pile of metal struts collapsed with a clatter. Cries of terror arose.

“Keep your heads!” Captain Future shouted. “It’s another quake.”

“Look!”
screamed Boraboll, pointing wildly to the east.

The sky there was blazing with fire. Up from the distant volcanoes were shooting huge geysers of flaming lava that painted the heavens crimson.

Vast clouds of steam and smoke and ashes whirled up to veil that titanic eruption. The air was thick with sulphurous fumes, and hot ashes rattled down upon them as the ground quivered ever more wildly beneath them.

“The end of this world has come already!” hoarsely yelled a terror-stricken mutineer.

THE darkness became Stygian as vast clouds of smoke from the erupting volcanoes filled the air. Winds were shrieking like fiends, and the sickening heave and fall of the solid ground beneath them continued.

Choking and gasping as he breathed the superheated, sulphurous fumes, Curt Newton struggled to the side of Joan.

“Lie down!” he yelled to her over the tumult. “This will soon pass.”

Grag’s tremendous voice shouted through the infernal uproar. “Chief, the ship’s framework is going to break loose!”

A new and appalling sound had entered the symphony of destruction. It was the heavy rumbling and thumping of a great mass rocking on the ground.

The heavy metal framework of the
Phoenix
was rocking wildly in its rough cradle as the quakes continued. It threatened to roll free entirely, to roll down the knoll and crush out their camp and themselves.

“Get away!” shrieked a scared mutineer. “She’ll come loose on us any minute!”

“No!” blared Captain Future’s voice. “We’ve got to pin her down! Grag, get the sledges and some of the smaller beams for stakes! Otho, grab those sledge-cables and bring them!”

Not even the terrifying nature of their situation could temper the instant loyalty and obedience of the Futuremen. They sprang to obey.

And Curt found big Kim Ivan beside him as he ran to help Otho unfasten the tough, strong cables by which they had drawn the ore-sledges.

“If she goes when we’re beside her, we’ll never see the Moon again!” gasped Otho as they ran toward the ship with the cables.

Clang! Clang!
Grag towered like an incredible metal giant in the storm, using the heaviest of the sledges to drive small, straight metal beams deep into the ground beside the
Phoenix.

The torpedo-shaped framework, upon which they had expended such tremendous toil and thought, was leaning toward them threateningly with each new heave of the quake. If it broke loose, it would smash itself and them, too.

Curt and Otho fumbled furiously in the darkness to tie their cables to the stakes and then to the lower beams of the frame. Kim Ivan had found a sledge and was helping Grag drive more stakes, while George McClinton had groped his way to them to help.

“Tighten those cables! Put two more on each side!” Curt shouted.

The framework was securely lashed down to the stakes. Now the tremors seemed subsiding a little. But now the buffeting winds were rising to a gale of hurricane force.

For two hours, they all lay flat upon the ground while the raging gale swept over them. By the end of that time, the quakes had ceased except for an occasional quiver. The disastrophic roar of shifting rock beneath had stopped, and the eruption of the volcanoes seemed lessening.

DAWN came as the gale died down. The feeble, murky light disclosed a scene of destruction in their camp. The grimed, haggard castaways surveyed it in mute dismay.

The framework of the
Phoenix
was undamaged, except for a bent beam which could soon be straightened. The huge barrel-like cacti still towered unharmed at the high central point of the clearing. But nearly everything else was wrecked. Most of the stockade was down, all the huts but one had collapsed, and their cyclotrons, tools and supplies were covered with debris.

Captain Future discovered that none of them had been seriously injured, though there were many bruises and minor hurts.

“By the Sun, I never thought I’d see another day,” declared Kim Ivan feelingly. “I sure thought the cursed planetoid was cracking up.”

“This is a warning,” Curt told them urgently. “We can expect more and heavier cataclysms as Astarfall draws nearer the System. This unstable little world is starting to respond to the gravitational perturbations that in a couple of weeks will shatter it completely.”

“Can we finish the
Phoenix
in time?” Joan asked breathlessly.

“We’ve got to,” Curt said tightly. “And we’ve got to find the calcium which will enable us to operate it.”

He detailed a small number of the men to clear up the battered camp. The rest he drove throughout the day with unremitting energy.

Grag and George McClinton straightened the few bent beams of the ship-frame, by softening the metal with atomic welders and exerting pressure upon it with improvised jacks. Meanwhile, Captain Future and Otho supervised the ceaseless operation of the big smelters.

They toiled all through that day casting the big beryllium alloy plates for the hull. The work parties of the mutineers brought constant new loads of ore upon their makeshift sledges. There was a quality of scared desperation in the way the convicts worked this day. They had been thoroughly impressed by the catastrophic outbreak of the night.

The Brain, returning that evening from his ceaseless search for calcium, reported that the whole volcanic area was in violent activity.

“New craters have broken out in the eastern section, and the Canyon of Chaos has partly collapsed on itself and is now a large lake of lava,” he stated.

Curt nodded grimly. “The increasing shocks are allowing the radioactive hellfire at Astarfall’s core to gush to the surface. It’ll get rapidly worse. But what about the calcium?”

“Curtis, I haven’t seen a sign of the element,” Simon Wright confessed. “It and certain related elements like potassium and scandium just do not seem to exist upon this world.”

“If we can only find a few pounds of the stuff, it’ll be enough,” Captain Future sweated. “Even a pound or so would at least allow us to use the eyes long enough to take off.”

That night Grag stood watch over the camp. But since the tireless robot could not alone keep watch over all the sleepers, young Rih Quili shared his guard.

But the next morning Rih Quili himself was missing. It was tragically obvious that the Mercurian officer had fallen asleep and had been seized hypnotically by the Dwellers.

Ezra Gurney raged. “I liked that boy a lot! If ever I find out who the cursed Dwellers are, I’ll — Cap’n Future, maybe them devilish tangle-trees are the Dwellers? Maybe they’re intelligent.”

CURT shook his head haggardly. “No, they can’t be the Dwellers. I admit that plant-life on this world seems to have evolved further than on any planet I’ve ever visited. But the Cubics, who know more than we do, show no fear of tangle-trees. It is this region that they dread and refuse to approach.”

The other castaways were less stricken by the new disappearance than Curt had expected. Their fear of the Dwellers was still great, but even greater now was their terror of the coming cataclysm.

Through the next days, Captain Future drove the work around the clock. Their last two weeks were slipping rapidly away. And the ominously increasing volcanic activity and recurrent tremors showed that the final catastrophe was near.

They welded the big plates onto the framework of the
Phoenix,
joining each plate to the next with the atomic welder to form an airtight joint. Presently, the inner hull of the torpedo-like ship was all on. But they still must build on the outer hull.

Captain Future put that work into the hands of Grag and Otho, who trained the mutineers and divided them into gangs that worked in successive shifts. Curt himself, with McClinton and Kim Ivan, toiled to melt sand and minerals into glassite for the portholes and bridge-windows, to cast the inertron rocket-tubes, and to fashion tight tanks for water and oxygen.

Kim Ivan, mopping sweat from his brow and staggering from sixteen hours of unresting labor, found one consolation.

“The only good thing about it is that now we’re working day and night both, the cursed Dwellers have let us alone,” panted the Martian.

Curt nodded exhaustedly. “Tomorrow we’ll install the cyclotrons in the ship, and fit the rocket-tubes.”