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

by Edmond Hamilton

  Otho shook his head. “No sign of that.”

  Curt frowned. “That’s not so good. We’ve now found almost every element we’ll need, except calcium. And we haven’t found a grain of it.”

  “You saved the lead plate?” the Brain asked Otho anxiously. “Curtis, look at this.”

  Curt was as astounded as Simon had been when he learned of Otho’s discovery of the ancient mine-workings, and inspected the plate.

  “You say the Cubics were taking chunks of lead-bearing rock out of the place?” he repeated puzzledly.

  “Yes, but the Cubics never sank those shafts,” Otho replied. “It was done ages ago, by the look of them.”

  “This is a mystery,” Captain Future said thoughtfully. “It seems that Astarfall once had an intelligent human or semi-human race. Who could they have been? How long ago did they exist on this planetoid?”

  “Don’t the symbols on that plate look something like the characters of the Antarian language, that we learned on our quest for the Birthplace?” the Brain keenly asked the red-haired planeteer.

  Simon was referring to a previous adventure of the Futuremen, an epic quest amid the more remote stars of the galaxy for the Birthplace of Matter.

  During that quest, they had had contact with natives of the star Antares’ worlds and had learned something of the Antarian language.

  “It does look a little like Antarian,” Curt admitted.

  “Maybe there are Antarians hidden on Astarfall yet?” Grag proposed. “Maybe they’re the mysterious Dwellers that Rollinger keeps raving about?”

  “That doesn’t seem possible,” Curt muttered. “Yet there is some great riddle about this planetoid which we haven’t guessed.”

  “I think that with sufficient study I could partially translate this inscription,” said the Brain quickly. “It might tell us something.”

  “Later on, Simon,” Captain Future agreed. “We’ve got too much work on hand right now, starting construction of a ship. You all know what that shock meant. It meant that Astarfall is sweeping toward doom!”

  The day was already far advanced, but before they returned to the encampment, they had used their geological knowledge to trace the beryllium vein to one of the chasms some, distance from the volcanic area.

  WHEN they entered camp, Curt stiffened. Moremos was coming toward them. The Venusian spoke earnestly.

  “Captain Future, I want to apologize for molesting the girl this morning. I was clear out of orbit.”

  The Futuremen and the other mutineers who heard were equally astonished. But Curt Newton eyed the Venusian unforgivingly.

  “Then I’m to understand that you’ve had a change of heart?” Curt asked dryly.

  Moremos shrugged. “There’s no love lost between us, you know that as well as I do. But we’re all in the same boat, and Kim Ivan gave his promise to you that there’d be no trouble. I’ll stick by that.”

  When the Venusian had gone, Otho looked after him surprisedly. “I never thought that he would knuckle down.”

  “He’s only nursing us along until we have built a ship and got away from here,” Curt predicted. “We’re his only chance of escape, and he’s smart enough to realize that. But once away from Astarfall, look out! That Venusian hates me worse than anyone else here. Anyway, there shouldn’t be any more trouble to interfere with our work.”

  CURT was wrong. That very night, three more men disappeared inexplicably from the camp.

  The disappearances were not discovered until after breakfast the next morning. Then Grabo, who was assembling his foraging party for the day’s work in the jungle, discovered that one of his men was missing. A quick check disclosed that two others of the mutineers were gone also.

  The disappearances were utterly baffling this time. For the stockade of high, pointed poles now formed a complete enclosure around the camp. The only gate through it had been guarded all night by old Tuhlus Thuun and George McClinton. And both the old pirate and the prune-loving engineer insisted that the three missing men had not gone out the gate.

  “We sat with our backs to that gate all night!” Tuhlus declared.

  “That’s r-right,” stuttered McClinton. “I was t-trying to convince Tuhlus Thuun of the f-food value of p-prunes. We were awake all the t-time.”

  “Those three men must have gone out the gate. It’s the only way out of the camp, and they’re not here now!” swore Kim Ivan.

  Boraboll’s teeth were chattering with fear as the fat Uranian suggested, “Those Dwellers Rollinger raves about took them for sure.”

  “How could your supposed Dwellers enter the camp if they didn’t come through the gate?” Captain Future asked incredulously.

  “They might be queer creatures of the ground, who could tunnel up through the soil.” advanced the terrified Uranian.

  They made a thorough search of the whole surface of the knoll. But though they inspected every foot of the ground, and even stirred the soil around the sills of the huts and the roots of the giant cacti, they found no traces of such mole-like monsters as Boraboll suggested.

  “That settles it,” muttered Grabo. “The Dwellers must be invisible monsters of some kind.”

  “Even invisible monsters couldn’t come through a closed gate,” sourly reminded Kim Ivan.

  “If you ask me,” drawled Ezra Gurney earnestly. “I still say that the Dwellers are none other than them Cubics. They could get in where nothin’ else could, by breakin’ up and slippin’ in one by one.”

  Some of the castaways were struck by this idea.

  Grabo said, thoughtfully, “The Cubics’ community must be near here in the jungle. We’ve glimpsed the creatures several times when we were out foraging.”

  Curt shook his head. “Even if the Cubics could get in, they couldn’t take three men out through the stockade like that.”

  He turned to the Brain. “Simon, you never sleep. Did you hear or see anything during the night?”

  “No, lad,” was the reply. “I spent the whole night attempting to translate that Antarian lead tablet Otho found in the Canyon of Chaos. I was too engrossed to notice anything.”

  Neither had Grag, it developed, heard anything. All their attempts at solution of the menacing mystery seemed to end in a blank wall.

  “Well, I don’t see that we can do anything but double the watch from now on at the gate of the stockade,” Curt said. “We’ve got too terrific a job on our hands to lose time investigating now.”

  In fact, the task ahead was beginning to look impossible even to the indomitable planeteer. They had spent nearly a week with little more to show for it than an array of steel tools. And within seven more weeks, Astarfall would be shattered as it approached the dreaded Limit.

  FUTURE drove the work that day with a fierceness of purpose born of dreadful apprehension. He pressed into service all of Kim Ivan’s followers except those engaged in the task of maintaining the food supply.

  He divided them into two parties. One engaged in mining copper ore from the chasm in which the Brain had located a deposit. The other party began excavating lead-bearing minerals from the vein which Captain Future had traced from the Canyon of Chaos.

  “Future, I’m not kicking, but it seems to me we’re not getting anywhere on a ship,” said Kim Ivan, wiping sweat from his brow. “What are we digging all this lead for? You can’t build a space ship of lead.”

  “You can’t build a ship,” Curt countered, “without an atomic smelter and forge to turn out your beams and plates. It would be hopeless to try doing it by hand. Therefore, our first need is an atomic smelter.”

  He added, “That’s what the lead is for. To make a cyclotron for production of atomic energy, you have to have inertron. Nothing else will withstand the explosion of disintegrating atoms. And inertron is a compound of lead and other elements.”

  “But why have you got the other lads digging copper?” the big Martian wanted to know.

  “Because a cyclotron’s heart is the electric apparatus that exp
lodes its unstable atomic fuel by a powerful charge,” Captain Future answered. “Electrical apparatus means coil-wire and condensers, and they mean copper.”

  He concluded grimly. “And that’s only the half of it. We’ll also have to have calcium and a half-dozen other substances before we can get going. And we haven’t even found some of them yet.”

  “You make the thing sound impossible,” groaned Kim Ivan discouragedly.

  Curt smiled grimly as he stooped again with his pick at the toilsome work of loosening masses of the lead-bearing rock.

  “Cheer up, Kim. Once we manage to get a cyc built, things will go a little faster.”

  Yet Curt Newton himself felt dark apprehension all through the long day of back-breaking toil. An icy premonition of possible failure oppressed his mind.

  Had he, for once, set himself and the Futuremen too gigantic a task? To build a space ship out of nothing! And to do it within a terribly short time-limit, with dangerous criminals who hated him for workers, and with a malign mystery of this alien world menacing them?

  He let none of the others see his doubts. He kept his mein confident in spite of his bone-crushing weariness, as they dragged their masses of lead and copper ore back to the camp at the end of the day.

  Chapter 12: Who Are the Dwellers?

  KIM IVAN came to Curt as darkness fell.

  “I’ve put a couple of men on guard at each side of the stockade tonight,” he announced.

  Curt nodded. “I’m going to keep watch myself tonight also, Kim.”

  “I’ll watch with you, then,” the big Martian declared. “Though space knows I’m tired enough to sleep a week.”

  The Brain had a discouraging report for Captain Future that night. Simon had spent the day exploring the more distant chasms in search of the few elements they still lacked.

  “I still can’t find any traces of calcium, lad. There just doesn’t seem to be any of it on this world.”

  “That’s bad,” Curt admitted. “We simply have to find a little of it, or no space ship we build will ever takeoff.”

  His thoughts were somber as he sat with Kim Ivan outside one of the huts later and kept watch upon the sleeping camp. Except for an occasional shuffle of movement by the guards around the stockade-gate, and the low medley of bird and animal noises from the jungle, it was silent.

  The great drift of stars that belted the night sky shed a vague light upon the camp. The gigantic, barrel-shaped cacti nearby threw grotesque shadows. Near the fire poised the strange, cubical shape of the Brain, intently studying by the firelight the inscribed lead tablet of mystery.

  Kim Ivan woke from a growing drowsiness at a low, wailing sound. “What’s that?”

  “Only Rollinger starting again,” Curt answered in a low voice.

  The raving mutter came from the hut in which Grag kept patient watch over the bound madman. It rose slowly in pitch, grew mare frantic.

  Captain Future suddenly stiffened. Joan Randall had just emerged from her hut into the starlight. She started to walk in an oddly rigid, mechanical stride. Her face was white and expressionless.

  “Joan, what’s the matter?” he called anxiously.

  There was no answer from the girl. In sudden alarm, Curt sprang to her side and grasped her arm. “Joan!”

  Joan struggled to free herself of his grasp, for a moment. Then she suddenly shuddered violently, and looked wildly around.

  “Curt!” she gasped. Quivering, she clung to him. “Curt, they had me! They were drawing me out to them.”

  He soothed her. “Relax, Joan. You’ve just had a nightmare, and started sleep-walking.”

  Her fine face was pallid with horror. “No, Curt — it was more than a nightmare! In my sleep, they hypnotized me somehow, drew me!”

  Captain Future’s brows knitted together. “Tell me just what happened. Who or what are ‘they’?”

  It was some moments before the shuddering girl could speak calmly. The stamp of a terrible experience still in her dark eyes.

  “I don’t know what or where they are,” she said breathlessly. “All I know is that soon after I fell asleep, I began to feel cold, powerful minds that somehow were reaching out to grip my mind.”

  “Say, that’s what I felt a little of in the bad dreams I had the other night,” Kim Ivan interrupted hastily. “It was so bad, I woke up. Some of the other chaps had the same kind of dreams.”

  “But I didn’t wake up. I couldn’t, though I wanted horribly to,” Joan gasped. “The icy grip of those mental attackers held me just as a rabbit is held by a snake’s eyes. And just like a hypnotized rabbit, I felt myself getting up and walking out of my hut. I knew that I was walking toward something awful, but I couldn’t stop until you awoke me, Curt.”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE was thoughtful as he held her protectingly in his arms. He looked over her dark head at Kim Ivan.

  “I begin to see now,” he muttered. “The Dwellers, as Rollinger called them, are creatures who somehow use tremendous telepathic power to draw victims toward themselves. There’s no other explanation.”

  Kim Ivan looked scared. “You mean that something or things out there in the jungle reached in here with hypnotic telepathy and dragged out all our men that disappeared?”

  “But whoever heard of a creature of prey that drew its victims to it by hypnotism?” exclaimed Otho.

  Curt shrugged helplessly. “The life of this planetoid has followed freakish paths of evolution, for some reason.”

  “I’m still bettin’ that them Cubics are what’s doin’ it,” muttered Ezra Gurney darkly.

  The commotion had aroused many in the camp. They seemed stricken by a chill horror as they speculated upon the mysterious Dwellers who somehow could reach into the camp by telepathic power to seize their prey.

  “You’ll notice,” Curt Newton commented, “that none of us are ever mentally attacked when we’re awake. It’s only in sleep, when the conscious mind is no longer on guard, that the Dwellers make their telepathic attack.”

  “M-m-maybe that, explains why R-rollinger is more sensitive to the th-things than we are,” stuttered George McClinton. “His c-conscious mind is so shattered that he has n-n-no guard against the Dwellers.”

  The Brain had joined them. And Simon Wright now imparted news to them.

  “I’ve been trying to translate that Antarian tablet which Otho found. It’s extremely difficult, and I’ve only translated a few phrases here and there. But what I’ve deciphered seems to refer to predatory creatures who use mental attack to seize victims. Undoubtedly, the Dwellers.”

  “If you can translate all of that, it might tell us more about the Dwellers and identify them for us!” Captain Future exclaimed. “There’s some tremendous riddle about this planetoid and its strange forms of life. The lead tablet may prove the key to the riddle. Keep working on it, Simon.”

  There seemed nothing more they could do to protect themselves until they should have found some clue to the identity of their attackers. And the work that engaged them was too vital to halt for any reason.

  During the next days, the Futuremen kept their improvised smelter running full blast. With painful slowness, they managed to refine a considerable quantity of copper, lead and other necessary metals.

  Curt kept Kim Ivan’s men at work mining and bringing in more of the ores. The mutineers swore at the labor of the task, but were too conscious of the life-or-death necessity of it to refuse. Twice, strong tremors shook the surface of the planetoid in those few days. And the activity of the volcanoes nearby seemed becoming ominously greater.

  During these few nights, they had no more attacks from the mysterious enemy and no more disappearances. They were nearly all on the watch the first nights. But nothing happened. It was as though the Dwellers were aware of their watchfulness, and would not make their telepathic attack when the humans were on guard.

  Grabo and his foragers found no clue to the identity of the Dwellers in the jungle. “We’ve kept our eyes open, but we haven’t seen a
ny creatures who might be them,” reported the Jovian. “Except for the Cubics and those big rodents and birds, there isn’t much animal life here — just a wild mass of those tangle-trees and other devilish queer plants.”

  “If we could spare the time to beat thoroughly through the jungle we might find the Dwellers.” Curt said.

  “But we can’t. The days are going by and we still have’t even started real construction of a ship.”

  The work of preparation for construction seemed, indeed, agonizingly slow. The terrific necessity of building every tool, mechanism and instrument they needed was making big inroads into their limited time.

  Captain Future and Grag and Otho and George McClinton had begun building the first cyclotron, or atomic power generator.

  FIRST, they had had to go back to steel-making and forge big crucibles of heat-resistant steel. With these, they could handle the softer metals of lead and copper and others, when in a molten condition.

  Curt built up a clay mold, with infinite care. Into this they poured molten inertron, the alloy composed of lead and tempering elements. When the metal had cooled, they broke open the mold and had a small but massive cylindrical shell of inertron. This was to be the main power-chamber of the cyclotron. The only openings in the cylinder were the small ones at the top for the fuel-feed and injector, and the bigger one for the power take-off.

  “Now to cast the fittings,” Curt said. “The fuel feed-lines and the power take-off lines all have to be inertron, too, as well as the valves. And our only way to get ‘em is to cast ‘em. We’ve not the elaborate equipment that you need for machining inertron.”

  “Oh, L-L-Lord,” groaned George McClinton. “I’ve worked with eyes for years, b-b-but never realized what it was to b-b-build one.”

  While they toiled to finish the fuel-feed, injector and power-leads, the Brain was ranging out every day to explore the chasms and gorges.

  Calcium was what Simon was looking for, most of all. The vital catalyst was imperative If they were to utilize the tremendous atomic energies locked up in copper. But the Brain reported no success.