“We’ve g-g-got the welders about ready,” McClinton reported to Curt that afternoon. “How are you c-c-coming?”
Captain Future straightened and mopped his brow. He was grimy, sweating, haggard-looking from the driving toil.
“We’re ready to cast the keel-beam now,” he said. “Otho and I have been preparing the mold.”
The mutineers, returning in troops from their day’s mining and dragging with them their rough sledges laden with beryllium and chromium ores, came flocking through the sunset to witness the operation.
Curt and the Brain had already sketched detailed plans for their projected space ship, working at night by firelight to draw their designs on thin sheets of lead. They had designed the simplest and smallest ship that would serve their need. And they had carefully planned so that it would require but few different sizes of beams, plates and struts.
The molds for the beams had been accurately fabricated from a perdurable cement made of certain rocks ground to powder. To the biggest of these molds was now connected the inertron spout of the big atomic smelter, which at this moment throbbed with power.
“The alloy should be thoroughly compounded by now,” Curt Newton declared. “Start her pouring, Otho.”
Otho opened the spout-valve. From the spout, a dazzling stream of molten beryllium alloy poured into the long cement mold.
A cheer went up from ragged band who had gathered to watch.
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Kim Ivan exclaimed. “We’ll soon have a ship to take us off this cursed world, now we’ve cast the keel.”
“In h-honor of this occasion, t-tonight I’ll eat the last of my p-prunes,” George McClinton declared. “I’ve been s-saving them.”
Captain Future himself was perhaps the least excited of them all. He knew only too well the vast amount of work still to be done in short time.
He turned, looking for Joan. And he was surprised not to find her. Everyone else was present, and the stockade gate had been closed for the night.
“Where’s Joan?” he asked McClinton sharply.
The spectacled engineer looked startled. “Why, I d-don’t know. Come to t-think of it, I haven’t seen her for s-several hours.”
Without a word, Captain Future started a rapid search of the encampment. By the time he had finished, night was falling.
“She’s not anywhere in the camp!” he exclaimed worriedly. “And Ezra Gurney is missing, too!”
Chapter 14: Riddle of the Jungle
EZRA GURNEY had sat all morning brooding over a plan which had taken shape in his mind. Finally in mid-afternoon, the old marshal had risen decisively to his feet.
“I’ll do it!” he muttered resolutely. “No matter what Cap’n Future says, I’m sure I’m right.”
The old Planet Patrol veteran was used to action. Ezra had spent more than forty years out in the great spaces and wild worlds. He had fought space-pirates in the old lawless days, had brought order to raw boom-towns on the interplanetary frontier, and was now the oldest and most experienced officer in the Patrol.
But Ezra was a fighter, not a scientist, and thus could be of no aid to the Futuremen in planning and building the new ship. And Curt had tactfully suggested that the work of mining ore or foraging in the jungle would be too arduous for him, and had requested that he spend his days in seeing to it that there were no dissensions or fights in the camp.
“Too old, that’s what he thinks of me!” snorted Ezra disgustedly. “Me, that could still show these young kiwis somethin’ in a scrap.”
His iron-gray hair almost bristled with indignation, and his keen, faded blue eyes snapped. “Maybe he thinks I’m so old I got softenin’ of the brain, too,” growled Ezra. “Maybe that’s why he won’t listen when I tell him that them Cubics are the Dwellers. I guess at that, he don’t want to spare time now to reconnoiter the Cubics. Time is all I have. I’m goin’ out there and scout the critters myself!”
His decision made, the old marshal proceeded to put it into effect.
Grabo and the other foragers had reported that each time they had glimpsed any Cubics, the little creatures were going to or coming from the northwest. It was logical to assume that their community lay somewhere in that direction.
Armed with a steel bush-knife forged for Grabo’s gang, he entered the green gloom of the weird forest and made his way in a northwestward direction. The great tree-ferns looming around him, and the other grotesque trees and shrubs, made an unearthly vista. He wondered, fleetingly, why the jungle contained no huge cacti like those at the camp.
After a few moments of travel, he suddenly stopped. There had reached his ears a clear call from behind him.
“Ezra! Wait!”
He recognized Joan Randall’s voice. And the old marshal’s wrinkled face expressed dismay.
“That danged girl! She saw me leavin’ the camp and she’s run after me to stop me. Treatin’ me like I was a runaway child!”
Indignantly, he decided that he would not argue with Joan. He would simply slip out of sight until she had given up hunting him.
With that idea in mind, Ezra hastily melted back into the jungle and sought concealment inside the thick foliage of a grotesque, towering shrub whose green limbs drooped limply like those of a weeping-willow.
Those drooping limbs suddenly came to life! They wrapped themselves around Ezra and began drawing the old veteran into the shrub.
“What the devil!” swore Ezra startledly.
He slashed hastily with his bush-knife. Swearing and sputtering with rage, he hacked through one after another of the clutching tendrils.
It took him several minutes to free himself. He finally was able to tear loose from the grip of the thing, and stood puffing some distance away.
“YOU see what happens to you when you come slipping out here by yourself!” accused a clear, stern voice.
Joan Randall had been attracted by the sound of struggle. She stood, her hands on her hips, eyeing him severely.
“You were starting out to find the Cubics,” she went on. “You’ve been wanting to for days. It’s a good thing I saw you slipping out of camp.”
“You wouldn’t have caught up to me if that danged snaky bush hadn’t grabbed me,” Ezra sputtered. “Blast me if I ever saw such queer, evil plant-life as this world has! From the big tangle-trees down to them nasty shrubs, most of the plants here seem to prey on animals.”
“It’s what you get for sneaking out this way,” Joan retorted unsympathetically. “I’m not going to let you go any farther.”
“Now, Joan, listen,” wheedled the old veteran. “I’m doin’ this for Cap’n Future’s sake. It’s to help him that I want to investigate the Cubics.”
Joan’s pretty face was serious as she considered this. Her brown eyes looked thoughtfully at him.
“You’re right, Ezra. We’ll go out together and see what we can learn about the Cubics.”
Ezra’s brief feeling of triumph turned to dismay. “But you can’t come along with me, Joan! Curt would never forgive me if I took you.”
“Either I go with you, or you don’t go at all,” the girl said firmly. “Try to go on without me, and I’ll shout.”
“Oh, dang all mule-headed women!” muttered the old marshal. “They haven’t got any business out in space. When I was a youngster, women stayed on Earth and didn’t go gallivantin’ all over creation. All right, come on.”
They started together through the jungle, threading their way through the more open glades in a northwestward direction.
“Grabo an’ the others said every time they saw the Cubics, the critters were comin’ from or goin’ in this direction,” Ezra explained. “They didn’t think the things could live very far from here.”
“I hope not,” said Joan a little anxiously. “We haven’t many hours of daylight left.”
Ezra used his bush-knife to hack a way through thickets of vegetation around which they could not detour. But they were careful to avoid all tangle-trees and ot
her similar carnivorous forms of plant-life with which the old marshal had so lately had his upsetting experience.
“Blast me if I don’t think the plants on this world have more strength and intelligence than the animals,” declared Ezra. “The way some of them growths try to grab a person is uncanny.”
“The Brain says that all this unprecedented evolution of plant-life is due to the burst of accelerated evolution when Astarfall passed through that realm of cosmic radiation,” Joan told him.
“Maybe so, but it still seems creepy and unnatural to me,” grunted the old veteran.
They went on for mile after mile, while the shafts of pale sunlight that struck through the weird forest slanted more and more toward the horizon. They were by now penetrating into completely unexplored jungle. For Grabo and his foraging parties had been too engrossed by the difficult task of gathering sufficient food to do any unnecessary exploring.
THEY had kept an alert eye out for the Cubics, but had so far seen none of the strange creatures. The only animal life they had encountered were a few of the rodent-like animals darting away in the thickets and a number of the bat-winged, featherless birds flying overhead.
Suddenly they struck a hard-packed, beaten trail that led due westward through the jungle. Ezra and Joan stopped, amazed.
“Why, the Cubics must have made this path!” the girl exclaimed. “You remember that Otho said the creatures seemed to be in the habit of mining and taking away ore from the volcanic area east of here? This must be the path they use.”
“If that’s so this path would lead us right to the home or community of the Cubics!” Ezra said excitedly. “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.”
Joan hesitated. The Sun was now sinking toward the horizon and the feeble daylight of the jungle was darkening into a somber dusk.
“Perhaps we ought to turn back, and return tomorrow,” she suggested. “It’ll soon be night.”
“Turn back when we’re this close?” Ezra scoffed. “Besides, night is when we want to watch the Cubics. If they’re the Dwellers, it’s at night that they somehow make those telepathic attacks on our camp.”
The reminder of those dreaded hypnotic attacks was one not calculated to reassure the girl. But Joan had courage, and she saw the logic in Ezra’s argument. Without further objection, she accompanied him onward.
Their progress was now much more rapid, for they were now following the beaten path. It ran due west except at places where it swerved aside to avoid a clump of tangle-trees or other dangerous vegetation. Those alien growths loomed dark and forbidding in the gathering dusk.
Stars were peeping forth in the darkening sky. Far behind them, the heavens were lighted by the quivering red glow of the smoking volcanoes. Presently Ezra and Joan heard a low, persistent sound from ahead. It sounded like the clash and clatter of many hammers beating upon rock.
“Must be the Cubics,” Ezra said in a low voice. “But what’re they doin’ to make that sound?”
“I don’t know,” answered the girl bewilderedly. “We’re very near.”
They went with much more care, following the path but ready to dart off it into the thickets at any alarm. The din ahead came louder to their ears. Then they came abruptly into full view of an amazing spectacle.
The path debouched ahead of them into a broad, flat clearing. This open plain contained the little city of the Cubics.
It was one of the strangest communities upon which human eye had ever looked. There were several scores of small buildings, built and arranged with mathematical precision. They looked like stone beehives, each having only a single opening. They were ranged in concentric circles.
Hundreds upon hundreds of the Cubics were visible in this weird little city. The little cube-shaped creatures were engaged in bewildering, activity. With their queer faculty of combination, they were gathered into many different figures that engaged upon several inexplicable tasks.
There was a row of grotesque, four-armed figures twice the height of a man. They were engaged in hammering and splitting chunks of rock, using harder masses of rock for hammers. There were other figures like huge centipedes, who carried the shattered rock away and sorted its pieces.
And each of those big, grotesque figures was composed of scores of the little Cubics! An arm of one of the hammers might be made up of ten separate Cubics, hooked together. Joan and Ezra could plainly see the tiny, twinkling eyes and mouths in the faces of those constituent cubes.
“Why, this is crazy!” muttered Ezra. “Why in the name o’ the Sun are they workin’ so hard, crushin’ that rock?”
“They’re crushing the metallic ores out of it,” Joan said quickly. “Look — the centipede-ones take the metal back to those big heaps.”
EZRA’S eyes traveled in the direction she indicated. Behind the little Cubic city there loomed colossal heaps of small fragments, heaps big as small hills. The fragments were of metal ingots or rich ore.
“Why they must have been laborin’ like this for centuries to amass all that metal ore!” gasped the old marshal. “There’s millions of pounds of it, and it looks like it had been gatherin’ there for ages.”
He was stunned by the riddle of the Cubics’ tremendous toil. Then a thought occurred to him.
“Maybe this is the answer, Joan. If these Cubics are the Dwellers, maybe they’ve been attackin’ us telepathically because we’ve been minin’ metal. It seems like these critters are crazy on minin’ ore themselves.”
“That might be the answer,” Joan admitted in a whisper. “Let’s take a closer look at those big ore-heaps. We can circle around nearer.”
She and the old marshal started skirting around the clearing to approach nearer that side of it on which the vast heaps of ore towered. They moved with extreme care in the dark jungle, to make no sound.
Joan was in the lead. Ezra suddenly descried a snaky movement as of tentacles in the thick foliage just ahead of her.
“Look out, Joan — you’re walking into a tangle-tree!” he shouted warning.
The girl recoiled in time. But next moment they both realized with dismay that the clatter of the Cubics’ activity had suddenly halted.
“They heard me!” Ezra groaned. “We got to beat it out of here on full-rockets!”
They scrambled back toward the path and started a hasty retreat away from the Cubic City. But it was too late.
Cubics who formed big centipedal figures were already racing along the path after them. In an instant they had overtaken and surrounded the old veteran and the girl.
Before the horrified eyes of Joan and Ezra, the Cubics who formed those figures abruptly shifted into new, towering formations. They became giant, semi-human shapes who advanced on the two humans with clutching arms.
Chapter 15: Secret of the Cubics
NO SOONER had Captain Future discovered the absence of Ezra and Joan from the camp, than he realized that it had but no logical explanation.
“Ezra’s slipped off to spy on the Cubics!” he exclaimed. “He’s been wanting to for days. He thinks they’re the Dwellers.”
“B-b-but M-m-miss Randall?” asked George McClinton anxiously.
McClinton’s deep solicitude for Joan’s safety was obvious — as obvious as the shy, whole-souled admiration which the stuttering engineer had shown for the girl agent since the beginning of the Vulcan’s voyage.
“Joan would go after him if she saw him leaving camp.” Curt guessed. “But I would have thought she’d have brought him back by now.”
“Ezra can be plenty mule-headed when he gets an idea into his head,” reminded Otho. “He probably insisted on going on and she went along!” Curt was thoroughly alarmed. Night was already falling upon the jungle. He knew from experience what uncanny dangers it contained.
“Otho, Grag — get picks for weapon and come on!” he said swiftly. “We’re going after them, and quickly.”
He was himself grabbing up one of the steel bars. They hastened toward the gate of the stockade, and found tha
t others had come with them.
Grabo, the Jovian mutineer, was one of them. “I know a path in there that I think leads toward the Cubics.” he said. “I’ll go along and show you.”
“And I’m g-g-going, too.” George McClinton insisted.
Kim Ivan was already opening the gate of the stockade, and the big Martian pirate swung along with them as they rapidly entered the jungle.
Grabo led the way through the dark fern-forest, avoiding tangle-trees and other dangers whose location he knew. They soon reached the path.
“We never followed it very far, but we’ve seen the Cubics using it,” the Jovian informed.
“Here’s a fresh slash by a bush-knife,” called Otho, bending over a hacked vine that had until recently lain across the path. “Ezra and Joan must have gone this way, all right.”
Curt’s anxiety mounted by the minute as they hurried westward along that beaten trail.
“Barging off into this jungle by night, as though she was strolling around in a Venusian park!” he exclaimed.
“Listen!” said Grag suddenly, after they had traveled some miles.
The super-sensitive microphonic ears of the robot could pick up sounds no one else could hear. Grag stood, a towering, gleaming silhouette in the starlight, motionless and listening.
“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.
Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) Page 12