Only the rounded knoll still rose above the hissing lava flood which completely surrounded it. Upon this clear knoll towered the stark, barrel-shaped forms of a score of grotesque, gigantic cacti. And near those monstrous growth bulked the metallic torpedo shape of the space ship around which less than fifty men were frantically laboring.
“We’ve got the first two cycs repaired,” Crag reported to Captain Future as the red-headed planeteer came out of the ship. “How about the hull?”
“The inner hull is patched. We’re still working on the outer one,” Curt Newton panted.
He swayed a little from exhaustion as he stood, passing his hand wearily across his bloodshot eyes.
For two days and nights of terror, Captain Future had driven the survivors in this last burst of seemingly hopeless activity. It was he who had fought against the utter despair which had possessed them after the ill-starred attempt of Moremos and the others had crippled the Phoenix.
“Are you going to stand here and fold your hands and wait to die?” Curt had lashed them. “Or are you going to keep fighting?”
“What’s the use, Future,” said Kim Ivan hollowly. “The cycs are wrecked, and the hull torn open. And we’ve got only a few days left.”
“We can repair those cycs and the hull if we hurry,” Curt had insisted. “The lava won’t come up over this knoll for awhile.”
“Even if we do,” Ezra muttered fatalistically, “we still can’t get away without calcium. Look what happened when Moremos and the rest of them tried it.”
“There’s still a chance that Simon will find calcium” Curt said. “A chance for life. Are you going to take it?”
THEY looked at him, most of them, with faces sick with hopeless discouragement.
“The Brain has been looking for calcium all these weeks without finding it,” said one mutineer. “He can’t find it now in a couple of days.”
“He may,” Curt stated, his face tightening. “And if he doesn’t, we’ll still get away. For I promise you that in that case, I will get the calcium.”
They stared.
“Curt, you can’t be serious,” protested Joan. “If the Brain can’t find calcium on this world, where would you get it?”
“I’ll get it,” Captain Future replied firmly. “I give you my solemn word that I will. And I never broke a promise in my life.”
A faint gleam of hope stirred upon the faces of the stricken castaways. There was no ground for hope except their belief in Curt’s promise. Yet they clutched at this straw.
“We’ll have to bring the cycs out of the ship and repair their cracked jackets,” Captain Future was continuing rapidly. “Also, there’ll be the job of repairing that hole in the hull, and the wrecked power and fuel-pipes. Every minute counts, from now on! To work!”
His indomitable resolution sparked the whole frenzied effort that followed. Every pair of hands was needed now. Joan helped with the others, dragging masses of ore toward the smelters to be used in repairing the cycs.
The fearful disturbances were not dying down. Instead, they were becoming worse. Tremendous thunder of deep diastrophism continually shook the ground under their feet. Strangling fumes drifted over them, and then were torn away by the howling winds.
The hissing lava flood was crawling toward them from the east. They could hear the ominous crackling and snapping as it rolled over the jungle and lapped around the slopes of their knoll. It soon completely surrounded the knoll. They were now trapped here. The space ship was their only possible way of escape!
That did not apply to the Brain. Simon Wright could still fly out over the lava floor, and he did so again and again in his quest.
“Lad, I’ve been almost everywhere on this world,” he reported to Curt that evening. “It’s always the same. No calcium!”
Curt’s face was dripping, his red hair disordered, his zipper-suit torn and soiled. He had been working on getting out the cyclotrons.
“Keep at it, Simon,” he urged tautly “We don’t need much calcium, remember. A few pounds would be enough. Even a pound to use as catalyst in one cyclotron would be at least enough to get the ship off Astarfall.”
The Brain looked at him closely. “If I don’t find any, have you really a plan for getting calcium or was that promise of yours just a story to encourage the others?”
“I have a way of getting a little calcium, enough to allow a take-off,” Captain Future replied. “But I only want to use that way if everything else fails.”
The Brain seemed startled, but Curt did not elucidate. He had already strode back to the work with the cycs.
That night was a fearsome one. They had plenty of light by which to work, for the surrounding, glowing lava cast a lurid red glare. By that terrible illumination they toiled at the task of repairing the wrecked cycs.
Before midnight a terrific electric storm raged across the doomed planetoid. Blue lightning danced and flashed incessantly, and the bawling hubbub of thunder drowned the more ominous sound of seismic tremblings. Hot, hissing rain slashed down, battering the half-blinded men.
Throughout the next day, the seething lava crept slowly up the sides of the knoll. Curt and his toiling men scarcely glanced at that inching, threatening tide. They were becoming numb to danger.
Late that afternoon, came two violent quakes. The Phoenix shifted dangerously in its cradle. And the big atomic smelters were overturned, spilling molten metal that almost engulfed Curt and Grag standing nearby.
“Get those smelters back up!” Captain Future shouted. “Move them into that little hollow near the cacti. They’ll be better braced there.”
“This is a n-n-nightmare,” George McClinton stammered as he strained at the job with them. “We’ll w-w — wake up back in the V-Vulcan.”
Over the din came the incessant, crazy shrieking of John Rollinger. “Masters, spare us! Do not slay us!”
“He seems to think the Dwellers are causin’ all this,” Ezra Gurney said. “He’s been prayin’ to them all day.”
They got the smelters upright in the little hollow near the towering cacti and soon had them in operation again. But their molds had been cracked by the quakes and had to be repaired before they could go on with the work of casting new jackets for the wrecked cyclotrons.
Men dropped and lay unconscious, during the fearful hours of that night of labor. Joan, staggering herself from weakness and strain, worked to revive them.
Chapter 18: Supreme Sacrifice
KIM IVAN was a tower of strength. The big Martian irate, his battered face rimed and terrible, his eyes a little wild, drove the faltering mutineers on whenever they showed signs of halting work.
“We may be outlaws and pirates, but we’re fighters, aren’t we?” roared the Martian, to them. “This is the biggest fight we ever had. Nobody is going to quit. There’ll be no more traitors like Moremos. We shall work and survive together — or we shall die together!”
They got the new jackets onto the cycs with fumbling hands. By morning they had moved the cycs back into the Phoenix and re-installed them.
While McClinton superintended this, Curt and others wielded atomic welders to repair the rent in the hull. Curt had not slept for forty-eight hours. He was staggering when Joan came to him with food.
“The job’s almost done,” he said thickly. “McClinton’s hooking up the fuel-pipes now. Has Simon come back?”
The Brain had been gone all through the previous day and the night.
“Not yet,” Joan answered. “Oh, Curt, maybe he’s been caught by one of the quakes when he was exploring for calcium.”
“He’ll be back,” Captain Future husked with unquenchable confidence. “Maybe his staying so long means that he has found calcium.”
There was suddenly a low moaning sound in the air. Winds and streamers of smoke whirled frightenedly from a dozen different directions. They felt a curious lightness on their feet, as though they were sinking.
“Another quake!” Curt yelled warning. “Down, everybo
dy!”
They flattened themselves upon the ground just as the shock hit. The ground seemed to rise and sink beneath them with inconceivable rapidity, like an elevator alternately ascending and descending.
A bursting, prolonged roar hit their ears. The Phoenix bounced up and down in its cradle, threatening to smash its keel by its own weight.
“Gods of Mars, look at that!” yelled Kim Ivan.
Out there in the haze, miles away, whole new fiery mountains were rising majestically into being. The tortured throes of doomed Astarfall were buckling up its crust.
Tremendous explosions of steam veiled the distant spectacle of planetary chaos. A new, higher wave of lava came hissing across the smoldering crimson sea that surrounded the knoll. It splashed higher against the sides of their elevation, breaking in fiery spray.
Choking from the fumes as he stumbled to his feet, Curt Newton saw vaguely that John Rollinger had escaped from his hut. The madman, his bonds apparently snapped by that last shock, was praying frenziedly upon his knees.
“Masters, do not slay us! Spare us!” he was praying insanely to the Dwellers.
CAPTAIN FUTURE, his brain rocking in this hour of planetary doom, disregarded the madman. He had glimpsed a wavering shape flying down through the smoke and steam.
“It’s Simon!” he shouted. “He’s come back!”
Buffeted about by the howling currents of hot air, the Brain’s glittering, transparent cube struggled down toward them.
“The calcium?” cried Ezra Gurney to him.
“I could not find any,” said the Brain. He spoke as though with a great effort, his metallic voice hesitating and jerky. “There is no calcium.”
“Masters! Masters!” came Rollinger’s wild, insane shriek of imploration in the stunned silence that followed Simon’s fateful news.
And Curt Newton suddenly noticed that, as he prayed, Rollinger was kneeling in front of the big clump of gigantic, barrel-shaped cacti.
Blinding revelation crashed into Captain Future’s brain. The veil was abruptly torn from the sinister mystery of the planetoid.
“Good God!” he choked. “The Dwellers! I’ve found them out, at last!” The others looked at him, obviously believing that the superhuman strain had unseated his reason.
Curt ran forward to the nearest of the giant cacti in front of which the madman was kneeling. He laid his hand shakingly upon the fluted, spineless side of that mighty growth which towered high above him.
“We’ve been blind,” he choked. “We knew that plant life had been tremendously developed by the burst of evolution through which Astarfall passed. We knew that the tangle-trees and other plants had developed the power to prey upon and ingest living creatures. We should have known that plant intelligence would have been developed too, by that evolutionary spurt!”
A look of awe came on their faces.
“What do you mean?” Kim Ivan asked huskily.
“I mean that one species of the mutating plants of this world developed intelligence to the point where it could use hypnotic mental power to draw its victims to it!” Captain Future cried. “I mean that these giant cacti are the Dwellers!”
“Curt, look out!” screamed Joan.
An opening had suddenly appeared in the fluted side of the gigantic cactus-creature beside Curt Newton. It was like a perpendicular, slitted mouth that suddenly yawned in the elastic fiber body of the thing.
Curt, off balance, was falling in toward the hideous, yawning maw. By a superb effort, the Brain flashed through the air and thrust Captain Future aside. He fell sprawling a little beyond the plant-monster.
The gaping slit-maw in the side of the great growth instantly closed.
“Name o’ the Sun!” Ezra Gurney cried wildly. “All our men that disappeared — those things drew them to themselves and swallowed them!”
“And all this time we’ve been hunting the Dwellers, they’ve been right here in our own camp!” Kim Ivan was saying dazedly.
Curt snatched up one of the heavy bush-knives. “Come on and help me!” he panted. “We’re going to cut that creature open.”
“Curt, there’s no time for mere revenge on the Dwellers,” pleaded the Brain.
“This is not just revenge,” Captain Future flashed. “These plant-creatures are intelligent. If there’s any calcium on this planetoid, they’ll know of it. And we’ll make this one tell where it is.”
THEY snatched up the heavy bush-knives and attacked the cactus-monster’s mighty base. As they started slashing into the tough fiber, the hideous maw of the thing opened and closed in vain effort to snatch them.
“Don’t!” screamed Rollinger. “You are hurting the Master. They will destroy us all!”
Captain Future suddenly reeled as into his brain came the impact of a raging telepathic attack. A furious thought-order to desist.
The others felt that mental resistance of the Dweller, too. Kim Ivan cried out.
“The thing’s fighting back telepathically! This is like a crazy dream.”
“Keep at it!” pressed Curt. “We know the Dwellers can’t dominate us hypnotically when our conscious minds are awake. It can’t stop us!”
The ground under them was shuddering violently from new quakes, as they fiercely slashed deeper into the base of the monstrous growth.
Ten feet in diameter was the massive thing, its outer skin of elastic plant-fiber shielding softer plant-tissues of pale white. Severed capillaries bled sticky sap in horrible imitation of a wounded animal as they cut deeper.
The hypnotic resistance of the Dweller was frantic, and their minds seemed clouded and chaotic. Yet it could not overcome them. They slashed ever deeper — and the whole towering, barrel-like mass of the creature was finally cut through and toppled aside.
Curt Newton slashed carefully down through the white fibrous tissues of the creature’s base, until he uncovered that which he sought.
“God, it’s the thing’s brain!” choked Ezra Gurney.
Deep within the base of the giant plant-creature nestled a pink, convoluted mass of fiber. It pulsated and quivered with uncanny life. From it branched strange fibrous nerve-tendrils.
Brain of the Dweller! Brain of the great plant whose species had been evolved toward high intelligence by that same burst of mutations which had caused the degeneration of the humans upon this planetoid!
Curt Newton poised his heavy knife over that helpless, quivering plant-brain. And he thought to it, in a concentrated mental message.
“I can kill you,” Curt telepathed. “I will kill you unless you give me information I require.”
Back into his mind came the quick telepathic reply of the Dweller. “What do you wish to know?”
“I must know at once where upon this world we can procure a small quantity of calcium,” Captain Future thought. “It is necessary to us if we are to escape from this doomed planetoid.”
The answering thought of the Dweller was sharply startled. “What? Is it true that this world is doomed?”
“It’s starting to crack open now!” Curt answered. “The end is close at hand. Didn’t you suspect that?”
“No, for we Masters have not visual or tactile senses with which to observe,” was the reply. “We have noticed increasing tremblings of the ground, but had not thought that they implied a catastrophe to the whole world.”
The cold, uncannily alien thought of the Dweller continued broodingly. “So this is the end of our glorious, brief history! For centuries, we have been evolving to greater intelligence and mental power, since the first mutations chanced to change us in that direction. We have dreamed of making ourselves the mental masters of all this world, of growing to such power that we could send our thoughts far out into the universe to explore and learn. And now that dream is ended.”
There was an overtone of weird tragedy in the thing’s brooding thoughts. But Curt Newton desperately seized upon one possibility.
“YOU could still live if you tell, us where there is calcium,” he th
ought, to the thing. “We could take your plant-body or roots and brain with us in our ship. You could grow again upon another world.”
“It is impossible. Our bodies are so adapted to the chemical conditions of this planetoid that we could not live in a different habitat,” answered the Dweller. “However, I would tell you where there was calcium if I could. I bear you no ill will. It is true that we were forced to catch and devour a number of your party, but you forced us to it by camping here. The small animals on which we formerly preyed would no longer approach this place with you here. And our bodies had to have the animal food upon which we subsist.”
The Dweller continued his calm mental message. “But though I would help you if I could, I cannot. It is my belief that there is not, and has never been, a single atom of calcium on this world.”
Curt felt the blood drain from his heart. “No calcium here at all? How can you know that, when you can neither see nor hear nor move?”
The Dweller replied. “We long ago investigated the history of this planetoid by probing the minds and knowledge of the degenerating human colonists here. We learned thus that this world was a moon in a planetary system whose sun was completely without calcium, potassium and several other elements. An atomic disintegration process similar to the carbon-nitrogen cycle had burned out all those elements before that sun ever gave birth to worlds.”
Captain Future turned toward the others. He told them what he had just heard from the Dweller.
“The Dweller is speaking the truth,” said the Brain gravely. “That explanation of why Astarfall is without calcium is scientifically probable. It explains the silicon structure of the bones of the jungle pigs.”
“Then — then it’s all over for us?” Joan Randall whispered, her face very pale but her eyes fixed steadily on Curt.
At that moment a violent new quake rocked them. They saw through the swirling haze that immense new bulks of rock were rising with a prolonged, grating roar from the lava nearby. The knoll rose and fell beneath them like a chip upon the sea. A new, higher wave of lava rolled its fiery crest toward them.
Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) Page 15