She raised a tear-smeared face.
“I’m — sorry,” she said unsteadily. “It isn’t just dying that I’m afraid of, but changing —”
“We’re not going to die or change either!” Curt declared forcefully. “It will take hours, perhaps days, before the paralysis of the pituitaries begins to affect us in the slightest. That gives us a reasonable time to try to get away.”
His gray eyes flashed as he added, “And we’ve got to do that, not for our own sakes alone, but to prevent a terrible thing from happening. That black devil is inciting the Jovians to attack all the Earthman settlements, and that attack may take place within hours!”
His big fists clenched.
“I’ve an idea now of a way in which the Space Emperor could be conquered — the only way. But it’ll do no good as long as we’re trapped down here.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t tried to rescue me,” Joan said in self-reproach.
“Joan, how did it happen that the Space Emperor kidnaped you?” Captain Future asked. “Did you see who he really is?”
“I don’t know who he is,” the shaken girl replied, “but I know someone whom I think does know.”
She explained unsteadily.
“Earlier tonight I slipped out of the hospital in Jungletown and went down to spy on Lucas Brewer and Mark Cannig in their offices. I peered in through a window.
“I saw Mark Cannig, in the offices, talking to the Space Emperor! He was, just as you had described him, concealed in that dark suit. Then as I watched, Cannig glimpsed me at the window and rushed out. I tried to escape but someone struck me a blow that knocked me unconscious. When I awoke I was bound, on my way here in the Space Emperor’s rocket-flier.”
Curt Newton’s red head jerked up.
“So Mark Cannig is an accomplice of the Space Emperor!”
His eyes narrowed.
“That eliminates Cannig of my four suspects, at least. But of the other three —”
“Captain Future, do you think there’s any hope at all of our getting out of here?” Joan interrupted. “Can we dig steps and climb out of this place?”
“Wouldn’t do us any good with those Jovians watching the mouth of the pit,” Curt told her. His eyes swept the dark dirt walls of the pit. “But there must be some way.”
Curt was reduced to his bare hands. Deprived of his belt and pistol, he was robbed of all the instruments he might have used to escape. Even his pocket-televisor was gone.
Joan had sunk to the dirt floor.
“We’ll never get out,” she said in dull hopelessness. “Well change into awful creatures and die, down in this pit.”
“Like the devil we will!” Captain Future declared. “I was chained to a rock on the Hot Side of Mercury once and left there to die. But I didn’t die.”
His powerful mind was working at top speed to find a way out of this trap. He went around the dark pit, his keen eyes inspecting the dirt walls.
Suddenly Curt stopped and listened. His ears had detected a faint rasping sound that was barely audible. Quickly he pressed his ear against the dirt wall. And now he heard it much more plainly, a chewing, grinding rasp.
“It’s a digger!” he exclaimed in a low voice to the girl. “I don’t think it’s many yards away from this pit in the soil.”
Joan shivered at the mention of the bloodthirsty subterranean burrowers which inhabit the soil beneath the Jovian jungles.
“I hope it doesn’t come this way,” she said fearfully.
“On the contrary, I want it to come this way!” Captain Future said. “Don’t you understand? The tunnels those diggers make connect with each other, and open at many places to the surface. It would be a way out for us!”
“But if the creature came into the pit here and attacked us —” the girl began terrifiedly.
“I can take care of that,” Curt told her. “The thing I’ve got to do now is to attract the beast to come here.”
The ingenious fastener of Curt’s zipper-suit was made of woven gray wire. He quickly broke a bit of this wire away, and with it he gashed his wrist.
AS BLOOD spurted, Curt smeared it onto the wall of the pit. Then he rapidly bound his wrist with a strip torn from his jacket.
“Those creatures can sense blood for hundreds of yards through the solid soil,” he told the girl. “I think that will bring it here.”
In a moment he heard the rasping, chewing sound definitely louder and nearer.
“It’s coming!” he exclaimed.
Joan shrank back against the opposite wall of the pit.
Captain Future was rapidly unraveling more of the tough gray wire from his woven suit-fastenings. When he had a doubled length of twelve feet, he fashioned a running noose and loop.
By that time the rasping, grinding sound of the advancing digger was very audible, and little flakes of dirt were falling from a spot on the dirt wall. Curt waited beside that point, his wire loop ready in his hand.
“Here it comes — make no sound!” he muttered.
Joan uttered a gasp of horror a moment later. Dirt had fallen from the wall, and through an opening its own jaws had made protruded the snout of a weird and menacing creature.
The digger was like a giant six-foot rat, with a broad, flat face opening in tremendous jaws armed with the big, flat grinding fangs with which it burrowed its way.
Its small red eyes glimpsed Joan Randall and it sprang out into the pit toward her. Curt cast his loop swiftly.
THE loop settled around the leaping brown beast’s head, tightened cruelly about its neck as Curt pulled hard. With a muffled squeal, the creature turned on its short legs. But Captain Future leaped aside, tightening the noose.
There was a brief, almost soundless flurry of struggle as the choking creature sought to reach the man. Soon its movements became weaker and it fell on its side, motionless.
“It’s done for!” Curt exclaimed. “Come on — we’re going out of here through the tunnel it burrowed.”
He scrambled into the raw new passageway that the bloodthirsty beast had excavated. It was full of loose dirt, but Captain Future squeezed blindly on through the darkness, with Joan bravely crawling after him.
Presently this raw, stifling passage opened into a larger tunnel, within which they could stand by stooping.
“This is a regular digger run,” Curt told the girl. “It may lead to the surface.”
They followed it forward, almost suffocated by the heavy, dirt-smelling air. Captain Future’s hopes rose as the tunnel slanted slightly upward. The darkness was absolute.
In some minutes they emerged suddenly from the low tunnel into a much larger space. They could stand erect here. But here too the air was heavy, and foul with the odor of old bones and animals.
“Where are we?” Joan asked bewilderedly. “I thought —”
“Quiet!” Captain Future hissed. “See — those eyes!”
In the utter darkness, a dozen pairs of red eyes that glowed with uncanny phosphorescence were watching them.
“We’ve blundered into a nest of the diggers!” Curt whispered. “And they see us!”
Chapter 17: Chamber of Horrors
JOAN uttered a little cry of horror. At the sound, the phosphorescent red eyes of the watching beasts began moving toward them. Captain Future swept the girl behind him, against the dirt wall of this underground dirt cave, and awaited the attack of the ravenous beasts.
"Can't we escape back through the tunnel?" Joan whispered frantically in the darkness.
"They'd run us down in a minute, and we couldn't turn to fight in that narrow passage," Curt gritted. "Here we can at least put up a fight."
The scene was enough to affect even the iron nerves of Captain Future. The utter blackness, the stifling atmosphere of ominous odors, and the red eyes that warily advanced.
He clenched his fists, knowing full well that they were useless against the fangs of these gathered beasts. Yet he would go down fighting, he knew — fighting as h
e had fought against hopeless odds from Mercury to Pluto.
Queerly enough, in that moment the paramount emotion of Curt was rage. Rage at the thought of the Space Emperor continuing his nefarious plot unchecked, of Jupiter turned into a hell of horror and struggle to further one man's mad ambitions.
"Look!" cried Joan suddenly. "What's that?"
Captain Future saw it, at the same instant. It was something flowing down into the digger nest from one of the tunnels, something vaguely shining and liquid.
It looked like a viscous tide of strangely shining jelly, gliding smoothly down into the dirt chamber. The sight of it startled Curt with a cold shock.
"It's a crawler!" he exclaimed, hoarsely.
"A crawler?" Joan's voice shook at the mention of the most dreaded of all Jovian beasts.
For the crawlers were almost the most deadly life-form on Jupiter. They were like great viscous masses of protoplasm, moving by flowing over the ground, seizing prey by protruding pseudopods. At first, Earthmen explorers had considered them a very low form of life.
But now it was known that the crawlers possessed a mysterious, high intelligence. Every other creature on Jupiter was in terror of them. And now Curt had visual evidence that they would descend even among the tunnels of the "diggers" in search of prey.
The diggers advancing toward Curt and Joan had not seen the flowing menace entering behind them, for their red eyes were still facing the man and girl. Then Curt saw a pseudo-pod of the shining viscous creature lick forth and seize a dark digger.
Squeals rent the air, and the diggers dashed in all directions in a wild effort to escape by the tunnels.
And the crawler, its two huge eyes coldly blazing in the midst of its formless body, towered up and sent one shooting pseudopod after another forth to seize the ratlike beasts.
“Out of here before the thing seizes us too!” Captain Future cried to the girl. “Quick, the tunnel it came from —”
He seized Joan’s hand and leaped around the rim of the dirt cavern that had now become a chamber of horror.
The crawler, intent on seizing as many of the bolting beasts as possible, did not notice the man and girl until they were entering the tunnel down through which it itself had come.
Then, as Curt pushed the girl up the cramped tunnel before him, he saw the crawler’s huge eyes turn on its viscous mass toward him, and a big pseudopod shoot swiftly out.
By main force, Captain Future thrust the girl secret agent up the tunnel, in a tremendous thrust. The pseudopod of shining liquid darted up the tunnel after them.
BUT they were beyond its reach. The viscous arm retreated. They could hear “the squeals of the diggers from below as the monster down there seized and ingested them.
“Hurry!” Curt urged the girl. “The thing may follow us! This tunnel must lead to the surface, since it came down this way.”
After a few moments more of climbing up the cramped dirt passageway, a circle of brilliant moonlight showed above.
In a moment they were climbing out into the brilliant radiance of the four moons. Joan staggered, and Curt supported her.
He looked swiftly around. They were in the jungle, but he could glimpse the cyclopean masses of brooding masonry of the Place of the Dead, some hundreds of yards away.
“I’ve got to go back there,” Captain Future told the girl rapidly. “I’ll have to find my belt and gun.”
“But the Jovians guarding the pit we were imprisoned in —” the girl began fearfully.
“I can take care of them, I think,” he said. “Keep behind me, and make no sound.”
Silently, stealthily, he advanced through the jungle toward the edge of the great circle of ancient ruins.
Crouching down on the edge of that wrecked city, he peered forth.
The moonlit ruins were now deserted except for six Jovians armed with flare-guns who sat around the ground-drum pit in which they supposed Captain Future and Joan to be still confined.
Curt’s eyes searched the ground all around and finally fixed on what he was hunting for. His tungstite belt and pistol! They lay near the pit, where they had been flung by the Jovian who had ripped them from him at the Space Emperor’s orders.
Curt motioned for the girl to remain hidden, and inched silently forward in a wriggling crawl. He was only a few yards from the belt and pistol when a Jovian saw him. The green man cried out and jumped up. Captain Future dived desperately toward the weapon.
He scooped it up and pulled the trigger in the same swift movement. The pale beam that lanced from it hit the Jovians as they were leveling their own guns, and sent them tumbling into a stunned heap.
“Captain Future, someone’s coming!” cried Joan Randall, running wildly out into the clearing toward him.
A dark, humming bulk was diving toward them out of the moonlight. Curt raised his pistol swiftly, then lowered it with a throb of gladness and relief.
“It’s the Comet!” he cried.
He ran forward. Out of the little teardrop ship burst Grag and Otho.
The big robot boomed noisily as he patted Curt with heavy metal hands. Otho held Simon Wright’s square brain-case.
“Simon, have you perfected the atavism-cure formula yet?” Curt asked the Brain tensely.
“Yes, lad — why do you ask?” the Brain countered quickly.
Curt explained. And a cry of heart-checking rage went up from Otho as he heard.
“He dared turn the thing on you!” hissed the android furiously.
Grag spoke solemnly. “For daring to do that, I will kill the Space Emperor myself.”
“Bring the girl inside,” Simon told Curt quickly. “I can give you both an injection at once. Hurry inside!”
IN THE laboratory of the Comet, the Brain gave Curt directions. Rapidly, an injection of the pink formula was made into the veins of Captain Future and the girl.
“I don’t feel any differently,” Joan said doubtfully.
“No, but you are both safe now from the atavism,” Simon told them. “The paralysis of your glands had been ended, before it could have any effect upon you.”
“What now, lad?” the Brain asked Curt.
“Simon, things are rushing toward a climax,” Curt said earnestly. “The Space Emperor plans to lead the Jovian hordes onto the Earthman towns, perhaps this very night. The only thing that will stop the Jovians is the destroying of that black devil whom they worship and follow.
“There’s not a chance in the world of our harming the Space Emperor while he can take refuge in immateriality through that vibration step-up. We’ve got to master that power ourselves before we can come to grips with him.”
“You have a plan?” the Brain asked him keenly.
“The only plan possible, and its possibility depends on something I glimpsed in these ruins,” Curt answered. “Come with me.”
He led the way back out into the moonlight, and hastened toward the great black stone globe that towered between the two ground-drum pits.
Upon its surface, as he had noticed before, were carved outlines of the continents and seas of Jupiter. Set in it were the silver stars that he had guessed marked the location of the long-perished cities of the Ancients. He had formed that guess because one star marked this exact location he stood in now.
Captain Future located the thing about the globe which had aroused his attention when he had glimpsed it from his hiding-place previously. From the star that marked this dead city he stood in, a line had been drawn due northward on the globe in white pencil.
“An Earthman drew that line while plotting directions,” Curt told the others rapidly. “And the only one who was likely to have done that was Kenneth Lester, the young archaeologist who disappeared up here weeks ago.”
The penciled line ran straight northward toward another silver star, enclosed in a circle, which was set on the southern edge of the big red oval that marked the precise location of the Fire Sea.
“Lester was plotting the direction from this ruined city to
some other city or ruin of the Ancients that lies up there on the shore of the Fire Sea,” Curt declared. “So that is where Lester must have gone.”
“But there couldn’t have ever been any city up there by the Fire Sea!” objected Joan. “Why, no one or no thing can live that close to that terrible flaming ocean!”
“The Ancients had a city of some kind there,” Captain Future insisted, “but it was different somehow from their other cities, for it is distinguished by a silver circle around the star that marks its location.”
“You think then that up there is the storehouse of knowledge from which the Space Emperor got the scientific secrets of the Ancients?” Simon Wright asked thoughtfully.
CURT nodded his red head quickly.
“Yes, I do think so. And I think that there I could secure that power of immaterialization for myself, and be able at last to come to grips with that black devil before he can loose an uprising.”
“It’s a long chance, lad,” muttered the Brain. “It’s hard, as Joan says, to believe that any city could ever have been located on the shore of that awful sea of flame.”
“It’s the only real chance we’ve got of stopping the Space Emperor,” Curt warned. “I’ve got to take it. I’m going up there now, and I’ll take Grag with me. We can go in the rocket-flier I left over at the radium mine.
“Otho will fly you and Joan back to Jungletown, Simon,” he went on. “It’s important that you get that atavism cure working on the victims that crowd the hospital there.”
“But I should go with you instead of Grag!” Otho objected loudly.
Curt silenced him peremptorily.
“Someone has to fly Simon and Joan back. And Grag’s strength may be more useful to me up there than anything else. Do as you’re told, Otho!”
Grumbling, the android gave in. They entered the Comet.
“You can drop Grag and me at the mine, and we’ll pick up our flier,” Curt ordered.
Captain Future 01 - The Space Emperor (Winter 1940) Page 12