Captain Future 03 - Captain Future's Challenge (Summer 1940)

by Edmond Hamilton

THEY saw other grotesque forms of the teeming Neptunian sea-life as they sped on. A great sea-snake coiled in battle around one of the giant, dinosaurlike ursals; a group of “breathers,” sluggish black whalelike creatures that spent half their time on the sea-bottom and half on the surface, gulping the air they needed; and a big school of the so-called “solar-fish” that stay always on the sunlit side of Neptune, swimming round and round the rotating planet.

  From far ahead a dull sound like distant thunder came to Otho’s ears above the surging roar of the waves.

  “Maelstrom ahead — twelve points to port!” called a Neptunian lookout in the bows.

  “Put over five more points to starboard,” Groro ordered the Plutonian helmsman, and to the crew he shouted, “Break out more sail! Jan Ullman, start the rocket-motor.”

  Otho started the auxiliary motor, whose underwater rocket-tubes began churning the green water astern to foam. The dull thunder from ahead had become ever louder and the racing Spray fought northward against strong westing currents.

  “There she is, Jan Ullman,” growled Groro, pointing off to port. “You’ll never see anything like that on Earth.”

  Otho stared. He had been on Neptune more than once but he had never been this close to the Great Maelstrom, the terrific whirlpool in the planetary sea that was known all over the System.

  It was an appalling spectacle. Far out there on the sea, tremendous currents swept in spirals toward a vast hole in the ocean. With deafening reverberation as of a thousand roaring cataracts, the currents swept into that titanic whirlpool.

  “Nobody knows where all that water falls to!” the Jovian captain was shouting to Otho over the thunderous roar. “They think maybe it’s sucked right through the planet. It’s dragged many a good boat into its maw, has that thing.”

  Then Groro yelled to the helmsman, “Bear more to starboard, you hairy idiot! Can’t you see we’re losing distance?”

  The currents, even at this distance, were insidiously sweeping the Spray closer to the ranging maelstrom. With sails strained by the wind, with rocket-motor throbbing, the fishing-boat fought away from the perilous currents. The thunderous roar dimmed, the Great Maelstrom receded, and the currents gradually lost their strength.

  Groro grunted in relief.

  “Always glad to get past that spot safely,” he sighed.

  “Are those islands ahead the Black Isles you were telling me about?” Otho asked eagerly.

  “No, those are the Spider Islands,” the Jovian told him. “The Black Isles are beyond.”

  The fishing-boat sailed close past the small archipelago of rock islands, and Otho saw how they had gained their name. Over the islets swarmed hordes of giant black spiders of a size incredible. Fully eight feet in diameter were the horrific arachnids, and they raced to the shore on great horny limbs and gazed with glowing, avid eyes at the passing boat.

  “Good thing they can’t swim or we wouldn’t last long!” declared Groro. “The gods help the man who lands on those isles.”

  A moment later he added, “There’s the Black Isles yonder. Our fishing-banks aren’t far to the north of them.”

  Otho gazed intently ahead. The small group of islands now coming into sight were of a distinctive jet-black rock that made them stand out sharply on the green ocean. Largest of them was one towering mass with steep, precipitous walls and a flat top.

  “That biggest and highest one is Black Peak,” Groro volunteered. “Funny thing about that island — a couple of fishing-boats have claimed they saw space ships landing there at night lately. They must have been dreaming! There’s nothing there to bring space ships.”

  Otho’s eyes narrowed.

  “And it’s near here that all those fishermen disappeared, eh?” he muttered.

  CRORO nodded his head. “Yes, somewhere around here. Storms wrecked ‘em, I suppose, and the ‘swallowers’ got the crews.”

  Otho’s mind was throbbing with excitement. He felt certain that on that high, lonely black island must be the mysterious base of the Wrecker’s organization. He must get on that island, somehow.

  Groro had gone forward to scold his crew for not reefing sail after passing the Great Maelstrom. And the Plutonian helmsman was looking the other way.

  Otho acted without a moment’s hesitation. He slid over the rail into the rushing waves, and struck out for the island a half mile to the west. He swam underwater, coming up only to breathe. The third time he came up, he saw the Spray circling around, a mile northward, and beating back and forth.

  “Looking for me — they think I fell overboard,” chuckled Otho to himself. “Well, it’s nice of Groro to take the trouble.”

  He dived again and next time he came up, the distant fishing-boat was sailing on, apparently giving up Otho for lost.

  With powerful strokes, the lithe android clove the green waters toward the high black mass of Black Peak, now only a quarter-mile away.

  Then, off to his left in the water, Otho glimpsed two smooth ripples coming rapidly toward him — two enormous creatures swimming toward him beneath the waves. And even the audacious, reckless android felt a chill as he recognized them.

  “Devils of space — two ‘swallowers’!” he exclaimed.

  The two great white monsters, the most feared of all creatures in the Neptunian sea, were bearing down on the android with deadly intention, opening wide the hideous maws that gave them their name.

  Chapter 14: Dangerous Imposture

  AS CAPTAIN FUTURE faced the three of the Wrecker’s men who had just murdered Quarus Qull, here in the Saturnian magnate’s office in the city Amphitrite, the wizard of science was thinking at high speed.

  These three men thought he was one of their comrades, one of the Wrecker’s men. His disguise as Ki Iri, the captured Venusian, had deceived them so far. But Curt Newton realized that they were suspicious of him because of his sudden appearance here.

  “What are you doing here, Ki Iri?” demanded again the hollow-eyed Jovian who held the atom-pistol. “Weren’t you captured by Captain Future’s men?”

  Curt answered, taking care to make his voice jerky and hesitant in accent like these other men of the Wrecker.

  “I was captured by the Futuremen, yes!” he said. “But I got away from them, and hurried to rejoin the band.”

  “But how could you know we’d be here?” the other demanded. “We just came here from the Base — it was only an hour ago that the Wrecker ordered us by televisor to come and kill this Saturnian.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” Curt explained quickly. “I was hanging around the docks trying to find some way to get back to the Base, when I glimpsed you coming here and followed.”

  Captain Future was gambling on the supposition that the Base of the Wrecker’s organization was in some other island than Amphitrite. The correctness of his assumption was soon proven, for the other Wrecker-men seemed to lose their suspicion at once.

  “Good! You can come back to Base with us now,” their leader said. “The Wrecker will want to hear of your escape from the Futuremen.”

  Curt risked a question. “Is the Wrecker at Base now?”

  “No, but he is to be there at dawn to meet and confer with the kings of our people,” answered the other, “so that they can prepare the last great stroke of the plan.”

  The man went on in his jerky voice, “Out of here quickly, now! That devil Captain Future must not find us here.”

  Curt Newton grinned inwardly as he hurried out of the murdered Saturnian magnate’s small office. He followed the two Jovians and the Neptunian along the dark docks to an unused, unlighted quay. Here was moored a small, tubular submersible speed-boat of the type much used on Neptune’s stormy sea.

  They piled into the craft. The Jovian took the controls. He ran the craft down under the surface at once, and, keeping beneath the nighted waters, headed out of the harbor northwestward.

  Captain Future’s pulse was racing with grim anticipation. The whole situation had changed. Quarus Qu
ll, one of his four suspects, had been definitely removed from the list. And a highly promising chance to get to the Wrecker had now presented itself. At dawn, in his hidden Base, the Wrecker was to meet the rulers of his mysterious allies, and plan the last stroke against the gravium industry. That last stroke, Captain Future knew, must be the destruction of Mine Three!

  Curt vowed inwardly that that destruction would never be carried out. So far, the Wrecker had taken most of the tricks in this deadly interplanetary game. But now he was going to learn that Captain Future could play that game. Disguised and accepted as one of the master-plotter’s own strange followers, Curt was on his way to the heart of the gigantic conspiracy!

  “We can run on the surface now,” the Neptunian was saying thickly to the Jovian steersman beside Curt. “The Maelstrom isn’t far ahead.”

  The Jovian’s handling of the speeding boat was awkward and clumsy, Curt noticed. Like their speech, every movement of these men betrayed something deeply alien and ill-at-ease about them.

  “I will be glad to get back into my own body, when the great plan has succeeded,” muttered the steersman thickly. “These clumsy bodies we now inhabit are fit for nothing — we can’t even speak our own language in them.”

  “It is the truth — they are uncomfortable, incapable bodies,” Curt replied in the same slurred accents.

  CAPTAIN FUTURE’S heart had jumped. So he and the Brain were right — the Wrecker’s followers were really alien minds transferred somehow into the bodies of kidnaped men. That was why they spoke only in Earthspeech, the lingua franca of the System. Their present human bodies couldn’t physically form the sounds used by them in their own native speech!

  “But if that’s so,” Captain Future wondered, “where in the name of ten thousand comets’ tails did they come from? What kind of a race are these allies of the Wreckers?”

  Curt’s lips tightened. “There’s only one possible answer to that, only one place the Wrecker could have found a race of secret allies. It all joins up together. The minds of some of that secret race, transferred into the bodies of kidnaped humans —”

  To others, such a transference of minds would have seemed incredible, but not to the red-haired wizard of science. For Captain Future had himself, in the laboratory of Earth’s moon, succeeded in such an experiment. He and Simon Wright, delving deeply into the nature of mind and discovering that a mind was really an immaterial web of electric currents, had tried the thing.

  They had found that with suitable forces they could lift the electric mind-web out of the living brain, and implant in that blank brain the electric web of a different mind. Curt had performed this experiment with small animals, exchanging their minds from body to body, and then re-exchanging them without harm.

  Captain Future had never thought of trying the experiment on humans, of course. But he had been sure that it could be repeated with them too — that the minds of any two beings of the same species or closely allied species, could be completely exchanged.

  “God, what a ghastly thing to use on humans!” Curt thought with repulsion. His jaw hardened. “The Wrecker has a lot to answer for when the reckoning comes —”

  “There’s the Great Maelstrom,” declared the alien-minded Jovian beside him, at that moment. “It’s not far now to the Black Isles.”

  Curt heard the dim, far-off roar of the mighty whirlpool. It lay miles to the west, a hanging cloud of seething mist and spray marking the boiling center. Captain Future had seen it from a distance on previous visits to Neptune. Yet he looked at it as intently as Otho was to look at it when he passed it hours later.

  The night was still dark, but the flying storm-clouds had disappeared and Curt estimated that it was not long before dawn. Their throbbing craft passed a series of small dots of land he recognized as the Spider Islands. Then the Black Isles loomed ahead.

  Straight toward the high mass of Black Peak, the steersman drove. The precipitous rock cliffs loomed up in front of the speeding boat. Captain Future stiffened. The man beside him seemed about to commit suicide by driving the speed-submersible straight into the cliffs. Curt tensed himself for the shock of impact —

  There was no shock. Like magic, a hidden cleft in the black precipice suddenly became visible. Through its narrow entrance shot the racing craft. Curt Newton saw that they had entered a hidden, narrow fjord in the cliffs. They were in almost complete darkness, in a silence that seemed oppressive after the roaring sea outside.

  THE Jovian snicked on a searchlight at the prow. Captain Future glimpsed black rock walls towering up awesomely into the gloom. The throbbing of the rocket-motor woke muffled, echoing reverberations. The waterway wound to the right, and debouched abruptly into a buried water-cavern of considerable size.

  “Back at Base at last,” muttered the Jovian thickly. “And you are lucky to see it again, Ki Iri.”

  “I know it,” Curt replied in equally hollow accents. “Those Futuremen who captured me were devils.”

  As he spoke, his eyes were keenly taking in every detail of this hidden base of the Wrecker.

  Fluoric lamps suspended from the rock walls cast an eerie crimson glow over everything. By that illumination, Captain Future perceived that at one side of the buried water-cavern was a broad rock ledge, toward which their craft was gliding. Moored to rings in this ledge were three other submersible speed-boats of familiar type. Upon the very edge of the ledge, half in the water, stood a small square metal structure. And beyond it were some scores of men lounging. They got jerkily to their feet and came down to meet the arriving boat.

  Captain Future’s eyes swept the queerly silent throng. There were almost a hundred of them, Venusians, Neptunians, Uranians, Earthmen, and others. But all had the same strangely hollow eyes and stiff, expressionless faces. All, he knew, had alien minds in them.

  “Has the Wrecker come yet?” asked the Jovian beside Curt Newton, as they stepped ashore.

  A hairy Plutonian in the throng answered.

  “Not yet, and neither have our kings come.”

  “They will be here soon,” Curt’s companion assured. He pointed toward Captain Future. “Here is Ki Iri, who escaped from the Futuremen and whom we brought back with us.”

  The Plutonian showed some excitement at sight of Curt.

  “You escaped, Ki Iri?” he exclaimed. “We did not like to leave you behind, but the Futuremen were too much for us.”

  Curt gathered that this Plutonian was one of the party of the Wrecker’s men to which the real Ki Iri had belonged.

  “It was not your fault they captured me,” Captain Future said hollowly. “I was lucky enough to get away from them later.”

  “Our kings and the Wrecker will be here very soon,” the Jovian declared. “Until then, we can rest.”

  Curt Newton, under pretense of sauntering idly, inspected the strange place. The rock ledge ran back along the side of the water-cavern for a hundred yards, and ended in a steep path winding upward through a crevice in the solid rock of the island.

  “I’ll bet that path leads up to some place where the Wrecker’s space ships are kept,” Curt muttered to himself.

  He turned and sauntered back along the red-lit ledge, toward the small, square metal structure by the water’s edge. Curt peered into it. In there he saw a big, complicated, mysterious-looking apparatus. The machine consisted mainly of two coffinlike metal chambers. Each chamber had a bulky, big helmet connected by heavy cables to a mass of electrical apparatus and switchboard.

  Captain Future’s scientifically trained eye immediately fathomed the design and purpose of the weird mechanism.

  “An apparatus for mind-transposition!” he whispered. “This is where they’ve done it —”

  Though larger, the mechanism was basically similar to the one he had used in his own lunar laboratory for exchanging the electric mind-webs of two animal subjects. The subjects were put into the two chambers, the helmets put on their heads and connected to their nerve-system. Then the subtle forces operated
, the minds exchanged.

  BUT in this mechanism, one of the two coffinlike chambers was under the surface of the water on whose edge the machine had been erected. That chamber was completely under water, while the other chamber was on the dry floor of the inward side of the structure.

  Captain Future realized the appalling significance of that fact.

  “My guess about the Wrecker’s secret allies was right! This proves it!”

  He turned sharply as a loud cry came from one of the alien-minded throng on the ledge.

  “They come! The kings of our people come!”

  All the strange throng were crowding now toward the water’s edge, gazing eagerly with hollow eyes at the black water. Curt Newton joined them, his heart pounding as he too stared. Yet he knew now what he was about to see — the secret race who were the allies of the Wrecker in his tremendous plot.

  Into the water-cavern from the ocean outside, a half dozen creatures were swimming. They swam below the surface, dimly visible underwater in the red glow of the fluoric lamps. Those underwater swimmers looked vaguely human. But the two legs of their white bodies seemed to have grown together into a powerful, tail-like limb that ended in fins instead of feet. And their short, powerful arms were finned at wrists and elbows.

  Their heads were hairless, their faces quite human-featured. But at the base of their throats were open gills, pulsing rhythmically as they breathed the water. All of these sea-men wore short tunics of woven metal, and two of them carried metal rods.

  An underwater race of near-human sea-folk, coming from the hidden recesses of the vast planetary ocean! The legendary super-civilized and super-cunning sea-devils about whom there were so many shadowy tales! They were the secret allies of the Wrecker!

  Chapter 15: Dwellers from the Deep

  FROM all the hollow-eyed men around Captain Future, an excited shout arose.

  “Our kings have come!”

  Curt Newton saw the sea-men down there in the water swim to the edge of the rock ledge.