Curt and Otho bent over the delicate task of pouring out the unstable atomic explosive in their proton-pistols. They encased the powder in an improvised cloth cartridge. As Captain Future started hastily to construct a makeshift atomic fuse, the throbbing reverberation from the upper end of the cavern was coming very much louder.
The Brain hurried up to that end of the cavern to listen. When he came gliding rapidly back, his report was alarming.
“They’re within a few feet of holing through. They’ll burst into this cavern in less than ten minutes.”
In fact, the whole cavern now was vibrating to the powerful throb of the boring machines, with which Larsen King’s crews were tunneling on.
“We daren’t take any longer!” Curt exclaimed. “Got that cartridge ready, Otho? What about the drill hole, Grag?”
“I’m only two feet deep,” rumbled Grag, between strokes of his improvised drill. “This rock is hard.”
The big robot had been toiling furiously, driving the pointed metal bar deeper into the lunar basalt with all his tremendous strength.
“That will have to do,” Captain Future said urgently. “Quick, give me the cartridge, Otho.” He took the innocent-looking little cloth cartridge and gently thrust it into the deep, slender aperture that Grag had sunk into the rock. Curt set his makeshift atomic fuse for a rough five-minute interval and thrust it in after the cartridge. Then he hastily tamped the aperture shut.
“Now — down the path away from here!” he exclaimed.
“That fuse of mine was no precision job — it may let go any second.”
Hastily they started down the ancient path, deeper along the descending fissure, to escape the imminent blast. Glancing back as he ran, Curt saw that light was showing through cracks in the cavern’s north wail as Larsen King’s miners broke down the final barrier.
Grag suddenly stopped short.
“Your transformers and other apparatus!” he cried, appalled. “I left them back there!”
Captain Future immediately understood the robot’s ruinous oversight. Grag had put down the vital burden of scientific apparatus, while he worked with the drill. And he had forgotten this precious equipment and left it up there on the floor of the passage, right where the rock slide would take place.
Without that apparatus, Curt’s plan of protecting the radium deposit was useless. That crushing realization held him speechless for a moment. Then he realized that Grag was racing madly back up the fissure.
“I’ll get the stuff Chief!” the big robot yelled.
“Grag, come back!” Curt cried in sharp alarm, lunging forward to follow. “That blast is due to let go now —”
Things happened then so swiftly that he could hardly apprehend their sequence.
As he yelled and started after the robot, Curt Newton saw a big round section of the cavern’s northern wall fall inward.
Men and machines were revealed there in a blaze of light. King’s miners had holed through!
The miners wore space suits, for they had expected to burst into a completely airless cave. They surged excitedly forward as they glimpsed the dim spaces of the great cave, the solemn Lunarian statue, the robot running with great strides up the passage.
Grag reached the spot where he had dropped the equipment. He picked up the mass of scientific apparatus.
Boom! The buried charge of atomic explosive let go at that moment, wildly shaking the rock walls. With ominous, terrifying sounds, the fissure walls bulged out over the robot.
“Grag — jump!” yelled Captain Future frantically.
Instead of doing so, Grag threw the mass of apparatus down toward Curt with all his strength.
“Catch it, Chief — I can’t get clear!” he bellowed.
The miraculous strength of the robot was behind that toss. The mass of apparatus, tied together for easier carrying, hit Curt’s chest and bore him to the floor.
With a thunderous roar, a massive fall of shattered black rock poured down from the sides of the narrow passage. Curt glimpsed Grag’s great metal form knocked down and covered by the falling rock. Captain Future recoiled with the bundle of apparatus, as the area of the slide increased.
For a hundred seconds, dislodged masses of black basalt showered from above, along fifty feet of the fissure. Then the rock-slide ceased.
“Chief, where are you?” came Otho’s sharp cry from below. “Are you hurt?”
Captain Future picked himself up shakenly.
“I’m all right,” he called. “But the slide caught Grag!”
The other two Futuremen reached his side. Curt turned his blue krypton beam upward along the passage. The narrow chasm was completely blocked, as high as the beam could reach, by a mass of shattered rock. No light or sound from the cavern above came down through that barrier the Futuremen had effectually interposed.
“Is Grag under that?” cried Otho in dismay. “We’ve got to get him out.”
“We can’t now!” Curt replied worriedly. “He was at the far end of the slide. We’d have to dig through fifty feet of that rock to reach him, and we’d be putting ourselves right into the hands of that crooked Larsen King’s outfit.”
CURT continued more hopefully. “I don’t think Grag can have been hurt much. It would kill anybody else to be buried under falling rock, but Grag’s metal body can stand a lot. And he won’t smother, for he doesn’t breathe. He’d be all right, and King’s crews will soon dig him out.”
“But they’d hold him a prisoner — he’s an outlaw now like all of us!” Otho reminded Curt anxiously.
“We’ll come back and take him away from them when we’ve assured the safety of the radium deposit,” Captain Future promised.”He’ll be all right till then.”
“Of course he will,” agreed the Brain. “The only way you could really harm Crag much would be to cut him up with an atomic torch.”
Curt turned his beam down the fissure. The ancient path of the Lunarians wound into the narrow chasm, out of sight around a sharp bend.
He picked up the mass of apparatus.
“We’d better get started. We’ve a long, long way to go before we’ll be anywhere near that radium deposit. I only hope this Lunarian path leads somewhere near it.”
They started on down the passage in silence. They all missed Grag, and were all anxiously thinking of the Futureman they had been forced to leave behind. Yet Curt knew it was the only possible course of action.
He stopped suddenly, his krypton beam painting rigidly on down the fissure. He had vaguely glimpsed a movement, down there beyond his light.
“Something’s coming this way!” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know what —”
“Devils of space — what are they?” cried Otho, peering frozenly.
Dim shapes were coming slowly up out of the deeper darkness into the illumination of the krypton beam. They could still see those shapes only as vague figures, whose half glimpsed outlines somehow suggested the monstrous.
Curt Newton realized the Futuremen were caught in the passage without chance of evading whatever creatures might be ahead. And, he remembered with sharp dismay, their proton-pistols were useless now.
Chapter 10: Grag’s Stratagem
GRAG had realized, as the blast of atomic explosive let go, that he could not escape the rock slide which already was beginning to roar downward. But the big robot was determined to retrieve his ruinous mistake of leaving Curt’s apparatus behind. So Grag, with all his great strength, had hurled the mass of apparatus down toward Captain Future.
“Catch it, Chief — I can’t get clear!” he had bellowed.
Grag glimpsed Curt catching the burden of scientific equipment. Then a shower of shattered black rock poured down on the robot from above.
Grag flung his metal arm up to protect his photo-electric eyes, the most vulnerable part of his strange body. As the avalanche bore him from his feet, he threw himself in toward the fissure wall.
He felt masses of broken basalt raining down on him, bur
ying him deeply. But by his last-minute lunge toward the wall, Grag avoided being hit by the huger chunks that would have crushed even his metal body.
The robot lay, pinned down by the tremendous weight of fallen debris, the roar reverberating deafeningly in his ears. Finally, the thunder and quake of the falling rock ceased. The slide had blocked the passage. Again and again Grag strained his great limbs in an effort to win free. Then he realized the utter uselessness of it. The weight of broken rock upon him held him in an immovable grip. So, with a simple philosophy that was part of his character, he gave up the vain attempt.
“I’ll simply have to wait here till somebody digs me out,” he thought.
Within a few minutes Grag heard faint sounds through the mass of rock over him. He guessed King’s miners were already working to clear away the rock slide.
Grag chuckled grimly to himself.
“They’ll get a surprise when they uncover me! I hope Larsen King, and Albert Wissler are both around. I’d enjoy knocking their heads together.”
He lay, expectantly waiting with this plan in mind, as the sounds of digging grew louder. Soon, he faintly heard Wissler’s voice.
“Careful, now, men!” the superintendent was ordering. “We’re getting near that robot. He was buried near this end of the slide.”
“I’ve uncovered one of his feet!” a man shouted, a little later.
“Take it easy!” Wissler barked. “Uncover his legs first.”
“Just wait till you get my arms free and see what happens to you, Mr. Wissler,” Grag muttered to himself.
But the robot’s grim plan suffered a sudden setback. He had felt the broken rock being removed from over his legs, though his upper body was still pinned down by a great mass of it. But now Grag heard a rattle of chains. He swore as he realized they were chaining him tightly as they uncovered him. They were taking no chance of letting him get free.
By the time they had all the rock off Grag, he was bound hand and foot by heavy steelite chains. The robot was dragged away from the mass of rock that blocked the passage.
He made furious attempts to break his bonds, but not even his strength could snap those massive chains.
The whole cavern was now brightly illuminated by powerful krypton lights that had been brought down here. Some forty of Larsen King’s planetary miners were present, wearing space-suits and helmets. Most of this motley collection of Martians, Saturnians, Earthmen and others were looking in uneasy awe around the gloomy cavern, and at the solemn Lunarian statue.
ALBERT WISSLER, his thin face anxious inside his glassite helmet, stood superintending Grag’s removal. The scientist turned as Larsen King hastily entered the cavern from above. King’s hard face showed excitement, and his voice came sharply on the space-suit phone.
“So you holed through into this cave at last?” Larsen King exclaimed to Wissler.
Then his eye fell on the blocked fissure.
“What did that?” he demanded.
“Captain Future!” exclaimed Wissler. “He and his Futuremen were in this cave when we entered it. They escaped down that passage, setting off a blast to block it. One of them, this robot, was caught in the explosion.”
King uttered an angry curse.
“But the Planet Patrol said the Futuremen were trapped over in the Thompson Range, miles away!”
He swung angrily on Grag.
“How did you reach this cavern?”
“Why, we just wished we were here, and here we were,” Grag grunted sarcastically. “Isn’t it remarkable?”
King turned furiously from the jeering robot.
“They must have come through some other crack or fissure, he muttered. “And they’ve gone on down that fissure they blocked. Captain Future must figure it will lead him down to the radium. Well, we can follow that way, too!”
“I don’t know that I want to follow that way,” Wissler said agitatedly. “There’s a lot of wrong about all this. There’s air in this cavern. And look at that statue! It seems to indicate that the ancient Lunarians migrated into these depths long ago, to follow their dwindling atmosphere.”
“To the devil with the Lunarians!” snapped Larsen King.
His voice rang in sharp orders to the workmen.
“Get the boring machines down here and open that blocked fissure, then we’ll have a clear way on down.”
The motley planetary miners hesitated uneasily. Then the lanky Saturnian who was their spokesman answered King sullenly.
“We don’t want to go any deeper in the Moon! That statue and the air here make us sure that some of those Moon-devils still exist.”
“Yes, there’s a footprint of one of the things here!” cried another.
“That’s right, men!” Grag shouted loudly. “These caves are full of Moon-devils. We saw a couple of them ourselves.”
“Silence that robot!” roared Larsen King furiously. “You men pay no attention to his lies. There’s nothing down there to hurt you.”
The miners still remained sulkily unmoving. King cursed in a low voice. Then he tried another tack.
“All right, men. If you’re afraid of shadows, I’ll see that you are protected,” he told the planetary workmen. “I’ll arrange for a full company of Planet Patrol officers to come here and accompany us as a guard in the deeper caves. That’s a guarantee of your safety, isn’t it?”
“We wouldn’t mind going deeper with a Patrol company to guard us,” the Saturnian miner conceded. “But we don’t go on till if gets here.”
King nodded impatiently.
“The Patrol guard will be here as soon as I can get it here. In the meantime, you use the boring machines to open up this passage.”
Reluctantly the miners obeyed. Grag saw them bringing down the big, snouted atomic boring machines. The great revolving jaws were soon biting into the fallen mass of rock.
LARSEN KING’S voice was scornful. “They’re a pack of frightened children!” he told Wissler. “Now I’ve got to go back to Earth and prevail on the Government to send a company of the Patrol here to guard these scared sheep.”
“Will the Government detail a company for that?” Wissler asked.
King nodded brusquely.
“They will when I tell them Captain Future is down in those caves. They want Future badly!”
He gestured toward Grag.
“Keep that robot tied up — you can turn him over to the Patrol when they get here. And keep the men working until they’ve got that fissure open. I’ll have Gil Strike pilot me back to Earth.”
Shortly afterward King left for Earth. Grag called after him.
“Hope you and Strike have a nice crash landing!”
In the following hours, Albert Wissler kept the planetary miners hard at work clearing the fissure. More krypton lights had been set up, and flat metal trucks had been brought down to remove the masses of fallen rock as the boring machines ate their way through.
Grag lay in his chains, morosely watching all this activity. But the robot was not as helpless as he seemed. His mind was busily searching for a way of escape. His arms were tightly bound against his metal body by the chains, his metal wrists being pressed together.
A plan came into Grag’s mind. He began a series of furtive attempts to move his wrists inside the chains. He could make only imperceptible movements at first, so tightly was he trussed up. But gradually, as time passed, he had so moved his forearms inside the binding chains that his left hand touched his right wrist.
The steely fingers of Grag’s left hand began work upon his other wrist. They began to unlock the cunning hidden bolts that held his metal hand. For Grag’s hands, like all his limbs, were detachable, so that they could be repaired easily when necessary.
Gradually, Grag completely unfastened his right hand from the wrist. He made certain he was not observed. Wissler was earnestly directing the mining crews, who had now bored nearly through the mass of obstructing rock. No one was watching Grag. Quietly the robot drew his handless right arm f
rom under the binding chains.
It took Grag some minutes to get his dismembered right hand free also. Then, using the fingers of his still-bound left hand, he refastened his right hand to the wrist. He now had one arm and hand completely free of the chains.
“They’ll learn that it’s not so simple to tie me up!” Grag told himself grimly.
With the free hand, he soon untied his chains. Quickly he rearranged the chains around his body so that although he was now really free of them, they looked as though they still bound him.
“Now I’ll wait till they get the passage open,” Grag decided coolly. “I might as well let them do all that hard work for me.”
He lay, apparently tightly chained, watching the planetary miners bore on into the fallen mass of rock. Before long, the powerful machines had penetrated completely through. The fissure was now open again.
At once, the miners drew back into the cavern. Grag saw their Saturnian spokesman anxiously report to Albert Wissler.
Wissler nodded his head emphatically.
“All right. You men can go back up to the dome till the Patrol company gets here.”
“Better haul that robot up with you. We’ll keep him up there till we can turn him over to the Patrol men.”
Grag, in the last few minutes, had evolved an improvement of his original scheme. He saw now a way, not only to escape, but to help Captain Future.
“Wissler, I’ve something to propose to you before you turn me over to the Patrol,” Grag said in a low, urgent voice to the scientist.
Wissler looked down at him doubtfully.
“What is it?”
“You’ve been trying to find the Moon laboratory,” Grag said earnestly. “I’d tell you where it is, if you gave me a chance to escape.”
Wissler rose immediately to the bait.
“Wait a minute,” he said in a low voice.
The planetary miners were approaching to haul Grag to the surface. Albert Wissler gestured impatiently.
“I’ve changed my mind. We can leave the robot safely down here, since he’s chained,” Wissler told the men. “You can go on up.”
Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) Page 8