Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) (2 page)

FAR, far out beyond the limits of the Solar System, billions of miles out in the shoreless sea of space that stretches toward the fixed stars, a small ship was racing Sunward. It moved at a speed approaching the velocity of light, yet in these great deeps it seemed only to be crawling.

Tears stood in Curtis Newton’s eyes as he sat in the pilot chair of the little
Comet
, gazing ahead at the bright yellow star of the Sun. He felt a warm, tremulous happiness that was choking. His tall, redheaded figure strained forward as though to go even faster. The glow of his quivering emotion lighted his tired brown face and haggard gray eyes.

“It looks so good,” he said unsteadily. “Just to see our own Sun again, after all these months —”

Months of danger and hardship were rushing through Captain Future’s memory now. Months in which he and his three comrades had quested beyond the stars themselves for a cosmic scientific secret.

They had risked the perils of uncharted outer space to find that secret, because it alone could make possible the supply of a new atmosphere to the withering little planet of Mercury. And they had found the secret! They were bringing back new life and hope for the System’s smallest world.

“It was worth all the toil and risks!” Curt Newton told the Futureman beside him. “Just for the blessedness of coming home again!”

Otho, who occupied the other chair in the little control room, exhaled a relieved sigh of agreement.

“I’ll say it is, Chief. I feel now like I’ll never want to go outside the System again!”

His heartfelt emotion was as human as Curt’s, even though Otho himself was not an ordinary human. For that matter, none of Captain Future’s three loyal Futuremen were completely human.

Otho was a man. But he had not been born of human parents. He had been created in the laboratory, long ago. A synthetic man — an android, showing that deep-buried strangeness only in the extraordinary litheness and speed of his rubbery white body, in the sensitive mobility of his colorless face, in the slant of his brilliant green eyes.

“I’ll bet the whole System’s wondering what happened to us!” he chuckled. “It’s been a long time. And we never did tell them just why we were going.”

Curt nodded thoughtfully.

“I thought it best not to raise the hopes of the people of Mercury. Though perhaps I should have told the President, and Ezra Gurney and Joan.”

The other two Futuremen were entering the control room. Two strange figures — stranger even than Otho — were Grag and the Brain.

Grag was a massive, manlike metal robot. A robot, not an automaton. His strength lay not wholly in his seven-foot body and mighty metal limbs. Behind the gleaming photoelectric eyes of his immobile face, inside his bulbous metal skull was a sponge-metal brain of high intelligence.

The Brain was different. He was not a man, either. But once he had been a man. Once, long ago, he had been Simon Wright, brilliant, aging Earthman scientist. He had been about to die, when his living brain had been taken from his body and placed within the square, transparent serum-case that was now his body.

He could move that strange body at will, gliding upon magnetic traction beams. He could emit other tractor rays that served him, as arms and hands. His microphone ears gave him the sense of hearing; and his lenslike glass eyes endowed him with keenest vision.

THE Futuremen — the three strangest individuals in the System! To another man, they might have seemed frighteningly alien. But to Captain Future, they were the most loyal of comrades. Their differing capabilities dovetailed with his own brilliant intelligence and skilled strength, to make them the most formidable quartet of adventurers alive.

The Brain’s rasping, metallic voice asked a question.

“Shall we inform the System of our successful quest at once?”

“I want to get home first,” Curt Newton admitted, flexing tired shoulders. “It’ll be good to be back on the Moon again. Its loneliness and silence and peace are what we need.”

Curt felt in familiar territory now. He drove the little ship between the planets with a skilled, sure hand in the following hours. Earth and the Moon grew at last into a gleaming, unbalanced dumbbell ahead. The bright face of the wild satellite was the focus of all four pairs of eyes. It tugged nostalgically at Captain Future’s heart. It had been his home all of his life.

Curt Newton had been born on the Moon. His father, a famous young scientist of Earth, had fled there with his bride and with the Brain for refuge from ruthless enemies. They had built their laboratory-home beneath Tycho crater. In it, their experiments had created Grag, the robot and Otho, the android. And in it, the young husband and wife had met tragic death soon after the birth of their son.

Cradled in the shadow of lonely lunar peaks, the orphaned infant had been guarded by the faithful robot, the android and the Brain. They had watched over and loved the growing boy. They had given him marvelous scientific education and training, which had fitted him superbly for the hazardous life of crusading space-adventure he had followed since manhood.

Softly, on throttled rackets, the
Comet
dropped toward the Moon. Half of its Earthward face was in shadow. The little ship scudded low over the peaks of the Taurus Range, heading southward toward Tycho.

“There’s the Moon laboratory!” Otho exclaimed, eagerly peering.

The
Comet
was slanting into Tycho crater. At the center of the great crater’s floor gleamed an almost unnoticeable crumb of glassite. It was the glassite ceiling window of the underground laboratory.

Curt dropped the little ship to a spot near the camouflaged window. Disguised doors automatically unfolded upward, to disclose a roomy underground hangar. He brought the ship to rest inside it. The doors closed, air hissed in. The Futuremen were home at last.

Curt Newton stretched mightily as they emerged from the ship.

“First I’m going to sleep a week,” he grinned tiredly. “Then I’m going to doze a while.”

“Sure is good to be home again,” rumbled Grag, as they strode along a subterranean passage from the hangar. “I wonder where Eek is.”

They entered the main chamber of the Moon laboratory. It was a circular room of large size, illuminated by the flood of sunlight that came through the ceiling window. It was crowded with the scientific paraphernalia of the Futuremen, with telescopes, spectroscopes and the like. This main laboratory was surrounded by a ring of smaller chambers.

OUT of one chamber scampered two queerly different little animals — the pets of the Futuremen. Oog, who was Otho’s mascot, was a meteor mimic — a fat, doughy little white beast with strange powers. Eek, Grag’s pet, was a moon-pup, a gray, bearlike little animal with chisellike teeth and claws and bright, black eyes.

The moon-pup belonged to a species native to the Moon, the so-called Moon Dogs, which were, almost the only known life on the dead satellite. Those fierce and much feared Moon Dogs could exist on the airless world, for they did not breathe. Their strange bodies extracted nutriment from the metallic ores they dug for food, their bodies being of inorganic silicate flesh. They haunted certain gorges and mountains of the Moon.

Grag solicitously cuddled this little gray Moon Dog pup, which he had caught and tamed.

“Did you miss me, Eek?” the robot rumbled fondly.

Captain Future chuckled.

“Those little pests wouldn’t miss you in a century, as long as their automatic feeding mechanism here kept functioning.

“That’s not so,” Grag said indignantly. “Eek gets lonely when —”

A bell rang sharply across the laboratory. Curt Newton stiffened at the sound.

“That’s the ship-detector’s alarm!” he exclaimed to the Brain.

He strode toward a tall mechanism in a corner, whose front was a panel of telltale dials. It was an ingenious device long ago installed by the Futuremen to give warning of any spaceship that approached the Moon. Curt studied the intensity and directional dials with keen eyes. They indicated by an aura-effect, just where upon the Moon any ship landed.

“It shows two ships landing inside Great North Chasm, over on the other side of the Moon,” Curt said, puzzled. “Now why in the world would any ship land there? Nothing’s there but those old Lunarian ruins.”

“Maybe some space pirates have planted a secret base there in the months we’ve been gone,” suggested the Brain. “Remember, they tried it a couple of times before on this planet, and we had to run them out.”

Curt nodded worriedly.

“I suppose we’ll have to go over and look into it. Dang it, just when we’ve got home —”

“It’s always the way,” grunted Grag disappointedly. “Whenever we figure to get a rest, trouble raises its ugly head.”

They were soon scudding back across the barren surface of the Moon in the
Comet
. They shot westward into the blaze of its sunlit face. Far ahead, the jagged white peaks around Thorson Crater towered against the black, star-dusted sky. Over the tremendous crater, the largest on the Moon, raced the ship of the Futuremen.

Upon the baking white desert beyond, the long black line of Great North Chasm extended east toward the Dragon Sea. Within a few minutes, the ship crossed above the rim of the gigantic canyon. The Futuremen peered down into its black maw. Far down in the tenebrous darkness, Captain Future saw a little cluster of lights.

“There’s some kind of base down in here, all right,” he said. “Funny, I’d have thought space pirates too superstitious about the North Chasm to use it as a secret base.”

He started the
Comet
in a rapid descent into the black depths.

“Better stand by the proton guns,” he said rapidly over his shoulder to Grag and Otho.

The depths of the chasm were a gloomy contrast to the sun-baked desert above. Sunlight never penetrated here, and only the thin starlight that sifted into the abyss showed the towering walls of jagged rock rising on either side.

Long ago when the Moon was young, the convulsive contraction of its cooling sphere had caused this gigantic split in its crust. This was the largest of the countless fissures and cavernous spaces that honeycombed the satellite, but strong superstition clung to the monster crack.

“We’re near the bottom — eighteen miles down,” called Otho after a glance at the altimeter. “Say, look at that dome down there!”

“That isn’t any pirate base,” said the Brain sharply. “It’s too big for that.”

Curt Newton was amazedly surveying the scene below. He was staggered by the magnitude of the activity on the chasm’s floor.

The canyon floor, forty miles in breadth from cliff to cliff, lay in freezing darkness that only the starlight faintly relieved. A few miles to the west vaguely glimmered the mysterious white ruins of ancient lunar civilization, which had invested this place with so many legends.

Enigmatic remnants of a perished race who long ago had inhabited the young Moon! What had they been like, those Lunarians of long ago? No one knew, now. It was believed that as their world withered, they had retreated into this great canyon, in which air might still have lingered, and had died here. Curt had more than once explored these puzzling ruins.

But now a little world of new life had sprung into being on the chasm floor near the ancient ruins. A huge glassite air-dome of three-thousand-feet diameter rested upon the rock floor. Inside the dome, blue-white krypton lights shed a strong illumination. The dome contained power stations, air-pump houses, supply shacks, barracks and offices.

These structures were grouped around a towering square edifice, clearly recognizable as the shaft-house of a vertical mine tunnel. Men in scores were coming and going busily around the building. And the four freighters which had preceded the Futuremen had landed amid other parked ships on the chasm floor near the dome.

“Why, that’s a mining dome!” Grag exclaimed in astonishment.

“They’re mining here, on our Moon!”

Otho’s green eyes flashed.

“Some greedy promoter has come sneaking in here while we were gone, prospecting for metals —”

“Prospecting for radium, you mean,” rapped Curt Newton, his eyes troubled. “The location they picked for operations admits no other explanation. Somehow, they’ve learned of the radium deposit inside the Moon.”

“And we kept that radium deposit a secret for so long!” exclaimed Otho. “How the devil did they learn about it?”

Curt was upset. He had himself long ago discovered the existence of the deep radium deposit, by sensitive instruments.

He had never tried to penetrate down to the radium so far beneath. For his chief desire had been to keep it secret, and he had not wanted to risk leaving a trail that would lead others to it. But now it had been found!

“They’ve no business mining on this world!” Grag was booming angrily. “We’ll run them out and wreck their dome in double-quick time.”

“Wait a minute, don’t fly off your orbit,” Curt interrupted. “These people are mining here illegally — the Government would never give them a Moon concession without our consent.

When they learn that their operations are discovered, they’ll get out quickly enough.”

HE BROUGHT the
Comet
down to a landing on the chasm floor beside the four freighters. He and Otho slipped into their spacesuits; neither Grag nor the Brain needed such protection. They strode toward the dome, found an automatic airlock entrance in its curved glassite wall. Passing through this into the air-filled dome, they looked indignantly around.

Before them lay a busy, noisy scene. The ceaseless droning of great cyclotrons in the power stations was a monotonous undertone for the throbbing of air pumps, the rattle of metal trucks and the whirring of machinery in the towering shaft-house.

Captain Future saw a man outside a distant office structure apparently issuing orders to a group of workmen. Future and his aides strode purposefully forward. Then came a yell of surprise and alarm from a passing Jovian miner, who had happened to glimpse the queer quartet.