Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (2 page)

“I wonder?” replied the Brain, his strange lens-eyes fixed thoughtfully on Curt’s face.

The
Vulcan
suddenly lurched upward with a roar of bursting rocket-tubes. They clung to stanchions as the ship took off. Swiftly, it screamed up through Earth’s atmosphere into the vast and shoreless sea of space.

The young Mercurian lieutenant started with them through the ship toward the bridge-room. As they left the airlock, they met Joan Randall. Her jaw dropped ludicrously at sight of them. Then her eyes grew stormy.

“You came along! As though I were a baby who needed watching over! Curt Newton, I won’t stand for it!”

“Afraid you’ll have to, darling,” grinned Curt. “We’re already at least ten thousand miles away from Earth.”

She was still protesting indignantly as they went forward through the mid-deck of the ship. This was the prison-cell deck. Along its main corridor were the barred doors of scores of cells. From behind the bars, convicts glared like caged wolves as they passed.

A SQUAT, evil-faced Jovian in one of the cells set up a roar as he saw Curt and his comrades pass.

“It’s Captain Future, mates!” he shouted.
“He’s
aboard!” A raging tumult instantly arose. Threats, maledictions, oaths, were hurled at the Futuremen as they passed along the corridor.

Not a criminal in the System but had good reason to hate the name of Captain Future. He had sent many an evil-doer out to the gray inferno of Interplanetary Prison to which these men were destined.

The tumult rose. The senseless shrieks of the madman Rollinger added weirdly to it. Captain Future’s bronzed face was coolly imperturbable as he strode along. He seemed unaware of the raging voices. Then, as he glimpsed a sudden flash of movement beside him, he yelled a warning.

“Look out — your pistol!” he cried to the Mercurian lieutenant.

A Venusian convict in one of the cells had hurled out through his barred door a little noose improvised from his belt. The loop had settled around the hilt of the Mercurian lieutenant’s belt-weapon. The Venusian tugged hard, snatching the atom-pistol toward himself as Future shouted.

Captain Future spun and charged that cell-door with superhuman speed. The Venusian had got the pistol into his hands. His blazing black eyes looked over its sights at Curt, with deadly purpose.

Curt ducked and flung up his hand in an oddly slicing gesture at the convict’s arm. The crash of blasting white fire from the atom-pistol grazed over his head and fused a patch in the metal ceiling.

Next moment, Curt had got hold of the Venusian’s arm through the bars and had wrenched hard. The gun clattered to the floor. He picked it up and grimly returned it to the scared young Mercurian lieutenant.

“Next time, keep your holster buttoned when you walk through this for corridor,” Curt advised him meaningly.

“Next time I’ll get you, Future!” hissed the Venusian convict, nursing his wrenched arm and glaring his hatred through the bars.

“It’s that devil, Moremos,” volunteered the shaken young Patrol officer. “Only he would have thought of a trick like that.”

“Oh, Curt — I wish you hadn’t come,” breathed Joan. Her brown eyes were shadowed by dread. “They all hate you so terribly.”

Raging threats were following Curt Newton and the others as they went on along the prison-deck. But the bellowing order of a huge Martian in one of the cells put a period to the tumult.

“Silence, you space-scum!” roared the big scarred-face red convict. “You hear? Kim Ivan orders it.”

The uproar quieted almost magically. It was as though all the convicts recognized authority in the notorious Martian pirate’s command.

But one voice remained unquieted. The uncanny shriek of John Rollinger still reached their ears as they left the prison-deck.

“There’s death here!” the mad Earthman was still screaming. “I tell you, there’s death on this ship!”

THE
Vulcan
was no more than a billion miles from Neptune when the real trouble came.

For many days, the black ship had droned out through the System on a zig-zag course. At Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus it had stopped, to pick up more sentenced criminals. Now, with more than two hundred convicts aboard, it headed for Neptune, the last stop before reaching Pluto and the prison moon.

Nothing untoward had yet occurred to justify Captain Future’s premonition. The convicts imprisoned down in the cell-deck had growled and grumbled, but seemed reconciled to their grim fate. Yet Curt Newton had not been entirely reassured. Upon the first day of the voyage, he had voiced his doubts.

“They’re
too
quiet,” he declared. “They shut up like magic when that fellow Kim Ivan ordered them to.”

“Well, that there big Martian swings a lot of weight with them,” drawled Ezra Gurney. “He was one of the biggest pirate leaders before the Patrol caught him.”

“Even so, that bunch of tough criminals wouldn’t obey him now without a reason,” Curt insisted.

“You think they’ve hatched up some scheme of escape?” asked Captain Theron anxiously.

Captain Jhel Theron, who had command of the navigational operation of the
Vulcan,
was a veteran of the Patrol. He was a tall, grave-eyed Uranian, bald like most of the men of that planet, his saffron skin darkened by years of exposure to the unsoftened radiation of space.

He and his next of rank, Lieutenant K’kan of Mars, commanded an operational crew that comprised three pilots, a chief engineer and two assistants, three space-mechanics and four deckhands.

Distinct from these fifteen members of the operational crew were the guards of the convicts. Marshal Ezra Gurney was guard-commander, with Joan Randall and young Rih Quili of Mercury as his sub-officers. They commanded eight non-coms of the Patrol, who watched over the convicts.

Curt Newton and the Futuremen had gathered with Ezra and Joan and the captain in the chart-room just abaft the bridge.

“I don’t say Kim Ivan is plotting anything,” Curt answered the captain’s question. “But I do say that if he had something in his mind, he’d prevent the convicts from staging any premature outbreak — as he has.”

Ezra Gurney snorted. “Cap’n Future. I got all the respect in the world for your judgment, but this time I think you’re chasin’ comets. How the devil can Kim Ivan or anybody else pull off anything, when they’re locked up tight in cells that they won’t leave till we reach Cerberus?”

“Men can get out even a chromaloy cell, if they have the right tools,” Curt answered significantly. “And men like Kim Ivan and that snake Moremos had criminal friends who would have been glad to smuggle things to them.”

“Not a chance!” Ezra affirmed. “I’ll stake my life that not one of those space-scum has any kind of tool or instrument.”

“You searched them when they were brought aboard?” Curt asked.

“What kind of amateur outfit do you think the Patrol is?” Ezra demanded injuredly. “O’ course we searched them. We used the X-Ray ‘scanner’ on each convict as he was brought into the ship.”

“Did you ‘scan’ the cells, too, to make certain that nothing had been planted in them?” Captain Future asked keenly.

“No, we didn’t do that, but there wasn’t any need to,” the old marshal declared. “The
Vulcan
was always under guard, and nothin’ could have been planted in her.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like to use the ‘scanner’ on the cells now,” Curt said. “Any objection?”

“Oh, no, if it’ll ease your mind any,” growled Ezra. He glanced winkingly at Joan as he added, “You’re sure takin’ a lot of precautions, Cap’n Future. Must be somebody aboard you’re worried about.”

GRAG and Otho, bored by the discussion, had got into one of their interminable arguments. Curt left them with Joan, and went down with Captain Theron and Ezra and the Brain to conduct his inspection.

The
Vulcan,
as a former small liner, was built along standard lines. It had three main decks, one above the other. Top-deck held the big bridge-room, the operational and chart rooms, and officer quarters. The little cabins occupied by the Patrol officers and by the Futuremen were in the rear part of this deck.

The mid-deck, which had formerly contained passenger cabins, had been redesigned into a cell-deck. Entrance to it was only through two massive chromaloy doors, one fore and one aft. Both were locked and had guards posted outside them at all hours.

The cyc-deck, as the lower deck of a liner was usually called, was a noisy, crowded place. It’s fore part was crowded with fuel tanks and supply-rooms, and the whole stern of this lowest deck was the big cyc-room in which the huge atomic generators droned away to feed streams of atomic power to the great rocket-tubes.

Captain Future and Simon and the captain followed the old marshal down the zigzag companionway to the fore door of the mid-deck. It was locked, and two armed Patrol officers stood guard outside it.

“Open her up an’ bring the X-Ray ‘scanner’,” Ezra Gurney drawled to the guards. “We’re goin’ to run a little inspection.”

The “scanner” was brought by one guard while the other unlocked the massive door. The instrument looked like a powerful searchlight, beside which was mounted an eyepiece that resembled binocular tubes.

When Curt Newton entered the cell-deck corridor with the others, a low, muttering growl ran along the crowded cells. It quickly subsided, but the caged criminals glared in silent hate at the tall, redhaired planeteer who was the greatest enemy of their kind.

“You can see that these cell-doors can only be opened by the outside control,” Ezra Gurney was saying to Curt. “Furthermore, this whole deck, like the other compartments of the ship, can be exhausted of air by the master-valves up in the bridge-room. If these fellows started anythin’, we could kill ‘em all in five minutes and they know it.”

“You certainly must admit that there is no chance of a break here, Captain Future,” said Captain Theron relievedly.

“It’s a good, tight set-up,” Curt admitted. “Nevertheless, I’d like to ‘scan’ the cells. Wheel the machine along, will you, Ezra?”

He began his X-Ray inspection of each cell along the corridor. The searchlight projector of the scanner flooded each cell in turn with invisible Roentgen rays. Through the fluoroscopic eyepiece, Curt Newton could have seen the tiniest scrap of metal in the cells.

But there was nothing. The gray-clad convicts had not even any metal in their plastic belt-buckles or shoes. Even their dishes, water-jugs and eating utensils were of soft fiber or unbaked clay.

Curt paused as he reached John Rollinger’s cell. The mad Earthman had been confined in a cell to himself. He sat muttering in a corner, paying no attention to Captain Future’s inspection.

“Hello, Rollinger — how are you feeling?” Curt asked him.

The ex-scientist stared at him, but made no answer. His haggard face and peculiarly burning eyes gave them all a creepy sensation.

“Hate to see a man with his mind shot like that,” muttered Ezra in a low voice. “ ‘Specially, a man as brilliant as he was.”

John Rollinger had been a famous biophysicist, Curt knew. He had specialized in encephalographic research, testing the effect of various form of radiation upon the human brain. Boldly using himself as a subject, he was supposed to have shattered his mind in his experiment.

“I wonder if he’s really as mad as he looks,” Captain Theron said skeptically. “The prosecution at his trial maintained he killed his colleague in a quarrel, and then used faked insanity to excuse himself.”

“Well, if he’s fakin’, it hasn’t done him much good,” Ezra shrugged. “They sentenced him to Cerberus just the same, for a homicidal maniac has to be locked up just the same as a deliberate killer.”

MOREMOS, the slender and wiry Venusian murderer in the next cell, glared at Captain Future in silent hatred as his cell was “scanned.”

But Kim Ivan, the big, battered Martian who shared a neighboring cell with Boraboll, fat Uranian swindler, greeted Curt with a calm grin.

“Nice of you to come down and visit us boys, Future,” said the big pirate. His froglike grin deepened. “Looking for something special?” Curt scanned that cell twice running before he answered. But there was no tool, instrument or tiniest scrap of metal anywhere in it, nothing whatever hidden. He looked up at the grinning pirate.

“You’ve kept things here pretty quiet, Kim,” he remarked. “You seem to have the others pretty well under control.”

“Sure, I won’t let ‘em start any trouble,” Kim Ivan affirmed. “I’m a peace-loving man, that’s why.”

Ezra snorted. “A peace-loving man who led the biggest pirate band since Rok Olor was on the loose.”

The big pirate laughed. “Aw, that’s all over and done with now. I tell the boys, what’s the use of beating our brains out against these bars, when all it’ll get us is six months’ solitary when we reach Cerberus.”

Curt Newton finished his close inspection of the cells. When they had gone back of the cell-deck, and its massive door was again locked and under guard, Ezra Gurney challenged him.