Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (3 page)

“Didn’t find anythin’, did you?”

“No, not a thing,” Curt admitted. “There’s no tool or weapon of any kind hidden in those cells, that’s sure.”

“We Patrol men ain’t as sleepy as you seem to think,” the old marshal told him. “Those birds are safe till we reach Cerberus, never fear.”

His apprehension somewhat dispelled, Curt had felt less worried about Joan’s safety during the long days of the voyage that followed. At each world where they stopped, the new prisoners brought aboard were thoroughly scanned. But no attempt to smuggle tools or weapons was detected.

Now they were drawing near to Neptune. The eighth planet was still more than a billion miles ahead, but that was only a few days of travel at the great speed with which the
Vulcan
was flying through space.

At dinner in the officers’ mess that “evening” before the night watch, Ezra commented upon their approaching stop at the Water World.

“Remember last time you Futuremen an’ Joan an’ I were out here, Cap’n Future? It was when we were after the Wrecker.”

Curt nodded grimly. “I’m not likely to forget what happened to me on Neptune that time, up in the Black Isles.”

“Can you tell us about it, Captain Future?” eagerly asked Rih Quili, the young Mercurian lieutenant, with hero-worship in his voice.

“Some other time,” evaded Curt, unwilling to recall near-tragic memories.

“We’ve all finished dinner now.”

“I ha-haven’t finished my p-p-prunes,” hastily stuttered George McClinton, the chief engineer.

There was a burst of laughter. McClinton, a lanky, spectacled, stammering young Earthman, was the butt of constant jokes because of his inordinate fondness for prunes. He always kept his pocket full of dried ones, which he munched ceaselessly as he supervised the cyc-room.

“If we wait till you have enough prunes, we’ll be here forever,” Ezra said dryly, getting up. “I’m goin’ to turn in.”

When Curt and Joan and Otho went to the bridge-deck, they found Grag leaning against a section of glassite window and looking disconsolately back toward Earth. The big robot turned to them.

“I wonder how Eek is getting along, back home,” Grag said anxiously. “I wish I had brought him with me.”

EEK was a queer little interplanetary animal that was Grag’s mascot. Otho had a somewhat similar pet, which he called Oog. Both pets had been left in the Futuremen’s Moon-laboratory when they had flown to Earth on the errand that had unexpectedly resulted in this long voyage.

“Eek will be all right, Grag,” reassured Curt. “The automatic feeding-arrangement in the Moon-laboratory will keep him fat and happy.”

“I know, but he’ll nearly die of loneliness because I’m not there,” Grag affirmed. “He’s such a sentimental little fellow.”

“Sentimental? That miserable little moon-pup?” cried Otho jeeringly. “Why, all that little pest knows is to eat and sleep. He has about as much sentiment in him as a Venusian fish.”

Grag swung wrathfully on the android. “Why, you cockeyed rubber imitation of a man, if you slander little Eek like that again, I’ll —”

Captain Future and Joan, chuckling, left them to the inevitable argument which might go on now for an hour. It was the favorite method of passing time for Grag and Otho, to find new insults for each other. Curt and the girl went back to a deck-window out of earshot.

The silence of the night watch reigned over the ship. Its cycs and rocket-tubes had been cut, for its speed of inertia was now great. In an unnatural stillness the
Vulcan
rushed on and on through the vast, star-decked vault toward the distant green speck of Neptune.

The vista from their window was a magnificent one. The golden eyes of a million million suns steadily watched the soundless, rushing ship. Jupiter was a white blob away back to the left, and the sun itself was only a little, fiery disk far astern. Far out in the void, they could glimpse a tiny red light creeping sunward across the starry background.

“That will be the bi-weekly Pluto-Earth liner,” remarked Curt Newton.

Joan’s brown eyes watched wistfully. “Don’t you wish we were aboard her, Curt? There’ll be lights, music, dancing.”

Curt looked down at her. “What’s the matter, Joan? Is this trip getting on your nerves?”

She smiled ruefully. “A little, I’m afraid. We’re so different from any other ship, with our cargo of human misery and hate. I wake up sometimes dreaming that the
Vulcan
will sail on like this forever.”

Curt nodded soberly. “Like the dead space-ship in Oliver Owen’s poem. Remember?

“ ‘Darkling she drifts toward the outer dark,

Silently falling, into eternity.’ ”

“Beautiful, but depressing,” Joan said, with a little shudder. She turned away. “I’m going to turn in, too. I have the guard-command in the next watch.”

Captain Future went back to his own little cabin. The Brain was there, his square case resting quiescent upon a small table. But Simon did not look up or speak when he entered. His lens-eyes stared unseeingly.

Curt knew that the Brain was deep in one of his unfathomable reveries of speculation. Simon’s cold, intellectual mind could lose itself for hours in contemplation of scientific problems. It was his method of relaxation when he had no laboratory for his endless researches.

Curt Newton slept soundly. Yet when he suddenly awakened an hour later, it was with every nerve thrillingly alert. He listened. The big ship was still rushing silently on through the vast deeps of space.

Then to his ears came suddenly the sound of distant yells and the crash of atom-guns. Instantly Curt was out of his bunk and plunging across the cabin toward the door.

“Something’s wrong! If the prisoners —” The words died on his lips as he burst out into the corridor. A mass of gray-clad convicts were pouring into the fore end of the passage. In their front rank was Moremos, the Venusian murderer, grasping an atom-gun.

He aimed instantly at Captain Future. And Joan Randall, who was emerging hastily from her cabin, was plunging directly into the line of his aim.

DOWN in the cell-deck, a few hours before, an odd atmosphere of pension gripped the scores of prisoners as the night-watch began.

The massive doors at the fore and aft ends of the deck had been closed and locked by the Patrol officers, who were now standing guard, outside them. A few uranite bulbs in the ceiling cast a vague, dim light upon the shining chromaloy bars and the shadowed, brutal faces behind them.

The hissing whisper of Moremos traveled along the row of barred doors. The Venusian’s sibilant voice was silkily vicious as he addressed the big Martian pirate in a neighboring cell.

“We’re only three or four days out of Neptune — I heard a guard say so today. I thought you were going to get us out of here before we reached Neptune, Kim Ivan?”

“Yes, what about it, Kim?” asked a squat Jovian killer’s rumbling voice. “You’ve been telling us all the way to keep quiet and that you’d manage a break, but you haven’t done anything yet.”

“He’s just been stringing us along to keep us quiet,” accused the quavering voice of a white-haired,
rial
-chewing Saturnian, a hoary old sinner named Tuhlus Thuun. “I’ll lay that the Patrol men put him up to giving us that story.”

A fierce, low babble of accusations, threats and demands instantly arose from the prisoners. All were addressed to the big Martian.

Then Kim Ivan’s deep voice cut through the babble, in low, harsh command. “Cut your blasts, you chattering space-monkeys! Do you want the guards coming in here?”

The authority in his voice, the authority that had made this towering Martian one of the great pirate leaders of his time, again silenced them.

“I said I’d stage a break, and I will,” Kim Ivan continued harshly. “And what’s more, tonight’s the night for it.”

An electric spark of excitement seemed to leap along the crowded cells at his statement. The voices broke out again, but in eager questions now.

“What’s your plan, Kim? How are you going to get us out of these cursed cells?”

“You’ll soon find out,” the big Martian promised. “Now shut off your cycs and keep quiet while I start.”

The prisoners instantly became still, though all pressed against the bars of their cells in a surge of sudden hope. The only sound was the low, monotonous muttering from the cell of John Rollinger.

Kim Ivan turned to his cell-mate. His fellow prisoner was Boraboll the swindler, a fat Uranian whose moon-like yellow face was ludicrous as he gaped at the big Martian.

“Kim, can you really do it?” he squeaked. “How are you so much as going to get out of this cell, when you have nothing to work with?”

“I have all I need,” Kim Ivan replied. “My old pals on the outside smuggled the stuff to me, before we ever left Earth, It’s hidden right here in the cell with us.”

“Are you crazy?” gasped Boraboll. “There’s nothing hidden in here, not so much as a pin. The X-Ray scanner would have detected it if there was.”

“The cursed scanner wouldn’t ever find my equipment,” Kim Ivan replied, with a chuckle. He was stripping off his gray convict jacket, and there was a look of triumph on his massive, battered face as he added, “I’ve got wit enough to outsmart the Patrol, every time.”

Boraboll watched him, open-mouthed. The big Martian had filled the biggest of their soft food-dishes with water from the fiber jug. Now Kim Ivan tore a sleeve off his jacket, and bent over the dish of water.

“Cell-crazy!” muttered the fat Uranian to himself with sudden conviction. “He’s gone clear cell-crazy. He’s as delirious as Rollinger.”

Kim Ivan wadded up the sleeve of his jacket and thrust it into the dish of water. He turned around, with a sharp command.

“Now, hand me that salt.” Pityingly, Boraboll handed him the little fiber container of salt. Kim Ivan took it and squatted down, waiting and watching the dish.

Gradually, a curious change came over the water in that dish. It turned blue, as though it had dissolved some dye or chemical in the jacket-sleeve that was immersed in it. Kim Ivan waited until the water was a dark blue color, before taking out the wadded sleeve.

“Now the reagent,” muttered the big Martian, and poured a carefully estimated quantity of salt into the dark blue liquid.

The blue liquid began to seethe and boil, and turned dark purple. Kim Ivan’s massive face flashed a light of triumph.

“It works!” he muttered exultantly. “Boraboll, we’re as good as out of here right now.”

“But what is that stuff?” Boraboll stammered, looking bewilderedly at the seething purple liquid.

“It’s an acid that eats through the toughest metal as though it were cheese,” the big Martian retorted. “The basic elements of the acid were mixed by a smart outside chemist into a gluey mixture that was soaked into a regulation convict jacket, and then dried. The jacket was smuggled in to me by my outside pals, along with plans of this ship.”

He chuckled as he added, “The scanner couldn’t show the chemicals soaked into my jacket. But they needed only to be dissolved into water, and then to have ordinary sodium chloride added to the solution, to form one of the most powerful metal acids known. Now watch it work!”

Kim Ivan picked up the vessel of seething liquid, and carefully poured a trickle of it upon the crossbars of the cell’s barred door.

The purple liquid foamed and hissed, eating swiftly into the tough chromaloy bars. Careful to avoid splashing himself with the acid, the Martian pirate continued the operation. In a few moments, the crossbars were eaten through. He put down the bowl of acid, and lifted out a whole section of the door. Then he squeezed out into the corridor.

“Kim, how did you do it?” came the excited, wondering exclamation of Grabo, the squat Jovian criminal across the corridor.

“Can you get the rest of us out, too?” Moremos asked swiftly. A chorus of amazement and excited hope was rising from the rest of the convicts. Kim Ivan quieted it with a wave of his big hand.

“Take it easy! I’ll soon have you out of those cursed cages.”

The cell-doors did not have individual locks. They were all secured by a master electro-lock whose controls were outside the cell-deck.

But Kim Ivan knew what he was doing. He secured his receptacle of purple acid and stooped over a certain section of the corridor floor.

“The main wiring for the electro-locks runs under here,” he muttered.
“If
the
ship plans my pals sent me are right.”

He used a trickle of the acid to burn out a two-foot section of the metal floor-plate. This exposed the tangle of wiring inside the floor. Kim Ivan studied it for several minutes, then began working with the wires.

Presently, his work bore results. With a loud clicking, all the locks of the scores of cell-doors drew their bolts. He had actuated the master control of the locks.

The convicts swarmed instantly out into the corridor. Brutal faces of Earthmen, Venusians, Jovians, Saturnians blazed with fierce hope.

“You’ve done wonders, Kim,” Moremos applauded tensely. “But now what?”