Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (6 page)

“The body indicated by those readings is really dead ahead of us!” he exclaimed. “Shift your course three arcs to port!”

“God!”
screeched Tuhlus Thuun, stiffening in the pilot-chair and staring through the broad window with dilated, bulging eyes.

For a heartbeat, they were all frozen by what they saw as they followed the old Saturnian’s gaze.

They were looking into the awful face of death.

In the starry darkness full ahead of the hurtling ship, there had suddenly loomed up a spinning world. It was no more than a hundred miles in diameter. But it bulked gigantic as they raced headlong toward it.

“Don’t try to brake!” yelled Curt frantically to the old Saturnian. “At this speed you’ll pile us up.”

His warning went unheeded. Terror-stricken by the awful apparition ahead, Tuhlus Thunn madly jammed the brake-blast pedal to the floor.

Next moment, the
Vulcan
seemed to explode around them. The roaring shock sent the men in the crowded bridge caroming into the walls.

Captain Future clutched a stanchion. He heard the scream of tortured metal coincident with the reverberations of the explosion.

He dragged himself erect. A dead silence reigned, then was broken by oaths and cries of pain from the other parts of the ship.

Kim Ivan, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, dragged himself indomitably to his feet. “What’s happened?” he husked dazedly.

“The bow rocket-tubes have back-blasted!” Curt cried. “You can’t use full brake-blasts at the speed we had — inertia forces the blast back up the tubes. I think the laterals let go, too.”

“Look at that!” shouted Boraboll. The Uranian’s fat moon-face was a muddy yellow as he pointed shakily ahead. “We’re going to crash!”

A cold hand seemed to close around Curt Newton’s heart as he caught a glimpse through the broad window. The tremendous force of the disastrous brake-blast had sharply checked the
Vulcan’s
headlong rush toward the planetoid ahead. But the crippled ship was still falling onward.

The uncharted little world already filled half the starry heavens before them. The thin, feeble light from the distant Sun vaguely illumined it. Dark, dense forests were visible upon it. And at one point on its surface, a great bed of smoldering volcanoes flung a lurid red glow.

“This is your fault!” roared Kim Ivan to the terrified old Saturnian.

“I lost my head!” shrilled Tuhlus Thuun. “I jammed the brake-blast pedal before I realized.”

Captain Future jumped to the interphone. He called the cyc-room: “What happened down there? Did the tail-tubes go, too?”

The scared, hoarse voice of the mutineer in charge of the cyc-room answered him. “We got a dozen dead men down here — half the cycs blew up when the bow and lateral tubes back-blasted! The tail-tubes didn’t give way, though they seem to be badly strained.”

“Switch the power of the remaining cycs into the tail rocket-tubes!” ordered Curt. “Then get out of the cyc-room!”

He turned and hauled the stunned old Saturnian out of the pilot-chair. “Give me those controls.”

MOREMOS leaped forward, deadly suspicion on his face. “Wait a minute, Future! You’re not pulling any of your tricks!”

“Tricks, the devil!” flamed Curt. “We’re falling toward that planetoid, and in ten minutes we’ll crash. We can’t get away, for the bow and lateral tubes are blown, and the tail-tubes are strained and can’t be used for more than a few minutes of firing.”

He was seating himself in the pilotchair and grabbing the space-stick as he talked. “If we crash on that planetoid, everybody in the ship dies. I don’t care a curse about you pirates. But I’ve got friends aboard. There’s a chance I can make a safe landing.”

“Go ahead and try, then!” exclaimed Kim Ivan. “Get back and give him room, the rest of you!”

The
Vulcan
was turning slowly over and over in space as it fell at appallingly increasing speed toward the mystery planetoid. Captain Future’s eyes tensely estimated the distance of the little world, by the graduated scale etched in the glassite window. The hundred-mile sphere now filled most of the firmament. The edges of its dark green mass were rimmed by a haze that told of a thin atmosphere.

Superhuman tension gripped the watching criminals as the ship fell on toward doom. Curt’s brown face was like rock, his hands holding the space-stick in the rigidly upright position that would fire the tail rocket-tubes when he depressed the cyc-pedal.

“We’re going to hit in a minute!” quavered fat Boraboll.

A wild scream came to their ears from the lower part of the ship. The mad shriek of John Rollinger.

“Are you going to let us crash without even trying?” roared Grabo to Captain Future.

The falling
Vulcan
was only miles above the surface of the uncharted planetoid. They were rushing down toward a convexity of green jungle in the center of which glowed the evil red volcanoes and lava-beds.

Air whistled outside the plunging ship, in a rising roar. It was still turning over, as it fell. Captain Future waited for one more turn.

“Do
something, you fool!” yelled Boraboll in terror.

“We’re falling toward those volcanoes!” shouted another of the mutineers. The iron-nerved Kim Ivan silenced them. “Shut up and let him alone!”

The volcanic region of the mystery planetoid stretched only a few miles beneath the plummeting ship. The center of the infernal activity was a double row of huge black craters separated by a stupendous chasm. From the craters flowed lurid crimson cataracts of molten rock that crept sluggishly down toward vast black beds of solid-crusted lava.

Curt Newton was estimating their speed of fall by split-seconds. He knew that the tail-tubes upon which all depended would stand but a few moments of firing before their strained walls exploded. It required all the superb spaceman’s nerve to wait for the
Vulcan
to turn once more. Yet he waited, till the instruments showed its tail pointed straight down.

Curt’s foot instantly jammed the cyc-pedal to the floor. The roar of raving power that lanced downward from the tubes flung him deep in the pilot-chair and jammed the others against the wall. The hull of the crippled ship grated and screamed from the shock of deceleration.

“We’re going to land in that lava!” cried Grabo.

CAPTAIN FUTURE saw the glowing red river that flowed from two volcanoes rushing up toward them. It was straight beneath the slowing ship.

His hands flashed desperately to the bank of individual rocket-tube throttles. He cut the tubes on the starboard side of the tail.

The off-balance thrust of the remaining tubes sent the falling
Vulcan
lurching to port. It sagged down toward the black lava beds beyond the fiery river. Instantly, Curt cut in all the tail-tubes again.

Crash! Crash!
The flaming tail of the ship came to rest upon the solid crust of lava. In a flash, he cut all tubes. The ship toppled over on its side and lay still.

“Good God, what a landing!” choked old Tuhlus Thuun, hoarsely.

Curt Newton, his face haggard and dripping with perspiration from superhuman strain, suddenly raised his hand. “Listen!”

The momentary silence that had followed the landing of the
Vulcan
was broken by ominous cracking sounds beneath the ship. The prostrate vessel shuddered violently as the cracking sounds became louder.

“We’re sinking into the lava!”
yelled a mutineer’s wild voice.
“The ship’s weight is cracking the solid crust — its going to sink into the molten rock beneath!”

With the cry came a louder cracking, and a sharp lurching of the ship. There was a screech of rending metal plates. Scorching, superheated air laden with choking sulphurous fumes flooded up through the ship.

“She’s going through the crust now!” bellowed Kim Ivan. “Out of the ship, everybody!”

The mutineers scrambled madly down toward the space-door of the cyc-deck. All else was forgotten in the wild instinct to escape.

Curt Newton fought his way down the companionway with the scrambling convicts. But it was toward the mid-deck he was struggling.

He paused briefly outside its door to fling the switch of the master electro-control. Then he plunged into the cell-deck corridor. The guard in it had already fled.

“Joan! Ezra!” Curt cried chokingly through the swirling smoke. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Figures were stumbling out of the unlocked cells, slipping upon the tilted floor, gasping as they breathed the scorching sulphurous air.

Curt found the staggering figure of Joan and steadied her with his arm. Ezra Gurney’s grizzled face appeared through the smoke, a big bruise upon his cheek and his faded eyes wild.

“Name o’ the Sun, what happened?” he was crying.

The Brain’s weird form flashed like a flying cube through the swirling fumes to Curt’s side, hastily followed by Curt and Otho.

“Young Rih Quili was stunned by the shock — he’s lying in his cell!” cried Simon.

“I’ll get him!” Captain Future yelled. “Ezra, get Joan to the space-door! Otho, see to McClinton and the crew-men!”

He plunged back to Rih Quili’s cell and picked up the unconscious young Mercurian. A sharper lurch of the settling ship staggered him as he did so.

The sulphurous air was choking him. As he fought up the tilted floor toward the door, he glimpsed the dazed McClinton and other crewmen being rushed by Otho toward the exit. Grag was coolly waiting for Curt. Through the mad uproar, a shrieking of mad laughter smote their ears.

“Rollinger’s back there!” Curt gasped. “Grag!”

THE great robot, who did not breathe and was not affected by the overpowering fumes and heat, was already clanking back to the madman’s cell. He returned quickly, clutching the insanely struggling scientist.

They tumbled down to the space-door. As they reached it, a violent downward movement of the sinking
Vulcan
threw them out.

Curt hit a surface of rough lava that was so searingly hot that he cried out. He staggered up with Rih Quili. Blinded by swirling smoke, scorched by almost unendurable heat, he glimpsed crevices cracking open in the solid crust around the ship. Fiery red lava gushed from beneath.

“This way, Chief!” boomed Grag’s tremendous voice.

Captain Future struggled forward. The vague figures of his friends and of the fleeing mutineers were dimly visible in the smoke ahead.

Crack!
The crust of lava shook violently under their feet. Curt turned and through the smoke he glimpsed the
Vulcan’s
black hull sinking swiftly into the hissing molten rock beneath the solid crust.

He stumbled on, choking, scorched, half-blinded. Presently the air seemed a little purer. And then it was no longer hot, jagged lava under his feet, but black soil. He had reached the edge of the lava-bed and was standing upon ground that sloped gently in the dusky light toward a distant wall of weird jungle.

Kim Ivan and the mutineers who had escaped were standing here, but they paid no attention in this moment to Captain Future and his group. The convicts were staring strickenly out across the smoking lava-field.

Curt Newton turned and looked. Out there in the smoke, he saw the curved black hull of the
Vulcan
finally disappearing beneath the cracked crust. A pool of molten lava glowed redly where it had been.

“She’s gone,” muttered the big Martian pirate.

A heavy silence followed, unbroken for long minutes. The appalling enormity of the disaster was coming home to them all.

Captain Future felt an iciness in his heart that he had never before experienced, as he realized their situation.

They were marooned here on an uncharted island of space, more than four billion miles outside the Solar System. A mere unknown speck in the void, to which no other ship would ever come.

They were utterly without tools or weapons. And, worst of all, he and his friends and the girl he loved had as fellow castaways more than a hundred of the most dangerous criminals of the nine worlds, every one of whom cherished a bitter enmity toward him.

NIGHT was creeping across the little world, the dusky day deepening into complete darkness as the bright star of the distant Sun sank beneath the horizon. From the brooding black jungle in the distance, an uncanny babble of weird animal or bird calls came to the ears of the stricken castaways.

Their faces were drawn and haggard in the lurid red light from the volcanoes. From those towering black craters in the east, evil-glowing rivers of molten lava crept constantly downward like crawling snakes of fire. Showers of burning ashes shot up ever and again from the seething craters, and there was a low, continuous growling and quivering of the ground beneath them.

Curt Newton felt a cold chill, despite the sulphurous warmth of the air. It was so terribly isolated from the universe of man, this drifting speck of land in the vast, shoreless sea of outer space. And they were so utterly unequipped to deal with whatever alien perils it might hold.