Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (7 page)

He felt Joan shiver inside the protecting circle of his arm, and looked down anxiously at her.

“You’re all right, Joan? That shock jar you when we crashed?”

“It didn’t hurt me.” Her face was very pale, her eyes dark and wide as she looked up at him. “I’m just scared, I guess. This weird, forbidding place — that we’ll never get away from.”

“Never is a long time,” Curt said quickly. “Don’t worry about it now, Joan.”

“Oh, Curt, you
know
we’re marooned here permanently!” Her voice broke in a sob. “We’ve no ship, no weapons, no tools.”

Captain Future could not answer that. His arm tightened almost fiercely around her, as though in protection against what was to come. The Futuremen and their allies, like the mass of Kim Ivan’s mutineers, were still staring frozenly at the lava-beds in which the ship had perished.

“Did anyone manage to salvage anything from the ship?” Curt asked them.

George McClinton, the lanky young engineer, was the only one to answer. He pointed hesitantly down at a fiber case at his feet.

“I g-g-grabbed that up as I r-r-ran out of the ship,” he stammered.

“What is it? A tool-kit?” Curt Newton demanded quickly.

McClinton’s spectacled face looked abashed in the red light. “N-no, it’s only a c-c-case of p-prunes. I j-just happened to see it in the s-s-supply-room door as I went past.”

“Blast me down!” swore old Ezra Gurney furiously. “Of all the crazy, useless things to snatch up, that’s the limit!”

A burst of laughter rose from the others at McClinton’s shame-faced admission. It came from the mutineers as well as the Futuremen’s party, and it was hysterically loud. It was a reaction on the part of all from their own terrifying thoughts, their realization of the appalling situation in which they stood.

It eased that frozen tension a little. Men relaxed enough from their stunned rigidity of mind and body to inspect their burns and bruises. And Kim Ivan strode out and turned to face the mutineers.

“Did any of you bring atom-guns out of the ship with you?” the big Martian pirate demanded.

Curt stiffened. He realized instantly what was in Kim Ivan’s mind.

BUT none of the mutineers answered in the affirmative to the question. Grabo, the Jovian, growled the explanation of the lack of guns.

“You wouldn’t let any of us wear atom-pistols in the ship,” he snarled, “for fear we’d kill each other in brawls. And there wasn’t any time to go digging them out of the arsenal-room when the ship crashed.”

Kim Ivan’s voice rose to a roar. “Don’t take that sulky tone with me. I’m still boss here! There may not be an atom-gun on this world, but I can beat the ears off any pair of you with my bare fists!”

None of the mutineers took up the redoubtable Martian’s challenge. But Grag’s big metal figure moved clankingly forward.

“Do you think you can beat the ears off
me?”
rumbled the great robot.

Kim Ivan faced the robot with an unflinching scowl. “I know you’re stronger than any four of us,” he admitted belligerently to Grag. “But there’s more than a hundred of us, remember that. We can pull you down, big and tough as you are.”

New tension sprang into being, as the mutineer’s hatred and antagonism toward the Futuremen’s party came again to the fore. Curt Newton realized that it would not take much to precipitate a struggle.

“It seems to me,” his cool voice cut in, “that we’ve had enough for one day without trying to kill each other right now.”

Kim Ivan roughly agreed. “We’re groggy and tired, and some of us are hurt. And there’s nothing to be gained by a scrap now. We’ll get some rest, and see how things stand in the morning.”

The tension diminished. With little further talk, the castaways dropped to the warm ground and stretched out exhaustedly.

Curt and his friends kept at a little distance from the mutineers. He noticed that Kim Ivan himself was not sleeping, but was keeping vigilant watch from where he sat.

Captain Future pillowed Joan’s head on his knee. “Try to get some sleep, Joan.”

“M-m-maybe I could g-g-get some moss or leaves from that jungle, to m-m-make a bed for her,” suggested George McClinton anxiously.

“No, it’s bad business to go blundering into an alien interplanetary forest by night,” Curt answered. “You never know what queer kind of creature is waiting for you.”

Silence and darkness held the makeshift camp of survivors. No one felt like talking, and most were already exhaustedly sleeping. The only sounds were the medley of uncanny calls from the starlit jungle, and the low rumbling of the distant volcanoes. Now and then, the ground quivered slightly under them, with a low, muted growling.

Captain Future looked down at Joan’s dark head, upon his knee. She was sleeping, her face white in the starlight. He perceived that Grag, who never slept, was standing watch nearby like an immobile metal statue.

John Rollinger was not sleeping. The crazed biophysicist was looking toward the distant jungle in an attitude of intent listening.

“Rollinger, what’s the matter?” Curt asked in low tones.

The Earthman turned dazed eyes toward him. “I hear voices talking, inside my head. I’m afraid.
There is somebody on this world.”

“There’s no one here,” Curt soothed. “Go to sleep. You haven’t anything to be afraid of.”

The Brain had been brooding silently nearby. Like Grag, Simon never slept. Now he glided to Captain Future’s side, and whispered.

“Lad, I’ve been thinking about this planetoid,” he said. “There’s something puzzling about it. I mean, all this volcanic and seismologic activity. There shouldn’t be volcanism on a world this small.”

Curt was grimly amused. “Same old Simon! All our predicament means to you is just an intriguing scientific problem.”

THE BRAIN’S metallic whisper was cold and annoyed. “If my reasoning is right, this particular scientific problem has an important bearing on our present predicament. Lad, you saw the meteorometer readings on this planetoid before we crashed on it. Can you remember its approximate mass, direction and speed of drift, and distance from the System?”

Captain Future was puzzled. “I think I can, thought I don’t see why it’s so important. The mass of it is two-thousands-Earth, position is slightly over four billion miles from the edge of the System, and its drift is almost straight toward the System at ten miles a second velocity —”

Curt stopped suddenly, as his keen scientific mind abruptly realized the significance of the data he was quoting.

“Good Lord, Simon, I didn’t see it before! This planetoid is approaching the Limit!”

“Yes, lad,” rasped the Brain. “And that accounts for its volcanic activity.”

Curt Newton was appalled. The ominous fact to which the Brain had called his attention made their predicament vastly more menacing.

In taut whispers, he and Simon Wright discussed it with feverish intensity as the night hours passed. Between these two master-scientists sped whispered formulae, equations and corrections, as they sought to solve mentally a problem which was of direst import.

The sky in the “east” began to lighten at last. A growing pallor crept across the starry heavens. And with it came a sharper, more violent tremor of the ground beneath them. The shock and the grinding roar brought the sleeping castaways into alarmed wakefulness.

“Curt, what’s happening?” Joan’s small hand clutched his sleeve as she awakened.

“It’s only a stronger seismic tremor,” he reassured her. “But it’s sun-rise now, Joan.”

The Sun came up as a bright, tiny disk hardly larger than a very brilliant star. It cast a feeble daylight across the alien landscape of smoking volcanoes, black lava-beds, and distant green jungles.

Kim Ivan stood, looking grimly around the unfriendly vista. The other mutineers were getting to their feet, staring about in dismal silence.

“This is a devil of a place to be marooned in,” muttered Grabo, the squat Jovian.

Kim Ivan shrugged. “It’s better than Interplanetary Prison, anyway. There’ll be fruits and meat-animals in that jungle. We can live here indefinitely.”

Captain Future grimly contradicted the big pirate. “We can’t live here indefinitely. This little world isn’t going to
exist
indefinitely.”

The big Martian frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that in a little more than two months, this planetoid will be shattered and destroyed,” retorted Curt.

“Bah, what are you trying to do, scare us?” scoffed Kim Ivan, incredulously.

Moremos, eyeing Curt Newton hatefully, hissed: “We ought to settle these cursed Futuremen right here and now. I say, let’s rid ourselves of them for good. All except the girl.”

Captain Future rarely lost his temper. But at the evil implication in the Venusian’s last words, and at the sudden pallor that came into Joan Randall’s face, Curt’s bronzed face went a dull red.

His voice was low and steady, but his gray eyes were fiery as he promised the Venusian murderer:

“Moremos, when the time comes you are going to pay for that suggestion with your life.”

The mutineers started threateningly forward, and Grag and Otho sprang instantly to Curt’s side. But Kim Ivan intervened roughly.

“Cut your blasts!” he bellowed to his glaring followers. Then, with eyes narrowed suspiciously, he snapped to Curt: “What’s this story of yours about this planetoid exploding in two months?”

CAPTAIN FUTURE slowly withdrew his flaming gaze from the Venusian. He explained in short, grim sentences.

“This planetoid is becoming internally unstable. That is because it is drifting toward our Solar System. The gravitational influence of our System is setting up seismic strains inside its mass. The quakes and volcanic activity here are due to those interior strains. They’ll become worse as it draws nearer the System.

“Two months from now, this planetoid will be so near the System that its tidal strains will burst it asunder. Roche’s Limit, which determines the critical distance at which a celestial body nearing a larger body will burst into fragments, operates in the case of this worldlet as though the whole System were one great body it was approaching.”

Kim Ivan seemed baffled by Captain Future’s scientific reference, and there was still strong skepticism on his battered red face.

He turned toward Boraboll, the Uranian. “What about that, Boraboll? You had a scientific education. Does Future’s claim make sense?”

The fat Uranian’s moonlike yellow face twitched with fear, and his voice was husky. “It’s true that Roche’s Limit will operate for the whole System as though for one body, in affecting an unstable planetoid like this. If this planetoid gets much nearer than four billion miles, it will burst.”

Old Tuhlus Thuun added a shrill word. “This planetoid isn’t a lot more than that from the System now, according to what our instruments read before we crashed. And it’s heading toward the System, all right.”

“Then Future’s right,” gasped Boraboll, terrified. “My God, this little world is going to burst under us in two months!”

The panic of the fat Uranian convinced the other mutineers as nothing else would have done. They looked at each other in fear.

“Name o’ the Sun!” exclaimed Ezra Gurney “I didn’t think last night that we
could
be in a worse jam, but this makes it plenty worse.”

Even big Kim Ivan looked a little appalled. He muttered, “That’s luck for you — cast away on a planetoid that’ll explode beneath us in a few weeks.”

Curt Newton spoke incisively. “We’ve got just one chance. That is to get away from here before the catastrophe occurs.”

“Get away?” echoed the big Martian blankly. “How the devil can we get away? We’ve got no ship now.”

“Which means,” retorted Captain Future, “that our only chance of life is to
build
a ship.”

Kim Ivan stared. “Build a ship, when we don’t have a single tool or piece of equipment? Build a spaceship, with our bare hands?”

“He’s raving,” growled Grabo. “A spaceship takes tons of metal plates and girders, glassite for instruments and ports, copper for cables and coils, refractory alloy for rocket-tubes, and about forty other elements for the cyclotrons, fuel and other parts. And we’ve just got our fingers!”

“We’ve got our fingers, and our
brains.”
Curt corrected. “We’ve got the accumulated knowledge of centuries of experimenters, from the first caveman who made a stone hammer on up to yesterday.”

His eyes flashed. “Why shouldn’t we be able to start from scratch? The primitive peoples of the remote past did. All the raw elements we need should be present on this world. And if we have courage and skill enough to wrench them free and build with them, we can save ourselves.”

His intensity seemed to make an impression upon the others. The mutineers listened as though clutching at a precarious straw of hope.

But old Tuhlus Thuun shook his head. He muttered, “Nobody has ever built anything as complicated as a spaceship from scratch, in the whole history of the System.”

“It’s never been done,” Curt admitted, “but that doesn’t say it
can’t
be done.”