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

by Edmond Hamilton

  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!”

  Chapter 2: Attacked

  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 be
gan 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.

  “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 loo
k 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.

  Chapter 3: Jailbreak

  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.”