For six hours, Carlin and the robot had followed their captive guide into the jungle. Gaa had readily agreed to lead them to the village of his people so that they might talk peace.
“He has agreed too readily,” the Brain had warned. “Curtis was right — the Roon intends to trick you. You’ll have to take care. Remember, your mission is only to find the Crypt of the Old Ones which is the center of the Roon superstitions. It must be near their chief village. If you discover it, reconnoiter it without letting yourselves be seen and then come back here at once.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find it,” Grag had promised confidently. “This Roon thinks he’s going to double-cross us, but he’s due for a double-double-cross.”
“I hope so,” said the Brain dubiously. “But I’d feel easier about it if I were going along.”
“Are you implying that I’m a dope?” bristled Grag. “Besides, the chief left you a job here. Just trust this to us.”
So Carlin and Grag had started with Gaa into the red forests. They had no sooner got out of sight of the plantation, than Grag stopped.
He fumbled in the small haversack slung over his shoulder. He had explained that it contained his atom-pistol. But now, to Carlin’s surprise, he drew from it the little gray, beady-eyed moon-pup that was his pet.
“I brought Eek along,” rumbled Grag, fondly perching the animal on his shoulder. “I had to hide him, or Simon wouldn’t have let me bring him.”
Carlin looked doubtfully at the moon-pup, squirming eagerly on the broad metal shoulder of its master. “Maybe it’s not a good idea, at that. He might make a racket just when we need to be quiet.”
“Eek can’t make any sounds,” Grag informed him. “Moon-dogs have no vocal apparatus, for they evolved on the Moon where there’s no air. They don’t even breathe. They have a telepathic sense for communication.”
“Still, he won’t be any help to us,” Carlin said.
“Help?” Grag boomed. “Eek can be a lot of help! He’s the greatest danger-barometer there is. Eek can scent danger miles away, by his telepathic sense. When he acts badly scared, look out for trouble.”
Carlin glanced curiously at his giant companion as they went on. Until now, despite his awareness of Grag’s intelligence, he had been unable entirely to accept the robot as a living personality.
But he was now discovering, as other people had discovered, that acquaintance with Grag dispelled all notions as to his being an automaton. Grag’s ways of thinking might be simpler than those of ordinary men. But the robot possessed pride, loyalty, and that perception of contrasts which is the basis of the sense of humor.
It was now mid-afternoon. Gaa had led them into the jungle along a network of dim trails made by “shufflers”. And twice, so far, they had been forced to dart hastily into the brush to avoid “shufflers” coming along the trail. The enormous sextupedal hairy creatures, elephant-high and dragging their short legs in the peculiar gait that gave them their name, were granivorous and harmless, but Carlin was not glad to meet them.
Quickly Gaa led the way southwestward in the new direction. The Roon had been stoically quiet all the way so far. Now there was a hint of expectation in his bearing.
“Look at him, the false-hearted son of a liar,” muttered Grag to Carlin, in their own language. “He just can’t wait to get within shouting distance of his village. Then he thinks he’s going to raise a yell that will bring them all out on our necks.”
CARLIN was anxious. “We’ll have to gag him before that. But we may not know we’re near the place until we come right on it.”
“Sure, we’ll know,” said Grag. He patted the moon-pup riding his shoulder. “Eek will warn us. When he senses the Roons, he’ll raise a rumpus miles before we reach them. I told you he’d be useful.”
Philip Carlin almost forgot their mission, in the scientific fascination of what lay about them. This jungle was a planetary botanist’s wonderland. The vast majority of its plant species had never been classified.
He had spent months here on Roo, years before when its suitability for vitron plantations was being tested. But he had been too busy on the urgent vitron problem to spend time in purely academic explorations. Now an even more urgent mission precluded such studies.
Grag suddenly stopped, his giant metal hand also halting Gaa. “Eek’s getting nervous already,” he said doubtfully. “Yet it can’t be that we’re near the Roons yet.”
Carlin looked skeptically at the moon-pup. Eek had begun to shiver.
“Probably he’s scared of some animal he senses in the forest,” suggested the botanist. “Maybe, but —”
Grag never finished. At that moment, Gaa wrenched suddenly from beside them and started running forward along the trail.
“Get him!” yelled Grag. “Don’t use your gun — we can catch him!”
Carlin had whipped out his atom-pistol, but he refrained from firing as he and Grag plunged down the trail after the escaping Roon.
Gaa, his arms bound, could not run fast enough to escape. Carlin wondered fleetingly why the Roon had made the hopeless attempt.
Gaa looked back over his shoulder at them, then slackened speed. But now they were within reach of the frantically stumbling tribesman. Grag’s great hand reached vengefully for him.
At this moment Carlin felt the ground cave in under his boots, and plunged downward. He struck a soft dirt surface in jarring fall, and heard two other heavy bodies thud beside him.
Carlin picked himself up, feeling dazed. He was standing at the bottom of a conical pit, whose floor was the base of the cone. The pit was ten feet across and its dirt sides sloped steeply upward more than twenty feet to a small, ragged hole through which they had fallen.
Grag was picking himself up, and Eek, who had clung to him in the fall, seemed frantic now with terror. But Grag turned with a roar on Gaa, who like themselves had been unhurt by his fall to the soft dirt floor.
“You dirty red son of perdition!” roared the robot, grabbing their bound captive. “I’ll twist your head right off your shoulders.”
“Wait, Grag!” said Philip Carlin. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Hurt him?” retorted the wrathful robot. “I’ll reduce him to atoms! He led us right into this hole.”
“What is this place? A pitfall built by your tribe?” he asked Gaa.
Gaa stood, coolly surveying them without a trace of fear on his parrot-beaked red face. “No, this is a hunting-worm’s pit. I saw the traces of a chain of them as we came along the trail, and knew there’d be another ahead.”
“A hunting worm?” roared Grag, looking around. “Where is he?”
Gaa nodded toward two six-foot round tunnels that opened into opposite sides of the conical pit, just above the floor.
“He will come,” said the Roon. “Hunting-worms hollow out many such pits, in a connected chain. They leave only a thin mask of dirt above, not sufficient to support an animal’s weight. They go through their pits regularly, looking for prey. When he comes, he will kill and devour us all. Then you star-men will never reach my village to spy on my people.”
“You block-headed lummox, he’ll devour you, too, in that case!” bellowed Grag.
Gaa nodded. “Yes, I will die, too. But I am not afraid of death.”
At another moment, Philip Carlin would have admired the Roon’s loyalty to his people.
But now he had too imminent a sense of danger for such reflections.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard stories of the size and ferocity of these hunting-worms.”
Grag looked upward. “Blast me if I see how we’re going to climb out of this hole.”
THE dirt of the pit sides was soft. But the inward slant of the high, steep walls made it impossible to dig out steps.
“This is what I get for not paying attention to Eek,” Grag went on ruefully. “He wasn’t scared for nothing, I should have known.”
“He’s certainly plenty scared now,” Carlin observed.
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Eek was in a very frenzy of fear, clawing at Grag’s legs, dashing to the wall, then running back to the robot. Eek, it was easy to deduce, wanted nothing more than to leave the pit.
“The hunting-worm is coming,” Gaa explained calmly. “It will be here soon.” Carlin reached instinctively for his atom-pistol. Then he remembered, appalled, that he had had it in his hand when he crashed into the pit. It had been jarred from his grasp when he fell. Hastily he searched the pit floor.
The weapon was not there. It had fallen on the trail above.
“It’s all right, I’ve got my gun,” Grag said. “We’ll make short work of the beast when it comes.”
Grag reached into his haversack and drew out his atom-pistol. Then he uttered an exclamation of dismay.
“Devils of space, look at this gun! Eek’s been at it!”
The hard metal of the atom-pistol barrel was gnawed away. The gun would back-blast if it was fired.
Grag uttered a groan. “I might have known Eek would start chewing on it when he was in the haversack with it. He can’t resist metal. It’s my fault for putting him in there.”
Carlin heard a faint, faraway rustling. It seemed to come from one of the tunnels that opened into the pit.
His heart hammered. The fantastic predicament loomed now with a brutal horror. It would be a messy way to die, he was thinking.
“We can’t get out, and we have no weapons,” he said. “What can we do?”
“If the hunting-worms are as big as Gaa says, I couldn’t kill the beast with just my hands,” Grag muttered. “The thing would be sure to kill you and the Roon, in this narrow hole.”
Grag suddenly turned. “There’s a chance, if we can get your atom-gun. It must be lying right up there beside the mouth of the pit.”
The robot picked up Eek and showed him the gnawed atom-pistol. Eek, even in his terror, cowered a little, expecting reprimand.
“You want a nice gun to eat, Eek?” Grag said. “All right, there’s one up there on the trail. You bring it back and you can have it.”
“How can he understand when he can’t speak or hear?” said Carlin.
“He doesn’t hear my words but he senses my thought,” Grag explained hastily. “Here you go, Eek — get the gun and bring it.”
With the words, Grag tossed the moon-pup accurately up through the hole twenty-odd feet above. They heard Eek fall with a thump on the trail.
They heard also, more loudly, the ominous rustling from the tunnels. Carlin felt an icy chill along his spine.
Eek reappeared above, peering down at them. Carlin could have kissed the moon-pup. For in his jaws, Eek held Carlin’s atom-pistol.
Grag held up his arms. “Jump, Eek! Grag will catch you.”
Eek very definitely did not want to jump. Eek’s hesitation showed he’d had quite enough of the pit.
Grag cajoled him. “You jump, Eek, and I’ll give you a nice big piece of copper to eat. All the copper you want.”
Eek seemed to be drooling mentally over that inducement, but still was restrained by an overpowering terror of the pit.
Gaa uttered a low exclamation. Carlin turned and froze as he saw, far back in one of the tunnels, two cold, glittering, lashless and enormous eyes that advanced softly like twin pale fires.
He could sense, rather than see, the enormous looping, rippling white worm body behind those monstrous eyes. He heard Grag yell.
Eek jumped! Grag grabbed him, snatched the atom-pistol from his jaws, and whirled with incredible rapidity.
The blunt, enormous head of the hunting-worm was swaying up as the first ten feet of the monster body uncoiled from the tunnel. Grag’s gun blasted a streak of blazing energy that severed the head and turned it into a charred mass. The monster coils twitched wildly far back into the tunnel, making the whole pit vibrate.
“That was too close for comfort!” said Grag. Then he picked up the quaking moon-pup. “Eek, you were responsible for my gun being useless but you redeemed yourself. I wish Otho had been here to see it.”
CARLIN stared at Otho. “How are we going to get out now?” he asked. He was shaken by the close call, sickened by the stench from the dead monster’s charred body.
“Cut our way out with the atom-pistol, of course,” said Grag. “Stand back.”
He turned the thin blast of the pistol on one side of the slanting dirt wall. Using it like a giant knife of fire, he undercut the side so that a whole mass of dirt slid downward, half burying them.
“Go ahead,” Grag told Carlin. “You can climb out now, with me boosting. When you get up there, let down a vine for me — I can’t climb in that soft dirt.”
Carlin found himself, light as he was, sinking to the knees in the sliding yellow soil as he clambered upward. He was breathless when he reached the surface.
He soon had cut a massive vine and lowered its end to Grag. First he hauled up the bound Roon captive. Then Grag himself clambered toilsomely out, hauling his weight up the tough vine rope.
“Now shall we fix this fellow Gaa for his trick?” Grag demanded, looking wrathfully at the Roon. “Listen!” Carlin said suddenly.
Dusk had come during their struggle to escape the pit. Arkar had sunk beneath the horizon and shadows were running through the jungle.
From southward there came a dim pulsing of persistent sound. It was too rhythmical to be any natural sound of the jungle.
“That may be from the Roon village!” Carlin exclaimed. “No, don’t hurt Gaa. But we’d better gag him before we go any farther.”
Grag efficiently gagged their captive. Gaa’s black eyes were glittering with fierce excitement. He, too, had heard the dim pulse of sound from the distance.
Roughly thrust on by Grag, he stumbled with them along the dim trail. And now darkness had come down on the jungle. Through a rift in the trees ahead, they glimpsed the vast, vague expanse of a night blanketed ocean, heaving beneath the great drift of stars and the shadowy rising sphere of Black Moon.
They came to that point where the trees ended. Instantly, Grag and Carlin shrank back, dragging their captive back with them.
“Down behind these bush-orchids!” Grag muttered. “Quick!”
Dropping behind the shelter of the shrubs, they peered tensely at the unearthly and astounding spectacle ahead.
Chapter 12: Valley of Dream Flowers
JOAN RANDALL and Ezra Gurney had started for Rootown soon after Grag and Carlin followed their captive guide into the jungle. They took the remaining rocket-car, leaving the Brain with the other two scientists at the plantation.
As she expertly steered the car along the rude road, Joan expressed doubt of the mission with which Captain Future had entrusted them.
“Curt just wanted to get us out of the way,” she said. “He doesn’t think we can find Lu Suur.”
Ezra grunted. “Prob’ly think I’m too old for real action. Me, that held my own in the old wild days on the interplanetary frontier, long before the Futuremen were heard of.” The flat white roofs of Rootown glimmered through the mass of pinkish feather-trees that lined the streets. Over on the spaceport, the massive bulk of the Starfarer was rising thunderously into the red sunlight for the long return voyage to the System.
The ship, Joan knew, was loaded now with bales of dried vitron that would be processed and distributed in the System. The importance of their mission here came home to her with increased force. Those cargoes that meant so much to the life and health of the System peoples must not be halted by chicanery and greed! There must be no rebellion!
They drove into Rootown’s plaza and parked the rocket-car in front of the unpretentious cement building that held the System Government’s offices. As they approached the building, they met a curious, noisy little procession.
A gaunt, unshaven Earthman in battered sun-helmet and tattered clothing was shuffling southward through the town, followed by a rag-tag of children who were shrieking delightedly at his heels.
“Crazy Jonny!” they were yelling joyou
sly. “Where you going, Crazy Jonny?”
The odd-looking man paid no attention to his tormentors.
“It’s the lunatic that Doctor Carlin told us about,” Joan said pityingly. She interposed to stop the children.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?” she told them.
They scattered, still derisively hooting the tattered figure. Joan turned to find the madman peering at her with a queer, filmy stare.
“Thanks for driving away the imps,” he muttered. “They won’t bother me much longer. The Roons will kill everybody here, pretty soon.”
“Nice, sweet character,” grunted Ezra Gurney as Crazy Jonny shuffled on. “Anyplace else but out here on the frontier, he’d be rounded up and taken care of.”
They went into the offices of the Governor. A bored young Martian clerk informed them that Walker King could see no visitors.
“I think he’ll see us,” said Joan, tossing a metal disk onto the desk.
It was the emblem of Section Four, secret service of the Planet Patrol, and bore her name and number. Martian eyes bulged. “I’ll tell the Governor at once!”
When they entered the inner office, Joan studied Walker King. He was an elderly, friendly man who obviously had found the anxiety of his official position too critical for him. The jerkiness of his movements told a story of overpowering worry.
“I never expected to see you two here on Roo!” he exclaimed. “Does this mean that the Futuremen are on the way?”
“Haven’t you heard that Captain Future was shot on Venus?” Joan answered. “You don’t think the Futuremen would leave him?”
Walker King seemed disappointed. “I was hoping the Government was sending the Futuremen to help restore order. You don’t know how upset and dangerous things are right now on Roo!”
“We’ve got a hazy idea,” drawled Ezra Gurney.
Captain Future 18 - Red Sun of Danger (Spring 1945) Page 9
