Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “You shall stay here as long as you wish,” avowed the Erosian ruler. “You are welcome to be our friends and guests.”

  They were led to one of the little minareted buildings, and given to understand that it was their home for as long as they cared to stay. Yellow women brought food — cooked fungi, and a colorless wine.

  “Not bad, if you don’t mind a musty taste,” remarked Otho, wiping his lips. He stretched hugely. “Can’t we get some sleep, Chief?”

  Curt nodded.

  “Might as well. Keep your eye on things, Grag. Wake us at once if you hear anything like a ship.”

  Captain Future slept dreamlessly on the woven grass mat that was an Erosian bed. He woke to find that night had come. The minareted little structures outside gleamed palely in the starlight. In the distance, the fungus forest was a dark obscurity.

  “Nothing’s happened,” reported Grag, stalking in from outside. “Nothing except that Otho’s snores drew a crowd of Erosians for a while.”

  “I resent that!” exclaimed Otho, who had also awakened.

  “Cut it, you two,” ordered Curt. “It’s time we held a council of war. We’ve got to plan how to defeat Larsen King’s grab for the Moon radium.”

  He paced to and fro in the dim room, frowning in thought.

  “We’ve got to keep King’s Moon miners from reaching that radium,” Captain Future said. “That’s our prime objective. Once we’ve assured the safety of the radium, then we can endeavor to clear our names of this ‘outlaw’ stigma.”

  “We shall have to take risks,” he went on. “For we haven’t much time. It won’t take King’s men so long to get down to the radium deposit.”

  Captain Future made his decision.

  “We’ve got to get down to that radium deposit before King’s men! If we can get to the radium first, I’ve a plan by which we can gum up King’s whole scheme. We’ll have to find a different way down to the radium deposit. We’ll have to enter one of the fissures near North Chasm, find our own way down through the caves.”

  “You know how risky that will be, lad!” warned the Brain. “You know better than anyone else the dangers of exploring those fissures.”

  Captain Future shrugged.

  “It’s a case of must, Simon.” He turned toward the door. “And we’d better start now. It’s going to be hard enough to land secretly on the Moon for our attempt.”

  “Start now?” echoed Otho in surprise. “Why, the Patrol ships will still be around here. We’ve only been here five or six hours.”

  “You forget that we’ve been living a hundred times slower than normal since we got here,” Curt reminded him. “It only seemed five or six hours to us, but actually we’ve been here about four weeks.”

  “The devil!” exclaimed Otho. “You mean to say I’ve been sleeping here for a solid month?”

  A little later, after taking leave of their Erosian friends, the Futuremen entered the Comet and rose from the surface of the asteroid. Passing its little satellite, they flashed the time-honored “salute” signal. By now they had shaken off the slower life-tempo.

  There appeared to be no patrolling squadrons now in this sector. Captain Future headed at once for the Moon, where the outlawed Futuremen must risk their perilous scheme to penetrate the dangers of a dead world.

  Chapter 6: Alien City

  DAWN was creeping across the outer face of the Moon. The advancing day flowed like a slow bright tide over the stark, peak-ringed craters and the deathly white pumice deserts. It touched the fused Sea of Glass to blinding brilliance. In gloomy gorges of the northern mountains, packs of the weird gray Moon Dogs trotted forth in fierce search for their metallic food, as the long lunar day began.

  But in the glaring northern desert, the Great North Chasm was still a well of perpetual cold and night. Sunlight had never penetrated this forbidding abyss, which for so long had guarded its enigmatic memorials of a mysterious vanished race. Its only light was the one point of man-made illumination at its bottom. The glittering bubble of the big mining-dome down there glowed with inner radiance. The blue-white glare of clusters of krypton’s boldly revealed the interior of this precarious oasis of air and life. Droning of power plants, beating of air pumps, slap of hurrying feet were all a background to the dominating throb of machinery in the tall shaft-house.

  Larsen King turned from the window of the little chromaloy office building, from which he had been surveying the activities here.

  “Six weeks of this,” King said bitingly, “and how far down have you got? Less than a mile! At that rate, it will take a lifetime to reach the radium.”

  King’s bullet head thrust forward angrily as he spoke, his hard impatient black eyes raking the other two men. Young Gil Strike, tilted back in his chair and lazily smoking a long green rial cigarette, had a look of unconcern on his predatory face. But Albert Wissler shifted uneasily in his chair. The thin, blinking scientist seemed to squirm inwardly at his employer’s words. “It’s not my fault the tunneling has gone so slowly,” Wissler said hastily. “I can explain —”

  “Explanations are all I’ve had from you,” King interrupted brutally. “That’s why I came out here from Earth today. I want results!”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “I understand you’ve spent more time roaming over the Moon, looking for Captain Future’s hidden laboratory, than you have at your job here.”

  Wissler answered sullenly.

  “Future’s home would yield a lot of valuable scientific secrets, if we could find it before he comes back.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to search for it later,” Larsen King declared coldly. “The Futuremen will never come back.”

  “I notice the Planet Patrol still keeps a lookout for them around the Moon,” said Wissler meaningly.

  “That’s just a matter of form,” scoffed the promoter. “Future’s left the System for good. It’s all he could do, now that he’s an outlaw.”

  Gil Strike laughed softly to himself, as though as a private joke. His hawklike eyes had lazy amusement in them.

  “I sure enjoy hearing people so bitter against Future for murdering the President,” he drawled. “I hand it to you for cleverness, King.”

  Larsen King’s lips thinned, and his voice was dangerous.

  “I told you to keep your mouth shut about that.”

  Strike shrugged carelessly.

  “What’s the difference when there’s only the three of us?”

  “Walls have ears, you fool,” rapped King. “And don’t you forget that it was you who actually operated that telautomaton, Strike. If you talk yourself into trouble, you’ll have nothing to prove I gave you your orders.”

  ALBERT WISSLER had listened uneasily to this exchange, a fidgety, half-fearful look on his thin face. He jumped when King turned to him.

  “I’m going to inspect the work myself,” snapped the promoter. “Come along.”

  Larsen King’s tall figure, impressive and commanding even in his blue silken zipper-suit, led the way across the blue-lit enclosure of the dome. Workers in grimy gray glanced at them inquiringly. These hard-bitten planetary miners had been gathered from every world. Among them were lanky, blue Saturnians, peaked-headed Neptunians, red Martians with hooded eyes, and rough-looking Earthmen.

  The noise inside the cavernous shaft-house was deafening. It came mostly from the giant revolving winches and drums at the mouth of the tunnel, and from the low metal trucks that ceaselessly rattled in and out of the shaft. The throb of air pumps, drone of atomic power turbines and bawling of orders all added to the uproar.

  The tunnel was not a vertical shaft. It was a twenty-foot tube bored obliquely downward in a westerly direction. Two parallel cogged tracks led down its steeply slanted floor into the depths. Empty metal trucks moved down into the tunnel along one track, and trucks loaded with shattered moon-rock came up the other track, to be shunted out of the shaft-house for eventual dumping outside the dome.

  Wissler raised his voic
e above the uproar.

  “We’re boring down toward one of the big caves, you know. Sonic probing shows there’s one not far down. Once we hole through into it, we’ll work our way on down through the labyrinth of caverns and fissures toward the radium deposit.”

  “Why didn’t you drop a vertical shaft straight down toward the cave, instead of slanting down toward it?” King demanded critically.

  “We save time this way,” Wissler assured him. “We’re following an ancient fissure that seems to have been closed by a landslide ages ago. It’s easier boring through broken rock and debris than through solid rock.”

  Larsen King was unsatisfied.

  “You’re still not making the progress you should. I can’t understand why the work’s going so slowly. Look at those trucks coming up empty now!”

  He pointed accusingly at the line of emerging metal trucks that rattled up from the tunnel. They were, in fact, all empty now.

  Wissler looked troubled.

  “Something must be wrong with the boring crews down there. I hope to heaven nothing’s aroused their superstitions again.”

  “Their superstitions?” repeated King angrily. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s what has made the work so slow,” Wissler explained nervously. “The men have got more and more superstitious about tunneling into the Moon.”

  “Devil take them and their superstitions!” exploded the promoter. “What kind of nonsense have they got into their heads?”

  “It’s about the ancient Lunarians — you know, the race that lived on this world ages ago,” his superintendent declared. “Some of the miners were over to look at that ruined city, a few miles from here on the floor of the chasm. They didn’t like what they saw. It scared them, and they’ve been doing much talking among themselves ever since.

  “They don’t like to work their shifts down in the tunnel anymore,” Wissler went on. “A good many of them are muttering that there’s a curse on this chasm, left here by the alien Lunarians who lived here long ago. They say that the deeper they go into the Moon, the greater is the danger from that curse.”

  LARSEN KING made a gesture of angry contempt.

  “And you’ve let them slow down work because of that nonsense?”

  Gil Strike, who had been peering down into the slanting tunnel, turned toward the other two.

  “Here come the boring crews back up,” he reported. “Their shift doesn’t end for an hour yet. They’ve quit on the job.”

  Moon miners began pouring up out of the tunnel on the rattling trucks, hastily disembarking in the shaft-house, as though glad to be out of the shaft. Last of the heterogeneous planetary group to emerge was a brawny green Jovian.

  “It’s Hok Kel, mine boss on this shift,” Wissler told his employer as the Jovian approached. “What happened down there?” he cried.

  The Jovian shook his head, looking disgustedly toward the miners, who were muttering excitedly together.

  “They got in a panic,” he rumbled. “All because they happened to run into this thing while they were boring.”

  He held out the object in his hand. It was a dry, shriveled fragment of bone — the arm of an ancient skeleton. But it was oddly curious in that instead of five fingers, the hand was a web of more than a dozen very slender bones.

  Wissler’s blinking eyes widened.

  “Why, it must be the skeletal arm of an ancient Lunarian!”

  “That’s what the men said,” rumbled Hok Kel. “They’ve been nervous all day, because this morning we turned up a few fragments of worked stone and a little metal implement. This put them in a panic.”

  “That little shred of bone?” cried Larsen King incredulously.

  He turned and surveyed the muttering planetary miners, scathing scorn in his black eyes.

  “I’m cursed if ever I heard of a tough bunch of interplanetary diggers going into a panic over a little thing like that!”

  The motley group of Moon miners eyed him sullenly. Then a tall hollow-eyed red Martian among them answered the promoter.

  “It is not the bone alone — it is what it means,” he said slowly. “Its presence in the debris of this ancient fissure proves that the ancient Lunarians went down through that fissure, ages ago when it was open.”

  “What if they did?” King demanded contemptuously. “What difference does it make now what those creatures of the dim past may have done?”

  A gaunt gray Neptunian miner growled his answer.

  “It makes a difference to us. We don’t want to go where those Moon-devils went. Maybe there’s some of them still alive down there.”

  “Maybe you’re a lot of fearful fools!” snorted Larsen King. “Afraid of men who’ve been dead for a thousand centuries!”

  “They weren’t men, they were devils,” muttered a Saturnian miner. “We saw what they looked like, over in that dead city.”

  King’s harsh voice rang domineeringly.

  “I’ll have no more of this nonsense. You men signed on for this job and you’re going to finish it. Now get back down into that tunnel!”

  His whiplash voice silenced the muttering, men. They looked uncertainly at one another. Then, driven by the powerful personality of their employer, they moved sullenly back into the metal trucks that rattled down into the shaft. But their reluctance was very apparent.

  “Keep them boring,” rapped King to Hok Kel.”Don’t give them any time to brood over that superstitious nonsense.”

  THE Jovian mine boss nodded a little doubtfully as he followed the men.

  “Maybe they’ll be better when we hole through into that cavern.”

  “Moon devils!” repeated Larsen King wrathfully. “The stupid fools!”

  He turned toward Albert Wissler.

  “What the devil, was it over in that ruined city that put such crazy, notions in their heads?”

  Wissler answered nervously.

  “There are stone figures over there that look like idols and are pretty ghastly. And other things —”

  “I’m going over there and see for myself,” King said decisively. “It might be wise to have those ruins blown up, if they’re affecting the men so much. Come along, Wissler. Strike, you stay here and see that they don’t stop work again.”

  Clad in space-suits and helmets, King and the thin scientist left the dome’s airlock entrance.

  They tramped westward, Wissler leading the way with a hand krypton light. The darkness and cold outside the dome were intense. The thin starlight that sifted into the abyss only faintly illuminated the looming masses of rock amid which they picked their way. Far, far overhead, the mouth of the chasm was but a narrow crack of starry black sky.

  Presently a mass of white ruins loomed vaguely in the blackness. The two men walked on, the blue beam of the krypton light slicing the dark. The Lunarian city was a tomb of cyclopean ruins. Its structures had been built of a hard white moon-rock, and had covered an area of a square mile. In plan, the city had been spiral. One narrow street that unfolded in ever-widening circles could still be traced.

  The architecture was disturbingly alien. Spiral fluted columns formed porticoes to low, windowless stone buildings of mausolean appearance. From atop many of the fluted spires gaped monstrous stone creatures — giant centipedal worms with staring eyes, wolflike beasts and others.

  “Those must represent lunar animals that once existed,” said Wissler. “It’s believed the Moon Dogs descended from one of those forms — a species that managed to adapt itself to the vanishing of the lunar air.”

  “They tell a lot of tall stories about those Moon Dogs,” sneered Larsen King. He stared about. “What the devil smashed this place up so?”

  The Lunarian city looked as though it had been shattered by giant hands. Broken columns and masses of stone debris blocked many streets. At the center of the spiral city loomed a larger roofless wreck.

  “It’s supposed,” Wissler explained, “that the impact of cosmic fragments which formed the lunar craters wa
s the shock that shattered this city. Also, it must have caused the rock slide that closed the fissure leading downward.”

  Clambering over masses of broken debris, Wissler led the way with his lamp toward the towering wreck at the center of the city.

  “This seems to have been a Lunarian temple of some kind,” he muttered. “Look and you’ll see what scared the men.”

  They had entered a cyclopean, roofless temple whose floor was littered with fallen blocs. Its dimensions were so great that the blue beam of the krypton lamp barely reached its farther end. The beam, angling upward, illuminated four stone colossi.

  These giant figures, sculptured in a stiffly sitting position, were oppressively alien despite their general resemblance to humanity. Their bodies were thick, short and neckless. The heads were round, the eyes saucerlike with queer shutter lids, the noses merely two gaping nostrils above the slitted mouth. They had flat webbed paws for hands and feet.

  LARSEN KING’S voice came scornfully.

  “So these stone statues are the Lunarians the men are scared of!”

  “It’s not the stone figures alone,” protested Wissler. “It’s the fact that no one has ever found a single Lunarian’s remains here in the city. What became of them all? Where did they all go?”

  “Bah, you’re as superstitious as the men,” jeered his employer contemptuously. “No wonder that — “.

  Wissler’s terrified exclamation interrupted.

  “What’s that?”

  A dark figure was entering the wrecked building from behind them. The unsteadiness of Wissler’s light as it flashed toward the intruder was evidence of the scientist’s state of nerves.

  He sighed with relief. It was a space-suited man who was approaching. They recognized Gil Strike’s hawk face inside the helmet.

  “What’s wrong? More trouble with the men?” King asked sharply.

  Strike’s voice was excited and exultant.

  “No, not that. We just got a flash from the Planet Patrol. They spotted Captain Future landing on the Moon. They’ve got him and the Futuremen trapped in the mountains southeast of here!”