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

by Edmond Hamilton

  Chapter 7: Moon Dog Gorge

  CURT NEWTON had taken extreme precautions to avoid observation as the Comet approached the Moon. He kept on the dark side of the satellite, running up its space-shadow to increase his chance of slipping past vigilant, patrolling cruisers.

  Curt believed that the hunt for him would have somewhat slackened by now. But there were always Planet Patrol cruisers near the Moon. The so-called Lunar Squadron, while it had no base on the satellite, used it as center of the sector in which they watched earthbound shipping.

  Luck seemed to favor the Futuremen. They followed the shadow right to the surface of the Moon without sighting a Patrol cruiser. Captain Future now steered around the satellite, toward the brilliant Sea of Glass that lay south of Great North Chasm. The Comet was soon out of the shadow, flying over white pumice desert glaring in the Sun.

  “I’m heading for a certain gorge north of the Sea of Glass,” Curt told his three comrades gathered in the control room. “If you remember, we explored a little of it two years ago. There was a fissure there that seemed to lead deeply down into the Moon.”

  The three nodded in recollection.

  In no time at all, it seemed, the Comet had left the desert behind and was flying over tall, jagged mountains, the extreme northeastern spurs of the mighty Thompson Range. It was a wilderness of sharp white pinnacles that menaced the passing ship like bared fangs. Miles ahead glittered the blinding Sea of Glass, over which they must pass.

  Suddenly out of the star-dusted black void, four grim cruisers screamed down like shooting stars toward the Comet.

  “Patrol cruisers!” yelled Otho. “They kept a telescopic check on the Moon —”

  “Captain Future, ahoy!” rang a stentorian voice from the televisor at the same instant, on an all-wave transmission. “Planet Patrol speaking! Land and surrender instantly or we’ll gun you down!”

  “You’ll gun nobody down!” flared Otho, flame leaping into his eyes as he jumped for the proton-cannon breech. “By the Sun, I’ll —”

  “No, get away from that gun!” Captain Future ordered sharply.

  The stentorian command thundered from the televisor.

  “Unless you land instantly, we’ll open fire! You can’t possibly break free!”

  “They’re right!” yelled Grag in alarm. “They’ve got us ‘pinned’ by their altitude, Chief. We’ll have to fight our way out this time!”

  Curt had already recognized the discouraging nature of their predicament. They had been flying very low over the towering lunar mountains. The four Patrol cruisers had swiftly spread out to “pin” them. They could not rise from the satellite now without meeting murderous fire.

  Realizing this in a flash, and resolved not to turn his own guns against the Patrol, Captain Future took the only chance open of escape. He jammed the cyclotron pedal down, flung the space stick to the right and a little forward.

  The Comet screamed down between the lunar pinnacles as though bent on suicide. Curt flung it right between towering peaks and precipices at high speed. It took the split second timing of a great pilot to brush so closely past the jagged stone scarps and ridges without fatal collision.

  HE WAS seeking to give the Patrol cruisers the slip by dodging away through the dangerous peaks. They would hesitate, he felt, to follow closely. But a shower of atom-shells suddenly exploded brilliantly to his left. The Patrol cruisers above were firing down at him heavily.

  “Patrol shooting!” jeered Otho, his green eyes blazing. “I’d like to show them gunnery.”

  Captain Future swung the space stick sharply to the left, to hurl the Comet between two tall pinnacles of rock. At that moment, more atom-shells exploded right in front of the fleeing ship. The terrific glare blinded Curt for an instant. There was a heart-stopping shock and crash that flung them violently about.

  “We grazed one of those peaks!” came Grag’s yell.

  The Comet’s left lateral rocket tubes had been crushed in by the grazing contact. The ship, temporarily unmanageable, spun crazily and then dived headlong toward the rocky valley between the two peaks.

  Curt Newton glimpsed the glaring rock waste rushing up at them with frightful speed. Instinctively, he kicked in both the cyclotron and brake-blast pedals. The rocket tubes in the prow of the ship spouted flame a moment before the Comet reached the ground.

  The terrific brake-blast batted the ship dizzily back up for a few yards. It roiled crazily and then crashed down onto the rock, and lay still. The shock had snapped the fuel-feed line.

  “Chief, are you hurt?” cried Grag.

  The big robot had picked himself up with Otho, and he and Simon Wright were anxiously bending over Curt. Captain Future shook his head to clear it. Then, as he took in their situation, he jumped unsteadily to his feet.

  “Left lateral tubes gone — but we could take off again if that fuel line hadn’t snapped!” he exclaimed.

  “It’ll only take us twenty minutes to put in a new feed line!” Otho cried.

  “That’s more time than we’ve got!” Curt rapped. “Those cruisers will be down after us like hawks —”

  “There they come now!” cried Grag, pointing.

  Through the control-room window they could see the four grim Planet Patrol cruisers, coming back low over the white rock pinnacles that towered against the star-specked black sky. The cruisers passed close above the narrow, boulder-strewn valley in which the Comet lay helpless.

  “They’ve spotted us — they’ll come down at the nearest possible landing place and rush here in space-suits to capture us!” Curt declared. “If we wait to fix that fuel line, they’ll get us sure. We’ve got to abandon the ship.”

  “Abandon the Comet?” Otho’s voice was sharp with dismay. “We can’t do that! If we did, how could we reach that gorge we’re heading for?”

  “On foot, in space-suits,” retorted Curt Newton.

  “It’s two hundred miles!” cried Grag, appalled. “And across that devilish Sea of Glass —”

  “It’s either that, or let ourselves be captured here and see the whole game go to Larsen King and his crowd!” rapped Captain Future.

  His voice rang in sharp command.

  “Grag, get together those transformers and condensers and other equipment. Tie them on your back. They’re fairly compact — you can carry them. Otho, get our space-suits. We’ll need extra oxygen tanks, and an oxide converter. Hurry!”

  NEED for haste was manifest. They had glimpsed the four Patrol cruisers slanting down to a landing farther along this lunar valley, where it was wider and clearer. Soon the Patrol men would be in hot pursuit. Grag hastily strung together the compact electrical equipment that Curt had devised for his secret scheme. Curt had purposely designed the apparatus to be light and easily transported. Grag slung the whole mass onto his back, and also picked up a stout metal bar. Captain Future and Otho had got into their space-suits.

  An extra alumiloy oxygen tank and a compact oxide converter were attached to the belt of each suit beside their proton pistols. The special inside pockets of their suits already held emergency rations of food tablets and water.

  “Now out of the ship, quick!” Curt exclaimed. “They’ll be coming up this valley in two minutes!”

  They emerged from the airlock door of the Comet, into the terrific solar glare of the airless Moon. Otho hesitated.

  “We can’t leave the Comet like this! Let’s stay and fight it out!”

  Curt knew how the Futuremen felt. He himself felt sharp dismay at the thought of abandoning their splendid, faithful little ship to capture. But everything now depended on their own escape.

  “We’ll retrieve the Comet later, never fear,” Captain Future pledged. “For space’s sake, hurry! Up over that ridge!”

  They plunged forward in a hard run along the wild, rocky lunar-valley toward the nearby ridge that promised temporary concealment. The scene was wild and awesome. The two lunar peaks that towered on either side of them were giant, upflung masses of rock te
n thousand feet high. Cruel, jagged scarps and buttresses glared blinding white in the unrelenting focus of the unsoftened Sun.

  The Futuremen ran at top speed. Their weight, of course, was the same here as it would have been on Earth. The gravitation equalizers they and every other interplanetary traveler always wore took care of that. But they slipped and stumbled on the loose rock, all except the Brain who glided swiftly and effortlessly on his beams.

  They pitched onto the ridge and down over it. Curt Newton raised his head over its rim to look back for a moment.

  “We just made it,” he muttered. “I don’t think they saw us.”

  Two score men in space-suits, carrying heavy hand atom guns and wearing the emblem of the Planet Patrol on their chests, were hurrying into the valley from its further end. They were approaching the Comet.

  “Curse them, it makes me mad to think of those heavy handed space greenies getting hold of our Comet!” raged Otho.

  Though they were now in an airless void, Curt and Otho could converse on the secret, untappable wave of their short radius space-suit phones. The Brain had a similar short-range audio-phone built into his mechanical speech apparatus, as also did Grag.

  “There’s no help for that,” Curt answered shortly. “We’ve got to move on. They’ll soon find we’re not in the ship, and then the hunt for us will really begin.”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE led the way rapidly to the spot where the valley ended in a tumbled wilderness of lower lunar peaks. Then he struck out through the mountains in a general northwesterly direction. The gorge which Curt believed might furnish passage down to the interior caverns of the Moon and the deep radium deposit, lay two hundred miles northwest. They could save a tenth of that distance by cutting across the Sea of Glass, but at what peril they knew.

  The Brain, gliding beside them, turned abruptly.

  “Lad, ships are coming!” he warned.

  They glimpsed two cruisers coming across the white peaks from behind them, climbing only enough to clear the mountains as they flew.

  “The Patrol has discovered we’re not in the Comet, and is quartering out to search for us!” Curt exclaimed. “Quick, under that overhang!”

  Barely in time, they jumped under the overhang of the neighboring cliff. The two Patrol cruisers scudded by close over their hiding place.

  “They’ll comb all those mountains for us,” predicted Otho. “The Patrol may be dumb but it’s thorough.”

  “I’m not used to being hunted around like this, complained Grag.”I guess I wasn’t cast to be an outlaw, after all.”

  Curt Newton led the way rapidly on through the tumbled rocky hills, in a steady northwestward direction. Once again they had to dart into the concealment of deep shadows as cruisers went by above them. Then they came out of the last low foothills of the great chain of lunar mountains. Before them, the baking white pumice desert over which the Comet had flown stretched northwestward toward the blinding brilliance of the Sea of Glass. Blocked by the Patrol cruisers, they would have to chance the desert again.

  “Here’s our worst danger of discovery,” Captain Future warned. “We’ve got to hurry now.”

  They quickened their pace as they slogged out across the glaring desert. The white pumice was a yielding and crunchy underfoot as sand. Its glare and heat were perceptible even through their insulated space-suits.

  They had covered but a few miles before Curt uttered a sharp warning. A Patrol cruiser was swinging out from the peaks over the desert.

  “Got us!” cried Otho furiously. “There’s no place here to hide.”

  “Down in the pumice!” Curt ordered. “Throw, it over yourselves!”

  They caught his idea and flung themselves down. Swiftly they covered themselves with handfuls of the powdery white stuff. The Patrol cruiser swung past at low altitude, a half mile to the west. The fugitive scrambled up and went on. The foothill peaks of the Thompson Range soon dropped from sight behind them. The small size of the Moon made its horizons always curiously close. Curt Newton kept looking anxiously back, for he knew the search for them would go on strenuously.

  A thin line of intolerable brilliance lay on the horizon ahead. It grew into what seemed a dazzling lake of light, lying across their path. That curious area was so blinding that they could not look at it. It was the Sea of Glass whose corner they must cross, to reach the gorge that was their ultimate goal. They nerved themselves for the ordeal as they approached.

  The Sea of Glass was a large, roughly square area in which the lunar rock had somehow been fused into a glassy green obsidian. It was generally believed that ancient volcanic action had caused the phenomenon, though some planetographers held other theories. Whatever its origin, the Sea of Glass was a vast, glittering sheet that flung back the solar radiance blindingly.

  “Keep your eyes shut as much as possible,” Curt warned the Futuremen as they approached. “Stay close together, so we won’t get separated.”

  “I must have had my eyes shut all along into this mess,” Otho declared. “Lead on, Chief we might as well fry now as later.”

  Curt Newton had his own eyes almost closed as they stumbled forward onto the glassy, slippery surface of the great sheet. But the terrific reflection forced itself between his lids, and stabbed to his brain. And the heat was now so intense that even through the super-insulation of their spacesuits, it became intolerable. Only Grag and Simon were unaffected by it, though their artificial sight-organs were dazzled and blinded.

  Their feet slipped drunkenly on the smooth obsidian as they struggled on. Curt dared open his eyes only a trifle every few minutes, trying to keep the northwestward course. But his eyes were soon so stunned and bleared by the glare that he could see nothing. He had to lead onward, trusting to instinct to follow the right direction. The air inside his space-suit was like a furnace. His skin was parched, his mouth dry, his head aching. He was aware only of the slippery glass surface underfoot, the touch of his comrades as they all clung blindly together. Time became meaningless to his blurred brain, and he could not estimate how long they had been traversing this inferno.

  “I can’t see a thing,” came Otho’s choking voice. “Aren’t we near the end of it?”

  “There should be only a few miles more,” Curt answered quickly. “Keep together!”

  Blinded, his head pounding from the heat, he stumbled on with the others. Suddenly he realized he was walking on crunchy pumice again.

  “We’re through!” Curt cried. “We’ve crossed the Sea of Glass!”

  “I still can’t see anything!” Otho exclaimed hoarsely.

  It took many minutes for their blinded eyes to clear. They discovered themselves trudging over glaring white pumice desert again, a little off their northwestward course.

  Captain Future took their bearings, from the dark, sunken plain of the Sea of Visions on their left. They slogged on, heading up the narrowing strait between that Sea and the Dragon Sea on their right. By now, Curt knew, they were not many miles south of Great North Chasm. His eyes constantly scanned the horizon for the gorge he sought. Finally he described it, a dark line across the desert horizon.

  “There it is!” he exclaimed, his pulse leaping with renewed hope. “That’s the gorge that has a fissure I think may lead us down through the caves to the radium. Our troubles are over for the time being!”

  “You mean, our troubles are just beginning!” Otho retorted. “It’s full day, remember. And the cursed Moon Dogs that haunt this gorge will be roaming through it hunting for food.”

  “Moon Dogs are nothing to be afraid of,” said Grag patronizingly. “It’s all in the way you handle them. Look how well I tamed little Eek.”

  THE gorge was so deep that the blazing sunlight did not reach its bottom, which was a place of great boulders and shadows. There were cracks of yawning fissures in the precipitous walls. And bright streaks of metallic ores gleamed at many places in the rock. It was these metal ores, Curt knew, that drew the Moon Dogs here. The strange, non-breathing creat
ures could ingest metallic elements as their food. They could sense the presence of such elements from afar. That was what made them dangerous to men wearing metal space-suits.

  “The fissure I noticed when we formerly explored this place is near the west end of the gorge,” Captain Future declared. “Come on!”

  They clambered down into the shadowy bottom of the gorge, and starred between the masses of jagged boulders toward its distant west end. As they came around one looming mass of rock, they suddenly confronted two Moon Dogs. The creatures were big, wolflike beasts with gray silicate flesh, whose curiously filmed eyes glared at the Futuremen. Then they sprang, their chisel-like teeth and talons gleaming brightly. Curt and Otho shot with their proton-pistols, though they knew it was useless. No proton beam could harm the inorganic silicate flesh of the Moon Dogs. The rays splashed off the creatures, without stopping them.

  But Grag halted them. Swinging his heavy metal bar, the great robot knocked the two lunging beasts off their feet with one blow. The Moon Dogs scrambled up and hastily retreated ahead of the Futuremen.

  “See what I told you? It’s all in knowing how to handle them,” Grag boasted.

  “I hope you know how to handle a lot of them!” Otho yelled. “There’s a whole pack of the devils coming after us!”

  Chapter 8: Lunar Caves

  CURT and the other Futuremen swung about, startled. Their encounter with the two Moon Dogs had prevented them from noticing that a huge pack of the weird gray beasts was racing along the shadowy gorge from behind. The uncanny silence in which the creatures charged was more nerve-chilling than if they had been able to howl.

  Their chisel-like fangs gleamed brightly in the shadows. The Futuremen knew that if they were once swept from their feet by that horde, those formidable teeth and talons would rip the metal of their space-suits and of Grag’s body to shreds: It was the Moon Dogs’ mysterious ability to sense the metal that had brought the pack after them.