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

by Edmond Hamilton

  The motley crew needed no urging. They were eager to leave the gloomy lunar cavern that had so strongly aroused their superstitious fears. They poured into the tunnel leading to the surface.

  Wissler came back to Grag. The scientist’s blinking eyes were lit with avid excitement as he approached the prostrate robot.

  “Now we’re alone. You can tell me where the Moon laboratory is,” he said eagerly. “If I find you’ve told the truth, I’ll see you getaway.”

  For answer, Grag suddenly flung away the heavy chains draped around him, and rose to his feet. The great robot’s steely hands gripped the neck of the thin scientist.

  Wissler’s eyes bulged in unbelieving horror at the massive metal giant standing over him. His knees buckled, his bony face was a pasty gray.

  “Don’t — don’t kill me!” he choked, in terrified accents.

  “I’m not going to kill you unless you make me,” Grag boomed grimly.

  He had possessed himself of the atom-pistol which the man had been too terrified to use.

  “You’re going with me, Wissler.”

  “Going with you? Where?” gasped the panicky scientist.

  “Down after the chief,” Grag retorted. “You’re going to be a hostage for us. And you’ll be a dead hostage, if you try any tricks.”

  They started down the narrow fissure, Grag stalking grimly behind the stumbling scientist. The robot had picked up one of the hand krypton lamps left by the planetary miners. He kept its beam flashing ahead. The blue ray illuminated a few hundred feet of the way ahead.

  The fissure was a mere narrow crack in the black Moon rock, angling this way and that as it dropped ever deeper into the lunar depths.

  A few minutes later, the two suddenly halted. There were signs of a recent struggle at this point. Grag flashed his beam on a little patch of red, glistening fluid on the jagged black rock wall.

  “That’s human blood!” the robot exclaimed anxiously. “The chief must have been in some kind of a fight here!”

  Chapter 11: Moon-men

  CAPTAIN FUTURE, Otho and the Brain had remained frozen in suspense there in the narrow fissure, as they peered down at the dim shapes approaching them from below. Those vaguely monstrous figures were still just beyond the limits of the blue beam of Curt’s lamp. Then, as though cautious of the light, the two creatures came closer. They were now clearly outlined. And at the sight of these twin horrors of the lunar depths, gasps of amazement came from both Otho and Captain Future.

  “Those things aren’t real! They’re a bad dream!” yelled Otho incredulously.

  “Quick — get back!” shouted Curt Newton. “They’re coming up at us, and we haven’t a single weapon.”

  The two advancing horrors were centipedal monsters. They looked like giant white worms, with thick bodies twenty feet long, borne upon a network of very short legs. The head of each was a blunt monstrosity split by a mouth of gaping fangs. The eyes were huge round and phosphorescent.

  Even as he realized their extreme danger, Curt’s scientifically trained mind apprehended the nature of these creatures. He had seen sculptures of just such monsters in the dead Lunarian cities above. These many-legged things were living relics of the Moon’s dead youth.

  The centipedal horrors advanced more rapidly as the Futuremen backed up the passage. The creatures seemed to be making ready for a fierce rush. The glare of their phosphorescent eyes was hypnotic.”

  “And our proton-pistols are dead, and we’re trapped in this cursed fissure!” Otho groaned. “I knew we’d meet grief in these ancient holes inside the Moon.”

  “Looks like it,” Captain Future admitted tersely. “Better save yourself, Simon,” he told the Brain. “You can get away, but we can’t.”

  The centipedal monsters had now reared up their hideous bodies a little in the blue light. They seemed to tense themselves for the spring.

  “Lad, there’s a niche up in the wall of the fissure here!” came Simon Wright’s sharp, metallic voice. “If you can get up to it, we could perhaps hold the creatures off.”

  Curt turned his head for a swift glance. There was a shallow pocket in the black rock wall on their right, twenty feet over their heads.

  “Try to jump for it, Otho,” he ordered the android quickly. “If you can make it, you can help haul me up.”

  The android tensed himself bunching like a rubber ball and then bounding upward with marvelous agility. Due to the gravitation equalizers, the Futuremen’s weight here was still normal. Yet even so, Otho’s wonderful muscles sent him hurtling upward. He caught the edge of the niche and clung to it with both hands.

  Instantly, Otho whipped up into the pocket in the rock. The Brain was already hovering beside him. The android yelled down urgently.

  “Jump quick, chief — there they come!”

  Curt Newton glimpsed the centipedal monsters, as though enraged by the possible escape of their prey, darting forward with lightning speed.

  With a fast movement, Curt flung the hand lamp up into the niche. As its angling blue beam whirled and sliced the dark, Captain Future leaped upward with all the force of his own finely trained muscles.

  His hands came several feet short of the niche’s edge. But Otho, hanging down over the edge, grabbed Curt’s wrists and started to pull him up.

  “Hurry, Otho!” cried the Brain. “The creatures are following —”

  THE centipedal horrors had flung themselves up the side of the rock wall after Curt, by the impetus of their fierce rush. Curt felt a sharp pain as fangs grazed his lower leg.

  Otho yanked him into the ruche. As he scrambled up Curt heard the android yelling anger. He whipped around, found the giant centipedes had climbed up the vertical wall after him. Their hideous heads already protruded over the edge.

  Their great jaws were gaping, the huge phosphorescent eyes luridly blazing. Otho promptly snatched out his empty proton-pistol. With its heavy butt he hammered on the top of the nearest monster’s skull. The creature, scrambling with its myriad feet to retain its precarious hold on the wall, recoiled from the tattoo of blows.

  Captain Future found a loose chunk of jagged lunar basalt in the niche, promptly hurled it at the owner’s head. That creature lost its hold and fell in a hideous coiling heap to the fissure floor, where it and its mate remained for the moment, staring furiously upward.

  “Holy sun-imps!” panted Otho. “The things nearly got you, Chief! Are you hurt badly?”

  “Just a scratch,” Curt Newton answered tersely. “Those creatures will try to get up here again. Gather up some rocks — they’re the only weapons we’ve got.”

  Otho hastily obeyed, prying loose split chunks of the black basalt, while the Brain kept watch over the monsters below.

  “We’re in a nice spot,” the android murmured disgustedly to himself. “Trapped in a hole in a wall by a couple of overgrown insects.”

  “They are exceedingly interesting creatures,” remarked the Brain, peering downward. “There can be no doubt they are survivors of the giant lunar arthropods of long ago, which made their way down here when the Moon’s atmosphere drained into these interior spaces.”

  Captain Future was hastily bandaging his wound. The fangs of the giant centipede had slashed through the leg of his heavy space-suit. But that break in the suit had not been fatal, since there was air here.

  Curt fastened an improvised pad over his wound. Then he sealed the break in his suit by one of the self-fusing patches, which he carried for such emergencies in an outer pocket of every space-suit. He finished this task just in time to hear the Brain call to them.

  “The creatures are going away,” Simon Wright reported.

  Curt looked down. The two centipedal monsters were indeed moving away down the fissure. But suddenly they turned in the beam of light he was playing upon them. They came rushing back at high speed.

  “They’re trying to swarm up the wall again!” Curt yelled. “Fire those rocks at them quick!”

  He and Otho unloosed a
barrage of stones at the twin monsters as they rushed up the jagged wall. Again, the missiles were too bruising for the giant centipedes to endure.

  They scrambled back down to the floor, coiling and uncoiling in rage.

  Finally the monsters turned and moved back down the crevasse in their scuttling run, to disappear from the range of Curt’s krypton beam.

  “They’ve gone to look for easier prey,” Captain Future decided. “We can get going now.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not crazy to follow those things,” muttered Otho. “What if we find them waiting for us somewhere along the road?”

  BUT he slid down to the floor of the passage with Curt. There Curt picked up the burden of apparatus he had been forced to drop when he leaped up to the niche. He examined the transformers, condensers and other equipment carefully. The centipedal monsters had not disturbed the apparatus.

  Once more Captain Future and his two comrades started on down the descending fissure into the lunar depths. But now they kept tense watch for the creatures which stalked somewhere ahead of them.

  “If lunar animals like that migrated down here into the interior and are still living, why not the Lunarians?” Otho wanted to know.

  Curt shook his head, though with lessened conviction now.

  “I can’t believe that any humanoid race could ever live without light.”

  The passage descended into a long, vaulted space from which many other fissures radiated. But here stood another of the solemn Lunarian statues, pointing with its webbed hand toward one of the cracks.

  “No doubt about it. The Lunarians came down this way ages ago,” Curt muttered. “Their first exploring parties must have set up these statues to guide the rest of the race.”

  As they moved on down this new passage, ever going deeper, Curt Newton’s mind was a fever of strange speculations. What would they find at the end of this ancient road?

  Deeper and deeper, mile after mile, Captain Future and his two loyal comrades forged downward through a bewildering labyrinth of fissures, galleries and gloomy caves.

  The path led suddenly out of a narrow crack in the rock, along the edge of a deep abyss.

  Their beam showed the jagged rock wall on their right, but on their left was an unplumbed darkness dropping to depths inconceivable, which their krypton light could not penetrate.

  Otho peered down into the abyss.

  “I can see some kind of light down there,” he muttered in awe. “Turn off the krypton, Chief, and look.”

  Curt obeyed. Snapping off the light, he gazed down into the dark void. And he described a faint, greenish glow that filtered from far beneath.

  “I can’t understand it,” he murmured incredulously. “How could there be light down there?”

  “Maybe the Lunarians had a way of making artificial sunlight?” Otho suggested excitedly.

  Captain Future rejected the suggestion.

  “The ancient Lunarians were not a scientific race. We know from the ruins of their cities on the surface that they were civilized in some respects, but quite unscientific. Besides —”

  “Lad, I hear something coming up the path!” the Brain interrupted. “It sounds like one of those centipede creatures.”

  Curt hastily snapped his krypton beam on again and stabbed the light down the path. He uttered an, exclamation of alarm. One of the hideous monsters was slowly advancing toward them.

  “Now we are in for it!” Otho cried in dismay. “There’s no niche in the wall here!”

  “Wait, that thing’s not going to attack us!” Captain Future said suddenly. “Look at it!”

  The giant centipede was behaving queerly. It had stopped on the narrow path a hundred feet below them, and was clawing at its own body. Then, with a hissing cry they could clearly hear, now that they wore no helmets, in the denser air, the creature stopped its writhing.

  Curt and his comrades slowly advanced toward the motionless monster. They discovered quickly that the thing was dead, its huge eyes closed. Two short metal spears bristled from its back, and thick, pale blood flowed from the wound.

  “Those spears mean men down here — living men!” Otho yelled in high excitement.

  “Get back at once!” Curt said sharply. “This thing was just wounded. Its hunters, whoever they are, must be close. We’ll hide until —”

  “Too late, lad!” rasped the Brain. “There they come!”

  CAPTAIN FUTURE and Otho stood stock still. Their blue beam showed a dozen alien looking men coming up the path.

  “Lunarians!” whispered Otho. “Men of the Moon’s dead past!”

  There could be no doubt of it. These men who were approaching with upraised weapons were exact replicas of the Lunarian statues.

  Their bodies were short and stocky and oddly neckless, and their heads unusually round. The skull was white, not a pinkish white but a greenish pallor. They were white-haired, also, but their features were not unhuman except in two details. One was the fact that their noses were so flat as to consist merely of two gaping nostril orifices. The other was the queer, shutter like lids above their dark, large-pupiled eyes.

  The Lunarians hands and feet were flat and webbed. They wore short garments of pale, soft leather. Each man had at his belt a quiver of short metal spears. And each carried an unusual weapon much like an ancient crossbow, in the slot of which one of the short spears was ready for firing.

  These Moon-men had burst into low cries of excitement or alarm as they came around the path in the glare of Captain Future’s beam. Their queer eyelids almost completely closed their eyes against the beam as they slowly advanced, their strange weapons leveled at the Futuremen.

  “Men of the Moon — men nobody has dreamed existed!” Otho was gasping.

  “Don’t make a move,” Captain Future murmured tensely. “They can riddle us with those spears. Right now, they’re too astonished to act.”

  Curt held up his hand, palm outward, in the instinctive sign of peace that is understood by every intelligent inhabitant of every world. But the Lunarians showed no signs of relaxing their threatening attitude.

  “They don’t seem very friendly,” Otho blurted. “Shall we turn off the lamp and make a break to get away in the dark?”

  “Don’t try anything of the sort,” Curt warned sharply. “They apparently can see in almost complete darkness. They’d have the advantage.”

  The Moon-men were conferring rapidly in excited voices. Their language was utterly strange to Captain Future. One of the Lunarians, a taller, grizzled fellow who seemed to be the leader, was pointing at Simon.

  “Perhaps they don’t understand that I’m living,” the Brain said.

  The Lunarians recoiled a little in astonishment as they heard the Brain speak. They stared at the Futuremen in mingled fear and perplexity.

  Captain Future repeated his friendly gesture, eyeing the Lunarian leader. That shrewd individual contemplated him thoughtfully. Then he pointed significantly down the narrow path, saying something as he did so.

  “A clear command or invitation to go with them,” Curt muttered. “I think we’d better accept. It’s the way we were going, anyway. And they might construe a refusal on our part as proof that we were enemies.

  “What about the radium deposit?” the Brain asked anxiously. “We want to reach that without a single moment’s delay, lad.”

  “I know, but it’s still somewhere below us,” Captain Future replied. “If we could learn a little of this Lunarian language, these people might be able to tell us the easiest way to the radium. They must know every cave.”

  “I’d rather find my own way, myself,” grunted Otho skeptically. “We may be walking into a nice little trap if we go with them.”

  Meanwhile, two of the Lunarians had been working with metal knives upon the dead centipedal monster.

  They now rose with the prize of their toil — the creature’s great, ivory-like fangs.

  “So they hunt those monstrosities for their teeth,” Otho muttered. “Nice peop
le!”

  Curt Newton made a sign to the Lunarian leader that they were willing to accompany the party. The tension of the Moon-men appeared to relax a little, and they lowered their spear-bows. But, Curt noticed, they kept the queer weapons ready for instant use.

  The march began, the Lunarians keeping ahead and behind the Futuremen. Curt kept his krypton beam shining, and their strange new escort made no objection. The Moon-men chattered in their soft, quick voices among themselves, as their grizzled leader led the way.

  The path wound downward through narrow fissures, across great gloomy caves in which giant centipedes and other smaller arthropodal monsters scuttled away, and along the rim of gigantic crevasses, from deep in which the faint green glow of light came persistently.

  Ever and again the party came to stone statues of ancient Lunarians, pointing the way. And always, the Lunarian escort solemnly saluted the statues.

  Hours passed in the downward trek. Then, in a small cave, the grizzled Lunarian leader signaled a halt for rest. The Moon-men brought forth strips of pale dried meat and hide bottles of water. They apportioned some of this food and drink to Curt and Otho. They did not venture to approach the Brain, whom they seemed to regard with some awe.

  Curt talked earnestly to the Lunarian leader, trying by gestures to obtain a rudimentary knowledge of the strange language. He learned but a few words.

  “It’s not going to be easy to learn their tongue,” he said discouragedly. “And if the plan I have in mind is to work, I must reach the radium deposit soon.”

  “I’d like to know whether we’re pals or prisoners,” Otho declared. “They seem friendly, yet they watch us pretty closely.”

  “Probably they’re not sure whether or not we are enemies,” Curt commented. “They can’t ever have seen other men than themselves before.”

  After the meal the Lunarians sprawled in sleep. But four of them remained awake and watchful. Curt and Otho slept also, the dreamless slumber of exhaustion.

  They awakened to find the Lunarians ready to resume the march. Hour upon hour, the steady progress down into the heart of the Moon went on, through endless labyrinths and caves. Curt estimated finally that they must be more than two score miles beneath the lunar surface.