Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) (6 page)

“They’re as alive as we are,” Curt retorted. “They just live slower.”

“I’ll say they do a hundred times slower,” Otho muttered.

These yellow Erosians were not completely motionless. They were all moving, but so slowly that the eye could hardly perceive it.

MINUTE by minute, the upraised foot of the man striding along with his burden came down toward the paving. When it finally rested on the stone, the other foot began slowly to rise in another step. All the other yellow people were moving or talking at the same half-paralyzed tempo.

“No wonder they call the place ‘Slow Motion World’,” rumbled Grag.

“And in a few minutes we’ll be moving and living as slowly as they do,” sniffed Otho. “Hanged if I like it!”

Already, in fact, Curt and the Futuremen were feeling the first tingling sensation that warned them the strange magnetic gravitational field of Eros was beginning to affect their bodies.

The gravitation of this little asteroid was powerfully reinforced by a strong, peculiar magnetic field. This magnetism affected the electric nerve-currents of any living creature which remained more than a few minutes on Eros. It slowed down those nerve-currents, and thus stepped down consciousness, thought and physical metabolism.

Thus, any man who remained more than a few minutes on this asteroid found himself living at a tempo a hundred times slower than normal. Yet because all other life on Eros lived and moved at the same tempo, he would seem to himself unchanged. It was this peculiar condition of the asteroid that made it sedulously avoided by spacemen.

“We are slowing down already,” the Brain observed with keen interest.”Do you notice?”

“I don’t feel any different,” Grag declared skeptically.

“Look at those people in the street!” Otho told him. “Can’t you see the difference?”

The yellow Erosians around the Futuremen seemed to be moving faster than they had. More and more rapidly they appeared to move — but in reality, it was only that the Futuremen were living and moving slower. Within a few more minutes, the Erosians around Curt and his comrades seemed walking and talking at normal tempo.

Captain Future realized that he and his companions were now on the same motion level.

“I’m glad that’s over,” he declared, and added with a fleeting grin, “When on Eros, live as slowly as the Erosians.”

The yellow people were now gathering around the Futuremen with excited cries. Curt and his comrades had been recognized.

“It is the four explorers who came to our world before!” went up the cry.

“Glad they remember us,” remarked Curt with relief. “Though I guess they have so few visitors they don’t forget ‘em.”

The gathering crowd made way for the approach of a dignified yellow man of advanced age. Captain Future recognized the Erosian ruler.

The yellow official greeted him with apparent pleasure. Curt had a unique faculty for cultivating the friendship of strange planetary races. And he had made friends with these Erosians on his first visit. “You have come to explore our world again?” asked the yellow king after his formal greeting.

“Not this time,” Captain Future replied. He spoke frankly, as was his inborn instinct. “We were being pursued by men who believed we had committed a crime of which we were innocent. To escape them, we landed here.”

“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.

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 voice 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.”