Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) (19 page)

“And then we’ll be able to leave this cursed planetoid!” exclaimed Moremos forcibly.

“Not until we find calcium,” warned Captain Future.

The venomous Venusian’s dark eyes narrowed. “What do you mean — till we find calcium? I’m no engineer, but I’ve rocketed enough to know that a ship’s cycs run on copper fuel, and we’ve plenty of copper. In this emergency, we can take off without that catalyst you talk about, surely.”

“You’re a f-f-fool, Moremos,” said George McClinton emphatically. “Without the calcium catalyst, the released energy of c-copper would b-blow us sky-high.”

THAT night came a frightening series of sharp shocks, like tremendous gunnings underground. The
Phoenix
rocked in its cradle, and great jets of fire shot far into the heavens from the neighboring volcanoes filling them with brilliance.

Joan Randall had incredible news for Curt when he awakened after that night of fear.

“John Rollinger has recovered his sanity!” she exclaimed. “I think the shocks last night somehow did it. He’s asking for you.”

Curt went with her to the physicist, who all these days had been confined a babbling madman in one of the huts. Rollinger’s spare face looked dazed but sane as he stared up at Curt.

“Captain Future, they’ve told me what’s happened,” the physicist said hoarsely. “I can’t seem to remember anything. Yet I’m clear enough in my mind now.”

“Take it easy, Rollinger,” Curt advised. “You’ve had a wonderful recovery, but you’ll relapse if you undergo any strain now. I’ll talk to you later.”

At regular intervals throughout that day came the ominous thunder-gunnings from beneath ground. There was something terrifying about their regularity. Yet the volcanoes seemed unusually quiet, not even smoke rising from them.

Thoroughly frightened by these new developments, the castaways worked furiously all through the day under Captain Future’s direction. They hauled the six massive cyclotrons into the
Phoenix,
and bolted them fast. The fuel-feed and power-lead pipes were installed, the heavy rocket-tubes were screwed into place, the hermetically tight space-door was hung.

By sunset the men were dropping in their tracks. The periodic sharp shocks had completely ceased two hours before. A dead, heavy hush reigned, and the air seemed thick and oppressive. Curt Newton’s worn brown face was dripping with perspiration as he and McClinton and Otho staggered almost drunkenly out of the ship.

“Now — the calcium,” Curt panted. “We’ve less than five days in which to find it, or perish.”

McClinton’s face was hopeless. “The Brain has h-h-hunted all these weeks without finding a g-grain.”

A wild yell interrupted them. It came from back inside the
Phoenix,
and was in Boraboll’s voice.

“Rollinger is wrecking the ship!”

Curt lunged back into the vessel. John Rollinger towered in its cyc-room, his face flaming as he battered with a heavy bar at the cycs.

“Get him!” Curt yelled, plunging forward himself.

The whirling bar sliced toward him in a blow meant to shatter his skull. He ducked under it and tackled Rollinger.

The crazed scientist seemed to have the strength of ten men, and Curt’s weary muscles could not hold him. But Grag and the others were rushing forward. In a few moments, Rollinger was bound.

Joan came running in to them, her face deathly white and a big bruise on her forehead.

“It’s my fault!” she sobbed. “He seemed so sane all day, that finally I untied his bonds as he asked. Then he struck me down and ran toward the ship.”

Rollinger was looking up at them with an expression of hatred and contempt upon his face. Then, abruptly, his face changed before their gaze.

It distorted into what it had been before, the face of a madman. A stream of insane babblings fell from his lips.

“They took my body!” whimpered the madman. “They guessed that you mean to escape from here —” He trailed off in unintelligible mouthing.

“The Dwellers!” swore Otho. “They’ve always had a grip on Rollinger’s shattered mind. And because they don’t want their victims to leave here, they used him today to try to wreck the ship.”

“Good God, what kind of creatures
are
they that can use such diabolical methods of attack?” cried Boraboll, shaking wildly.

“Take Rollinger back to his hut,” Curt ordered. “He didn’t have time to do any real damage. Though, in a few minutes more —”

The words were swept from his lips by a tremendous, booming sound that broke the heavy hush. The ship quivered suddenly in its cradle.

A SHRILL yell from Ezra brought them tumbling out into the open. The ground was shuddering like a harp-string. The booming was increasing in volume and rapidity by the second.

“The volcanoes are going to blow!” Curt shouted. “Everybody get —”

For a second time he was interrupted. And this time the interruption was an explosive detonation of such titanic magnitude as to stun them.

They glimpsed the crests of the distant volcanic range hurtling into the sky in great masses of rock and lava. The whole top of the range had blown off. Fiery lava raved up in spouting geysers, then was hidden by a tremendous wave of dark, smoky gases that puffed outward gigantically.

“Into the ship!” Curt cried. “That burst of fumes will asphyxiate us all if it catches us!”

They tumbled back into the ship, Grag dragging the raving Rollinger in with them. Otho slammed shut the heavy door.

It was not a moment too soon. The wave of poisonous fumes rolled over the camp a minute later. Everything outside was blotted from sight by the swirling gases.

Then the fumes began to thin. The
Phoenix
was still shuddering in its cradle. When the titanic burst of gases had been swept away, they staggered out of the vessel.

They stood, appalled by what they saw. Innumerable colossal fountains of lava were pouring up from the shattered craters and chasms of the neighboring volcanic area. And already a ten-foot crest of the flaming molten rock was rolling toward the jungle and their camp.

“That lava will wipe out everything here!” Moremos shouted. “Our only chance is to take off in the ship at once.”

“No!”
Captain Future cried. “I tell you, we
can’t
take off without calcium.”

“I don’t believe you!” flamed the Venusian. “You’re only stalling so that you and your friends can slip away in the ship and leave the rest of us here.”

“It’s better to risk starting without the calcium than to stay here and be killed by the lava!” howled Boraboll.

“Listen to me!” Curt Newton’s voice rang out. “That lava may rollover the jungle but it won’t touch us yet, for our camp is built on this knoll. The lava may surround the knoll, but won’t be high enough to cover it. There’s still a chance to find the calcium. The Brain can still come and go even though the lava surrounds us. You’ve got to trust in me.”

“I’m with you, Future,” said Kim Ivan promptly. “I think we’re sunk, but we gave you a promise and we’ll play it out to the end.”

“Then get your men to work hauling everything up here to the highest part of the knoll!” Curt exclaimed. “Put the ores, tools, food supplies, everything up here between the ship and those cacti. Otho, you and Ezra come with me and we’ll see whether the lava can be deflected in any way.”

Ezra Gurney and the android, as well as McClinton, raced beside Captain Future through the jungle toward the oncoming flaming tide.

Curt’s eyes desperately studied the topography of the ground as they advanced. He was hoping that some freak of the surface might enable them to build a temporary dam or wall to shunt the lava away from the knoll.

His hope died within him as they came closer to the advancing tide. The crimson-glowing wave was higher than a man, rolling forward with majestic slowness, hissing and crackling as it ate the jungle before it.

“Holy sun-imps, nothing can deflect
that!”
cried Otho.

CRASH!
The hollow sound of the explosion came from the camp behind them. “That s-sounded like cycs exploding!” cried McClinton.

Curt whirled. “Good God, if those fools —”

He didn’t finish. He was already racing back toward the knoll. As he ran up its low slope, Kim Ivan and Joan and others came stumbling frantically to meet him.

“The ship?” cried Captain Future. “Did Moremos —”

“Yes, he did!” raged Kim Ivan. The big Martian was mad with wild anger. “When we others were hauling the stuff up out of danger, Moremos and Boraboll and a dozen other fools like them tried to take off in the
Phoenix.”

Curt and the others came into sight of the ship. An icy feeling of utter despair clutched at his heart as he saw.

The cyclotrons had exploded when copper fuel was released into atomic power without the inhibitory calcium catalyst to control the violent energy. The explosion had rent a great hole in the stern of the ship.

The battered bodies of Moremos and Boraboll and others who had been with them in the cyc-room had been blown out of the gaping hole in the hull. Other stunned mutineers were staggering dazedly beside it.

Ezra Gurney’s voice was calm in despair. “So this is the end. Well, we made a good try, didn’t we?”

Through murky veils of smoke and steam, the rising Sun looked down upon a world in dreadful travail. The whole surface of Astarfall was shuddering uneasily as the little planetoid felt the increasing gravitational grip of the planetary system toward which it was rushing. The volcanic area was now a hell’s-caldron of geysering lava, from which an angry red tide had crept out like an ominous blot over the jungle for miles.

Only the rounded knoll still rose above the hissing lava flood which completely surrounded it. Upon this clear knoll towered the stark, barrel-shaped forms of a score of grotesque, gigantic cacti. And near those monstrous growth bulked the metallic torpedo shape of the space ship around which less than fifty men were frantically laboring.

“We’ve got the first two cycs repaired,” Crag reported to Captain Future as the red-headed planeteer came out of the ship. “How about the hull?”

“The inner hull is patched. We’re still working on the outer one,” Curt Newton panted.

He swayed a little from exhaustion as he stood, passing his hand wearily across his bloodshot eyes.

For two days and nights of terror, Captain Future had driven the survivors in this last burst of seemingly hopeless activity. It was he who had fought against the utter despair which had possessed them after the ill-starred attempt of Moremos and the others had crippled the
Phoenix.

“Are you going to stand here and fold your hands and wait to die?” Curt had lashed them. “Or are you going to keep fighting?”

“What’s the use, Future,” said Kim Ivan hollowly. “The cycs are wrecked, and the hull torn open. And we’ve got only a few days left.”

“We can repair those cycs and the hull if we hurry,” Curt had insisted. “The lava won’t come up over this knoll for awhile.”

“Even if we do,” Ezra muttered fatalistically, “we still can’t get away without calcium. Look what happened when Moremos and the rest of them tried it.”

“There’s still a chance that Simon will find calcium” Curt said. “A chance for life. Are you going to take it?”

THEY looked at him, most of them, with faces sick with hopeless discouragement.

“The Brain has been looking for calcium all these weeks without finding it,” said one mutineer. “He can’t find it now in a couple of days.”

“He may,” Curt stated, his face tightening. “And if he doesn’t, we’ll still get away. For I promise you that in that case, I will get the calcium.”

They stared.

“Curt, you can’t be serious,” protested Joan. “If the Brain can’t find calcium on this world, where would you get it?”

“I’ll get it,” Captain Future replied firmly. “I give you my solemn word that I will. And I never broke a promise in my life.”

A faint gleam of hope stirred upon the faces of the stricken castaways. There was no ground for hope except their belief in Curt’s promise. Yet they clutched at this straw.

“We’ll have to bring the cycs out of the ship and repair their cracked jackets,” Captain Future was continuing rapidly. “Also, there’ll be the job of repairing that hole in the hull, and the wrecked power and fuel-pipes. Every minute counts, from now on! To work!”

His indomitable resolution sparked the whole frenzied effort that followed. Every pair of hands was needed now. Joan helped with the others, dragging masses of ore toward the smelters to be used in repairing the cycs.

The fearful disturbances were not dying down. Instead, they were becoming worse. Tremendous thunder of deep diastrophism continually shook the ground under their feet. Strangling fumes drifted over them, and then were torn away by the howling winds.

The hissing lava flood was crawling toward them from the east. They could hear the ominous crackling and snapping as it rolled over the jungle and lapped around the slopes of their knoll. It soon completely surrounded the knoll. They were now trapped here. The space ship was their only possible way of escape!