THE FACE OF THE DEEP
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
By EDMOND HAMILTON
Carried Far Outside the Solar System, and wrecked on a Volcanic Planetoid in Company with a
Shipload of Condemned Criminals, Captain Future Faces the Surpreme Test of His Courage!
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THE FACE OF THE DEEP
CHAPTER I
Prison Ship
HE had been a proud ship once, a splendid,
shining liner rocketing between the planets
with laughter and music and happiness aboard. But
that had been years ago. Tonight she lay grim and
black in her dock at New York spaceport, somberly
waiting to carry damned souls to their place of
punishment.
S
Her name was the Vulcan and she was the
famous prison-ship of the Planet Patrol. Once a
year, she went out through the worlds upon a
fateful voyage. At each world, criminals sentenced
to life imprisonment came aboard her. The end of
the voyage was at the grim, gray Interplanetary
Prison on Cerberus, moon of Pluto.
Men in purple-striped convict dress were
shuffling now under the krypton lights' blue glare
toward the looming black hull. They were a motley
crew of vicious, hardened criminals- mostly hard-
faced Earthmen, but a few green-skinned Venusians
and red Martians.
They were guarded by vigilant, armed officers in
the black uniform of the Planet Patrol.
A girl who also wore that black uniform stood
under the lights near the ship, shaking her dark
head at her tall, redhaired male companion.
"I have to go, Curt," she was protesting. "The
Patrol is short-handed because of that trouble on
Mercury. And these criminals must be well-
guarded, for they're the most dangerous lot in the
System."
"But to send a girl as a guard-officer on that hell-
ship!" exclaimed the tall, redhaired young man
angrily. "Your Commander must be crazy."
Joan Randall, slim and dark and youthful in her
black jacket and slacks, was distractingly pretty in
her resentful denial.
"You talk as though I were a simpering
debutante who had never been off Earth before,"
she said indignantly. "Haven't I been working for
the Patrol for four years?"
Curt Newton objected. "You've been in the
Secret Service section of the Patrol. That's different
from guarding a lot of hellions on a prison ship."
His lean, space-bronzed face was sober with
anxiety, and his clear gray eyes had a worried frown
in them as he expostulated with the girl.
He did not often worry about danger, this
brilliant adventurer and scientific wizard whom the
whole System knew as Captain Future. To him and
his three comrades, the famous Futuremen, danger
wore a familiar face. They had met it countless
times in their star-roving quests to far worlds, in
their ceaseless crusade against the master-criminals
of the System.
UT danger to himself was to Curt a very
different thing than a danger that
threatened this girl he loved. That was why the tall,
redheaded planeteer bent toward her in a final
earnest appeal.
B
"I've got a premonition about this voyage, Joan.
A hunch, you can call it. I don't want you to go."
Her brown eyes laughed up at him. "You're
getting jumpy as a Saturnian shadow-cat, Curt.
There's no danger. Our criminals will be tightly
locked up until we reach Cerberus."
There came a startling interruption. It was the
sudden shrieking of one of the convicts who were
being marched into the ship.
He was a middle-aged Earthman, with a mass of
iron-gray hair falling disorderedly about his
haggard white face and terror-dilated eyes.
"You're taking me to death!" he was screaming
wildly, struggling with the uniformed guards.
"There's death on that ship!"
There was something peculiarly disturbing about
the wild face and crazy screams. But the alert
Planet Patrol officers guarding the line of shuffling
convicts quickly hurried the struggling prisoner
aboard.
Joan Randall's fine eyes had pity in them. "That's
Rollinger -- you remember, Doctor John Rollinger
of American University."
Captain Future nodded thoughtfully. "The
biophysicist who killed his colleague last month? I
thought his attorneys pleaded insanity?"
"They did," the girl answered. "They claimed
Rollinger's mind was wrecked by an
encephalographic experiment he carried too far. But
the prosecution claimed he was shamming. He got
life on Cerberus."
"And you're going on a voyage of weeks with
scores of others like that homicidal maniac!" Curt
Newton said, with deepened dismay. "Some of
2
3
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
them worse! I've seen the prisoner-list. Kim Ivan,
the Martian space-pirate, Moremos, that poisonous
Venusian murder-ring leader, Boraboll the Uranian,
the wiliest trickster in the System -- and dozens
more. Joan, I won't let you do it!"
Joan shook her dark head stubbornly. "It's too
late to argue about it now. All the prisoners are
aboard. We take off in five minutes."
A voice came from the darkness behind them --
a sightly hissing voice that was oddly alien in
timbre.
"What's the matter. Chief? it asked Curt.
"Haven't you talked reason into her yet?"
It was Otho, one of the three Futurmen. He and
Grag and the Brain were advancing into the circle
of light.
The three Futuremen made a spectacle so
strange that many people would have recoiled from
them in terror. But Joan was too well acpointed
with these three loyal comrades of Curt, to see any
strangeness about them.
Otho, the android, was perhaps the most human-
looking of the three. He looked, indeed, much like
an ordinary man except that his lithe body had a
curiously rubbery, boneless appearance, and his
chalk-white face and slanted green eyes held a
superhuman deviltry and mocking humor. Otho
was a man -- but a synthetic man. He had been
created in a laboratory, long ago.
Grag, the robot, had been created in that same
laboratory, in the long-dead past. But Grag had
been made of metal. He was a gigantic, manlike
metal figure, seven feet high. His metal torso and
limbs hinted his colossal strength. But the strange
face of his bulbous metal head, with its gleaming
photoelectric eyes and mechanical loudspeaker
voice-orifice, gave no sign of the intelligence and
loyalty of his complex mechanical brain.
The Brain, third of the Futuremen, was by far
the strangest. Yet he had been an ordinary human,
once. He had been Simon Wright, brilliant, aging
Earth scientist. Dying of an incurable ailment,
Wright's living brain had been removed from his
human body and transferred into a special serum
case in which it still lived, thought and acted. The
Brain now resembled a square box of transparent
metal. Upon one face of it were his protruding lens-
like eyes and microphonic ears and speech
apparatus. From compact generators inside the case
jetted the magnetic tractorbeams that enabled the
Brain to glide swiftly through the air and to handle
objects and tools.
THOUGHT," Otho was saying to Captain
Future, "that we came on this rush trip to
Earth to stop Joan from going on this crazy
assignment."
I
"We did, but we might a well have stayed at
home on the Moon," Curt said disgustedly. "She's
as mule-headed as -- as -- "
"As a mule," Joan finished for him, with a laugh.
Grag stepped forward. The giant metal robot
suddenly picked up Joan in his mighty arms as
though she were a doll.
"Do you want me to keep her here, Chief?" he
asked Captain Future in his deep, booming voice.
"Grag, you put me down!" stormed the girl.
"Curt, if you try to keep me here by force --"
"Put her down, Grag," growled Captain Future.
"You can reason with a Jovian marsh-elephant or a
Uranian cave-bear -- but not with a woman."
An elderly officer in the black uniform of the
Patrol was hurrying toward them from the black
ship. His grizzled face and bleak old eyes lit with
pleasure as he recognized Curt and the Futuremen.
"Come to see us off, Cap'n Future?" he asked.
"Where's your Comet?"
Marshal Ezra Gurney, veteran officer of the
Planet Patrol, was referring to the famous little ship
of he Futuremen. Curt answered by waving his
hand toward the distant, lighted pinnacle of
Government Tower.
"The Comet's up there on the tower landing-
deck. And we didn't come to see you off. I came to
dissuade Joan from going." A bell rang sharply
from the big black ship that loomed into the
darkness nearby.
"Nearly take-off time!" warned Ezra Gurney.
"Better say your goodbyes, Joan."
Joan's brown eyes danced as she kissed Curt
quickly. "For once," she laughed, "it's I who am
going to space while you stay behind and worry,
instead of the other way around."
Curt Newton could not smile. He held her, loath
to let her go.
"Joan, won't you listen --"
"Of course I'll listen -- when I get back from
Cerberus!" the girl cried gaily, slipping out of his
detaining grasp and running after Ezra toward the
ship. "See you then, Curt!" She and the white-
haired old marshal reached the gangway. A final
wave of her hand, and she disappeared into the
black vessel. "Why didn't you let me hold her back,
4
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Chief?" demanded Grag. "You've got to treat
women rough."
"Listen to Grag -- now he's setting up to give
advice to the lovelorn!" exclaimed Otho
witheringly.
Curt Newton paid no attention to the argument
that instantly developed. Grag and Otho were
always arguing, usually about which of them was
the most nearly human. He didn't even hear them,
now.
His eyes were upon the Vulcan. The last officers
were going aboard. The bridge-room up at the nose
of the long hull had sprung into light. Dock-hands
were hastily knocking out the holding-pins.
The vessel, with it freight of scores of dangerous
criminals, was about to take off on its long voyage.
It would zigzag out through the Solar System for
weeks, stopping at each planet to pick up more
sentenced men. It would be a long time before it
returned from the somber voyage.
There was nothing to worry about, Captain
Future told himself earnestly. The ship had made
this voyage to Cerberus many times before, and
nothing had ever gone wrong. Surely nothing
would go wrong now.
But Curt couldn't expel foreboding from his
mind. The Vulcan this time was carrying the largest
and most desperate cargo of convicts it had ever
taken. There were men aboard it who would kill
merely for pleasure, let alone to prevent their being
taken out to the grim living death of Interplanetary
Prison. And Joan Randall was one of the guards of
those human tigers!
URT NEWTON reached decision, swiftly
as he always did. He wouldn't let Joan take
such chances. If she insisted on going, then --
C
"I'm going, too!" Captain Future said suddenly.
He plunged toward the gangway of the ship. Over
his shoulder he called to his astonished comrades,
"Take the Comet back to the Moon and wait for
me!"
The gangway was already being drawn in. But
the Patrol officers inside halted it as they saw
Captain Future racing toward them.
The rangy, red-haired planeteer raced up the
metal gangway and stood pantingly inside the
airlock. The Patrol men looked at him amazedly.
"It's all right," Curt laughed. "I'm going with
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THE FACE OF THE DEEP
you, this trip. There's no objection, is there?"
"Objection?" The swarthy young Mercurian
lieutenant flushed with pleasure. "Objection to you
coming along? I'll say there isn't!"
His eyes were sparkling with excitement. To this
young lieutenant, as to most space-men, Curt
Newton was an idolized hero.
"I'll inform Captain Theron that you and the
Futuremen are aboard, sir," he told Curt eagerly.
"That I and the Futuremen?" Curt repeated,
turning swiftly. In the airlock were Otho and big
Grag and the calmly poised Brain.
"What the devil!" exploded Captain Future. "I
told you to go back to the Moon with the Comet."
"The Comet," Otho answered coolly, "is safe
enough, locked up atop Government Tower. We're
going with you. You're not going to leave us sitting
on the Moon, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for
you."
"This is what women get you into," growled
Grag gloomily. "Now we're stuck on this craft for
weeks."
"It is certainly annoying that I shall have to
spend all that time in a ship that does not even have
a decent research laboratory," said the Brain sourly
in his rasping, metallic voice.
Captain Future was not deceived by their
grumbling. He knew that it was loyalty to himself
that had made the Futuremen instantly follow him.
The tie between himself and the three strange
comrades was old and deep. It went back to his
infancy. For when his own parents had met death in
their laboratory-dwelling on the lonely Moon, it
was these three strange beings who had become his
foster-parents.
The Brain, who had been his dead father's
colleague in research; the robot, who had been
created as an experiment by the two colleagues; and
the android, who had been similarly created -- these
three had first been Curt's tutors and guardians, and
then his comrades in the crusading adventures
which had won him the name of Captain Future.
They had followed him faithfully to far stars and
worlds. They were following him now.
"Oh, all right," Curt said, dissimulating his
feelings. "But you'll find this a pretty dull voyage."
"I wonder?" replied the Brain, his strange lens-
eyes fixed thoughtfully on Curt's face.
The Vulcan suddenly lurched upward with a roar
of bursting rocket-tubes. They clung to stanchions
as the ship took off. Swiftly, it screamed up through
Earth's atmosphere into the vast and shoreless sea
of space.
The young Mercurian lieutenant started with
them through the ship toward the bridge-room. As
they left the airlock, they met Joan Randall. Her
jaw dropped ludicrously at sight of them. Then her
eyes grew stormy.
"You came along! As though I were a baby who
needed watching over! Curt Newton, I won't stand
for it!"
" Afraid you'll have to, darling," grinned Curt.
"We're already at least ten thousand miles away
from Earth."
She was still protesting indignantly as they went
forward through the mid-deck of the ship. This was
the prison-cell deck. Along its main corridor were
the barred doors of scores of cells. From behind the
bars, convicts glared like caged wolves a they
passed.
SQUAT, evil-faced Jovian in one of the
cells set up a roar as he saw Curt and his
comrades pass.
A
"It's Captain Future, mates!" he shouted. "He's
aboard!" A raging tumult instantly arose. Threats,
maledictions, oaths, were hurled at the Futurermen
as they passed along the corridor.
Not a criminal in the System but had good
reason to hate the name of Captain Future. He had
sent many an evil-doer out to the gray inferno of
Interplanetary Prison to which these men were
destined.
The tumult rose. The senseless shrieks of the
madman Rollinger added weirdly to it. Captain
Future's bronzed face was coolly imperturbable as
he strode along. He seemed unaware of the raging
voices. Then as he glimpsed a sudden flash of
movement beside him, he yelled a warning.
"Look out -- your pistol!" he cried to the
Mercurian lieutenant.
A Venusian convict in one of the cells had
hurled out through his barred door a little noose
improvised from his belt. The loop had settled
around the hilt of the Mercurian lieutenant's belt-
weapon. The Venusian tugged hard, snatching the
atom-pistol toward himself as Future shouted.
Captain Future spun and charged that cell-door
with superhuman speed. The Venusian had got the
pistol into his hands. His blazing black eyes looked
over its sights at Curt, with deadly purpose.
Curt ducked and flung up his hand in an oddly
slicing gesture at the convict's arm. The crash of
6
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
blasting white fire from the atom-pistol grazed over
his head and fused a patch in the metal ceiling.
Next moment, Curt had got hold of the
Venusian's arm through the bars and had wrenched
hard. The gun clattered to the floor. He picked it up
and grimly returned it to the scared young
Mercurian lieutenant.
"Next time, keep your holster buttoned when
you walk through this for corridor," Curt advised
him meaningly.
"Next time I'll get you, Future!" hissed the
Venusian convict, nursing his wrenched arm and
glaring his hatred through the bars.
"It's that devil, Moremos," volunteered the
shaken young Patrol officer. "Only he would have
thought of a trick like that."
"Oh, Curt -- I wish you hadn't come," breathed
Joan. Her brown eyes were shadowed by dread.
"They all hate you so terribly."
Raging threats were following Curt Newton and
the others as they went on along the prison-deck.
But the bellowing order of a huge Martian in one of
the cells put a period to the tumult.
"Silence, you space-scum!" roared the big
scarred-face red convict. "You hear? Kim Ivan
orders it."
The uproar quieted almost magically. It was as
though all the convicts recognized authority in the
notorious Martian pirate's command.
But one voice remained unquieted. The uncanny
shriek of John Rollinger still reached their ears as
they left the prison-deck.
"There's death here!" the mad Earthman was still
screaming. "I tell you, there's death on this ship!"
CHAPTER II
Attacked
THE Vulcan was no
more than a billion miles
from Neptune when the
real trouble came.
For many days, the
black ship had droned out
through the System on a
zig-zag course. At Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus
it had stopped, to pick up
more sentenced criminals.
Now, with more than two
hundred convicts aboard,
it headed for Neptune, the
last stop before reaching Pluto and the prison
moon.
Nothing untoward had yet occurred to justify
Captain Future's premonition. The convicts
imprisoned down in the cell-deck had growled and
grumbled, but seemed reconciled to their grim fate.
Yet Curt Newton had not been entirely reassured.
Upon the first day of the voyage, he had voiced his
doubts.
"They're too quiet," he declared. "They shut up
like magic when that fellow Kim Ivan ordered them
to."
"Well, that there big Martian swings a lot of
weight with them," drawled Ezra Gurney. "He was
one of the biggest pirate leaders before the Patrol
caught him."
"Even so, that bunch of tough criminals wouldn't
obey him now without a reason," Curt insisted.
"You think they've hatched up some scheme of
escape?" asked Captain Theron anxiously.
Captain Jhel Theron, who had command of the
navigational operation of the Vulcan, was a veteran
of the Patrol. He was a tall, grave-eyed Uranian,
bald like most of the men of that planet, his saffron
skin darkened by years of exposure to the
unsoftened radiation of space.
He and his next of rank, Lieutenant K'kan of
Mars, commanded an operational crew that
comprised three pilots, a chief engineer and two
assistants, three space-mechanics and four deck-
hands.
Distinct from these fifteen members of the
operational crew were the guards of the convicts.
7
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Marshal Ezra Gurney was guard-commander, with
Joan Randall and young Rih Quili of Mercury as
his sub-officers. They commanded eight non-coms
of the Patrol, who watched over the convicts.
Curt Newton and the Futuremen had gathered
with Ezra and Joan and the captain in the chart-
room just abaft the bridge.
"I don't say Kim Ivan is plotting anything," Curt
answered the captain's question. "But I do say that
if he had something in his mind, he'd prevent the
convicts from staging any premature outbreak -- as
he has."
Ezra Gurney snorted. "Cap'n Future. I got all the
respect in the world for your judgment, but this
time I think you're chasin' comets. How the devil
can Kim Ivan or anybody else pull off anything,
when they're locked up tight in cells that they won't
leave till we reach Cerberus?"
"Men can get out even a chromaloy cell, if they
have the right tools," Curt answered significantly.
"And men like Kim Ivan and that snake Moremos
had criminal friends who would have been glad to
smuggle things to them."
"Not a chance!" Ezra affirmed. "I'll stake my life
that not one of those space-scum has any kind of
tool or instrument."
"You searched them when they were brought
aboard?" Curt asked.
"What kind of amateur outfit do you think the
Patrol is?" Ezra demanded injuredly. "O' course we
searched them. We used the X-Ray 'scanner' on
each convict as he was brought into the ship."
"Did you 'scan' the cells, too, to make certain
that nothing had been planted in them?" Captain
Future asked keenly.
"No, we didn't do that, but there wasn't any need
to," the old marshal declared. "The Vulcan was
always under guard, and nothin' could have been
planted in her."
"Nevertheless, I'd like to use the 'scanner' on the
cells now," Curt said. "Any objection?"
"Oh, no, if it'll ease your mind any," growled
Ezra. He glanced winkingly at Joan as he added,
"You're sure takin' a lot of precautions, Cap'n
Future. Must be somebody aboard you're worried
about."
RAG and Otho, bored by the discussion,
had got into one of their interminable
arguments. Curt left them with Joan, and went
down with Captain Theron and Ezra and the Brain
G
to conduct his inspection.
The Vulcan, as a former small liner, was built
along standard lines. It had three main decks, one
above the other. Top-deck held the big bridge-
room, the operational and chart rooms, and officer
quarters. The little cabins occupied by the Patrol
officers and by the Futuremen were in the rear part
of this deck.
The mid-deck, which had formerly contained
passenger cabins, had been redesigned into a cell-
deck. Entrance to it was only through two massive
chromaloy doors, one fore and one aft. Both were
locked and had guards posted outside them at all
hours.
The cyc-deck, as the lower deck of a liner was
usually called, was a noisy, crowded place. It's fore
part was crowded with fuel tanks and supply-
rooms, and the whole stern of this lowest deck was
the big cyc-room in which the huge atomic
generators droned away to feed streams of atomic
power to the great rocket-tubes.
Captain Future and Simon and the captain
followed the old marshal down the zigzag
companionway to the fore door of the mid-deck. It
was locked, and two armed Patrol officers stood
guard outside it.
"Open her up an' bring the X-Ray 'scanner',"
Ezra Gurney drawled to the guards. "We're goin' to
run a little inspection."
The "scanner" was brought by one guard while
the other unlocked the massive door. The
instrument looked like a powerful searchlight,
beside which was mounted an eyepiece that
resembled binocular tubes.
When Curt Newton entered the cell-deck
corridor with the others, a low, muttering growl ran
along the crowded cells. It quickly sudsided, but the
caged criminals glared in silent hate at the tall,
redhaired planeteer who was the greatest enemy of
their kind.
"You can see that these cell-doors can only be
opened by the outside control," Ezra Gurney was
saying to Curt. "Furthermore, this whole deck, like
the other compartments of the ship, can be
exhausted of air by the master-valves up in the
bridge-room. If these fellows started anythin', we
could kill 'em all in five minutes and they know it."
"You certainly must admit that there is no
chance of a break here, Captain Future," said
Captain Theron relievedly.
"It's a good, tight set-up," Curt admitted.
8
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"Nevertheless, I'd like to 'scan' the cells. Wheel the
machine along, will you, Ezra?"
He began his X-Ray inspection of each cell
along the corridor. The, searchlight projector of the
scanner flooded each cell in turn with invisible
Roentgen rays. Through the fluoroscopic eyepiece,
Curt Newton could have seen the tiniest scrap of
metal in the cells.
But there was nothing. The gray-clad convicts
had not even any metal in their plastic belt-buckles
or shoes. Even their dishes, water-jugs and eating
utensils were of soft fiber or unbaked clay.
Curt paused as he reached John Rollinger's cell.
The mad Earthman had been confined in a cell to
himself. He sat muttering in a corner, paying no
attention to Captain Future's inspection.
"Hello, Rollinger -- how are you feeling?" Curt
asked him.
The ex-scientist stared at him, but made no
answer. His haggard face and peculiarly burning
eyes gave them all a creepy sensation.
"Hate to see a man with his mind shot like that,"
muttered Ezra in a low voice. " 'Specially, a man as
brilliant as he was."
John Rollinger had been a famous biophysicist,
Curt knew. He had specialized in encephalographic
research, testing the effect of various form of
radiation upon the human brain. Boldly using
himself as a subject, he was supposed to have
shattered his mind in his experiment.
"I wonder if he's really as mad as he looks,"
Captain Theron said skeptically. "The prosecution
at his trial maintained he killed his colleague in a
quarrel, and then used faked insanity to excuse
himself."
"Well, if he's fakin', it hasn't done him much
good," Ezra shrugged. "They sentenced him to
Cerberus just the same, for a homicidal maniac has
to be locked up just the same as a deliberate killer."
OREMOS, the slender and wiry
Venusian murderer in the next cell,
glared at Captain Future in silent hatred as his cell
was "scanned."
M
But Kim Ivan, the big, battered Martian who
shared a neighboring cell with Boraboll, fat
Uranian swindler, greeted Curt with a calm grin.
"Nice of you to come down and visit us boys,
Future," said the big pirate. His froglike grin
deepened. "Looking for something special?" Curt
scanned that cell twice running before he answered.
But there was no tool, instrument or tiniest scrap of
metal anywhere in it, nothing whatever hidden. He
looked up at the grinning pirate.
"You've kept things here pretty quiet, Kim," he
remarked. "You seem to have the others pretty well
under control."
"Sure, I won't let 'em start any trouble," Kim
Ivan affirmed. "I'm a peace-loving man, that's why."
Ezra snorted. "A peace-loving man who led the
biggest pirate band since Rok Olor was on the
loose."
The big pirate laughed. "Aw, that's all over and
done with now. I tell the boys, what's the use of
beating our brains out against these bars, when all
it'll get us is six months' solitary when we reach
Cerberus."
Curt Newton finished his close inspection of the
cells. When they had gone back of the cell-deck,
and its massive door was again locked and under
guard, Ezra Gurney challenged him.
"Didn't find anythin', did you?"
"No, not a thing," Curt admitted. "There's no
tool or weapon of any kind hidden in those cells,
that's sure."
"We Patrol men ain't as sleepy as you seem to
think," the old marshal told him. "Those birds are
safe till we reach Cerberus, never fear."
His apprehension somewhat dispelled, Curt had
felt less worried about Joan's safety during the long
days of the voyage that followed. At each world
where they stopped, the new prisoners brought,
aboard were thoroughly scanned. But no attempt to
smuggle tools or weapons was detected.
Now they were drawing near to Neptune. The
eighth planet was still more than a billion miles
ahead, but that was only a few days of travel at the
great speed with which the Vulcan was flying
through space.
At dinner in the officers' mess that "evening"
before the night watch, Ezra commented upon their
approaching stop at the Water World.
"Remember last time you Futuremen an' Joan an'
I were out here, Cap'n Future? It was when we were
after the Wrecker."
Curt nodded grimly. "I'm not likely to forget
what happened to me on Neptune that time, up in
the Black Isles."
"Can you tell us about it, Captain Future?"
eagerly asked Rih Quili, the young Mercurian
lieutenant, with hero-worship in his voice.
"Some other time," evaded Curt, unwilling to
9
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
recall near-tragic memories.
"We've all finished dinner now."
"I ha-haven't finished my p-p-prunes," hastily
stuttered George McClinton, the chief engineer.
There was a burst of laughter. McClinton, a
lanky, spectacled, stammering young Earthman,
was the butt of constant jokes because of his
inordinate fondness for prunes. He always kept his
pocket full of dried ones, which he munched
ceaselessly as he supervised the cyc-room.
"If we wait till you have enough prunes, we'll be
here forever," Ezra said dryly, getting up. "I'm goin'
to turn in."
When Curt and Joan and Otho went to the
bridge-dack, they found Grag leaning against a
section of glassite window and looking
disconsolately back toward Earth. The big robot
turned to them.
"I wonder how Eek is getting along, back
home," Grag said anxiously. "I wish I had brought
him with me."
EK was a queer little interplanetary animal
that was Grag's mascot. Otho had a
somewhat similar pet, which he called Oog. Both
pets had been left in the Futuremen's Moon-
laboratory when they had flown to Earth on the
errand that had unexpectedly resulted in this long
voyage.
E
"Eek will be all right, Grag," reassured Curt.
"The automatic feeding-arrangement in the Moon-
laboratory will keep him fat and happy."
"I know, but he'll nearly die of loneliness
because I'm not there," Grag affirmed. "He's such a
sentimental little fellow."
"Sentimental? That miserable little moon-pup?"
cried Otho jeeringly. "Why, all that little pest
knows is to eat and sleep. He has about as much
sentiment in him as a Venusian fish."
Grag swung wrathfully on the android. "Why,
you cockeyed rubber imitation of a man, if you
slander little Eek like that again, I'll --"
Captain Future and Joan, chuckling, left them to
the inevitable argument which might go on now for
an hour. It was the favorite method of passing time
for Grag and Otho, to find new insults for each
other. Curt and the girl went back to a deck-
window out of earshot.
The silence of the night watch reigned over the
ship. Its cycs and rocket-tubes had been cut, for its
speed of inertia was now great. In an unnatural
stillness the Vulcan rushed on and on through the
vast. star-decked vault toward the distant green
speck of Neptune.
The vista from their window was a magnificent
one. The golden eyes of a million million suns
steadily watched the soundless rushing ship. Jupiter
was a white blob away back to the left, and the sun
itself was only a little, fiery disk far astern. Far out
in the void, they could glimpse a tiny red light
creeping Sunward across the starry background.
"That will be the bi-weekly Pluto-Earth liner,"
remarked Curt Newton.
Joan's brown eyes watched wistfully. "Don't you
wish we were aboard her, Curt? There'll be lights,
music, dancing."
Curt looked down at her. "What's the matter,
Joan? Is this trip getting on your nerves?"
She smiled ruefully. "A little, I'm afraid. We're
so different from any other ship, with our cargo of
human misery and hate. I wake up sometimes
dreaming that the Vulcan will sail on like this
forever."
Curt nodded soberly. "Like the dead space-ship
in Oliver Owen's poem. Remember?
" 'Darkling she drifts toward the
outer dark,
Silently falling, into eternity.'"
"Beautiful, but depressing," Joan said, with a
little shudder. She turned away. "I'm going to turn
in, too. I have the guard-command in the next
watch."
Captain Future went back to his own little cabin.
The Brain was there, his square case resting
quiescent upon a small table. But Simon did not
look up or speak when he entered. His lens-eyes
stared unseeingly.
Curt knew that the Brain was deep in one of his
unfathomable reveries of speculation. Simon's cold,
intellectual mind could lose itself for hours in
contemplation of scientific problems. It was his
method of relaxation when he had no laboratory for
his endless researches.
Curt Newton slept soundly. Yet when he
suddenly awakened an hour later, it was with every
nerve thrillingly alert. He listened. The big ship was
still rushing silently on through the vast deeps of
space.
Then to his ears came suddenly the sound of
distant yells and the crash of atom-guns. Instantly
10
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Curt was out of his bunk and plunging across the
cabin toward the door.
"Something's wrong! If the prisoners --"
The words died on his lips as he burst out into
the corridor. A mass of gray-clad convict were
pouring into the fore end of the passage, In their
front rank was Moremos, the Venusian murderer,
grasping an atom-gun.
He aimed instantly at Captain Future. And Joan
Randall, who was emerging hastily from her cabin,
was plunging directly into the line of his aim.
CHAPTER III
Jailbreak
DOWN in the cell-
deck, a few hours before,
an odd atmosphere of,
tension gripped the scores
of prisoners as the night-
watch began.
The massive doors at
the fore and aft ends of the
deck had been and locked
by the Patrol officers, who
were now standing guard,
outside them. A few
uranite bulbs in the ceiling
cast a vague, dim light
upon the shining chromaloy bars and the shadowed,
brutal faces behind them.
The hissing whisper of Moremos traveled along
the row of barred doors. The Venusian's sibilant
voice was silkily vicious as he addressed the big
Martian pirate in a neighboring cell.
"We're only three or four days out of Neptune --
I heard a guard say so today. I thought you were
going to get us out of here before we reached
Neptune, Kim Ivan?"
"Yes, what about it, Kim?" asked a squat Jovian
killer's rumbling voice. "You've been telling us all
the way to keep quiet and that you'd manage a
break, but you haven't done anything yet."
"He's just been stringing us along to keep us
quiet," accused the quavering voice of a white-
haired, rial-chewing Saturnian, a hoary old sinner
named Thuhlus Thuun. "I'll lay that the Patrol men
put him up to giving us that story ."
A fierce, low babble of accusations, threats and
demands instantly arose from the prisoners. All
were addressed to the big Martian.
Then Kim Ivan's deep voice cut through the
babble, in low, harsh command. "Cut your blasts,
you chattering space-monkeys! Do you want the
guards coming in here?"
The authority in his voice, the authority that had
made this towering Martian one of the great pirate
leaders of his time, again silenced them.
"I said I'd stage a break, and I will," Kim Ivan
continued harshly. "And what's more, tonight's the
night for it."
An electric spark of excitement seemed to leap
along the crowded cells at his statement. The voices
broke out again, but in eager questions now.
"What's your plan, Kim? How are you going to
get us out of these cursed cells"
"You'll soon find out," the big Martian
promised. "Now shut off your cycs and keep quiet
while I start."
The prisoners instantly became still, though all
pressed against the bars of their cells in a surge of
sudden hope. The only sound was the low,
monotonous muttering from the cell of John
Rollinger.
Kim Ivan turned to his cell-mate. His fellow
prisoner was Boraboll the swindler, a fat Uranian
whose moon-like yellow face was ludicrous as he
gaped at the big Martian.
"Kim, can you really do it?" he squeaked. "How
are you so much as going to get out of this cell,
when you have nothing to work with?"
"I have all I need," Kim Ivan replied. "My old
pals on the outside smuggled the stuff to me, before
we ever left Earth, It's hidden right here in the cell
with us."
"Are you crazy?" gasped Boraboll. "There's
nothing hidden in here, not so much as a pin. The
X-Ray scanner would have detected it if there was."
"The cursed scanner wouldn't ever find my
equipment," Kim Ivan replied, with a chuckle. He
was stripping off his gray convict jacket, and there
was a look of triumph on his massive, battered face
as he added, "I've got wit enough to outsmart the
Patrol, every time."
Boraboll watched him, open-mouthed. The big
Martian had filled the biggest of their soft food-
dishes with water from the fiber jug. Now Kim Ivan
tore a sleeve off his jacket, and bent over the dish
of water.
"Cell-crazy!" muttered the fat Uranian to himself
with sudden conviction. "He's gone clear cell-crazy.
11
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"He's as delirious as Rollinger."
Kim Ivan wadded up the sleeve of his jacket and
thrust it into the dish of water. He turned around,
with a sharp command.
"Now hand me that salt." Pityingly, Boraboll
handed him the little fiber container of salt. Kim
Ivan took it and squatted down, waiting and
watching the dish.
Gradually, a curious change came over the water
in that dish. It turned blue, as though it had
dissolved some dye or chemical in the jacket-sleeve
that was immersed in it. Kim Ivan waited until the
water was a dark blue color, before taking out the
wadded sleeve.
"Now the reagent," muttered the big Martian,
and poured a carefully estimated quantity of salt
into the dark blue liquid.
The blue liquid began to seethe and boil, and
turned dark purple. Kim Ivan's massive face flashed
a light of triumph.
"It works!" he muttered exultantly. "Boraboll,
we're as good as out of here right now."
"But what is that stuff?" Boraboll stammered,
looking bewilderedly at the seething purple liquid.
"It's an acid that eats through the toughest metal
as though it were cheese," the big Martian retorted.
"The basic elements of the acid were mixed by a
smart outside chemist into a gluey mixture that was
soaked into a regulation convict jacket, and then
dried. The jacket was smuggled in to me by my
outside pals, along with plans of this ship."
He chuckled as he added, "The scanner couldn't
show the chemicals soaked into my jacket. But they
needed only to be dissolved into water, and then to
have ordinary sodium chloride added to the
solution, to form one of the most powerful metal
acids known. Now watch it work!"
Kim Ivan picked up the vessel of seething liquid,
and carefully poured a trickle of it upon the cross-
bars of the cell's barred door.
The purple liquid foamed and hissed, eating
swiftly into the tough chromaloy bars. Careful to
avoid splashing himself with the acid, the Martian
pirate continued the operation. In a few moments,
the crossbars were eaten through. He put down the
bowl of acid, and lifted out a whole section of the
door. Then he squeezed out into the corridor.
"Kim, how did you do it?" came the excited,
wondering exclamation of Grabo, the squat Jovian
criminal across the corridor.
"Can you get the rest of us out, too?" Moremos
asked swiftly. A chorus of amazement and excited
hope was rising from the rest of the convicts. Kim
Ivan quieted it with a wave of his big hand.
"Take it easy! I'll soon have you out of those
cursed cages."
The cell-doors did not have indidual locks. They
were all secured by a master electro-lock whose
controls were outside the cell-deck.
But Kim Ivan knew what he was doing. He
secured his receptacle of purple acid and stooped
over a certain section of the corridor floor.
"The main wiring for the electro-locks runs
under here," he muttered. "If the ship plans my pals
sent me are right."
He used a trickle of the acid to burn out a two-
foot section of the metal floor-plate. This exposed
the tangle of wiring inside the floor. Kim Ivan
studied it for several minutes, then began working
with the wires.
Presently, his work bore results. With a loud
clicking, all the locks of the scores of cell-doors
drew their bolts. He had actuated the master control
of the locks.
The convicts swarmed instantly out into the
corridor. Brutal faces of Earthmen, Venusians,
Jovians, Saturnians blazed with fierce hope.
"You've done wonders, Kim," Moremos
applauded tensely. "But now what?"
"Now," answered the big Martian with a flash in
his eyes, "we're going to seize the ship! Then ho for
freedom!"
"The Patrol will hunt us down no matter where
we go, once they find out we've seized the Vulcan,"
muttered fat Boraboll doubtingly.
"Don't worry, I've got a plan," reassured the
Martian. "The Patrol will never catch up to us
where I'm figuring on going."
Tuhlus Thuun, the hoary old Saturnian pirate,
spat rial juice on the floor and demanded, "How're
we going to grab the ship? We're locked on this
deck, with Patrol men on guard outside both
doors."
Kim Ivan grinned. "There's another way out of
here. The ship-plans showed that when this craft
was a liner, it had an emergency escape-hatch
leading from this passenger-deck to the top-deck.
The hatch was walled shut when they made this a
prison ship. But I know where it is."
E APPROACHED a blank section of
metal wall between two cells midway inH
12
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
the main corridor. Motioning the others
peremptorily to stand back, the Martian poured his
remaining purple acid upon that wall.
The liquid hissed and burned into the metal
panel. In a few moments, it had eaten out a big
section. Through the hole they looked into a dark,
small escape-hatch whose ladders ran up toward the
top-deck.
Kim Ivan faced the swarming, eager convicts
grimly. "Now listen to me. I'm running this show,
and anyone who doesn't like that can speak up right
now."
There was no challenge to the authority of the
towering, hard-faced Martian pirate. But a shrill
voice back in the throng laughed wildly.
"It's only that crazy Rollinger," muttered
Moremos. He viciously shoved the staring, mad-
eyed Earthman back into his cell.
"This hatch will let us out into the forepart of the
top-deck," Kim Ivan continued rapidly. "We'll jump
first on the ship officers on duty in the bridge and
chart-rooms. Once we have their guns, we can
overpower the others before they're awake enough
to know what's going on. But no massacre --
undertand?"
Moremos' green face stiffened. "You mean we're
not to blast down that devil Captain Future? He and
his cursed Futuremen have sent plenty of our pals
to Cerberus!"
A low growl of agreement came from the other
convicts.
"You blockheads, they are the most valuable
hostages we could have aboard, if we're not fools
enough to kill them!" lashed Kim Ivan. "And we
may need hostages once the Patrol starts hunting
us."
His grim reminder silenced them. "Now come
on!" the big Martian exclaimed. "If luck's with us,
we'll pull off a feat that'll go down in pirate
history!"
The mutineers poured up the escape-hatch after
their big leader. Kim Ivan opened the unsealed door
at its top, and they emerged with a sudden rush into
the top-deck just behind the chart-room.
Two pilots were on duty in the bridge ahead, and
Lieutenant K'kan was checking the drift-gauges in
the chart-room. The young Martian second officer
turned, appalled, and then reached swiftly toward
an alarm-button.
Kim Ivan's balled fist knocked him senseless
before he could press the button. Old Tuhlus Thuun
eagerly snatched up the officer's atom-pistol.
"Get that pilot, Grabo!" yelled the Martian
leader furiously.
One of the two pilots had evaded the Jovian
criminal and his group who had burst into the
bridge. The pilot, with a yell, was darting back
through the chart-room to escape.
Crash! The fiery blast from old Tuhlus Thuun's
gun cut the man down in mid-stride.
The old Saturnian cackled. "Ain't my aim yet!
First man I've led down for two years."
"You old fool, there wasn't any need that!" raged
Kim Ivan. I told you to --
Crash! Crash!
"Where the devil's the Moremos?" cried the
Martian furiously, striding hastily back toward the
main corridor of the top-deck.
Boraboll answered, his moon-like yellow face
muddy with fear. "Moremos killed Captain Theron
with his own gun! He and the others have gone
back for the Futuremen!"
"I might have known that murderous Venusian
couldn't hold his trigger!" roared Kim Ivan. "Come
on!"
They burst into the top-deck longitudinal
corridor, stumbling over the slain bodies of Captain
Theron, a Patrol guard and a deck-hand.
CHAPTER IV
Trapped
A TENSE tableau met
their eyes. Ahead of them,
Moremos and a half-
dozen other mutineers
were charging the stern
corridor. Captain Future's
tall figure had just burst
out of his cabin, and the
Venusian murderer was
raising his gun to fire at
the hated planeteer.
Curt Newton's draw
was the swiftest in the
Solar System. His proton-
pistol came out of his holster with the speed of
light. Yet he could not fire, for Joan at this moment
emerged into the corridor. She was between him
and the Venusian.
"Joan, get back!" he yelled to her. She hesitated
13
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
dazedly. Curt couldn't fire at the Venusian while
she stood between them. But Moremos, who had no
interest in the girl's safety, was going to shoot!
Curt's desperate expedient came with such
lightning speed that it seemed an instinctive
reaction rather than a deliberate decision.
He fired the blazing white bolt of his weapon,
aiming at the metal wall of the corridor beside
Joan. Most of the energy of the oblique blast
burned into the wall. But a part of that blazing blast
of force was reflected and deflected on along the
corridor toward the mutineers.
The deflected blast was not strong enough to be
fatal. But it was enough to scorch and daze
Moremos and the others. They recoiled.
Captain Future lunged forward, swept Joan
behind him, and triggered swiftly.
His blasts cut down two of the men beside
Moremos. The Venusian and the others hastily
darted back out of the corridor.
"Holy space-imps, what's going on?" It was
Otho, his green eyes blazing and his proton-gun in
his hand, who had emerged with Grag from the
cabin they shared. Ezra Gurney, too, was
scrambling startledly out.
"Mutiny!" Curt Newton cried. His voice was
bitter with self-reproach. "Just what I feared, and
yet I let it happen."
OUNG Rih Quili, the Mercurian
lieutenant, and another Patrol officer had
wakened and come out to join them.
Y
A stentorian voice echoed back to their little
group from the fore part of the top-deck. It
reverberated along the corridors.
"Future, will you and the others surrender? You
haven't got a chance. We hold the bridge and
control the ship."
"That's Kim Ivan," gritted Ezra. His thin hand
clenched upon his atom-gun and he started forward.
"I'll show that cursed Martian!"
Grag and Otho started forward with him, but
Curt Newton held them back. "Don't be foolish!
There're scores of convicts up there and they've got
all the guns in the arsenal by now. They' d get us no
matter how many of them we got first."
He glanced swiftly around, his gray eyes
snapping. "We can't stay here. They'll come up the
aft companionway, and then they'll have us caught
between them. We'd better retreat down the aft stair
to the cyc-room. If we can hold the cyc-room
against them, we'll get the upper hand over them
yet."
"I get it!" exclaimed Otho. "If we hold the cyc-
room, we can keep the cycs shut off and prevent
them from taking the ship anywhere save Neptune."
Hastily, the little party entered the aft
companionway and went down its short, zigzag
stair to the lowest deck of the Vulcan.
The big cyc-room took up the whole rear half of
this deck. It was crowded with machinery -- the
huge, massive, cylindrical cyclotrons, the tangle of
fuel pipes and power-leads, the squat generators of
the auxiliary drive whose vibration-thrust was used
only in emergencies.
George McClinton ran bewilderedly toward
them. The lanky young chief engineer had
apparently just been aroused from his nearby bunk
by the Neptunian engineer on duty. He was
automatically popping a dried prune into his mouth,
as his spectacled eyes blinked at them amazedly.
"Wh-what's going on?" he stammered. "Orluk
says that he h-h-heard shooting --"
"The cursed convicts have grabbed the bridge-
room and upper decks!" answered Ezra Gurney, his
faded eyes still raging.
C APTAIN FUTURE was snapping orders.
"Grag, you and Rih Quili lock the fore door and
watch it. Otho, take the aft door."
"You're not h-hurt, are you, M-m-miss Randall?"
the prune-loving engineer was asking anxiously of
Joan.
"I'm all right," she said. "But I've failed in my
duty. This is the first time there has ever been a
break on the Vulcan."
"It's more my fault than yours or Ezra's," Curt
said bitterly. "I felt all along that that desperate
bunch might try something. That's why I came
along and took all the precautions I could. But they
somehow outsmarted me."
There was a loud hammering at the fore and aft
doors of the cyc-room. The mutineers had
apparently discovered the whereabouts of the
group.
"They can't break in here," Ezra muttered
hopefully. "They know if they do, we'll blast 'em
down as fast as they come through the door."
Curt was searching the crowded cyc-room with
intent gray eyes. "Are there any space-suits down
here?" he asked McClinton.
"N-n-no," stuttered the lanky engineer
wonderingly. "Suits aren't ever k-kept down here,
for there's n-n-no need for them here."
14
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"We'll need them pretty quickly, if my guess is
right," Curt exclaimed. He pointed at two big
valves inset in niches in the thick wall of the cyc-
room. "Those are air-exhaust valves, controlled
from the bridge-room. They're part of the valve
system designed to make possible the exhaustion of
air from any section of the ship."
"Good God, I forgot all 'bout those exhausts!"
cried Ezra, aghast. "They were intended to enable
the ship's commander to quell any convict mutiny
in any part of the ship. If the convicts learn about
'em and turn 'em against us --"
"They will, and quickly," Curt snapped. "That
Kim Ivan seems to know all about this ship. Can
we fix those valves to keep them from being
opened?"
"There's n-n-no way!" answered McClinton,
paling. "Operation of the v-v-valves is all by r-r-
remote control through w-wires in the w-walls."
"Then we've got to weld metal patches over the
valve-niches -- and quickly!" Captain Future cried.
"You've got atomic welding-torches here? Get them
out, and bring some sheet metal stock."
As they started to work with the sputtering
atomic torches to cut metal patches that would seal
the exhaust-valve openings, the hammering on the
doors ceased.
Grag, Otho, Rih Quili and Ezra remained on
guard inside those doors while Curt and McClinton
worked hastily.
Before they had even cut out the first metal
patch, a loud voice bellowed through the cyc-room.
It came from the interphone that connected with the
bridge.
"Captain Future!" it bellowed.
"This is Kim Ivan talking. We've taken the
whole ship except the cyc-room. You haven't a
chance. Unless you open the fore door and toss out
your atom-guns, I'm going to open the cyc-room
exhaust-valves."
"That Martian devil!" gritted Ezra Gurney
furiously. "He knew about the valve-system, all
right."
"What about it, Future?" bellowed the Martian's
voice. "I'm going to give you two minutes. Unless
you agree by then, the valves open!"
Stricken by the threat, the others looked at Curt.
His bronzed-face was a taut mask as he assessed
their hopeless situation.
HEY could not seal the deadly valves in
two minutes. That job would take a half
hour, at least. Long before they finished it, the
valves would be opened and the air would puff out
of the cyc-room, slaying them all.
T
"They've got the doors locked on the other side
now, chief!" Otho reported.
"So we can't come out fighting," Curt gritted.
His eyes swung to Joan. Then he stepped to the
interphone. "Captain Future speaking, Kim Ivan!
What assurance have we that if we do surrender
you won't blast down every one of us?"
"If I wanted to kill you, I could do it right now
by opening the cyc-room exhaust valves," retorted
Kim Ivan. "I want to keep you for hostages. If the
Patrol catches up to us, you'll be valuable to us. I
give you my word that if you surrender, none of
you will be harmed."
15
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Curt looked at the others in his silent group.
"You all heard. What's your decision?"
"Looks like there ain't any choice," muttered
Ezra somberly. "We can either die right now, or
accept Kim Ivan's proposition. It's to his interest to
keep us alive as hostages, all right. An', black-
hearted pirate though he is, he's got the reputation
of keepin' his word."
Captain Future and the Futuremen might have
taken their chance and refused surrender, by
themselves. But to sentence Joan to death?
Curt's mind was decided by the threat to the girl.
He turned and spoke slowly into the interphone.
"All right, Kim Ivan. We agree."
HE words were bitter in his mouth. It was
almost the first time the Futurernen had
acknowledged defeat and made quiet surrender.
T
Otho's eyes were blazing, and Grag's huge metal
figure was still rigidly ready for action.
But the Brain's chill, logical mind approved.
"It is all we can do," rasped Simon. "While we
live, we have a chance of reversing the situation."
Curt unlocked the fore-door, which had now
been unbolted outside also. Silently, he cast their
atom-guns out onto the landing.
Instantly, convicts appeared out there and
snatched up the weapons. Then the fierce, exultant
crowd swarmed into the cyc-room with Kim Ivan's
towering figure leading them.
The big Martian's battered red face was jovial
with high good humor at his success. But
Moremos, the Venusian, glared at the Futuremen
with a hatred reflected on the fierce faces of most
of the other mutineers.
Curt ignored the threat in their tigerish stare.
"What have you done with Captain Theron and the
others?" he demanded.
Kim Ivan looked uncomfortable. "They're dead,
all except four crewmen. I told the boys there didn't
need to be any killing, but they didn't follow my
orders. That's your fault, Moremos."
Moremos had a sneer on his emerald-hued face
as he answered the Martian. "You're too chicken-
hearted, Kim. If I had my way, we'd blast down all
the rest of them right now. Why should we let
Future and his pals live, when we've got a chance to
wipe them out?"
The Venusian's venomous words kindled
explosive agreement among the majority of the
mutineers.
"Moremos is right!" roared Grabo, the squat
Jovian. "Future and his bunch have sent lots of
good lads to Cerberus. Now we can pay 'em off."
Kim Ivan's bull bellow rose above the fierce
tumult. "I'm giving the orders here and I say we
don't kill these prisoners."
His voice rang with contempt. "Are you all so
thick-headed you can't see our danger? When the
Vulcan fails to arrive at Neptune a few days from
now, the whole Patrol will start out looking for it. If
they overtake us, we'll have these prisoners as
hostages."
His grim reminder of the Planet Patrol seemed to
sober the mutineers somewhat. Every one of them
had good reason to know the remorseless efficiency
of that great organization.
"The Patrol will hunt us till they find us, all
right," muttered fat Boraboll nervously. "They'll
comb the whole Solar System."
"They will," Kim Ivan agreed. "But they won't
find us if you agree to my proposal. I propose that
we leave the System altogether."
APTAIN FUTURE and his fellow-captives
were as startled by that proposal as were
the mutineers.
C
"Leave the system?" gasped Grabo, the Jovian.
"What do you mean?"
Kim Ivan's eyes flashed. "I've thought it all out.
If we stay in the System, no matter what wild moon
or asteroid we hide on, the Patrol will finally find
us. Our only chance is to leave this Solar System
forever."
He swept his hand in a grandiloquent gesture.
"Out there beyond Pluto's orbit is a whole universe
for our refuge! Out there across the interstellar void
are stars and worlds beyond number. You know
that exploring expeditions have already visited the
worlds of Alpha Centauri, and returned. They found
those worlds wild and strange, but habitable."
The Martian's voice deepened. "I propose that
we steer for Alpha Centauri. It's billions of miles
away, I know. But we can use the auxiliary
vibration-drive to pump this ship gradually up to a
speed that will take it to that other star in several
months. We have enough supplies for that long a
voyage. Once there, we'll have whole worlds for
our own! We can easily dominate the primitive
peoples that were found on those worlds."
The sheer audacity of the proposition held the
mutineers in stunned silence.
Then Curt Newton saw their faces kindle with
16
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
excitement.
"Kim's right!" exclaimed Grabo. "If we stay here
in the System we'll be caught and sent to Cerberus
sooner or later."
"I say, let's go," shrilled old Tuhlus Thuun. "The
voyage may be long, but at the end of it there'll be
whole new worlds to loot."
Boraboll, the fat Uranian, looked scared. "We
don't know what we'll run into out in uncharted
outer space. It's a terrible risk."
"The risk is no greater than the one we'll run if
we stay here in the System," Grabo retorted. "We're
with you, Kim. It's starward ho!"
Stunned by dismay at what the daring decision
meant to them, the Futuremen and their fellow-
captives heard the mutineers' fierce, excited chorus
of agreement.
"Starward ho!"
CHAPTER V
Wrecked
SHUDDERING and
creaking, the Vulcan
hurtled out into the great
deeps of interstellar space
at the highest speed of its
rocket-tubes. Days ago it
had crossed the Line, as
the orbit of Pluto was
called.
It was already more
than four billion miles out
into the vast abyss that
stretches between the
stars.
As yet the mutineers had not dared make use of
the auxiliary vibration-drive. For the powerful
propulsion vibrations of that mechanism set up a
peculiar excitation of the ether which could be
spotted at great distances by the instruments of the
Planet Patrol. Not until they were still farther from
the System could the high speed drive be safely
used.
Down in the cell-deck, in one of whose cells he
was confined, old Ezra Gurney gloomily considered
their situation.
"We're a couple o'billion miles from the System
now. Soon as we get a little farther, there won't be
any chance o' the Patrol overtakin' us. Then we
won't be any more use to these space-scum as
hostages."
"You think they'll murder us then?" asked Joan
Randall incredulously from her own cell. "But Kim
Ivan gave his word they woudn't."
"I know, an' Kim Ivan would proba'ly keep his
word, but the others won't," Ezra predicted
pessimistically. "That snake Moremos an' the rest
like him are just achin' to put the blast on all of us."
Curt Newton, confined in his own separate cell,
looked anxiously across the corridor at the barred
door of Joan's cell.
"It's my fault, letting you in for this," he said
ruefully. "I was overconfident, and they tricked me
neatly."
"You know that isn't so, Curt," Joan denied
staunchly. "The Patrol was in charge of this ship,
and we fell down in spite of all your warnings."
The shrill, insane laugh of the crazed Earthman
scientist came from farther down the corridor.
"I said that there was death on this ship!"
They had been imprisoned here for days, ever
since the mutineers' seizure of the ship. The
electrolock cables had been repaired by Kim Ivan,
and the Futureman and others had been confined in
separate cells. Two mutineers armed with atom-
guns constantly watched in the corridor.
There were fifteen of them imprisoned here.
Beside the Futuremen and Ezra and Joan, there
were George McClinton, the stuttering chief
engineer, and his two assistants; Rih Quili, the
young Mercurian lieutenant; three space-hands and
one Patrol guardsman; and John Rollinger, whose
insane babbling had so exasperated the mutineers
that they had reconfined him.
"If ever I get my hands on that Kim Ivan," Grag's
rumbling voice threatened, "I'll tear him into little
bits -- slowly."
"You'll do nothing of the kind!" promptly,
asserted Otho's hissing voice. "You'll simply watch
while I give him the Venusian water-torture."
George McClinton, the lanky chief engineer,
was arguing through his bars with their two guards.
"l t-t-tell you, you've got to give me some p-p-
prunes with my rations! I'm s-starving for l-lack of
them."
"Cut your blasts, all of you!" ordered the guards
harshly. "You people are lucky just to be living yet
-- you don't know how lucky."
Silence fall upon the dim-lit deck of cells.
Captain Future squatted down against the front wall
of his own cell, and seemed to doze.
17
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Actually, Curt had never been more awake. His
position concealed from the vigilant guards the fact
that his left hand was twirling a rude little metal
drill which was biting ever deeper into the metal
floor.
Curt had not been idle during these days. From
the moment of their capture, he had racked his
brain for an expedient by means of which he might
turn the tables on their captors. He had found one
slim chance.
The control-cables of the master electro-locks
ran beneath the corridor floor just outside his cell.
If he could drill through the floor of his cell, out
beneath its wall, he could short-circuit the cables as
Kim Ivan had done, and thus unlock all their cell
doors.
He had nothing to drill with. They had all been
thoroughly searched with the scanner when they
were locked in. His cell contained nothing but the
fiber and clay dishes for food and water, and a flat
metal bunk. But Captain Future had managed to
unbolt one of the metal rods that supported his
bunk. It was of harder metal than the floor.
ATIENTLY, Curt had shaped the end of
this rod into a drill by grinding it against his
bunk-edge. For days now, he had been using it to
drill surreptitiously through his cell-floor toward
the lock cables. He could work only in moments
when the guards were not directly watching him.
But his hopes were fast rising as he felt himself
nearing the vital cables.
P
Suddenly the rough voice of Grabo, the Jovian,
interrupted Curt's tensely hopeful work.
"Fetch Captain Future out of his cell," the Jovian
pirate was ordering the two guards in the corridor.
"Kim Ivan's orders."
Curt Newton's heart sank. Had they discovered
his secret labors?
His cell door was unlocked separately. He had
already hastily secreted his drill by restoring it to
position as a support of the bunk. Curt stepped
obediently into the corridor, the two guards
covering him with the guns.
The red-haired planeteer looked at Grabo with
cool inquiry. "What does Kim Ivan want with me?"
"You'll find out on the bridge," the Jovian
answered harshly. "Get moving. One of you guards
come along to cover him."
Grabo himself was not armed. Brawls among the
mutineers during the first days had resulted in so
many killings that Kim Ivan had decreed that only
the guards of the prisoners should henceforth carry
atom-guns.
Curt walked calmly ahead of the Jovian and the
watchful guard, up to the bridge-room. Old Tuhlus
Thuun was in the pilot-chair. The hoary Saturnian
criminal looked nervous, and there was a worried
expression on big Kim Ivan's massive red face.
Moremos was arguing angrily with them.
The broad sheet of the pilot-window, above the
complex instrument panel, framed a glittering vista
of interstellar space. The firmament was a great
drift of stars, amid which the white spark of Alpha
Centauri shone like a beacon in a direction dead
ahead.
Curt Newton's practised eyes, noticed at once the
tiny red lights winking and flashing on the
instrument- panel, and the buzzers whirring.
"Future, we need some help," Kim Ivan told
Curt bluntly. "We're running into something out
here, I don't know what. Tuhlus Thuun can't figure
it out, either."
"I never did any piloting outside the System
before," angrily defended the old Saturnian pirate.
"Everything is cockeyed out here beyond the Line."
"You've been out here in deep space before,
Future," Kim Ivan said to Curt. "Can you figure out
what's got our instruments acting crazy?"
"Suppose I do, will you turn around and go back
to land us on Pluto?" Captain Future demanded.
T WAS Joan's safety he was thinking of.
There was a chance that he could bargain
them into at least releasing the girl.
I
Before Kim Ivan could reply, Moremos
answered for him. The venomous Venusian
murderer thrust his head toward Curt like a striking
swamp adder of his native world. as he hissed:
"No! You're not dictating to anybody now,
Future! You'll either help us out or we'll blast you
down here and now."
"Go ahead and blast." Curt retorted. "It won't get
you out of your troubles. And you'll have plenty of
trouble, piloting deep space."
He was bluffing, trying to high-pressure them
into agreeing to the bargain he had proposed. And
Kim Ivan called his bluff.
"You're not fooling anybody, Captain Future,"
said the big Martian. "You won't let this ship be
wrecked for lack of your help. Because if it's
wrecked, the Randall girl dies -- and you think
plenty of her."
18
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Curt winced. It was true. They held a trump card
in the fact that Joan's safety was tied up with that of
the ship.
"Let me see those instruments," Curt said
shortly, admitting defeat. He still had his secret
plan of escape, he was thinking.
Old Tuhlus Thuun began a voluble explanation.
"I never saw instruments act so crazy! They
indicate a meteor-swarm or some other celestial
body near us, but the readings of its position they
give are impossible!"
"That's because you're not allowing for ether-
drift and relativity space-warp," Captain Future told
him. "Out here in deep space, you have to correct
for those factors."
His keen gray eyes swung along the deep bank
of complicated dials. The red tell-tale lights under
four of the meteorometers were blinking.
The readings of those meteorometers showed the
presence of a body of planetoidal dimensions,
several hundred thousand miles away. That was a
far greater distance than the instruments could
actually function. The reading was being distorted
by ether-drift and space-warp and must be
corrected.
Curt Newton hastily made nimble mental
calculations. Trained in the routine of correction by
his own former interstellar voyages, he rapidly
reached a mental approximation of the true
readings of the instruments.
"The body indicated by those readings is really
dead ahead of us!" he exclaimed. "Shift your course
three arcs to port!"
"God!" screeched Tuhlus Thuun, stiffening in
the pilot-chair and staring through the broad
window with dilated, bulging eyes.
For a heartbeat, they were all frozen by what
they saw as they followed the old Saturnian's gaze.
They were looking into the awful face of death.
In the starry darkness full ahead of the hurtling
ship, there had suddenly loomed up a spinning
world. It was no more than a hundred miles in
diameter. But it bulked gigantic as they raced
headlong toward it.
"Don't try to brake!" yelled Curt frantically to
the old Saturnian. "At this speed you'll pile us up."
His warning went unheeded. Terror-stricken by
the awful apparition ahead, Tuhlus Thunn madly
jammed the brake-blast pedal to the floor.
Next moment, the Vulcan seemed to explode
around them. The roaring shock sent the men in the
crowded bridge caroming into the walls.
Captain Future clutched a stanchion. He heard
the scream of tortured metal coincident with the
reverberations of the explosion.
He dragged himself erect. A dead silence
reigned, then was broken by oaths and cries of pain
from the other parts of the ship.
Kim Ivan, bleeding from a gash on his forehead,
dragged himself indomitably to his feet. "What's
happened?" he husked dazedly.
"The bow rocket-tubes have back-blasted!" Curt
cried. "You can't use full brake-blasts at the speed
we had -- inertia forces the blast back up the tubes.
I think the laterals let go, too."
"Look at that!" shouted Boraboll. The Uranian's
fat moon-face was a muddy yellow as he pointed
shakily ahead. "We're going to crash!"
A cold hand seemed to close around Curt
Newton's heart as he caught a glimpse through the
broad window. The tremendous force of the
disastrous brake-blast had sharply checked the
Vulcan's headlong rush toward the planetoid ahead.
But the crippled ship was still falling onward.
The uncharted little world already filled half the
19
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
starry heavens before them. The thin, feeble light
from the distant Sun vaguely illumined it. Dark,
dense forests were visible upon it. And at one point
on its surface, a great bed of smouldering volcanoes
flung a lurid red glow.
"This is your fault!" roared Kim Ivan to the
terrified old Saturnian.
"I lost my head!" shrilled Tuhlus Thuun. "I
jammed the brake-blast pedal before I realized."
Captain Future jumped to the interphone. He
called the cyc-room: "What happened down there?
Did the tail-tubes go, too?"
The scared, hoarse voice of the mutineer in
charge of the cyc-room answered him. "We got a
dozen dead men down here-half the cycs blew up
when the bow and lateral tubes back-blasted! The
tail-tubes didn't give way, though they seem to be
badly strained."
"Switch the power of the remaining cycs into the
tail rocket-tubes!" ordered Curt. "Then get out of
the cyc-room!"
He turned and hauled the stunned old Saturnian
out of the pilot-chair . "Give me those controls."
OREMOS leaped forward, deadly
suspicion on his face. "Wait a minute.
Future! You're not pulling any of your tricks!"
M
"Tricks, the devil!" flamed Curt. "We're falling
toward that planetoid, and in ten minutes we'll
crash. We can't get away, for the bow and lateral
tubes are blown, and the tail-tubes are strained and
can't be used for more than a few minutes of
firing."
He was seating himself in the pilotchair and
grabbing the space-stick as he talked. "If we crash
on that planetoid, everybody in the ship dies. I don't
care a curse about you pirates. But I've got friends
aboard. There's a chance I can make a safe
landing."
"Go ahead and try, then!" exclaimed Kim Ivan.
"Get back and give him room, the rest of you!"
The Vulcan was turning slowly over and over in
space as it fell at appallingly increasing speed
toward the mystery planetoid. Captain Future's eyes
tensely estimated the distance of the little world, by
the graduated scale etched in the glassite window.
The hundred-mile sphere now filled most of the
firmament. The edges of its dark green mass were
rimmed by a haze that told of a thin atmosphere.
Superhuman tension gripped the watching
criminals as the ship fell on toward doom. Curt's
brown face was like rock, his hands holding the
space-stick in the rigidly upright position that
would fire the tail rocket-tubes when he depressed
the cyc-pedal.
"We're going to hit in a minute!" quavered fat
Boraboll.
A wild scream came to their ears from the lower
part of the ship. The mad shriek of John Rollinger.
"Are you going to let us crash without even
trying?" roared Grabo to Captain Future.
The falling Vulcan was only miles above the
surface of the uncharted planetoid. They were
rushing down toward a convexity of green jungle in
the center of which glowed the evil red volcanoes
and lava-beds.
Air whistled outside the plunging ship, in a
rising roar. It was still turning over, as it fell.
Captain Future waited for one more turn.
"Do something, you fool!" yelled Boraboll in
terror.
"We're falling toward those volcanoes!" shouted
another of the mutineers. The iron-nerved Kim Ivan
silenced them. "Shut up and let him alone!"
The volcanic region of the mystery planetoid
stretched only a few miles beneath the plummeting
ship. The center of the infernal activity was a
double row of huge black craters separated by a
stupendous chasm. From the craters flowed lurid
crimson cataracts of molten rock that crept
sluggishly down toward vast black beds of solid-
crusted lava.
Curt Newton was estimating their speed of fall
by split-seconds. He knew that the tail-tubes upon
which all depended would stand but a few moments
of firing before their strained walls exploded. It
required all the superb spaceman's nerve to wait for
the Vulcan to turn once more. Yet he waited, till the
instruments showed its tail pointed straight down.
Curt's foot instantly jammed the cyc-pedal to the
floor. The roar of raving power that lanced
downward from the tubes flung him deep in the
pilot-chair and jammed the others against the wall.
The hull of the crippled ship grated and screamed
from the shock of deceleration.
"We're going to land in that lava!" cried Grabo.
APTAIN FUTURE saw the glowing red
river that flowed from two volcanoes
rushing up toward them. It was straight beneath the
slowing ship.
C
His hands flashed desperately to the bank of
20
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
individual rocket-tube throttles. He cut the tubes on
the starboard side of the tail.
The off-balance thrust of the remaining tubes
sent the falling Vulcan lurching to port. It sagged
down toward the black lava beds beyond the fiery
river. Instantly, Curt cut in all the tail-tubes again.
Crash! Crash! The flaming tail of the ship came
to rest upon the solid crust of lava. In a flash, he cut
all tubes. The ship toppled over on its side and lay
still.
"Good God, what a landing!" choked old Tuhlus
Thuun, hoarsely.
Curt Newton, his face haggard and dripping with
perspiration from superhuman strain, suddenly
raised his hand. "Listen!"
The momentary silence that had followed the
landing of the Vulcan was broken by ominous
cracking sounds beneath the ship. The prostrate
vessel shuddered violently as the cracking sounds
became louder
"We're sinking into the lava!" yelled a mutineer's
wild voice. "The ship's weight is cracking the solid
crust -- it's going to sink into the molten rock
beneath!"
With the cry came a louder cracking, and a sharp
lurching of the ship There was a screech of rending
metal plates. Scorching, superheated air laden with
choking sulphurous fumes flooded up through the
ship.
"She's going through the crust now!" bellowed
Kim Ivan. "Out of the ship, everybody!"
The mutineers scrambled madly down toward
the space-door of the cyc-deck. All else was
forgotten in the wild instinct to escape.
Curt Newton fought his way down the
companionway with the scrambling convicts. But it
was toward the mid-deck he was struggling.
He paused briefly outside its door to fling the
switch of the master electro-control. Then he
plunged into the cell-deck corridor. The guard in it
had aready fled.
"Joan! Ezra!" Curt cried chokingly through the
swirling smoke. "We've got to get out of here!"
Figures were stumbling out of the unlocked
cells, slipping upon the tilted floor, gasping as they
breathed the scorching sulphurous air.
Curt found the staggering figure of Joan and
steadied her with his arm. Ezra Gurney's grizzled
face appeared through the smoke, a big bruise upon
his cheek and his faded eyes wild.
"Name o' the Sun, what happened?" he was
crying.
The Brain's weird form flashed like a flying cube
through the swirling fumes to Curt's side, hastily
followed by Curt and Otho.
"Young Rih Quili was stunned by the shock --
he's lying in his cell!" cried Simon.
"I'll get him!" Captain Future yelled. "Ezra, get
Joan to the space-door! Otho, see to McClinton and
the crew-men!"
He plunged back to Rih Quili's cell and picked
up the unconscious young Mercurian. A sharper
lurch of the settling ship staggered him as he did so.
The sulphurous air was choking him. As the
fought up the tilted floor toward the door, he
glimpsed the dazed McClinton and other crewmen
being rushed by Otho toward the exit. Grag was
coolly waiting for Curt. Through the mad uproar, a
shrieking of mad laughter smote their ears.
"Rollinger's back there!" Curt gasped. "Grag!"
HE great robot, who did not breathe and
was not affected by the overpowering
fumes and heat, was already clanking back to the
madman's cell. He returned quickly, clutching the
insanely struggling scientist.
T
They tumbled down to the space-door. As they
reached it, a violent downward movement of the
sinking Vulcan threw them out.
Curt hit a surface of rough lava that was so
searingly hot that he cried out. He staggered up
with Rih Quili. Blinded by swirling smoke,
scorched by almost unendurable heat, he glimpsed
crevices cracking open in the solid crust around the
ship. Fiery red lava gushed from beneath.
"This way, Chief!" boomed Grag's tremendous
voice.
Captain Future struggled forward. The vague
figures of his friends and of the fleeing mutineers
were dimly visible in the smoke ahead.
Crack! The crust of lava shook violently under
their feet. Curt turned and through the smoke he
glimpsed the Vlucan's black hull sinking swiftly
into the hissing molten rock beneath the solid crust.
He stumbled on, choking, scorched, half-
blinded. Presently the air seemed a little purer. And
then it was no longer hot, jagged lava under his
feet, but black soil. He had reached the edge of the
lava-bed and was standing upon ground that sloped
gently in the dusky light toward a distant wall of
weird jungle.
Kim Ivan and the mutineers who had escaped
were standing here, but they paid no attention in
21
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
this moment to Captain Future and his group. The
convicts were staring strickenly out across the
smoking lava-field.
Curt Newton turned and looked. Out there in the
smoke, he saw the curved black hull of the Vulcan
finally disappearing beneath the cracked crust. A
pool of molten lava glowed redly where it had
been.
"She's gone," muttered the big Martian pirate.
A heavy silence followed, unbroken for long
minutes. The appalling enormity of the disaster was
coming home to them all.
Captain Future felt an iciness in his heart that he
had never before experienced, as he realized their
situation.
They were marooned here on an uncharted
island of space, more than four billion miles
outside the Solar System. A mere unknown speck
in the void, to which no other ship would ever
come.
They were utterly without tools or weapons.
And, worst of all, he and his friends and the girl he
loved had as fellow castaways more than a hundred
of the most dangerous criminals of the nine worlds,
every one of whom cherished a bitter enmity
toward him.
CHAPTER VI
Mystery Planetoid
NIGHT was creeping
across the little world, the
dusky day deepening into
complete darkness as the
bright star of the distant Sun
sank beneath the horizon.
From the brooding black
jungle in the distance, an
uncanny babble of weird
animal or bird calls came to
the ears of the stricken
castaways.
Their faces were drawn
and haggard in the lurid red light from the
volcanoes. From those towering black craters in the
east, evil-glowing rivers of molten lava crept
constantly downward like crawling snakes of fire.
Showers of burning ashes shot up ever and again
from the seething craters, and there was a low,
continuous growling and quivering of the ground
beneath them.
Curt Newton felt a cold chill, despite the
sulphurous warmth of the air. It was so terribly
isolated from the universe of man, this drifting
speck of land in the vast, shoreless sea of outer
space. And they were so utterly unequipped to deal
with whatever alien perils it might hold.
He felt Joan shiver inside the protecting cicle of
his arm, and looked down anxiously at her.
"You're all right, Joan? That shock jar you when
we crashed?"
"It didn't hurt me." Her face was very pale, her
eyes dark and wide as she looked up at him. "I'm
just scared, I guess. This weird, forbidding place --
that we'll never get away from."
"Never is a long time," Curt said quickly. "Don't
worry about it now, Joan."
"Oh, Curt, you know we're marooned here
permanently!" Her voice broke in a sob. "We've no
ship, no weapons, no tools."
Captain Future could not answer that. His arm
tightened almost fiercely around her, as though in
protection against what was to come. The
Futuremen and their allies, like the mass of Kim
Ivan's mutineers, were still staring frozenly at the
lava-beds in which the ship had perished.
"Did anyone manage to salvage anything from
the ship?" Curt asked them.
George McClinton, the lanky young engineer,
was the only one to answer. He pointed hesitantly
down at a fiber case at his feet.
"I g-g-grabbed that up as I r-r-ran out of the
ship," he stammered.
"What is it? A tool-kit?" Curt Newton demanded
quickly.
McClinton's spectacled face looked abashed in
the red light. "N-no, it's only a c-c-case of p-prunes.
I j-just happened to see it in the s-s-supply-room
door as I went past."
"Blast me down!" swore old Ezra Gurney
furiously. "Of all the crazy, useless things to snatch
up, that's the limit!"
A burst of laughter rose from the others at
McClinton's shame-faced admission. It came from
the mutineers as well as the Futuremen's party, and
it was hysterically loud. It was a reaction on the
part of all from their own terrifying thoughts, their
realization of the appalling situation in which they
stood.
22
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
It eased that frozen tension a little. Men relaxed
enough from their stunned rigidity of mind and
body to inspect their burns and bruises. And Kim
Ivan strode out and turned to face the mutineers.
"Did any of you bring atom-guns out of the ship
with you?" the big Martian pirate demanded.
Curt stiffened. He realized instantly what was in
Kim Ivan's mind.
UT none of the mutineers answered in the
affirmative to the question. Grabo, the
Jovian, growled the explanation of the lack of guns.
B
"You wouldn't let any of us wear atom-pistols in
the ship," he snarled, "for fear we'd kill each other
in brawls. And there wasn't any time to go digging
them out of the arsenal-room when the ship
crashed."
Kim Ivan's voice rose to a roar. "Don't take that
sulky tone with me. I'm still boss here! There may
not be an atom-gun on this world, but I can beat the
ears off any pair of you with my bare fists!"
None of the mutineers took up the redoubtable
Martian's challenge. But Grag's big metal figure
moved clankingly forward.
"Do you think you can beat the ears off me?"
rumbled the great robot.
Kim Ivan faced the robot with an unflinching
scowl. "I know you're stronger than any four of us,"
he admitted belligerenly to Grag. "But there's more
than a hundred of us, remember that. We can pull
you down, big and tough as you are."
New tension sprang into being, as the mutineer's
hatred and antagonism toward the Futuremen's
party came again to the fore. Curt Newton realized
that it would not take much to precipitate a
struggle.
"It seems to me," his cool voice cut in, "that
we've had enough for one day without trying to kill
each other right now."
Kim Ivan roughly agreed. "We're groggy and
tired, and some of us are hurt. And there's nothing
to be gained by a scrap now. We'll get some rest,
and see how things stand in the morning."
The tension diminished. With little further talk,
the castaways dropped to the warm ground and
stretched out exhaustedly.
Curt and his friends kept at a little distance from
the mutineers. He noticed that Kim Ivan himself
was not sleeping, but was keeping vigilant watch
from where he sat.
Captain Future pillowed Joan's head on his knee.
"Try to get some sleep, Joan."
"M-m-maybe I could g-g-get some moss or
leaves from that jungle, to m-m-make a bed for
her," suggested George McClinton anxiously.
"No, it's bad business to go blundering into an
alien interplanetary forest by night," Curt answered.
"You never know what queer kind of creature is
waiting for you."
Silence and darkness held the makeshift camp of
survivors. No one felt like talking, and most were
already exhaustedly sleeping. The only sounds were
the medley of uncanny calls from the starlit jungle,
and the low rumbling of the distant volcanoes. Now
and then, the ground quivered slightly under them,
with a low, muted growling.
Captain Future looked down at Joan's dark head,
upon his knee. She was sleeping, her face white in
the starlight. He perceived that Grag, who never
slept, was standing watch nearby like an immobile
metal statue.
John Rollinger was not sleeping. The crazed
biophysicist was looking toward the distant jungle
in an attitude of intent listening.
"Rollinger, what's the matter?" Curt asked in
low tones.
The Earthman turned dazed eyes toward him. "I
hear voices talking, inside my head. I'm afraid.
There's somebody on this world."
"There's no one here," Curt soothed. "Go to
sleep. You haven't anything to be afraid of."
The Brain had been brooding silently nearby.
Like Grag, Simon never slept. Now he glided to
Captain Future's side, and whispered.
"Lad, I've been thinking about this planetoid," he
said. "There's something puzzling about it. I mean,
all this volcanic and seismologic activity. There
shouldn't be volcanism on a world this small."
Curt was grimly amused. "Same old Simon! All
our predicament means to you is just an intriguing
scientific problem."
HE BRAIN'S metallic whisper was cold
and annoyed. "If my reasoning is right, this
particular scientific problem has an important
bearing on our present predicament. Lad, you saw
the meteorometer readings on this planetoid before
we crashed on it. Can you remember its
approximate mass, direction and speed of drift, and
distance from the System?"
T
Captain Future was puzzled. "I think I can,
thought I don't see why it's so important. The mass
23
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
of it is two-thousands-Earth, position is slightly
over four billion miles from the edge of the System,
and its drift is almost straight toward the System at
ten miles a second velocity --"
Curt stopped suddenly, as his keen scientific
mind abruptly realized the significance of the data
he was quoting.
"Good Lord, Simon, I didn't see it before! This
planetoid is approaching the Limit!"
"Yes, lad," rasped the Brain. "And that accounts
for its volcanic activity."
Curt Newton was appalled. The ominous fact to
which the Brain had called his attention made their
predicament vastly more menacing.
In taut whispers, he and Simon Wright discussed
it with feverish intensity as the night hours passed.
Between these two master-scientists sped
whispered formulae, equations and corrections, as
they sought to solve mentally a problem which was
of direst import.
The sky in the 'east' began to lighten at last. A
growing pallor crept across the starry heavens. And
with it came a sharper, more violent tremor of the
ground beneath them. The shock and the grinding
roar brought the sleeping castaways into alarmed
wakefulness.
"Curt, what's happening?" Joan's small hand
clutched his sleeve as she awakened.
"It's only a stronger seismic tremor," he
reassured her. "But it's sun-rise now, Joan."
The Sun came up as a bright, tiny disk hardly
larger than a very brilliant star. It cast a feeble
daylight across the alien landscape of smoking
volcanoes, black lava-beds, and distant green
jungles.
Kim Ivan stood, looking grimly around the
unfriendly vista. The other mutineers were getting
to their feet, staring about in dismal silence.
"This is a devil of a place to be marooned in,"
muttered Grabo, the squat Jovian.
Kim Ivan shrugged. "It's better than
Interplanetary Prison, anyway. There'll be fruits and
meat-animals in that jungle. We can live here
indefinitely."
Captain Future grimly contradicted the big
pirate. "We can't live here indefinitely. This little
world isn't going to exist indefinitely."
The big Martian frowned at him. "What do you
mean?"
"I mean that in a little more than two months,
this planetoid will be shattered and destroyed,"
retorted Curt.
"Bah, what are you trying to do, scare us?"
scoffed Kim Ivan, incredulously.
Moremos, eyeing Curt Newton hatefully, hissed:
"We ought to settle these cursed Futuremen right
here and now. I say, let's rid ourselves of them for
good. All except the girl."
Captain Future rarely lost his temper. But at the
evil implication in the Venusian's last words, and at
the sudden pallor that came into Joan Randall's
face, Curt's bronzed face went a dull red.
His voice was low and steady, but his gray eyes
were fiery as he promised the Venusian murderer:
"Moremos, when the time comes you are going
to pay for that suggestion with your life."
The mutineers started threateningly forward, and
Grag and Otho sprang instantly to Curt's side. But
Kim Ivan intervened roughly.
"Cut your blasts!" he bellowed to his glaring
followers. Then, with eyes narrowed suspiciously,
he snapped to Curt: "What's this story of yours
about this planetoid exploding in two months?"
APTAIN FUTURE slowly withdrew his
flaming gaze from the Venusian. He
explained in short, grim sentences.
C
"This planetoid is becoming internally unstable.
That is because it is drifting toward our Solar
System. The gravitational influence of our System
is setting up seismic strains inside its mass. The
quakes and volcanic activity here are due to those
interior strains. They'll become worse as it draws
nearer the System.
"Two months from now, this planetoid will be
so near the System that its tidal strains will burst it
asunder. Roche's Limit, which determines the
critical distance at which a celestial body nearing a
larger body will burst into fragments, operates in
the case of this worldlet as though the whole
System were one great body it was approaching."
Kim Ivan seemed baffled by Captain Future's
scientific reference, and there was still strong
skepticism on his battered red face.
He turned toward Boraboll, the Uranian. "What
about that, Boraboll? You had a scientific
education. Does Future's claim make sense?"
The fat Uranian's moonlike yellow face twitched
with fear, and his voice was husky. "It's true that
Roche's Limit will operate for the whole System as
though for one body, in affecting an unstable
planetoid like this. If this planetoid gets much
24
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
nearer than four billion miles, it will burst."
Old Tuhlus Thuun added a shrill word. "This
planetoid isn't a lot more than that from the System
now, according to what our instruments read before
we crashed. And it's heading toward the System, all
right."
"Then Future's right," gasped Boraboll, terrified.
"My God, this little world is going to burst under us
in two months!"
The panic of the fat Uranian convinced the other
mutineers as nothing else would have done. They
looked at each other in fear.
"Name o' the Sun!" exclaimed Ezra Gurney. "I
didn't think last night that we could be in a worse
jam, but this makes it plenty worse."
Even big Kim Ivan looked a little appalled. He
muttered, "That's luck for you -- cast away on a
planetoid that'll explode beneath us in a few
weeks."
Curt Newton spoke incisively. "We've got just
one chance. That is to get away from here before
the catastrophe occurs."
"Get away?" echoed the big Martian blankly.
"How the devil can we get away? We've got no ship
now."
"Which means," retorted Captain Future, "that
our only chance of life is to build a ship."
Kim Ivan stared. "Build a ship, when we don't
have a single tool or piece of equipment? Build a
spaceship, with our bare hands?"
"He's raving," growled Grabo. "A spaceship
takes tons of metal plates and girders, glassite for
instruments and ports, copper for cables and coils,
refractory alloy for rocket-tubes, and about forty
other elements for the cyclotrons, fuel and other
parts. And we've just got our fingers!"
"We've got our fingers, and our brains." Curt
corrected. "We've got the accumulated knowledge
of centuries of experimenters, from the first cave-
man who made a stone hammer on up to
yesterday."
His eyes flashed. "Why shouldn't we be able to
start from scratch? The primitive peoples of the
remote past did. All the raw elements we need
should be present on this world. And if we have
courage and skill enough to wrench them free and
build with them, we can save ourselves."
His intensity seemed to make an impression
upon the others. The mutineers listened as though
clutching at a precarious straw of hope.
But old Tuhlus Thuun shook his head. He
muttered, "Nobody has ever built anything as
complicated as a spaceship from scratch, in the
whole history of the System."
"It's never been done," Curt admitted, "but that
doesn't say it can't be done."
CHAPTER VII
The Tangle-Tree
SOMETHING of Curt
Newton's driving purpose
seemed to communicate
itself to the doubting
mutineers. They might hate
this red-haired planeteer,
but they were nevertheless
impressed by him.
It was at such moments
that Captain Future's
genius for leadership
asserted itself. The Brain
was more deeply versed in
scientific lore than he. Grag was stronger than he
was, and Otho swifter. But he was leader of the
Futuremen because of his indomitable will and
courage.
"If anybody could build a ship out of nothing,
which I still doubt, you Futuremen maybe could,"
muttered Kim Ivan.
"It's worth trying!" Boraboll exclaimed
nervously. "Anything's better than just sitting here
waiting to die."
A general murmur of agreement came from the
mutineers. Appalled as they were by the vista of
approaching doom, they grasped at any straw.
"There's just one thing," Curt said incisively. "If
we Futuremen are to try building a ship, we must
have absolute freedom of action and must have
authority to command the assistance of all of you."
Moremos flared at that. "Me take orders from
you, Future? Not in a million years!"
"By God, you'll take orders from me!" roared
Kim Ivan to the green-faced Venusian. "And I'm
agreeing to Future's conditions. We can't reasonaby
expect him to achieve this feat without the help of
us all."
"It's all a lot of nonsense," shrilled old Tuhlus
25
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Thuun skeptically. "Nobody can build a spaceship
out o' nothing. It just can't be done."
"Suppose we do manage to build a ship and get
away? What then?" Grabo demanded suspiciously.
Curt was ready for that. "Then you'll agree to set
myself and my friends down on some inhabited
world of the System."
He knew better than to demand more. If he could
once assure Joan's safety, the pursuit of the
mutineers could be taken up later.
"I agree to that, Future," said Kim Ivan
promptly. "Now how do we start?"
For a moment, even Captain Future was daunted
by that question. It made him realize to the full the
appall magnitude of the thing they were about to
attempt.
How did you start building a big, complicated
space ship when you had literally nothing but your
bare hands? He groaned mentally as he envisioned
the complexity of thousands of massive and
delicate parts which must be correctly fabricated
and assembled to form a navigable vessel.
It wouldn't do to show doubt. He quickly looked
around the hostile, alien vista of the mystery
planetoid.
"Our first step necessarily must be to establish
safe living-quarters for ourselves and investigate
for food," he declared. "Then we'll make
preliminary survey for sources of the raw materials
we'll need."
Kim Ivan assented to that with a nod. "I'm
hungry already, and getting more so by the minute."
George McClinton had opened his fiber case of
prunes. The lanky, spectacled engineer stopped
munching the dried fruit to inquire:
"Anybody w-w-want some prunes? They're very
n-n-nourishing."
"Not until I'm hungrier than I am now, will I eat
those danged things," growled Ezra Gurney. "When
you was snatchin' up somethin', why didn't you
snatch up a case of beef or somethin' like that?"
Captain Future and Kim Ivan, after a brief
colloquy, had decided that they must find a suitable
spot for a base nearer to the jungle. From the jungle
must come whatever food they could glean. And
the sulphurous air that clung over these lava-beds
made proximity to them unpleasant.
HE whole party started toward the jungle.
Its green wall was less than a half-mile
away. They could see birds or winged creatures
T
flitting above the roof of the forest, and deduced the
presence of a varied animal life from the calls and
noises they had heard during the night.
Joan asked Curt an earnest question as they
tramped forward. "Curt, is it really possible to build
a ship? I know you could do it if anybody could,
but can anybody do that?"
"Joan, I don't know," he admitted. "But our lives
hang on the answer, and it's up to us to find out."
"If we had unlimited time and materials, it might
be done," remarked the Brain pessimistically. "But
to do it in two months, with no tools to begin with
and criminals for workers --"
Grag's deep voice shouted from behind them,
interrupting. "Hey, Chief, this crazy Rollinger won't
come along."
The crazed scientist, whom Curt had deputed
Grag to keep an eye on, was refusing to accompany
the party toward the jungle. Rollinger's haggard
face was distorted by overpowering fear, and his
eyes were wild as he babbled objection.
"I won't go there!" he cried, peering terrifiedly
toward the distant jungle. "They are there -- the
mighty ones. I heard Them speaking last night, in
my mind. They know we are here, and They don't
like it."
"Who's he talking about?" Grag asked puzzledly,
as Curt and Otho and Joan came back.
"He's just raving again." Otho commented.
Rollinger's voice rose to a shrill pitch. "They
warned last night that we must not stay here, that
They will kill us if we do!"
"Pick him up and bring him along, Grag,"
ordered Curt. "We can't delay now to soothe him."
Rollinger struggled frantically, but was like a
child in the grip of the great robot.
"Do you suppose there really could be
intelligent, malign life on this world?" Joan asked
Curt.
"I doubt it. We've seen no signs of intelligent life
here so far," Captain Future replied. "Of course,
we're likely to find some very queer plant and
animal life here. For this planetoid doesn't belong
to our own System. It's a wanderer of the
interstellar void, a tiny planet that must long ago
have been torn away somehow from its parent sun."
He continued thoughtfully. "Perhaps it has
drifted through space for ages. Undoubtedly it has a
radioactive core that has furnished sufficient
warmth to support life on its surface. Evolution
might take some weird paths upon a little, isolated
26
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
worldlet like this."
The green wall of the jungle loomed before them
in the feeble daylight.
The castaways halted and stood silently looking
at the alien, grotesque forest.
It was composed chiefly of towering tree-ferns,
whose colossal fronds were interlaced by lianas and
vines. Thorny underbrush decked with brilliant
scarlet and yellow flowers, and big pale-green
mosses choked much of the space between the
trunks of the mighty ferns.
"There's some kind of a natural clearing in
there," Kim Ivan reported to Curt. "Want to go in
and look it over?"
Captain Future nodded, and he and the big
Martian pushed their way beneath the shadow of
the towering ferns. The air was hot and steamy
inside the jungle, and many transparent-winged
insects flashed about them.
"Makes you think of the Jovian forests, and yet
everything is different," Kim Ivan said soberly.
"Ah, here we are."
They emerged into the natural clearing that lay a
little within the jungle. It was actually a low knoll,
a few yards high and several hundred yards in
diameter.
OTHING grew within this clearing except
a few dozen gigantic cacti. They were
dark, barrel-shaped growths twelve feet high,
spineless and with fluted sides.
N
"Lucky, finding a natural clearing like this," Kim
Ivan remarked. "It's just what we're looking for,
isn't it?"
Curt nodded. "We can build a stockade of fern-
trunks around it for protection against possible
beasts of prey. And it looks as though we could dig
a spring at that moist patch of ground."
He turned to go back and bring the others, but
Kim Ivan delayed him with a hand on his arm. The
big Martian pirate had an oddly earnest expression
on his massive, battered red face.
"Future, wait a minute. I got something to tell
you."
Curt looked at him keenly. "What is it?"
Kim Ivan scratched his ear. "Well, it's like this. I
know you got it in for me because I led the mutiny.
Not that I'm excusing that -- I still say anything's
better than Interplanetary Prison. Though if the
boys had obeyed my orders, there wouldn't have
been any killing."
Curt Newton wondered what this rambling
introduction was leading toward. "So what?"
"Well, I gave you my word we'd work with you
all the way, trying to build this ship, and I'm a chap
who keeps his word," Kim Ivan went on. "But I
can't always control the boys. So -- watch out for
Moremos!"
Captain Future stiffened. "Is that Venusian
already planing to make trouble?"
"He hates you like poison," Kim Ivan said. "He
was saying a little bit ago that he'd figured out how
to get you and your pals, when the time came. And
I'm afraid some of the boys would side with him. I'd
keep an eye open for death-traps, if I was you."
Curt said thoughtfully, "I doubt if he'd try
anything right away, for building this space ship is
his only hope's well as ours. But I'll watch out for
his clever little traps. And thanks for the warning,
Kim."
"Don't thank me," disclaimed the big pirate
bluffly. "I'm not worried about you for any reason
except that you're our only chance of getting off
this cursed little world. I know that we can't build a
space ship out of nothing, but maybe you can."
They went back and brought the rest of the
castaways to the clearing which they had selected
for an encampment. Then Captain Future issued
orders which were backed up by Kim Ivan's
authority over the mutineers.
27
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"The first essential is to build a stockade for
protection and to find food," he declared. "Then we
can build huts for living-quarters, and start work
assembling materials and tools for the ship."
He formed them into work and foraging parties.
The former were to bring saplings and vines with
which to build a rough wall around the clearing.
The foraging groups were to look for fruits, nuts or
other possible edibles, and bring them back to the
Brain for inspection.
"Ezra, you stay here with Joan," Curt told the old
marshal. "How are you, Rih Quili?"
"The injured young Mercurian lieutenant
gingerly touched his bandaged head. "It still aches a
little, but I'm fit for work now."
"Better take it easy," Curt advised. " And, Ezra,
keep an eye on Rollinger all the time."
OHN ROLLINGER had exhibited an almost
pitiful terror of the jungle, and had had to be
dragged by Grag to this clearing. The crazed
Earthman now crouched, looking about the place
with wild, scared eyes.
J
Curt, Grag, Otho and George McClinton formed
one of the work parties. They plunged into the
shadowy green jungle of giant tree-ferns and
choking underbrush, in search of suitable material
for the stockade.
"If we had just a b-b-bush-knife, it would be a l-
lot easier," mumbled the lanky McClinton, who
was munching dried prunes as he marched.
"Why not wish for an atomic blaster, while
you're at it?" suggested Otho. "Besides, this is
where Grag comes in handy. He can tear up trees by
the roots. You never saw anybody so strong."
"Meaning that you're trying to flatter me into
doing all the work," growled Grag. "Well, it won't
go, my slippery rubberoid friend."
They were already deep in the green jungle. Big
tree-ferns reared their glossy trunks for fifty to sixty
feet, bearing masses of flat fronds and spore-pods.
Yet these were not true pteridophytes at all, but the
result of a wholly different line of plant evolution,
which appeared not to rely on photosynthesis as a
source of life.
There were other and even stranger trees. Huge
ones like banyans reached out many leafless limbs
from a massive central trunk. Others looked like
big horse-tails. Club mosses flourished in the
spaces between the crowding trunks, and creeping
vines were everywhere. Many of the vines and the
thorny smaller shrubs bore unfamiliar fruits.
Insect life was abundant. But most of the winged
arthropods possessed perfectly transparent wings
and were hard to see. There were no true feathered
birds, but white, bat-winged creatures were
numerous and noisy in the tree-tops. And Curt
Newton found tracks and other traces of animals
that were apparently several species of small
rodents.
"There doesn't seem to be any sign of large
animals," Captain Future declared. "Though all the
life here is so alien it's hard to tell."
George McClinton's spectacled face was
discouraged as he looked about the green gloom of
the jungle.
"It's certainly w-w-wild enough." Grag was
already at work, uprooting saplings and ripping off
big branches from the tree-ferns to be stripped into
stockade-poles. The other three pitched in, but the
huge robot had the advantage here. His steel arms
could break tough limbs that the others could not
tackle.
Leaving a trail of trimmed poles behind him,
Grag advanced toward one of the big banyan-like
trees. He seized one of its leafless, drooping
branches. Instantly, the branch retaliated by seizing
him. It and others of the scores of branches coiled
around him like tough plant-tentacles and dragged
him toward the central trunk.
"Hey, Chief, this tree's fighting back!" yelled
Grag alarmedly.
"It's some kind of carnivorous form of plant-life
that can devour animals!" Captain Future cried.
"Tear those branches away, Grag."
"I can't!" shouted the robot. "The cursed things
are strong as steel! It's a regular tangle-tree."
CHAPTER VIII
The Cubics
AT least twenty of the tentacle-
like limbs had now coiled around
Grag. They were lifting his massive
figure toward the central trunk. This
was a cylindrical mass of fiber
twelve feet in diameter. The tangle
of branches grew from its sides, and
its top was a huge, hollow calyx.
28
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Curt and the other two sprang forward to aid the
robot. But they were themselves gripped by other
branches. As they sought to free themselves, Grag's
struggling form was being hoisted up into the air
and held above the hollow calyx of the tangle-tree.
From inside the huge calyx spurted up streams
of sticky green liquid that smeared the helpless
robot from head to foot. Grag yelled with fury at
this, but the sticky juices continued to spurt over
him.
"The thing is covering Grag with its digestive
juices before it eats him!" exclaimed Curt. "Try to
reach him."
But they couldn't reach him. Each of them had a
coiling branch around him. Only the fact that most
of the tangle-tree's branches were occupied with
Grag made it possible for them to avoid being
drawn in also.
Grag, bellowing in rage and completely covered
by sticky plant-juice, was now being drawn
remorselessly down into the hollow calyx of the
trunk. He disappeared inside it, though his muffled
roaring still sounded.
"Good Lord, he's g-g-gone!" stammered
McClinton. "The thing has d-d-devoured him."
But after a few moments, during which they
fought to free themselves, Grag was suddenly
drawn up again from the calyx of the tree.
The robot was held as before, while the sticky
digestive juices of the carnivorous tree spurted
again over his raging figure.
Otho uttered a mirthful shout as he tore himself
free from the branch holding him. "The tree
couldn't digest Grag's iron carcass that time, so it's
going to try again."
In fact, Grag was now being drawn back down
into the calyx of the massive trunk. Again came his
muffled bellowing. Curt and McClinton had by
now managed to release themselves also.
But there was no need for the three to spring
forward to Grag's aid. For now the robot was being
hoisted up again out of the calyx. And with an
almost human gesture of disappointment and
disgust, the tangle-tree's gripping branches hurled
the robot away. He flew through the air and lit upon
the soft ground some distance away, with a
resounding thud.
Otho collapsed in a fit of laughter when they
reached Grag's side. "The thing couldn't digest
Grag, nohow! I'll never forget how he looked
squirming up there with the tangle-tree hopefully
squirting sap over him!"
"Laugh, you misbegotten son of a test-tube!"
roared Grag furiously.
The big robot was a ludicrous figure, smeared
from head to foot with thick green plant-juice.
Curt, too, was shaking with mirth. "It's lucky the
tree did happen to grab you instead of one of us,"
he consoled the angry robot. "Any one of us would
have found it no joke."
Grag ruefully tried to clean himself off. "Of an
the screwy forms of life that I ever --"
Captain Future suddenly interrupted, holding up
his hand sharply. "Listen! I heard a cry!"
A distant yell came to them through the green
gloom of the weird forest.
"One of the other parties has run into trouble!"
Curt exclaimed. "Come on!"
They plunged through the jungle in the direction
from which the cry had come. Now they could hear
a chorus of alarmed voices.
It was one of the work-parties headed by Grabo,
the Jovian, that was doing the shouting. The squat
Jovian pirate turned as Curt and his companions
appeared.
"Look at those things!" he exclaimed. "We don't
know what to make of 'em."
URT NEWTON stared. He too, in all his
extensive experience with the strange life
of far worlds, had seen no creatures such as these.
C
There were six of the creatures, and they were
busily working in a little open glade of the forest.
Each of the things looked like a giant centipede,
with an oddly geometrical body eight feet long and
many square legs set along it. They were carrying
slabs of stone along.
A closer look revealed the amazing details of
their appearance. Each of these big creatures
appeared to be composed of scores of small, living
fleshy pink cubes. Each cube was four inches
square, and had two twinkling, bright little eyes and
a small mouth-opening.
"Why, I never saw anything like these before,"
Captain Future muttered, stepping forward.
"You haven't seen the half of it yet!" exclaimed
Grabo. "They can split themselves up when we start
toward 'em. Look at 'em! They're doing it again!"
The weird, geometrical creatures had until now
ignored Curt Newton and the others, diligently
resuming their work of carrying away the stone
slabs.
29
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
But now, as Captain Future approached, the
centipede creatures suddenly dropped the slabs and
then underwent an incredible transformation.
Their big, geometrical bodies disintegrated.
They broke up into the scores of living cubes of
which they were composed. Each cube was
revealed to be a separate, living creature. Each had
eight tiny claws or legs, one at each corner of its
cubical body, as well as its own eyes and mouth
and ears.
These hundreds of cube-creatures scurried
swiftly together, and joined into a single big figure.
The living cubes joined tightly, each to the next, by
instantly hooking their tiny claws together.
Silently and quickly as though by magic, the
cubical creatures had combined to form a towering,
semi-human figure ten feet high. It advanced on
square, stocky legs with its massive arms raised
menacingly toward the Futuremen.
"Get back!" Curt Newton cried warning. "The
creatures think we're hostile."
They hastily recoiled. Grabo and the mutineers
already had fallen back, and George McClinton was
gaping incredously.
The geometrical monster halted its advance. As
though satisfied they had nothing more to fear, the
cube-creatures that composed it broke up into
separate units. Quickly, they recombined into the
six centipede-figures. Then, carrying the stone
slabs, they calmly disappeared into the jungle.
"Did I dream that or have I been drinking radium
highballs?" gasped Otho. "What the devil are those
freakish little cubics?"
"That's a good name for them -- the Cubics,"
Captain Future commented. "As to their nature, it
seems pretty obvious that they're small animals
who have developed to a great degree the faculty of
living in a cooperative community. Just like a hive
of bees or a colony of beavers, only more so."
"But how can the little devils go through those
quick formations of theirs without any hesitation or
discussion?" marvelled Grabo.
Curt thought he could guess. "They must be
constantly in telepathic rapport with each other.
Something like the "hive mind" of the bees, even
further developed. Maybe the individual
intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group-
intelligence, just as their bodies combine. They're at
least semi-intelligent, judging from the way they
were working."
HE discovery of the Cubics made all of
them more cautious in the hours of work
that followed. It was increasingly evident that their
former surmise was correct, and that evolution in
plant and animal life had indeed followed strange
paths upon this age-long isolated planetoid.
T
What other uncanny forms of life might haunt
the dense fern-jungles, they wondered? And what if
the Cubics themselves should prove definitely
hostile? They could be, Curt Newton realized,
formidable enemies. And the tangle-trees, which
seemed numerous, were a constant danger.
By sunset of that day, they bad gathered in the
clearing a mass of strong poles sufficient to build a
stockade. The foraging parties had also brought
back a mass of fruits, berries and nuts. These were
of every shape and color, and most of them were
utterly unfamiliar in appearance.
The Brain, whose knowledge of planetary
botany was encyclopedic, had inspected the fruits
and had ruled out a few which he considered likely
to be poisonous. The castaways ate hungrily of the
others, finding a big, spherical, meaty nut the most
nourishing.
"We'll need meat, too," Captain Future declared.
"There are small animals in the jungle. Any of you
know anything about trapping?"
Grabo, the squat green Jovian, nodded. "I used
to trap 'diggers' in the jungle north of Jovopolis,
when I was a kid on Jupiter. All I needed was a
cord to make into a snare for their runways."
"Take a couple of men and get some snares set
tomorrow," Curt suggested. "You can make the
cords from strips of clothing."
George McClinton distastefully put down a very
ripe, squashy yellow fruit of egg shape which he
had been eating.
"Too m-m-messy," he said. "And it doesn't have
the f-f-flavor of a p-p-prune."
The tiny disk of the Sun was sinking again
toward the horizon. The shadows of the grotesque,
towering cacti in the center of the clearing grew
longer .
Night was falling. The stars were already
pricking forth in the dusking sky, and the heavens
eastward showed a quivering red glare from the
volcanoes and lava-beds there.
"I think," Curt decided. "that we'd better keep a
fire going nights until we have our stockade up.
We've already learned that there are formidable
forms of life on this worldlet."
30
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
A fire of dry fern-logs soon blazed up near the
center of the clearing. Curt had kindled it by
striking sparks from his steelite belt-buckle against
a hard stone. The castaways gathered around it as
though taking comfort from it as the night
deepened.
Captain Future musingly looked around the
circle of many firelit faces. What an oddly assorted
company they were, he thought. Joan's lovely face,
and McClinton's spectacled, serious countenance.
Otho lolling indolently with slant eyes watching the
blaze, and young Rih Quili's bandaged head. Kim
Ivan's massive, jovial red face, and Grabo and old
Tuhlus Thuun and fat Boraboll, and Moremos'
sulking features and secretive eyes. And the Brain
poised outside the circle a little, while big Grag
stood in the shadows keeping watch upon the
raving John Rollinger.
"We've got a fire and some food," Kim Ivan was
saying, "and tomorrow we'll put up a stockade and
some huts. Then what?"
"Yes, what then?" Moremos asked Captain
Future with an open sneer. "Just how do we start
building a space ship with our bare hands?"
Curt answered tersely. "Our first need will be
tools -- durable metal tools. Let's see how much
metal we have among us."
The result of the inventory of their possessions
was discouraging. They had a few metal trinkets
and buckles. One of McClinton's engineers had a
small chromaloy wrench.
F course, they all had their gravity-belts.
Every interplanetary traveler constantly
wore his belt, whose compact gravitation-equalizer
made his weight the same on any world. But they
couldn't sacrifice their belts, without suffering
dangerous effects from the low gravitation of the
little planetoid.
O
"I also got a big package of chewin' rial, if that's
any good," shrilled old Tuhlus Thuun.
" And I have this c-c-case of p-prunes," stuttered
McClinton.
"There isn't enough metal here to do us any
good," Curt Newton declared. "We'll have to make
our own steelite tools, from scratch."
"Say, what about Grag?" Otho asked. "There's a
ton of metal in his carcass. If we melted him down
--"
"I heard that!" bellowed Grag from out in the
shadows where he was watching Rollinger.
Kim Ivan asked gloomily, "How're we going to
get steelite for tools?"
Captain Future shrugged. "We'll have to locate
iron deposits, and smelt the metal out, and make
our own alloys. It won't be easy, but it's the first
essential step toward building a ship."
"And then what will be the next?" Boraboll
squeaked skeptically.
"Then we'll try building an atomic smelter for
large-scale operations," Curt answered. "Some of
us can be reconnoitering this worldlet in the
meantime for the raw materials we're going to need.
Chromium, beryllium, manganese, copper, calcium,
and about forty or fifty others."
They all seemed dashed by the magnitude of the
task proposed. To many of them, the difficulties
looked insuperable.
"How do we know we'll find any of those
elements here?" Ezra objected. "Those are elements
of our own Solar System, but this planetoid ain't a
part of our System. It's from way off in the Galaxy,
you said."
The Brain woke from his brooding reverie to
answer that. "The matter of the whole Galaxy is
largely homogenous in nature, for all its stars had a
common cosmic origin. The remotest suns show
the spectra of much the same elements as our own
Sun. We should find most of the needed elements
here, though on this small body a few of them may
not be present."
"Is this planetoid really a wanderer from some
distant star-system?" Joan asked Curt with eager
interest.
He nodded. "It must be. Probably it was torn
away from its parent-star by some gravitational
disturbance, and has been drifting through the void
ever since."
"A little star, falling alone through space for
ages," Joan murmured. "Let us call it by that name
-- Astarfall!"
The fire died down, and they split into separate
groups to prepare for sleep. George McClinton had
prepared a mattress of soft fern-fronds for Joan,
which the lanky engineer shyly showed her.
"It's not m-m-much, but it's b-better than the
ground," he stuttered, and retreated awkwardly
from her thanks.
She looked at Captain Future with pretended
indignation. "Why didn't you think of that?"
Curt grinned. "I don 't believe in pampering my
women."
31
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"Your women!" she echoed scornfully. "There's
no other girl beside myself who'd waste time on a
crazy, foot-loose planeteer like you."
He chuckled as he turned away. The others were
already stretched out, asleep. The fire had died to
glowing embers, but the red glare of the smoking
volcanoes eastward cast weird, flickering shadows
in the camp.
Curt went to where Grag was standing guard
beside John Rollinger. He bad bound the crazed
scientist's feet to prevent him from fleeing. For
Rollinger was still muttering and babbling in
unabated terror .
"I hear," Rollinger was muttering, his mad,
brilliant eyes staring into nothingness. "I hear, but I
cannot obey --"
Grag asked uneasily, "What do you suppose he's
raving about? He gets on my nerves."
"He's just delirious," Curt said. "It's a pity -- a
fine mind like that, irretrievably wrecked."
Captain Future stretched out tiredly on the
ground nearby. The night air was growing chill, and
he wrapped his zipper-jacket more tightly around
him.
As he dropped off to sleep, the low, babbling
mutter of the crazed Earthman scientist was the last
sound in his ears.
CHAPTER IX
The Work Begins
CURT awakened
suddenly. It was still dark,
and everything was
drenched with a cold dew.
But by the shifting of the
starry sky, he perceived that
he had slept for several
hours.
He soon discovered what
had awakened him.
Rollinger's ravings had
become louder and shriller,
were ascending to a
frenzied pitch. Curt quickly rose and went over to
the spot where Grag was standing watch over the
madman.
"No, do not make me!" Rollinger was gasping.
"I can't do it -- I can't!"
The man's face was frantic in the starlight, and
his body was writhing and shuddering.
"Chief, he's been getting worse by the minute!"
Grag reported. "He keeps talking to somebody he
calls the Dwellers."
Curt knelt by the bound madman, and spoke
earnestly in an effort to reach that dimmed,
distorted mind.
"Rollinger, what are you afraid of?"
The man's wild eyes looked up at him, as though
dimly recognizing him.
"The Dwellers!" gasped the madman. "The
hidden lords of this world, whose powers are
strange and mighty! They have been speaking to me
in my mind, have been commanding me to do that
which I cannot do."
Captain Future frowned. There was something
uncanny about the raw, shuddering terror of the
crazed scientist.
"Chief, do you suppose there could be malign
creatures on this world that he can sense but we
can't?" Grag asked in a low voice. "There's
scientific proof that an unhinged mind is more
sensitive to outside telepathic influences than a
sound mind," muttered Grag.
Curt felt definitely uneasy. He straightened and
looked around the starlit, sleeping camp.
"There don't seem to be any intruders here. You
didn't see anything strange, did you?"
Grag shook his head. "No, nothing at all. And
everyone else has been sleeping, except for that
Neptunian mutineer, Luuq, I saw moving around a
little bit ago."
"Maybe Luuq saw something," Captain Future
murmured. "I'll see if he did."
He went through the camp, searching the
sleepers for Luuq. To his surprise, he could not find
the Neptunian anywhere in the camp. The ex-bandit
had disappeared.
Kim Ivan awoke with catlike alertness as Curt
renewed his search for the missing man. The big
Martian. instantly got to his feet.
"What's the matter? Something wrong?" he
demanded.
"I'm afraid so," answered Captain Future. "Your
friend Luuq is missing. Grag saw him moving
about, but now he's gone."
Others were awakening, aroused by the
Martian's loud voice. They looked at each other
uneasily.
32
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"See if anyone else is missing," ordered Kim
Ivan, frowning.
They soon discovered that one other of the
mutineers had also disappeared, a little Mercurian
ex-thief.
"Maybe the two of them just went out into the
jungle and will come back," suggested Boraboll,
the fat Uranian, hopefully.
"They wouldn't go prowling around in that
jungle by night," Kim Ivan said emphatically. "If
they left the camp, it was because they were
dragged out of it."
"Future seems to know more about it than
anyone else," said Moremos insinuatingly.
The gathered mutineers understood the
Venusian's veiled accusation. They turned hard
eyes upon Curt Newton.
"I know no more than you do,". Curt said
quietly.
"Future couldn't have made away with Luuq and
the other," Kim Ivan said loudly. "Not without
some sound that would've roused us all."
"I don't know," muttered old Tuhlus Thuun.
OHN ROLLINGER interrupted. The crazed
scientist, still lying bound under Grag's guard
nearby, was sobbing hysterically.
J
"We must leave this world!" he screamed.
"Unless we leave, the Dwellers will kill us all!"
"What's he talking about -- the Dwellers?" Kim
Ivan asked puzzledly.
"The hidden ones -- the mighty lords -- they
watch us now and they wait!" raved Rollinger.
Grabo, the Jovian, stirred uneasily, his dark face
nervous in expression. "I don't like this place. It's as
spooky as the Place of the Dead, on Jupiter."
"Do you s'pose there could be critters of some
kind on this planetoid cunning enough to steal into
the camp and carry away them two men?" asked
Ezra Gurney.
Surely we'd have seen any creatures as
intelligent as that," objected Joan, eyes bright with
concentration.
"I don't know," Curt muttered. "Everyhing about
this planetoid is alien, different from the life of our
own System. It comes from remote regions of the
galaxy, and during its ages of isolation, its
evolution has taken different paths."
There was an uneasy silence. The night suddenly
seemed pregnant with mysterious menace. The low
calls of small animals and the squeak of birds from
the dark surrounding jungle fell upon tensely
listening ears.
Had some formidable beast of prey actually
entered the camp and slain the Neptunian and
Mercurian, it would not have have been so
terrifying as this baffling disappearance of the two
men. It was the unearthly mystery of it that chilled
them. Their minds conjured pictures of malign and
alien creatures lurking out there in the dark,
watching and waiting.
"The most intelligent-lookin' creatures we've
seen on this planetoid are the Cubics," drawled
Ezra. "Do you s'pose they're the Dwellers?"
"They didn't look of high intelligence," Curt said
doubtfully. "Besides, how could they enter the
camp and make off silently with two men?"
"Luuq and the Mercurian must have went
sleepwalking into the jungle and got grabbed by
some beast," Kim Ivan growled.
"Just the same, I propose we post our own
guards at night to prevent any more 'sleepwalking',"
said Moremos, glancing toward Curt Newton.
For the remaining few hours of that night they
sat around the fire, talking in low voices. All
realized more completely than ever before the alien
nature of this wandering worldlet from outer space.
What dark riddle was it hiding?
The coming of day was a relief to strained
nerves. Almost cheerfully, they breakfasted on fruit
and berries. Then Captain Future got to his feet and
incisively addressed them.
"We've got to organize our operations, if we're to
get anywhere with the task ahead of us," he
declared.
He was a confidence-inspiring figure as he
stood, his tall, rangy figure and red head silhouetted
against the pale sunrise, his keen gray eyes
sweeping their faces. But he was not nearly so
confident as he looked. He was a little
overwhelmed by the audacity of what they were
about to attempt.
"First, we've got to complete the stockade
around this knoll and build some huts," he stated.
"Others of us have to form regular foraging parties
to supply fruit, roots, and small meat-animals if
possible."
IM IVAN spoke up. "I'll superintend the
building of the stockade and huts. And
Grabo can take care of the food-supply. He says he
knows how to set traps for the animals whose traces
K
33
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
we saw in the jungle."
Curt nodded. "I'll leave all that to you, then," he
told Kim Ivan. "The Futuremen and I will begin an
exploratory survey for the metallic ores and other
materials we'll require. That's our first step toward a
ship."
The big clear knoll soon was buzzing with
activity. Kim Ivan's stentorian voice bellowed
orders, supervising a large party of the mutineers in
hauling fern-poles from the jungle and setting them
up in a stockade and in framework for huts.
Grabo had chosen a dozen of the men and had
gone into the fern-forest to set the animal-snares he
had improvised from strips of clothing. Other of the
men were already bringing in fruits and roots.
Curt asked Ezra Gurney, "Will you stay here and
keep an eye on Moremos? I don't think he'll try to
make any real trouble until we have built a ship.
But I don't want to take any chances."
"I understand," nodded the veteran marshal. "I'll
watch that varmint."
Captain Future and Grag and Otho and the Brain
set forth eastward upon their quest for ores,
accompanied by George McClinton and Joan. The
girl had insisted upon going.
Curt headed toward the nearby region of
volcanic activity. All around that region were
chasms and crevasses that had been split by the
recent seismic disturbances.
"Our best chance of finding surface deposits of
iron, beryllium and the other ores we need, is in
those chasms," he pointed out. "We have to find the
stuff in easily worked surface deposits at first, for
as yet we have no tools for mining."
"When I think of all the work ahead of us, I wish
I was back home on the Moon," Otho said
gloomily.
They approached the black fields of solidified
lava. Beyond that crusted expanse lay the smoking
valleys through which came the sluggish red rivers
of molten rock that flowed down from the towering
volcanoes. The sulphurous fumes half-veiled the
forbidding vista.
Curt Newton turned to the Brain. "Simon, will
you reconnoiter as many of the chasms and gorges
as you can? See what deposits of ores you can spot.
We'll be working northward, from here."
The Brain glided off upon his mission, looking
like a glittering flying cube as he shot away through
the pale sunlight upon his traction-beams. He was
quickly out of sight.
George McClinton, to whom Simon was not as
familiar as to the others, looked after the Brain with
marveling wonder .
"If the Brain can f-f-fly like that so easily, w-w-
why couldn't he f-f-fly back to the System for
help?" he asked.
Curt shook his head. "Simon derives the power
for his beams from a tiny atomic generator inside
his case. It holds a charge of fuel sufficient for
many hours' activity, but not enough for a long
flight in space."
"That reminds me," Grag said dismayedly, "I'll
be needing copper and other elements for fuel for
my own generators pretty soon. Otherwise, my
power will run down."
Otho told the robot, "That's all right -- when
your power runs out, we can make some swell tools
out of you. Yes, sir, you're going to come in mighty
handy, Grag."
"Chief, will you make Otho quit threatening
me!" demanded Grag angrily. "He's getting on my
nerves by his talk of using me for metal."
"He can use up some of his wind climbing down
into this crevice and prospecting for iron, " Captain
Future said acidly as they started forward.
They had been moving northward and had come
to a deep crevasse driven in the rock of the
planetoid by quakes. It was quite narrow and its
jagged walls were almost vertical.
THO'S rubbery figure went down the walls
as though he were a fly. Presently his
voice echoed hollowly up to them.
O
"Yes, there's nickel-iron down here. Looks like
the core of Astarfall."
"That's what I was hoping for ," Curt declared. "I
figured from its mass that Astarfall would have a
nickel-iron core like most planetoids and planets,
and that its rock crust could not be a thick one."
They went back to the jungle and secured a
quantity of tough vines from which they fashioned
a strong, flexible ladder. Curt and Grag went down
this into the gloomy depths of the crevasse.
Glittering outcrops of nickel-iron ores were
plentiful in the bottom of the chasm. But digging
out the ore without tools was another matter. Here
Grag's great strength came into play. With a few
chunks of hard rock for hammers, the big robot
loosened small masses of ore.
Joan and McClinton had woven wicker baskets
which they let down by a vine rope. Thus the
34
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
masses of ore were hauled to the surface. It was
slow, toilsome work. The day was waning when
they finally had enough of the ore for Captain
Future's immediate purposes.
The Brain had returned and made his report. "I
investigated a good many of the chasms. And I
found indications of copper, manganese, chromium
and several other of the ores we need."
He listed them all, and Curt Newton listened
intently. He asked then, "What about the beryllium,
calcium and lead? They're vital."
"I've not found any of them yet," admitted the
Brain. "There are signs of possible beryllium: and
lead deposits in that huge gorge between the double
range of volcanoes. But I didn't risk going far down
into it, for, that abyss is highly dangerous. The
terrific air-currents, heat and fumes from the lava at
its bottom make it a veritable canyon of chaos."
"The Canyon of Chaos sounds like a good name
for that place, at that," remarked Otho.
"It's hardly worth while naming places on a
world that's going to blow up two months from
now," grumbled Grag.
The Sun was sinking when they returned to the
camp. The transformation there proved that Kim
Ivan and his men had been at work.
The stockade around the knoll was roughly
complete. A spring had been dug. The framework
of a dozen huts was up, and several had already
been thatched with flat fronds. The huge, barrel-
shaped cacti in the clearing had been left
untouched, since to attempt to cut down those giant
growths would have entailed immense labor for no
particular reason.
"Not bad," Kim Ivan admitted when Curt
complimented him on the day's work. "It won't take
us long to finish up the huts now."
RABO and his trappers soon returned
from the jungle. "We eat tonight, and not
just fruit," proclaimed the Jovian complacently.
G
They had snared four plump, rodent-like animals
as big as small pigs. And they had brought several
new varieties of edible fruits.
"But that jungle is a devilish place." swore the
Jovian."Beside those cursed tangle-trees, there's
smaller plants that eat insects and birds in the same
way. I never saw such evil plant-life as this world
has."
Nevertheless, the animals made a palatable sort
or stew. Although he didn't eat. the Brain passed
upon the flesh as being harmless and containing
nutriment. He waved his eye-stalks questioningly
when Captain Future thoughtfully fished a couple
of bones out of the stew and offered them for his
inspection.
"What is it, lad?" he asked.
"Note the glazed appearance of these bones,"
said Curt. "Just an interesting side problem, but do
you make the same thing I do of the skeletal
structure of mammals here?"
"Siliciferous compounds!" ex-claimed the Brain
at once. "The bony structure of creatures on
Astarfall are built up from silicon. Altogether
different from Earthly specimens. It's
unmistakable."
"Exactly," said Captain Future, nodding. He
turned to speak to one of the cooks.
"Save the skins of those animals for me," he
requested. "I'll need them tomorrow.
"To build the space ship?" sneered Moremos,
who had returned with the Jovian.
"Yes, to build the ship," Curt nodded, with a
calm smile.
He and Grabo scraped and cleaned the hides that
night, and he used strong fiber threads and a thorn
needle to sew two of them together into a rude but
effective bellows. This he mounted in a rough
wooden frame.
It was late when he finished this work by the
firelight. Joan had retired to the smallest hut, which
had been assigned for her use. Most of the
mutineers and others were also already asleep.
Grag had taken up his tireless and sleepless
watch. And old Tuhlus Thuun and Boraboll were
remaining awake and watchful tonight, too.
"I'm going to turn in," Curt yawned,
straightening. "How's Rollinger?"
"Muttering a little, but not as noisy as he was
last night," Grag replied. "I think he's quieting
down."
The crazed scientist was now confined in one of
the other small huts. He had been subdued and
silent all during the day.
CHAPTER X
Dread Warning
CURT slept heavily. When he awakened and
35
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
went out into the sunrise,
he found Kim Ivan
swearing.
"There is something
cursed spooky about this
place," declared the big
Martian. "I had queer
dreams all night -- as
though somebody was
talking inside my mind."
Boraboll spoke
nervously. "Nothing
happened all night. And
nothing came near the camp that we could see or
hear."
That day, while most of the mutineers resumed
the work of building the huts and replenishing the
food-supply, Captain Future and his party began the
next step of their task.
"We've got iron ore, and now we've got to smelt
it out for steel," Curt stated. "Since we don't have
any atomic smelter, we'll have to go back to ancient
ways."
He supervised the bringing of massive stones,
and the building of them into a small furnace. They
had no coal with which to fire this, but the Brain
had located a deposit of combustible peat in one of
the swampy sections of the jungle.
Curt Newton attached his rude bellows to the
stone furnace. He used its draft to fan the peat fire
he kindled inside. Then he arranged a mass of the
nickel-iron ore inside the furnace. When the ore
became molten, he forced air through it by hard
pumping on the bellows.
"This arrangement goes back to primitive
times," he commented. "It's crude, but we'll have to
use crude ways until we have some tools."
When the forced air had reduced the ore to a
mass of molten iron, Captain Future added a small
quantity of carbon.
"Hey, that isn't the way you make steelite,"
objected Otho.
"We can't make a modern steelite alloy without
beryllium and other elements which we haven't got
yet," Curt retorted. "We'll have to be satisfied at
first with this old-fashioned steel."
The product of his labors for the day were two
chunks of solid steel. One, which was much larger
than the other, was roughly shaped to serve as an
anvil. The other Curt attached to a limber wooden
handle, converting it into a crude but heavy
forging-hammer.
Joan looked a little disappointedly at these two
unlovely products of their day's toil.
"It's wonderful that you've been able to make
them, but they seem a long way off from a big,
complex space ship," she murmured.
"They're the seeds of a space ship," Curt old her.
"You have to crawl before you can walk.
Remember that we're starting here completely
empty-handed. That means that we're forced to
retrace a lot of the steps by which thousands of
generations of men ascended from the discovery of
fire to the building of space ships."
All during the next two days, he kept their
improvised furnace and forge at work. McClinton
was his chief helper, while Otho untiringly pumped
the bellows and Grag utilized his huge strength in
bringing fresh masses of ore from the surface
working they had discovered.
Kim Ivan had detailed a party of the mutineers to
dig that ore and help transport it to the camp. The
Brain was away from dawn till dark each day,
searching .the face of Astarfall for the other needed
elements. He had already managed to locate
deposits of several of them.
The first thing which Captain Future beat out
upon their forge was the steel framework for a
larger and more efficient smelter. When that was
going, a larger amount of better quality steel began
to result.
"We're still only in the first stages of tooling up,"
Curt declared. "We can't really make any start on
ship-building until we have atomic power and an
atomic smelter for turning out high-grade light
alloys."
"Why don't you start on that right away, then?"
Joan wanted to know. "Be reasonable, woman,"
pleaded Captain Future. " An atomic power set-up
requires certain chemicals which we can't dig out
until we have strong steel tools for mining."
HEY were concentrating now upon making
tough steel picks, bars and other tools for
mining operations. Each tool had to be beaten into
shape upon their forge. The camp rang with the
clangorous hammering.
T
By now, the huts had been completed and a
routine system of gathering and preparing food set
up. These last few nights had brought no recurrence
of the mysterious disappearances, although several
others beside Kim Ivan had complained of
36
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
uncannily oppressive dreams. The stockade gate
was guarded each night by a couple of the
mutineers.
"Now," said Captain Future on the fourth
morning, "we can start mining copper and the other
elements we need for the next step."
"I told you of the copper-ore deposit I found,"
said the Brain. "But I've still not located any
calcium, beryllium or lead."
"Let me scout for those and the other elements
we still lack," begged Otho. "I can maybe find them
where Simon would miss them."
"All right, you can prospect the chasms
northwest of the volcanic area," Curt acceded. "The
rest of us will start copper-mining today ."
Otho departed upon his prospecting mission.
Captain Future, Grag, McClinton and Rih Quili
gathered their new tools and started out for
preliminary work upon the copper deposit the Brain
had located. Joan was ready to accompany them,
but Curt firmly overruled her this time, leaving her
standing rebelliously outside the stockade. But
before they had gone far through the jungle, he
stopped.
"I thought I heard Joan calling," he said.
"Listen!"
They heard Joan's voice raised sharply again, in
an exclamation that had more of anger than fear in
it.
Instantly Curt plunged back through the jungle
the way they had come. When he came into sight of
the stockade, a sudden tide of red fury pulsed
through his brain.
Joan was struggling angrily in the arms of
Moremos. The green-skinned Venusian was
laughing as he drew her toward him.
"You are a little wildcat," he chuckled.
In all the years, Captain Future had killed more
than one man. But always he had slain as the
personification of stern, icy justice. He had almost
never before felt the hot, raging desire to slay that
now flung him forward.
Moremos thrust the girl away and recoiled
startledly. Next moment Curt had him by the throat.
The Venusian fought furiously, a savage hate
flaming in his eyes as he sought a deadly swamp-
man's grip.
"Curt, wait!" Joan pleaded appalled by the
terrible expression upon his face, one she had never
seen there before.
Captain Future did not even hear her. The raging
desire to kill bad momentarily made him forget all
his own skill in super ju-jitsu. He broke Moremos'
deadly grip by sheer strength, and slammed the
Venusian down to the ground like a doll. His
fingers tightened on the man's throat.
Then big hands gripped Curt's collar and pulled
him back off the Venusian. Grabo and a score of
the other mutineers had come running from the
camp.
Moremos staggered up, his face livid. his voice a
choking gasp. "Future. I'll pay you for this, too. It
adds to an old debt."
"Let go of the Chief!" roared a new voice. Grag
had followed Curt back and now charged on the
scene, ready for battle.
"What the devil's going on here?" bellowed Kim
Ivan. The big Martian was pushing his way through
the crowd.
"Future was trying to kill Moremos!" squeaked
fat Boraboll.
Curt made no explanations. But his voice was a
throbbing whisper as he spoke to the Venusian.
"If ever you so much as touch Joan again,
nothing will stop me from killing you."
A growl came from the mutineers. Their deep
and ancient feud against Futuremen and the Patrol
flamed quickly to the surface.
At that moment came a low, grinding roar from
far beneath their feet. The ground quivered slightly
under them, and then shook wildly.
The powerful and unexpected shock threw them
from their feet. They heard the crash of some of the
huts collapsing, and a section of the stockade near
them fell inward.
The fat Uranian mutineer uttered a screech and
there were cries of alarm from others. Curt Newton,
scrambling to Joan's side, felt the ground rolling
and heaving sickeningly under them. Then the
shocks subsided, and the grinding roar of
diastrophism died away.
"Gods of space, that was the worst tremor yet!"
gasped Grabo.
They looked at each other in a tense silence. All
realized that the quakes were now growing stronger
as Astarfall approached near the critical distance
from the System at which it would be shattered and
desroyed.
THO had set out in high spirits upon his
prospecting expedition that morning. The
restless android, always impatient of monotony had
O
37
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
been chafing during the lasst few days of steel-
making.
He swung eastward through the jungle and then
started around the rim of the great region of
earthquake-riven chasms and smoking black lava-
beds whose center was the towering double range
of active volcanoes. As he moved along, he
mentally listed the raw materials they still lacked.
"Cobalt, beryllium, lead, calcium, and about a
dozen others," Otho thought ruefully. "We might do
without a few of those in a pinch. But there just
can't be any space ship without beryllium and
calcium."
Beryllium was important, for it was the chief
ingredient of the metallic alloy whose strength and
lightness were necessary for the construction of a
space ship hull.
Calcium was even more vital. A small anount of
it was an absolute necessity before a ship's
cyclotrons could operate to produce atomic power.
For calcium was the only inhibitory catalyst that
could control the production of atomic power from
copper, and prevent a disastrous explosion.
"So it's up to me to find the stuff," the android
told himself determinedly.
The Brain had sketched for Otho a rough
diagram of the chasms around the volcanic region.
Many of these Simon had not closely explored.
Otho began a systematic exploration of them.
The rubbery android could climb like no other
being in the System.
He went down into the first chasm by
imperceptible holds on the jagged wall.
His keen, scientifically trained eyes strained in
the dusk to inspect the rock formations.
With the small steel hammer he had brought, he
tapped loose samples here and there. A streak of
bluish ore he uncovered at one spot proved to be
cobalt, one of the necessary materials. But he found
none of their other requirements in that chasm.
He clambered back up out of it and stood
panting upon its rim, looking a little dashedly
across the wilderness of lava and crevasses.
"No wonder Simon couldn't explore all these
cracks," he thought. "I've picked myself a job."
He resolutely went on to explore the next chasm.
But in it, he found nothing at all. Otho felt
increasingly worried about the lack of beryllium
and calcium as he climbed back to the surface.
The beryllium would soon be needed for hull-
construction, and a few pounds of the calcium
catalyst must be found before their projected ship
could leave this world.
As he reached the surface, he suddenly recoiled.
A half-dozen weird creatures had emerged from the
jungle and were silently marching across the lava-
beds nearby. They looked like gigantic centipedes.
Then Otho recognized them as a band of the
Cubics, the weird little cooperative cubical
creatures they had already seen. The things had
grouped together into the centipedal formations.
They were solemnly crossing the lava-beds
toward the towering double range of volcanoes.
"Now what the devil are they going out there
for?" Otho wondered. "They must know it's
dangerous around the volcanoes."
The Cubics were heading toward the gigantic
canyon between the volcano-ranges, that which the
castaways had named the Canyon of Chaos.
The weird creatures approached a point some
distance along the rim of that terrifying abyss, and
then disappeared down into it.
"Holy space-imps, what reason can they have for
entering that devilish place?" muttered the android.
YSTIFIED and intrigued, Otho started
out across the lava-beds after the Cubics.
He picked his way as they had done, across the hot
expanses of solidified lava.
M
Swirling smoke made him cough and gasp for
breath. But he pressed on until he reached the rim
of the Canyon of Chaos at the point where the
Cubics had entered it. He peered down into the
abyss.
The Canyon was a fearsome spectacle. Many
miles long, a mile in width, and almost that in
depth, its gloomy rock walls sank downward almost
vertically everywhere. Far below, a glowing,
narrow river of crimson lava crawled along the
floor of the titan gorge.
Sulphurous smoke and blasts of superheated air
screamed up from its depths. The lava river at its
floor, Otho perceived, bubbled up from fiery
springs at the north end of the canyon and flowed
down its length and away through an underground
chasm at the southern end.
"But where did the Cubics go?" he muttered,
trying to peer down through the rushing smokes.
Then Otho perceived that a precarious pathway
led downward from where he crouched, along the
steep wall below him. The creatures he had
followed had obviously descended by that path.
38
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
He was on the point of starting down after them,
when he glimpsed them returning up the pathway.
At once Otho ducked behind a mass of rocks for
concealment.
The Cubics, still joined in groups to form the
centipede-like figures, emerged laboriously from
the abyss. But now each of these cooperative
figures carried with it a chunk of rock shot with
gray metal.
"That rock is lead-bearing," Otho thought
swiftly. "That's good-we need lead. But what are
they going to do with it?"
There was no apparent answer to that riddle.
The Cubics started marching back across the
lava-beds toward the jungle with their burdens.
Otho remembered now that when they had first
encountered the Cubics the little cooperative
creatures had been carrying similar chunks of rock
with them.
"Why, they come to this canyon for lead-bearing
rock!" he thought astonishedly. "They must be
more intelligent even than we figured. Wonder
what they do with it?"
He decided at once to enter the abyss and locate
the source of the lead ores.
Lead was one of the needed materials they had
not yet located. And there might well be other
required substances down there.
Yet even the hardy Otho hesitated a few
moments before entering that fearsome abyss. The
smoke and scorching air threatened to asphyxiate
even his tough lungs. His own respiratory system
was much more resistant to fumes and gases than
the ordinary human's. Still, he took care to make
himself a rude respirator from strips of cloth which
he tore from his jacket and bound across his nose
and mouth.
HEN Otho started down the pathway. It
was so. precarious, and had so many
sections torn out of it by recent seismic
convulsions, that only the agile android or creatures
like the Cubics could possibly descend.
T
Smoke-laden winds shrieked and howled
upward around him, as he made his way slowly
down. Hot ashes rained constantly upon him, from
the showers cast up constantly by the towering
volcanoes that flanked the canyon. The evil glow of
the lava river far below seemed to yawn for him.
Otho kept on. Presently he descried a big ledge
or shelf in the vertical wall close beneath him. In a
few minutes, he was standing upon this ledge. He
looked wonderingly around.
"Imps of the Sun, the Cubics never did all this!"
he exclaimed.
There were ancient mine-workings upon this
ledge. Tunnels had been driven back into the rock
wall for a dozen yards, and marks of the tools
which had dug them were still evident.
It was obvious that the purpose of the tunnels
had been to tap several rich veins of metallic ores
here. Otho's trained eyes at once recognized the
glittering streaks in the rock.
"Not only lead deposits, but also beryllium --
and plenty of it!" he exulted. "Now if we can only
find the calcium and a few others, we're all set as
far as materials are concerned."
Then wonder returned to conquer his exultation.
Who had dug these shafts? Who had mined here for
lead and other metals?
It could not have been the Cubics, he thought.
These cooperative little creatures appeared not to
make use of tools. They apparently came down here
and secured chunks of the lead-bearing rock which
had already been loosened by the ancient mining
operations.
CHAPTER XI
Cosmic Mystery
OTHO advanced into one
of the, shafts. Something
upon its wall caught his eye.
It was a smooth plate of
pure lead, affixed to the
rock. He discovered that it
was engraved closely with
unfamiliar symbols.
"Why, that's writing!" he
exclaimed. "Then whoever
did the mining here long
ago were intelligent
creatures -- maybe humans."
He pried the soft lead plate out of the rock and
excitedly examined its engraved characters. They
were not, of course, in any language of the Solar
System. Here was a cosmic mystery, indeed!
"The chief and Simon will be plenty excited by
this thing," Otho thought. "And by the beryllium
39
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
and lead I've found."
At that moment, there came a slight quivering of
the rock walls around him. It put him instantly on
the alert.
"Better get out of here, and tell the others about
this!"
At the moment the words left his lips, he was
thrown from his feet by a terrifc shock. Flattened
upon the floor of the ledge, he heard an awful
grinding roar as the whole Canyon of Chaos rocked
wildly.
It was the same unprecendentedly strong quake
which at this very moment was so startling to the
other Futuremen and the mutineers, back at the
camp. But it had disastrous effects here.
Otho heard a cracking, crashing reverberation
from above as he struggled to his feet on the
swaying ledge. He looked up. A whole vast mass of
the canyon, wall above him had been split loose by
the shock and was falling toward him.
With a smothered yell, Otho plunged into the
nearest of the ancient mine-tunnels. He was not a
moment too soon. A shower of boulders crashed
down upon the ledge, as a huge mass of the rock
above split loose and fell.
The shock gradually died away. Otho picked his
way out onto the rock-strewn ledge, and then
uttered a cry of consternation.
"Now how am I going to get out of here?"
The violent quake had split off. a great section
of the rock wall just above the ledge, destroying the
precarious path upward. There was a great cleft in
the wall there, which even Otho could not hope to
climb. He was trapped upon the ledge.
Otho, as he looked around in dismay, became
aware of a louder roaring and hissing beneath him.
He peered down into the canyon.
His dismay became acute. The molten lava river
down there at the floor of the abyss was rapidly
rising. The shock had opened new rifts by which
the liquid lava was pouring into the bottom of the
canyon faster than the single narrow outlet could
carry it away.
"Holy sun-imps, this is a real jam!" muttered the
android. "That lava will be washing over this ledge
in an hour."
He peered intently through the swirling smoke,
endeavoring to discover some way of escape from
the ledge. There was none. And the lava continued
to rise relentlessly.
How to get help? Captain Future and the others
didn't even know he was down here in the Canyon
of Chaos. He had to signal them somehow. How?
"I'd give my right arm for a rocket signal-pistol
right now," he thought.
That thought brought a vague possible expedient
into his fertile mind. There might be a way of
signaling the others.
Hopefully Otho began searching through the
mass of broken rock that now littered the ledge. He
finally found some chunks of a rock that he thought
might be suitable for his purpose. It was a tawny
stone streaked with rich veins of orange mineral.
Otho experimentally tossed a small piece of it
down into the rising lava. As the rock melted and
vaporized in the molten river, a small puff of
orange-colored smoke shot up from it.
"Yes, that might do it," Otho told himself. "Here
goes, anyway."
E assembled a number of chunks of that
orange rock. Then be began tossing them
down into the fiery lava.
H
He dropped them in a certain order first a small
chunk, then a large one, then two small ones, and
so on.
From each chunk of rock, as it melted and
vaporized, a brilliant puff of orange smoke shot up
through the swirling fumes to the surface above the
canyon. The succession of short and long puffs of
orange smoke were spelling out Otho's message in
the Futuremen's code. ,
"I-n C-h-a-o-s C-a-n-y-o-n-c-o-m-e k q-u-i-c-k-l-
y --"
He came to the end of bis message. Hopefully,
be peered up through the drifting smoke. Those
distinctive orange puffs should have been visible
from a distance. If the others bad only seen them.
But no one came to answer bis signals. His
hopes declined. And the molten lava was still
rising. The beat was becoming terrific. He
assembled more chunks of orange rock and
repeated his smoke-puff message.
Again be waited. There was still no answer. And
the crimson tide of rising lava was now only a few
hundred feet below the ledge.
"This," muttered the undaunted android calmly,
"begins to look serious. I won't have time for many
more signals."
Then be discovered that he had not enough of
the chemical-laden rock for even one more signal.
There were only a few chunks of it left.
40
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Otho used them to spellout a last, incomplete
smoke-signal. "I-n C-h-a-o-s C-a-n-y-o-n --"
"If none of them see that, this cursed place is
liable to be the end of Otho's rocket-trail," he
muttered.
A few minutes passed. Then a thrill of hope shot
through the android as he glimpsed a small, cubical
object flying down toward him through the swirling
fumes.
It was the Brain. And Simon Wright was having
a difficult time to beat against the wild currents of
up-steaming hot air. Otho yelled and waved his
arms, and his old comrade saw and came toward
him.
The Brain was quickly beside the ledge the. His
square, transparent "body" hovered in the air, his
lens-like eyes estimating the desperate situation as
Otho explained his predicament.
"Humph, it's lucky for you that I saw your last
smoke-signal," said Simon. "I've been
reconnoitering some of the chasms northeast of
here. I found some rich veins of magnesium and
cadmium in one of them."
"You can talk about that later," Otho said
hastily. "Right now, how am I to get out of here?
That rising lava will be over the ledge soon."
"Well, I can't possibly lift you out of here,"
rasped the Brain. "I'll have to find Curtis and Grag."
Simon's gaze fell upon the inscribed lead plate
which Otho had wrenched from the wall of the
ancient shafts. "What's that?"
Otho explained hurriedly how he had found that
mysterious relic of the past.
"Why, that's amazing," Simon exclaimed with
deep interest. "I believe those characters have a
resemblance to the Antarian language. Let me see
it."
"For space's sake, Simon, forget your scientific
curiosity for now and go get the others!" howled
Otho.
"All right, but take care of that plate," cautioned
Simon. "I don't want to see it destroyed."
"You're worrying a lot more about the cursed
plate than you are about me," Otho declared,
outraged.
The Brain shot up through the streaming smoke
and disappeared. The lava was still rising
menacingly, and the heat and fumes from it had
become almost overpowering.
UT Otho felt reassured. He had unlimited
confidence in his fellow Futuremen. He
crouched as far back on the ledge as he could get.
gasping for breath against the choking fumes.
B
It seemed a long time to him before he heard a
yell from above. Then a long rope made of tough
vines knotted together was let down to him. The
agile android instantly grabbed it and was drawn
up.
Captain Future, Grag and the Brain greeted him
diversely when he thankfully emerged onto the rim
of the Canyon of Chaos.
"So we had to pull you out of another crazy
jam!" said Grag loudly. "What the devil were you
doing poking around in this place?"
"Did you find any beryllium or calcium, Otho?"
Curt asked.
"I found beryllium, lead and some other metals
in plenty, but it won't do us any good now," Otho
answered ruefully. "Look, the lava down there is
covering the whole ledge."
"That doesn't matter -- we can trace the
beryllium vein and mine it from up here," Captain
Future assured. "What about calcium?"
Otho shook his head. "No sign of that."
Curt frowned. "That's not so good. We've now
found almost every element we'll need, except
calcium. And we haven't found a grain of it."
"You saved the lead plate?" the Brain asked
Otho anxiously. "Cur-tis, look at this."
Curt was as astounded as Simon had been when
he learned of Otho's discovery of the ancient mine-
workings, and inspected the plate.
"You say the Cubics were taking chunks of lead-
bearing rock out of the place?" he repeated
puzzledly.
"Yes, but the Cubics never sank those shafts,"
Otho replied. "It was done ages ago, by the look of
them."
"This is a mystery," Captain Future said
thoughtfully. "It seems that Astarfall once had an
intelligent human or semi-human race. Who could
they have been? How long ago did they exist on
this planetoid?"
"Don't the symbols on that plate look something
like the characters of the Antarian language, that we
learned on our quest for the Birthplace?" the Brain
keenly asked the red-haired planeteer.
Simon was referring to a previous adventure of
the Futuremen, an epic quest amid the more remote
stars of the galaxy for the Birthplace of Matter.
41
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
During that quest, they had had contact with natives
of the star Antares' worlds and had learned
something of the Antarian language.
"It does look a little like Antarian," Curt
admitted.
"Maybe there are Antarians hidden on Astarfall
yet?" Grag proposed. "Maybe they're the
mysterious Dwellers that Rollinger keeps raving
about ?"
"That doesn't seem possible," Curt muttered.
"Yet there is some great riddle about this planetoid
which we haven't guessed."
"I think that with sufficient study I could
partially translate this inscription," saud the Brain
quickly. "It might tell us something."
"Later on, Simon," Captain Future agreed.
"We've got too much work on hand right now,
starting construction of a ship. You all know what
that shock meant. It meant that Astarfall is
sweeping toward doom !"
The day was already far advanced, but before
they returned to the encampment, they had used
their geological knowledge to trace the beryllium
vein to one of the chasms some, distance from the
volcanic area.
HEN they entered camp, Curt stiffened.
Moremos was coming toward them. The
Venusian spoke earnestly.
W
"Captain Future, I want to apologize for
molesting the girl this morning. I was clear out of
orbit."
The Futuremen and the other mutineers who
heard were equally astonished. But Curt Newton
eyed the Venusian unforgivingly.
"Then I'm to understand that you've had a
change of heart?" Curt asked dryly.
Moremos shrugged. "There's no love lost
between us, you know that as well as I do. But
we're all in the same boat, and Kim Ivan gave his
promise to you that there'd be no trouble. I'll stick
by that."
When the Venusian had gone, Otho, looked after
him surprisedly. "I never thought that he would
knuckle down."
"He's only nursing us along until we have built a
ship and got away from here," Curt predicted.
"We're his only chance of escape, and he's smart
enough to realize that. But once away from
Astarfall, look out! That Venusian hates me worse
than anyone else here. Anyway, there shouldn't be
any more trouble to interfere with our work."
URT was wrong. That very night, three
more men disappeared inexplicably from
the camp.
C
The disappearances were not discovered until
after breakfast the next morning. Then Grabo, who
was assembling his foraging party for the day's
work in the jungle, discovered that one of his men
was missing. A quick check disclosed that two
others of the mutineers were gone also.
The disappearances were utterly baffling this
time. For the stockade of high, pointed poles now
formed a complete enclosure around the camp. The
only gate through it had been guarded all night by
old Tuhlus Thuun and George McClinton. And
both the old pirate and the prune-loving engineer
insisted that the three missing men had not gone out
the gate.
"We sat with our backs to that gate all night!"
Tuhlus declared.
"That's r-right," stuttered McClinton. "l was t-
trying to convince Tuhlus Thuun of the f-food
value of p-prunes. We were awake all the t-time."
"Those three men must have gone out the gate.
It's the only way out of the camp, and they're not
here now!" swore Kim Ivan.
Boraboll's teeth were chattering with fear as the
fat Uranian suggested, "Those Dwellers Rollinger
raves about took them for sure."
"How could your supposed Dwellers enter the
camp if they didn't come through the gate?" Captain
Future asked incredulously.
"They might be queer creatures of the ground,
who could tunnel up through the soil." advanced
the terrified Uranian.
They made a thorough search of the whole
surface of the knoll. But though they inspected
every foot of the ground, and even stirred. the soil
around the sills of the huts and the roots of the giant
cacti, they found no traces of such mole-like
monsters as Boraboll suggested.
"That settles it," muttered Grabo. "The Dwellers
must be invisible mon-sters of some kind."
"Even invisible monsters couldn't come through
a closed gate," sourly reminded Kim Ivan.
"If you ask me." drawled Ezra Gurney earnestly.
"I still say that the Dwellers are none other than
them Cubics. They could get in where nothin' else
could, by breakin' up and slippin' in one by one."
Some of the castaways were struck by this idea.
42
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Grabo said, thoughtfully, "The Cubics' community
must be near here in the jungle. We've glimpsed the
creatures several times when we were out
foraging."
Curt shook his head. "Even if the Cubics could
get in, they couldn't take three men out through the
stockade like that."
He turned to the Brain. "Simon, you never sleep.
Did you hear or see anything during the night?"
"No, lad," was the reply. "I spent the whole night
attempting to translate that Antarian lead tablet
Otho found in the Canyon of Chaos. I was too
engrossed to notice anything."
Neither had Grag, it developed, heard anything.
All their attempts at solution of the menacing
mystery seemed to end in a blank wall.
"Well, I don't see that we can do anything but
double the watch from now on at the gate of the
stockade," Curt said. "We've got too terrific a job
on our hands to lose time investigating now."
In fact, the task ahead was beginning to look
impossible even to the indomitable planeteer. They
had spent nearly a week with little more to show for
it than an array of steel tools. And within seven
more weeks, Astarfall would be shattered as it
approached the dreaded Limit.
UTURE drove the work that day with a
fierceness of purpose born of dreadful
apprehension. He pressed into service all of Kim
Ivan's followers except those engaged in the task of
maintaining the food supply.
F
He divided them into two parties. One engaged
in mining copper ore from the chasm in which the
Brain had located a deposit. The other party began
excavating lead-bearing minerals from the vein
which Captain Future had traced from the Canyon
of Chaos.
"Future, I'm not kicking, but it seems to me
we're not getting anywhere on a ship," said Kim
Ivan, wiping sweat from his brow. "What are we
digging all this lead for? You can't build a space
ship of lead."
"You can't build a ship," Curt countered,
"without an atomic smelter and forge to turn out
your beams and plates. It would be hopeless to try
doing it by hand. Therefore, our first need is an
atomic smelter ."
He added, "That's what the lead is for. To make
a cyclotron for production of atomic energy, you
have to have inertron. Nothing else will withstand
the explosion of disintegrating atoms. And inertron
is a compound of lead and other elements."
"But why have you got the other lads digging
copper?" the big Martian wanted to know.
"Because a cyclotron's heart is the electric
apparatus that explodes its unstable atomic fuel by
a powerful charge," Captain Future answered.
"Electrical apparatus means coil-wire and
condensers, and they mean copper."
He concluded grimly. "And that's only the half
of it. We'll also have to have calcium and a half-
dozen other substances before we can get going.
And we haven't even found some of them yet."
"You make the thing sound impossible,"
groaned Kim Ivan discouragedly.
Curt smiled grimly as he stooped again with his
pick at the toilsome work of loosening masses of
the lead-bearing rock.
"Cheer up, Kim. Once we manage to get a cyc
built, things will go a little faser."
Yet Curt Newton himself felt dark apprehension
all through the long day of back-breaking toil. An
icy premonition of possible failure oppressed his
mind.
Had he, for once, set himself and the Futuremen
too gigantic a task? To build a space ship out of
nothing! And to do it within a terribly short time-
limit, with dangerous criminals who hated him for
workers, and with a malign mystery of this alien
world menacing them?
He let none of the others see his doubts. He kept
his mein confident in spite of his bone-crushing
weariness, as they dragged their masses of lead and
copper ore back to the camp at the end of the day.
CHAPTER XII
Who Are the Dwellers?
KIM IVAN came to Curt as
darkness fell.
"I've put a couple of men on
guard at each side of the
stockade tonight," he
announced.
Curt nodded. "I'm going to
keep watch myself tonight also,
Kim."
"I'll watch with you, then,"
43
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
the big Martian declared. "Though space knows I'm
tired enough to sleep a week."
The Brain had a discouraging report for Captain
Future that night. Simon had spent the day
exploring the more distant chasms in search of the
few elements they still lacked.
"I still can 't find any traces of calcium, lad.
There just doesn't seem to be any of it on this
world."
"That's bad," Curt admitted. "We simply have to
find a little of it, or no space ship we build will ever
take off."
His thoughts were somber as he sat with Kim
Ivan outside one of the huts later and kept watch
upon the sleeping camp. Except for an occasional
shuffle of movement by the guards around the
stockade-gate, and the low medley of bird and
animal noises from the jungle, it was silent.
The great drift of stars that belted the night sky
shed a vague light upon the camp. The gigantic,
barrel-shaped cacti nearby threw grotesque
shadows. Near the fire poised the strange, cubical
shape of the Brain, intently studying by the firelight
the inscribed lead tablet of mystery.
Kim Ivan woke from a growing drowsiness at a
low, wailing sound. "What's that?"
"Only Rollinger starting again," Curt answered
in a low voice.
The raving mutter came from the hut in which
Grag kept patient watch over the bound madman. It
raoe slowly in pitch, grew mare frantic.
Captain Future suddenly stiffened. Joan Randall
had just emerged from her hut into the starlight.
She started to walk in an oddly rigid, mechanical
stride. Her face was white and expressionless.
"Joan, what's the matter?" he called anxiously.
There was no answer from the girl. In sudden
alarm, Curt sprang to her side and grasped her arm.
"Joan!"
Joan struggled to free herself of his grasp, for a
moment. Then she suddenly shuddered violently,
and looked wildly around.
"Curt!" she gasped. Quivering, she clung to him.
"Curt, they had me! They were drawing me out to
them."
He soothed her. "Relax, Joan. You've just had a
nightmare, and started sleep-walking."
Her fine face was pallid with horror. "No, Curt --
it was more than a nightmare! In my sleep, they
hypnotized me somehow, drew me!"
Captin Future's brows knitted together. "Tell me
just what happened. Who or what are 'they'?"
It was some moments before the shuddering girl
could speak calmly. The stamp of a terrible
experience still in her dark eyes.
"I don't know what or where they are," she said
breathlessly. "All I know is that soon after I fell
asleep, I began to feel cold, powerful minds that
somehow were reaching out to grip my mind."
"Say, that's what I felt a little of in the bad
dreams I had the other night," Kim Ivan interrupted
hastily. "It was so bad, I woke up. Some of the
other chaps had the same kind of dreams."
"But I didn't wake up. I couldn't, though I
wanted horribly to," Joan gasped. "The icy grip of
those mental attackers held me just as a rabbit is
held by a snake's eyes. And just like a hypnotized
rabbit, I felt myself getting up and walking out of
my hut. I knew that I was walking toward
something awful, but I couldn't stop until you
awoke me, Curt."
APTAIN FUTURE was thoughtful as he
held her protectingly in his arms. He
looked over her dark head at Kim Ivan.
C
"I begin to see now," he muttered. "The
Dwellers, as Rollinger called them, are creatures
who somehow use tremendous telepathic power to
draw victims toward themselves. There's no other
explanation."
Kim Ivan looked scared. "You mean that
something or things out there in the jungle reached
in here with hypnotic telepathy and dragged out all
our men that disappeared?"
"But whoever heard of a creature of prey that
drew its victims to it by hypnotism?" exclaimed
Otho.
Curt shrugged helplessly. "The life of this
planetoid has followed freakish paths of evolution,
for some reason."
"I'm still bettin' that them Cubics are what's doin'
it," muttered Ezra Gurney darkly.
The commotion had aroused many in the camp.
They seemed stricken by a chill horror as they
speculated upon the mysterious Dwellers who
somehow could reach into the camp by telepathic
power to seize their prey.
"You'll notice," Curt Newton commented. "that
none of us are ever mentally attacked when we're
awake. It's only in sleep. when the conscious mind
is no longer on guard. that the Dwellers make their
telepathic attack."
44
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"M-m-maybe that. explains why R-rollinger is
more sensitive to the th-things than we are,"
stuttered George McClinton. "His c-conscious mind
is so shattered that he has n-n-no guard against the
Dwellers."
The Brain had joined them. And Simon Wright
now imparted news to them.
"I've been trying to translate that Antarian tablet
which Otho found. It's extremely difficult, and I've
only translated a few phrases here and there. But
what I've deciphered seems to refer to predatory
creatures who use mental attack to seize victims.
Undoubtedly, the Dwellers."
"If you can translate all of that, it might tel us
more about the Dwellers and identify them for us!"
Captain Future exclaimed. "There's some
tremendous riddle about this planetoid and its
strange forms of life. The lead tablet may prove the
key to the riddle. Keep working on it, Simon."
There seemed nothing more they could do to
protect themselves until they should have found
some clue to the identity of their attackers. And the
work that engaged them was too vital to halt for
any reason.
During the next days, the Futuremen kept their
improvised smelter running full blast. With painful
slowness, they managed to refine a considerable
quantity of copper, lead and other necessary metals.
Curt kept Kim Ivan's men at work mining and
bringing in more of the ores. The mutineers swore
at the labor of the task, but were too conscious of
the life-or-death necessity of it to refuse. Twice,
strong tremors shook the surface of the planetoid in
those few days. And the activity of the volcanoes
nearby seemed becoming ominously greater .
During these few nights, they had no more
attacks from the mysterious enemy and no more
disappearances. They were nearly all on the watch
the first nights. But nothing happened. It was as
though the Dwellers were aware of their
watchfulness, and would not make their telepathic
attack when the humans were on guard.
Grabo and his foragers found no clue to the
identity of the Dwellers in the jungle. "We've kept
our eyes open, but we haven't seen any creatures
who might be them," reported the Jovian. "Except
for the Cubics and those big rodents and birds,
there isn't much animal life here -- just a wild mass
of those tangle-trees and other devilish queer
plants."
"If we could spare the time to beat thoroughly
through the jungle we might find the Dwellers."
Curt said.
"But we can't. The days are going by and we still
have'.t even started real construction of a ship."
The work of preparation for construction
seemed, indeed, agonizingly slow. The terrific
necessity of building every tool. mechanism and
instrument they needed was making big inroads
into their limited time.
Captain Future and Grag and Otho and George
McClinton had begun building the first cyclotron,
or atomic power generator.
IRST, they had had to go back to steel-
making and forge big crucibles of heat-
resistant steel. With these, they could handle the
softer metals of lead and copper and others, when
in a molten condition.
F
Curt built up a clay mold, with infinite care. Into
this they poured molten inertron, the alloy
composed of lead and tempering elements. When
the metal had cooled, they broke open the mold and
had a small but massive cylindrical shell of
inertron. This was to be the main power-chamber of
the cyclotron. The only openings in the cylinder
were the small ones at the top for the fuel-feed and
injector, and the bigger one for the power-take-off.
"Now to cast the fittings," Curt said. "The fuel
feed-lines and the power take-off lines all have to
be inertron, too, as well as the valves. And our only
way to get 'em is to cast 'em. We've not the
elaborate equipment that you need for machining
inertron."
"Oh, L-L-Lord," groaned George McClinton.
"I've worked with cycs for years, b-b-but never
realized what it was to b-b-build one."
While they toiled to finish the fuel-feed, injector
and power-leads, the Brain was ranging out every
day to explore the chasms and gorges.
Calcium was what Simon was looking for, most
of all. The vital catalyst was imperative If they were
to utilize the tremendous atomic energies locked up
in copper. But the Brain reported no success.
"I am beginning to fear," said Simon, "that there
is no accessible calcium on Astarfall."
Curt bit his lip. "We've got our makeshift cyc
almost finished. But we can't use copper fuel in it
until we have a little calcium."
Copper was the fuel most ordinarily used in
cyclotrons. That metal released more atomic energy
when disintegrated than did any other ordinary
45
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
substance. It released so much energy, indeed, that
it would blow any cyclotron apart unless its
disintegration was slowed down by calcium.
"We c-c-could use iron for fuel, instead of c-c-
copper," McClinton suggested. "It won't p-produce
half as much power as c-copper would, but it c-
could be used w-without the c-calcium catalyst."
"It's what we'll have to do, to get going," Captain
Future agreed. "But we still must have calcium!
Only copper will release enough energy to power a
space-ship! Unless we get a little calcium, any ship
we build will never take off."
He put McClinton to work upon casting the
inertron valves and fittings. The lanky engineer
labored diligently, stopping only to munch a few of
his dried prunes now and then.
"They g-g-give me energy," he defended when
Joan chaffed him about his addiction. "P-people
don't realize the value of p-prunes."
"What'll you do when they're all gone?" Joan
laughed. "Your case is almost empty ."
He looked dismal. "I know. That's why I'm w-
working so hard to g-get the ship started. To get
back to c-civilization and p-prunes."
Captain Future himself was engaged upon the
harder job of building the electric firing-mechanism
for their cyclotron.
A cyclotron is operated by disintegrating
powdered metal fuel atoms into their constituent
electrons. This exploding cloud of free electrons
was in reality what people called atomic energy.
NCE the disintegration process was
started, It was self-continuing as long as
the injector fed powdered fuel. But to start it, it was
necessary to have a trigger-apparatus consisting of
an electrostatic generator that would release a bolt
violent enough to start the disintegration within a
small trigger-tube attached to the main power-
chamber.
O
"How the devil do we build an electrostatic
generator when we don't even have a foot of wire?"
Otho demanded.
"We make the wire first," Curt retorted.
"This thing gets more complicated the further we
go with it," groaned the android.
But he fell to with Grag and Curt in the
tremendously difficult task of drawing out the
necessary wire from their supply of smelted copper.
Joan's deft fingers wove fine fiber threads from
certain plants into the necessary insulation for the
wire. Curt wound the complex coils, upon wooden
frames. Gradually the electrostatic generator took
shape.
The inertron trigger-tube was fitted into one of
the small openings of their cyclotron, with its
electrodes in place inside it and with heavy copper
cables running from it to the generator itself.
The generator contained the condensers for
storing the charge, the transformer coils, and the
copper spheres, belts and brushes of an electrostatic
machine which was to be turned by a geared crank.
"We're about r-r-ready," said McClinton
hopefully, at last. "I p-p-put the refined iron powder
into the f-f-fuel-hopper."
Everyone of the castaways was gathered that
morning to witness the test of the vital cyclotron
upon which all of them had labored in some way or
other. An atmosphere of tension held them.
Grag had already for some time been turning the
crank of the electrostatic generator, building up the
charge in its condensers. Lacking instruments, Curt
had to calculate mentally the amount of charge
available.
"It should be enough to fire the trigger-tube," he
said tautly. "Shove in the injector, George."
The prune-chewing engineer eagerly obeyed,
pushing down the knob atop the massive little
cyclotron, injecting a charge of powdered iron into
it.
Captain Future instantly closed the heavy switch
that broke the copper cable connecting the
generator to the cyc. The stored electric charge
flashed into the trigger-tube of the cyclotron.
There was a sharp detonation as the terrific
electic bolt started the bit of fuel in the trigger-tube
disintegrating. Almost instantly, it was followed by
a bursting, vibrating roar as the process of atomic
disintegration spread to the main charge of
powdered iron in the power-chamber .
Curt depressed the valve-lever atop the power
take-off. From that take-off tube, a jet of pale white
fire lanced out. It was a sword of atomic energy that
cut deep into the side of the knoll behind the
cyclotron.
"She works!" yelled Otho, his face aflame with
excitement.
"By space, you've done it!" bellowed Kim Ivan.
"We've got atomic power now!"
Weary as he was, Curt Newton felt a thrill of
inextinguishable pride in what they had done. In
two short weeks, they had retraced the whole
46
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
history of human invention from fire to atomic
power .
They had started from nothing, as the first
primitive savages of Earth had done. The only
difference was that they had had the knowledge
slowly gathered by hundreds of generations, and
had been able to apply it.
"N-n-now do we start laying the f-frame of the
ship?" McClinton asked eagerly, but Captain Future
shook his head.
"Not yet. We've got to build more cyclotrons
first. We'll need them for the immense labor of
actual construction. Then when we've built the ship,
our cyclotrons can be installed in it as its
propulsion machinery."
URT drove the work relentlessly on in the
next days, spending every possible minute
on the construction of more cyclotrons. Progress
was much faster now, for they could use the cyc
they had already built to power an atomic smelter
that reduced the time of operations greatly.
C
But on that first night after com-pleting the
original cyclotron, two more men had mysteriously
disappeared! Old Tuhlus Thuun and one of
McClinton's engineers vanished as inexplicably as
though they had been swallowed by thin air. And
the stockade wall had been guarded all night!
Next night, another mutineer vanished. Few
slept on the following nights, so great was the
alarm and fear. Nothing happened those nights.
Than the vanishings started again.
Panic halted the operations of the mutineers.
Their terror was so great that they refused longer to
assist the Futuremen's labors.
"There's no use of working to build a ship!"
cried Boraboll when Curt tried to get them to
resume work. "Long before we get a ship built, the ,
Dwellers will have murdered all of us!"
Curt felt baffled desperation. He had depended
on the mutineers to mine the great amount of metal-
ores necessary for construction. Their panicky
stoppage of work imperiled, all his hopes of
building a ship in time to escape from this doomed
world.
"We demand that the cursed Dwellers be found
and destroyed before we'll go on working!" shouted
one of the rebels.
"We can't stop work now to search for the
Dwellers," Captain Future pleaded desperately.
"We're behind schedule as it is. In a little more than
four weeks, Astarfall is going to.be destroyed." ,
Kim Ivan added his authority to Curt Newton's
plea. "Don't be idiots!" the big Martian stormed his
followers. "The Dwellers may get same us, hut
unless we build a ship in till we're all finished."
Moremos nodded agreement. The Venusian
murderer not to have seen the force of arguments.
Its logic was undeniable.
"You know I have no love for Future, but he's
right in this," snapped Moremos. "We still haven't
the faintest clue as to what or where the Dwellers
are. We might spend weeks hunting for them
without success."
But the superstitious terror of most of the
mutineers was not to be allayed by cold reason. The
nearer danger loomed bigger to them.
"We're not going to work in those diggings all
day and then be afraid to sleep at night, lest we
vanish, too!" Boraboll squeaked.
Curt Newton felt a sense of frustration. He could
understand the terror of these men. But their
panicky strike was the last straw.
Unexpectedly, the Brain came to his help. Simon
Wright glided to his side and spoke coolly.
"Tell them to quit acting like scared children --
that I now have at least a clue to the Dwellers," said
the Brain. "I've managed partially to decipher that
inscribed tablet from the Canyon of Chaos."
"Simon, then you've found out something about
the mystery of this place?" demanded Curt.
"Yes, lad," answered the Brain. "I have at least
begun to solve the riddle of this planetoid's strange
history."
CHAPTER XIII
Tragedy of the Void
FUTURE was more than a
little excied by this in-
formation.
"Does that inscription
identify the Dwellers?" he asked
quickly.
"No," admitted Simon
Wright. "But it does give a
possible clue to them, if we
47
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
could decipher all the writing. You see, the
inscription was the Antarian language, as we
surmised. But none of us have more than sketchy
acquaintance with that tongue from our brief
experience with it. And this writing seems to be in
a quite ancient form of it. Many terms I could not
translate."
"What became of the men who left that tablet?"
asked Joan wonderingly.
"I'm coming to that," said the Brain. "It appears
that this little world we call Astarfall has a strange
and terrible history. But I shall read you my partial
translation itself."
Everyone listened with deep interest as the
Brain's chill, metallic voice recited his translation
of the old tablet.
"We men of Antares colonized this small world many
generations ago. This world was then the moon of a planet in
the system of **** near our own star. It possessed mineral
resources, and to exploit those resources a band of our people
settled here and established mines. Each **** came ships
from Antares which brought us supplies and took away the
ores we had mined.
"But then came unforeseen catastrophe. A dark star was
approaching the system **** of which this moon was a
member. The passing dark star came so close that its huge
gravitational pull dragged this moon from its orbit and flung it
off into space. The moon left that system and drifted steadily
out into the vast interstellar void.
"Our colonists had but a few ships of their own. These
could contain only a smal1 number of people. So only that
smal1 number were able to escape the torn-away moon. There
was no escape for the others, for by the time ships could have
been assembled and come from Antares, this drifting world
was too far out in the trackless void.
"So some thousands of Antarian colonists were marooned
upon this moon as it traveled steadily out into the face of the
deep. They knew that they were cut off forever from their
parent system, but they did not despair of life. For the
radioactive core of the moon **** sufficient heat to maintain
life upon it even in the sunless depths of the outer void.
"Farther and farther into the vast abyss traveled the
drifting moon, on into the remote **** a sector of the galaxy
which no ship had ever traversed. The older generation of
colonists passed away and a new generation was born who
had never known anything but this little world. It seemed that
generation would fol1ow generation without change, and that
some day the drifting moon would reach the distant star-
system of *** and perhaps attach itself to a planet there.
"But out in the face of the deep a terrible thing began to
happen. The drifting moon had entered a region of terrific
cosmic radiation. It was an area of space in which cosmic
radiation swept in a concentrated current, due to **** and
other obscure factors of space-warp. The result was that all
life upon this little world was drenched by constant
penetrating radiation which soon caused a subtle and fearful
change.
"Evolution began to speed up terrifically upon our drifting
world. The unprecedented radiation produced **** and other
changes in the genes of every living species, which caused a
tremendous flowering of new mutations. Each species of
animal and plant life on the world began a rapid new
evolution. And our human species, too, began to evolve.
"We humans became less and less human! New mutations
rising among us, such as **** radically altered the nature of
our species. By now it seems evident that we **** destined to
evolve hideously onward into species entirely unhuman.
"But all the other forms of life on this world have also
been evolving at terrific speed. Plant life here has developed
weird new carnivorous forms of trees and shrubs, animal life
has evolved into equally uncanny and alien forms, and one
species of **** has evolved into such great intelligence and
mental power that it has been able to menace us by means of
hypnotic mental attack.
"We found a way to protect ourselves from that dreadful
hypnotic attack of the **** We still cling to life, by means of
that protection. But our world is still traversing the region
**** cosmic radiation, and evolution stil1 continues to alter
our human species with nightmare speed. We fear that by the
time this world has final1y drifted out of the region of ****
radiation and the burst of evolution stops, we shal1 have been
conquered by our evermore powerful enemies, and shal1 have
disappeared forever. And so we leave this table as record of
our fate should ever men of Antares manage to reach this
world."
HEY were all silent for a little when the
Brain finished reading his translation of the
tablet. All were gripped by an overpowing sense of
the cosmic tragedy that was the history of this little
world.
T
An inhabited moon, torn away from its native
system and drifting fatally out into the vast night of
the interstellar void, never to return! They seemed
with their own eyes to look back and see that
Antarian, a man whom hideous evolutionary
changes had perhaps already made inhuman,
writing upon the lead tablet his tragic record of the
awful fate of his people.
Captain Future broke the silence. "So that is the
reason for the unprecedentedly weird animal and
plant life of this planetoid! Out there in the abyss, it
passed through a region of radiation that caused
nightmare evolutionary change in every species."
"What do you suppose became of the people
who had been human?" Joan whispered.
"They must have perished entirely," said the
Brain. "No doubt despite their attempts to protect
themselves, they finally succumbed to the hypnotic
attacks of the new species, whom we call the
Dwellers."
Otho voiced an urgent question. "That's what I'm
48
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
most interested in the Dwellers. Doesn't the
inscription, tell just what they are?"
"Yes, if we knew that, we could hunt the devils
out and destroy them," put in Kim Ivan.
"The inscription does not help us much there,"
denied the Brain. "It names the species who
evolved into the Dwellers. But their scientific name
for that and other species is meaningless to us.
There's no way I can translate their scientific terms
or: proper names."
"Try it anyway, Simon," urged Curt Newton.
"Our safety depends on it. Until we have some idea
what and where the Dwellers are, we're helpless, to
do anything against them."
Ezra Gurney made an emphatic assertion. "That
inscription just proves what I said before -- that the
Dwellers are none other than the Cubics. It's clear
as daylight. One o' the animal species here evolved
into them little cubic monsters, whose group-minds
are strong enough to carry out those telepathic
attacks."
"I still can't believe that the Cubics, are the
Dwellers," Curt demurred "They just don't appear
to be of high enough intelligence. But if Simon can
translate the gaps in the inscription, it will give us a
clear clue to the Dwellers. Then we can act."
"I will try, but I am not too optimistic of
success," rasped the Brain "I know almost nothing
of the scientific terminology of the Antarian
language."
"What are we going to do in th meantime?"
demanded Boraboll.
Captain Future reassured him. "We'll fix up an
alarm-signal around the whole stockade. Then if the
Dwellers get a mental grip on any of us and try to
draw us out, there'll be an alarm that will rouse the
others."
That promise placated the uneasy castaways a
little. Curt Newton worked hastily to arrange the
alarm, grudging the time spent upon it.
He devised a strong cord of vegetable fibers,
which was so looped around the inside of the
stockade that anyone touching it would sound a
clamorous copper gong to which the cord was
attached.
"That will keep anyone from being drawn out
over the wall," he pointed out. "And the gate is
guarded at night. Now, back to work!"
LL that day, Captain Future kept .the
others so busy that they had no time toA
think of the Dwellers. They finished their battery of
six cyclotrons, and started the rigging of several
atomic smelters.
The smelters were big inertron crucibles into
which large amounts of ore could be shoveled. A
stream of atomic energy brought through inertron
pipes to each smelter would burn out the mineral
impurities and permit the molten refined metal
which remained to be suitably alloyed and run off
into casting-molds.
"Twenty-two days -- we're behind schedule,"
sweated Curt Newton that evening. "We should be
casting beams and plates by now. We've got to
speed up somehow."
Weary as the mutineers were that night from
their toil in the ore-diggings, few of them slept.
Their fear of the Dwellers was too great. They sat
in close groups around the fire, listening nervously
for the alarm that would signify that the mysterious
enemy had hypnotically seized one of them and was
drawing him out of the camp.
But the alarm did not come. And morning found
none of them missing. It reassured the men a little,
though some contended that the Dwellers had not
struck simply because they had been wakeful. The
hypnotic attacks had always been made upon
sleeping men.
The atomic smelters were finished this day.
During his work upon the smelters, Captain Future
had detailed McClinton and Grag to a special job.
This was the construction of several very small
cyclotrons which could be used to power such
portable tools as atomic welders. They would be
neces-ary for the fabrication of the ship.
"We've g-g-got the welders about ready,"
McClinton reported to Curt that afternoon. "How
are you c-c-coming?"
Captain Future straightened and mopped his
brow. He was grimy, sweating, haggard-looking
from the driving toil.
"We're ready to cast the keel-beam now," he
said. "Otho and I have been preparing the mold."
The mutineers, returning in troops from their
day's mining and dragging with them their rough
sledges laden with beryllium and chromium ores,
came flocking through the sunset to witness the
operation.
Curt and the Brain had already sketched detailed
plans for their projected space ship, working at
night by firelight to draw their designs on thin
sheets of lead. They had designed the simplest and
49
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
smallest ship that would serve their need. And they
had carefully planned so that it would require but
few different sizes of beams, plates and struts.
The molds for the beams had been accurately
fabricated from a perdurable cement made of
certain rocks ground to powder. To the biggest of
these molds was now connected the inertron spout
of the big atomic smelter, which at this moment
throb- bed with power.
"The alloy should be thoroughly compounded by
now," Curt Newton declared. "Start her pouring,
Otho."
Otho opened the spout-valve. From the spout, a
dazzling stream of molten beryllium alloy poured
into the long cement mold.
A cheer went up from ragged band who had
gathered to watch.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" Kim Ivan
exclaimed. "We'll soon have a ship to take us off
this cursed world, now we've cast the keel."
"In h-honor of this occasion, t-tonight I'll eat the
last of my p-prunes," George McClinton declared.
"I've been s-saving them."
Captain Future himself was perhaps the least
excited of them all. He knew only too well the vast
amount of work still to be done in short time.
He turned, looking for Joan. And he was
surprised not to find her. Everyone else was
present, and the stockade gate had been closed for
the night.
"Where's Joan?" he asked McClinton sharply.
The spectacled engineer looked startled. "Why, I
d-don't know. Come to t-think of it, I haven't seen
her for s-several hours."
Without a word, Captain Future started a rapid
search of the encampment. By the time he had
finished, night was falling.
"She's not anywhere in the camp!" he exclaimed
worriedly. "And Ezra Gurney is missing, too!"
CHAPTER XIV
Riddle of the Jungle
EZRA GURNEY had sat
all morning brooding over a
plan which had taken shape
in his mind. Finally in mid-
afternoon, the old marshal
had risen decisively to his
feet.
"I'll do it!" he muttered
resolutely. "No matter what
Cap'n Future says, I'm sure
I'm right."
The old Planet Patrol
veteran was used to action.
Ezra had spent more than forty years out in the
great spaces and wild worlds. He had fought space-
pirates in the old lawless days, had brought order to
raw boom-towns on the interplanetary frontier, and
was now the oldest and most experienced officer in
the Patrol.
But Ezra was a fighter, not a scientist, and thus
could be of no aid to the Futuremen in planning and
building the new ship. And Curt had tactfully
suggested that the work of mining ore or foraging
in the jungle would be too arduous for him, and had
requested that he spend his days in seeing to it that
there were no dissensions or fights in the camp.
"Too old, that's what he thinks of me!" snorted
Ezra disgustedly. "Me, that could still show these
young kiwis somethin' in a scrap."
His iron-gray hair almost bristled with.
indignation, and his keen, faded blue eyes snapped.
"Maybe he thinks I'm so old I got softenin' of the
brain, too," growled Ezra. "Maybe that's why he
won't listen when I tell him that them Cubics are
the Dwellers. I guess at that, he don't want to spare
time now to reconnoiter the Cubics. Time is all I
have. I'm goin' out there and scout the critters
myself!"
His decision made, the old marshal proceeded to
put it into effect.
Grabo and the other foragers had reported that
each time they had glimpsed any Cubics, the little
creaures were going to or coming from the
northwest. It was logical to assume that their
community lay somewhere in that direction.
Armed with a steel bush-knife forged for
50
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Grabo's gang, he entered the green gloom of the
weird forest and made his way in a northwestward
direction. The great tree-ferns looming around him,
and the other grotesque trees and shrubs, made an
unearthly vista. He wondered, fleetingly, why the
jungle contained no huge cacti like those at the
camp.
After a few moments of travel, he suddenly
stopped. There had reached his ears a clear call
from behind him.
"Ezra! Wait!"
He recognized Joan Randall's voice. And the old
marshal's wrinkled face expressed dismay.
"That danged girl! She saw me leavin' the camp
and she's run after me to stop me. Treatin' me like I
was a ru'away child!"
Indignantly, he decided that he would not argue
with Joan. He would simply slip out of sight until
she had given up hunting him.
With that idea in mind, Ezra hastily melted back
into the jungle and sought concealment inside the
thick foliage of a grotesque, towering shrub whose
green limbs drooped limply like those of a
weeping-willow.
Those drooping limbs suddenly came to life!
They wrapped themselves around Ezra and began
drawing the old veteran into the shrub.
"What the devil!" swore Ezra startledly.
He slashed hastily with his bush-knife. Swearing
and sputtering with rage, he hacked through one
after another of the clutching tendrils.
It took him several minutes to free himself. He
finally was able to tear loose from the grip of the
thing, and stood puffing some distance away.
OU SEE what happens to you when you
come slipping out here by yourself!"
accused a clear, stern voice.
Y
Joan Randall had been attracted by the sound of
struggle. She stood, her hands on her hips, eyeing
him severely.
"You were starting out to find the Cubics," she
went on. "You've been wanting to for days. It's a
good thing I saw you slipping out of camp."
"You wouldn't have caught up to me if that
danged snaky bush hadn't .grabbed me," Ezra
sputtered. "Blast me if I ever saw such queer, evil
plant-life as this world has! From the big tangle-
trees down to them nasty shrubs, most of the plants
here seem to prey on animals."
"It's what you get for sneaking out this way,"
Joan retorted unsympathetically. "I'm not going to
let you go any farther."
"Now, Joan, listen," wheedled the old veteran.
"I'm doin' this for Cap'n Future's sake. It's to help
him that I want to investigate the Cubics."
Joan's pretty face was serious as she considered
this. Her brown eyes looked thoughtfully at him.
"You're right, Ezra. We'll go out together and
see what we can learn about the Cubics."
Ezra's brief feeling of triumph turned to dismay.
"But you can't come along with me, Joan! Curt
would never forgive me if I took you."
"Either I go with you, or you don't go at all," the
girl said firmly. "Try to go on without me, and I'll
shout."
"Oh, dang all mule-headed women!" muttered
the old marshal. "They haven't got any business out
in space. When I was a youngster, women stayed on
Earth and didn't go gallivantin' all over creation. All
right, come on."
They started together through the jungle,
threading their way through the more open glades
in a northwest- ward direction.
"Grabo an' the others said every time they saw
the Cubics, the critters were comin' from or goin' in
this direction," Ezra explained. "They didn't think
the things could live very far from here."
"I hope not," said Joan a little anxiously. "We
haven't many hours of daylight left."
Ezra used his bush-knife to hack a way through
thickets of vegetation around which they could not
detour. But they were careful to avoid all tangle-
trees and other similar carnivorous forms of plant-
life with which the old marshal had so lately had
his upsetting experience.
"Blast me if I don't think the plants on this world
have more strength and intelligence than the
animals," declared Ezra. "The way some of them
growths try to grab a person is uncanny."
"The Brain says that all this unprecedented
evolution of plant-life is due to the burst of
accelerated evolution when Astarfall passed
through that realm of cosmic radiation," Joan told
him.
"Maybe so, but it still seems creepy and
unnatural to me," grunted the old veteran.
They went on for mile after mile, while the
shafts of pale sunlights that struck through the
weird forest slanted more and more toward the
horizon. They were by now penetrating into
completely unexplored jungle. For Grabo and his
51
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
foraging parties had been too engrossed by the
difficult task of gathering sufficient food to do any
unnecessary exploring.
HEY had kept an alert eye out for the
Cubics, but had so far seen none of the
strange creatures. The only animal life they had
encountered were a few of the rodent-like animals
darting away in the thickets and a number of the
bat-winged, featherless birds flying overhead.
T
Suddenly they struck a hard-packed, beaten trail
that led due westward through the jungle. Ezra and
Joan stopped, amazed.
"Why, the Cubics must have made this path!"
the girl exclaimed. "You remember that Otho said
the creatures seemed to be in the habit of mining
'nd taking away ore from the volcanic area east of
here? This must be the path they use."
"If that's so this path would lead us right to the
home or community of the Cubics!" Ezra said
excitedly. "Now we're gettin' somewhere."
Joan hesitated. The Sun was now sinking toward
the horizon and the feeble daylight of the jungle
was darkening into a somber dusk.
"Perhaps we ought to turn back, and return
tomorrow," she suggested. "It'll soon be night."
"Turn back when we're this close?" Ezra scoffed.
"Besides, night is when we want to watch the
Cubics. If they're the Dwellers, it's at night that they
somehow make those telepathic attacks on our
camp."
The reminder of those dreaded hypnotic attacks
was one not calculated to reassure the girl. But Joan
had courage, and she saw the logic in Ezra's
argument. Without further objection, she
accompanied him onward.
Their progress was now much more rapid, for
they were now following the beaten path. It ran due
west except at places where it swerved aside to
avoid a clump of tangle-trees or other dangerous
vegetation. Those alien growths loomed dark and
for- bidding in the gathering dusk.
Stars were peeping forth in the darkening sky.
Far behind them, the heavens were lighted by the
quivering red glow of the smoking volcanoes.
Presently Ezra and Joan heard a low, persistent
sound from ahead. It sounded like the clash and
clatter of many hammers beating upon rock.
"Must be the Cubics," Ezra said in a low voice.
"But what're they doin' to make that sound?"
"I don't know," answered the girl bewilderedly.
"We're very near."
They went with much more care, following the
path but ready to dart off it into the thickets at any
alarm. The din ahead came louder to their ears.
Then they came abruptly into full view of an
amazing spectacle.
The path debouched ahead of them into a broad,
flat clearing. This open plain contained the little
city of the Cubics.
It was one of the strangest communities upon
which human eye had ever looked. There were
several scores of small buildings, built and arranged
with mathematical precision. They looked like
stone beehives, each having only a single opening.
They were ranged in concentric circles.
Hundreds upon hundreds of the Cubics were
visible in this weird little city. The little cube-
shaped creatures were engaged in bewildering,
activity. With their queer faculty of combination,
they were gathered into many different figures that
engaged upon several inexplicable tasks.
There was a row of grotesque, four-armed
figures twice the height of a man. They were
engaged in hammering and splitting chunks of rock,
using harder masses of rock for hammers. There
were other figures like huge centipedes, who
carried the shattered rock away and sorted its
pieces.
And each of those big, grotesque figures was
composed of scores of the little Cubics! An arm of
one of the hammers might be made up of ten
separate Cubics, hooked together. Joan and Ezra
could plainly see the tiny, twinkling eyes and
mouths in the faces of those constituent cubes.
"Why, this is crazy!" muttered Ezra. "Why in the
name o' the Sun are they workin' so hard, crushin'
that rock?"
"They're crushing the metallic ores out of it,"
Joan said quickly. "Look -- the centipede-ones take
the metal back to those big heaps."
ZRA'S eyes traveled in the direction she
indicated. Behind the little Cubic city there
loomed colossal heaps of small fragments, heaps
big as small hills. The fragments were of metal
ingots or rich ore.
E
"Why they must have been laborin' like this for
centuries to amass all that metal ore!" gasped the
old marshal. "There's millions of pounds of it, and
it looks like it had been gatherin' there for ages."
He was stunned by the riddle of the Cubics'
52
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
tremendous toil. Then a thought occurred to him.
"Maybe this is the answer, Joan. If these Cubics
are the Dwellers, maybe they've been attackin' us
telepathically because we've been minin' metal. It
seems like these critters are crazy on minin' ore
themselves."
"That might be the answer," Joan admitted in a
whisper. "Let's take a closer look at those big ore-
heaps. We can circle around nearer."
She and the old marshal started skirting around
the clearing to approach nearer that side of it on
which the vast heaps of ore towered. They moved
with extreme care in the dark jungle, to make no
sound.
Joan was in the lead. Ezra suddenly descried a
snaky movement as of tentacles in the thick foliage
just ahead of her.
"Look out, Joan -- you're walking into a tangle-
tree!" he shouted warning.
The girl recoiled in time. But next moment they
both realized with dismay that the clatter of the
Cubics' activity had suddenly halted.
"They heard me!" Ezra groaned. "We got to beat
it out of here on full-rockets!"
They scrambled back toward the path and started
a hasty retreat away from the Cubic City. But it was
too late.
Cubics who formed big centipedal figures were
already racing along the path after them. In an
instant they had overtaken and surrounded the old
veteran and the girl.
Before the horrified eyes of Joan and Ezra, the
Cubics who formed those figures abruptly shifted
into new, towering formations. They became giant,
semi-human shapes who advanced on the two
humans with clutching arms.
CHAPTER XV
Secret of the Cubics
NO SOONER had
Captain Future discovered
the absence of Ezra and
Joan from the camp, than
he realized that it had but
one logical explanation.
"Ezra's slipped off to spy
on the Cubics!" he
exclaimed. "He's been
wanting to for days. He
thinks they're the
Dwellers."
"B-b-but M-m-miss
Randall?" asked George McClinton anxiously.
McClinton's deep solicitude for Joan's safety
was obvious -- as obvious as the shy, whole-souled
admiration which the stuttering engineer had shown
for the girl agent since the beginning of the
Vulcan's voyage.
"Joan would go after him if she saw him leaving
camp." Curt guessed. "But I would have thought
she'd have brought him back by now."
"Ezra can be plenty mule-headed when he gets
an idea into his head," reminded Otho. "He
probably insisted on going on. and she went along!"
Curt was thoroughly alarmed. Night was already
falling upon the jungle. He knew from experience
what uncanny dangers it contained.
"Otho, Grag -- get picks for weapon and come
on!" he said swiftly. "We're going after them. and
quickly."
He was himself grabbing up one of the steel
bars. They hastened toward the gate of the
stockade, and found that others had come with
them.
Grabo, the Jovian mutineer, was one of them. "I
know a path in there that I think leads toward the
Cubics." he said. "I'll go along and show you."
"And I'm g-g-going, too." George McClinton
insisted.
Kim Ivan was already opening the gate of the
stockade, and the big Martian pirate swung along
with them as they rapidly entered the jungle.
Grabo led the way through th:e dark fern-forest,
avoiding tangle-trees and other dangers whose
location he knew. They soon reached the path.
53
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"We never followed it very far, but we've seen
the Cubics using it," the Jovian informed.
"Here's a fresh slash by a bush- knife," called
Otho, bending over a hacked vine that had until
recently lain across the path. "Ezra and Joan must
have gone this way, all right."
Curt's anxiety mounted by the minute as they
hurried westward along that beaten trail.
"Barging off into this jungle by night, as though
she was strolling around in a Venusian park!" he
exclaimed.
"Listen!" said Grag suddenly, after they had
traveled some miles.
The super-sensitive microphonic ears of the
robot could pick up sounds no one else could hear.
Grag stood, a towering, gleaming silhouette in the
starlight, motionless and listening.
"I can hear a lot of activity from somewhere far
ahead," finally reported the robot. "It sounds like
rock being shattered."
"You're crazy!" Otho jeered. "Who the devil
would be pounding up rock here in the jungle?"
"The Cubics wouldn't be -- or would they?" Kim
Ivan wondered. "Come to think of it, they're always
carrying rock when you see them."
Captain Future imperatively enjoined silence,
and led the way on along the path toward the west.
Presently he and the others could also hear the
distant sound of clashing rock that had reached
Grag's ears.
FEW minutes later found them crouching
at the edge of the jungle and looking out at
the starlit little city of the Cubics, with in-
credulous astonishment. The stone beehive
structures, the hordes of Cubics engaged in
crushing rock ores, the towering heaps of crushed
ore behind the village, all stunned them as they had
so recently dumfounded Ezra and Joan.
A
"Why, those Cubics are grinding out ore!" Otho
gasped. "And look, when they get it crushed out,
they simply carry it over to those big heaps and
dump, and then go get more. They're balmy as
Martian fool-monkeys!"
"I'll be blasted!" Kim Ivan was swearing in a
whisper. "Why would the little creatures crush out
all that ore when they haven't any use for it?"
"I see Joan and Ezra!" Grag announced. "Look,
Chief!"
With sharp relief, Curt Newton perceived that
Joan and Ezra were sitting on the ground in front of
one of the little stone beehive buildings. A ring of
Cubics surrounded them, guarding them.
Obviously, the Cubics had taken the girl and the old
marshal prisoner but had not harmed them.
"They've not been hurt," exclaimed Otho in a
low voice. "Now all we've got to do is to crash in
there and bring them out."
The android raised his steel weapon, as he and
Grag and the others prepared to follow Captain
Future in a sortie into the community. "Wait a
minute," ordered Curt Newton. There was a
strange, frozen look on his face.
Curt's eyes had been traveling over that bustling,
inexplicable scene. And a possible explanation of it
had entered his mind, one whose implications were
paralyzing.
The possibility that had occurred to him sent
through him an icy horror such as he had almost
never before experienced. He seemed to see behind
this half-comic, purposeless activity of the Cubics,
a ghastly story.
"Good God!" he choked. "If I'm right, we're
looking at the most awful scene our eyes have ever
rested on."
"Chief, what are you talking about?" whispered
Otho. "I can't see anything awful about those
Cubics breaking up ore for metal they don't know
how to use. It seems funny, to me."
"Yes, and look at the big heaps of it they've piled
up," chuckled Kim Ivan. "They must have been
doing this for hundreds of years."
"Yes, for hundreds of years," muttered Captain
Future. His face was pale in the starlight. "For
hundreds of years."
They stared at him, completely perplexed by the
emotion of horror that seemed to have
overwhelmed him.
"Listen," he said after a moment. "If my guess is
right, we won't have to fight these Cubics to get
Ezra and Joan away. I want you to refrain from
making a single hostile move toward them when we
go out there. Let me talk to them."
"Talk to them?" echoed Otho incredulously.
"But they won't understand you. They're only queer,
clever little animals."
"Maybe they will understand me," Captain
Future muttered. "Though I almost hope they
don't."
Completely without understanding, the four
followed him out of the jungle as he stepped
straight into the starlight of the open clearing.
54
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
Instantly they were glimpsed by the Cubics. At
once the noisy crushing and carrying of ore was
broken off, and the creatures came gliding toward
the five newcomers.
They approached menacingly, in the form of
huge, semi-manlike figures with upraised,
threatening arms. Curt Newton waited until they
were quite near, and then he spoke loudly to them.
He used a queer language.
The Cubics stopped short! They froze where
they were, every eye of the grotesque little cubical
creatures staring at Captain Future.
"What's he saying?" murmured Kim Ivan
wonderingly.
"He's talking to them in the Antarian tongue!"
Otho said dumbfoundedly. "I don't get it."
UT Captain Future's speech seemed to be
having a paralyzing effect upon the
Cubics. Curt was saying to them, in the Antarian
language:
B
"We come from the home world, from Antares."
He waited. Had his appalling guess been right?
It seemed that it had, for the Cubics were now
betraying the wildest excitement.
The creatures had not the intelligence or
memory to understand the meaning of his words,
Curt divined. But the language in which he spoke
was striking some deep, buried chord of memory in
their queer minds.
For the creatures had broken up their menacing
formations and were rushing forward and swarming
around Curt in a swarm of swirling cubical bodies.
Their little eyes were fixed upon his face, and from
their tiny mouths came little, piping sounds
indicative of immense excitement.
Captain Future advanced toward the little city,
with Otho and the others amazedly following. The
Cubics continued to swarm around Curt eagerly.
All work had ceased, and every Cubic was
gathering.
Joan and Ezra saw them coming. Relief and
astonishment were both in the girl's face as she
greeted Captain Future.
"Curt, how did you win over the Cubics? They
took us prisoner and they've been holding us here."
" Joan, you and Ezra speak to the Cubics," he
ordered. "Say a few words to them in Antarian.
You know I taught you a few phrases of it."
Wonderingly, the old marshal and the girl agent
obeyed. No sooner had the words left their lips,
than the attitude of their captors changed. The
Cubics who had been guarding them now clamored
pipingly around them as well as around Captain
Future.
"What in the name o' the Sun does it mean?"
Ezra Gurney exclaimed. "How come just hearin'
Antarian spoken has such an effect on these
critters?"
Curt answered solemnly. "Because these Cubics
are Antarians. At least, they're the remote
descendants of human Antarians."
It was too staggering a statement for the others
to take in immediately. They looked
uncomprehendingly at the weird little creatures
swarming by the hundreds around them -- the tiny
cubical bodies, the queer, clawlike little limbs, the
twinkling eyes and piping mouths.
"These critters human once?" gasped Ezra. "you
must be jokin'."
Joan paled. That horror which had so shaken
Curt Newton was invading her mind as she began
to realize what he meant.
"Oh, Curt, no! You can't mean that the human
Antarians who once colonized Astarfall, who left
that inscribed tablet, changed into --"
"Into these Cubics, yes," Curt finished somberly.
"We wondered what had become of those human
colonists. Well, here they are."
A stunned silence held his companions, while
the unearthly little creatures continued their mad
dance of excitement about them.
"Every species of life upon this worldlet suffered
tremendous evolutionary development when
Astarfall passed long ago through that region of
cosmic radiation," Curt continued. "But evolution
can work in a downward direction as well as an
upward one. Some of the species on this world
evolved upward, notably its plant-life. But others,
like its human species, were subjected to a
progressive degeneration by the mutational
changes.
"The Antarians here mutated gradually into
unhuman form. We know from that inscription that
it was so. They mutated into a form in which they
had lost the intelligence and memory that had been
theirs. Their former telepathic method of
communication developed prodigiously, to
compensate for the diminishing of their size and
strength. By necessity, they developed an uncanny
ability for physical and mental cooperation. That
ability is all that has even kept them surviving,
55
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
when intelligence and size and strength were
gradually lost."
ORROR was on the face of every one of
Captain Future's companions, now. The
little Cubics were no longer comic, but tragic.
H
These tiny, semi-intelligent creatures -- the
descendants of men! The ghastliness of it shook
them all.
"But why have they kept mining metals, all these
centuries?" cried Kim I van. "They no longer have
the intelligence to use it."
"Racial memory," Curt answered somberly,
"persists in a species long after intelligence is lost.
In these Cubics has persisted the tradition of their
human ancestors who upon this world mined metal
which the ships of Antares came to get."
"Good God!" whispered George McClinton
horrifiedly. " All these c-c-centuries, the c-creatures
have been faithfully m-massing ores because of that
tradition."
Captain Future nodded. "That's why I spoke to
them in the Antarian tongue. I hoped it would strike
a chord of racial memory. And it has. They have a
dim idea that we are those who have come for their
gathered metal."
Tears glistened in Joan's eyes. There was
something terribly poignant about the excited
happiness of the simple little creatures swarming
around them.
The Cubics eagerly led Curt and his companions
toward the giant ore-heaps behind their community.
There was a quality of pride in their excited,
meaningless piping.
"There's almost all the metal here that we'll need
for our shp," Curt said aftr a quick examination of
the great heaps. "Everything except calcium."
"Blast it, why is it we can find everything on this
world except the few pounds of calcium that are the
most vital of all?" Otho muttered.
"Say, this will save us the work of mining ores,
if the Cubics will let us have what we need of these
metal piles," Grag declared.
Captain Future nodded. "And we need to save
all the time we can, for we're far behind schedule
on the ship. I'm sure they'll let us have it."
He stepped forward, and gathered up an armful
of sample chunks from the great pile of beryllium
ores. Instantly, as though comprehending his
purpose, the Cubics rushed forward toward that
pile.
The creatures swiftly formed themselved into
several dozen of the big centipedal figures whose
formation they took for carrying purposes. Other
Cubics became octopoid figures who rapidly loaded
the centipedal ones with masses of the beryllium
ore. They they stood, eyeing Curt expectantly.
"They're going to carry the stuff wherever we
want it," Captain Future guessed. "Poor devils --
they have some dim traditional notion that we've
come in ships to this world to get it."
He and Joan and the others started back through
the jungle, in the direction of the camp. Quickly the
Cubics carrying the masses of ore swung into the
jungle behind them and followed them along the
path.
T WAS a weird procession through the dark
fern-forest, the eager piping of the Cubics
sounding incessantly as they followed the humans.
I
But when they were still a few miles from the
camp, the attitude of the Cubics changed. They
began to move more slowly, to show an extreme
reluctance toward going farther in this direction.
Finally they stopped altogether, putting down their
loads and clustering with dismayed pipings around
Captain Future.
"They won't go any farther!" said Otho
surprisedly. "I wonder what they're afraid of?"
"I believe," Curt said thoughtfully, "that they
know of something dangerous in the area in which
our camp is located. That would explain why the
Cubics have never come close to the camp."
"The Dwellers!" cried Kim Ivan. "Future, they're
scared of the Dwelers!"
"Say, that's right," Grag rumbled. "We thought
the Cubics might be the Dwellers, but we know
now they're not. Who are the Dwellers, then?"
"They're somewhere in the area around our
camp, whoever they are," Curt Newton murmured.
"If the Cubics could only tell us."
He tried to get into intelligent communication
with the little creatures. But it was impossible.
Their only method of communication was the weird
sixth-sense of cooperation by which they
interlocked their own minds and bodies. Their
piping sounds were utterly without meaning.
The only definite thing that could be gathered
from the actions of the Cubics was that the area
around the castaways' camp held danger, and that
the creatures would not enter it. And the creatures
set up a distressed piping when Curt and his
56
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
comrades finally strode on and left them.
"We can have our own men come this far and
sledge that metal ore to camp," Curt planned as
they went on. "And the Cubics will let us have all
the other ores we need from those great heaps. It'll
save precious time!"
Joan looked at him soberly. "When Astarfall is
destroyed, those little creatures will all perish?"
"Yes," said Captain Future heavily. "There's no
possible way in which they could be saved. And
would you want to keep alive those pitiful
descendants of a once-human race?"
CHAPTER XVI
Dire Awakening
UPON the next
morning, Curt's improvised
organization began the
work of casting the scores
of great beams that would
form the frame of the ship.
The atomic smelters
throbbed and hummed. the
molten alloy hissed into the
cement molds, the shining
beams were later broken
free of the molds and the
same routine was
immediately repeated.
During the next days, a mass of numbered
beams and struts rapidly accumulated near the
towering, giant cacti at the center of the camp. Grag
and McClinton operated the smelters under Curt
Newton's direction, while Otho, Kim Ivan and most
of the mutineers hauled the loads of ore to camp.
The Brain still ranged out over the surface of
Astarfall in vain search of calcium. So far, they had
not found a grain of the vital catalyst. And so far,
the Brain had not been able to translate the gaps in
the ancient inscription, which might have given
them a clue to the identity of the Dwellers.
"The Dwellers are somewhere within a few
miles of our camp," Curt reasoned. "We know that
from the actions of the Cubics. But what and where
are they? We've seen no creatures of high
intelligence in all this area."
"It's possible, I suppose," murmured the Brain,
"that that fellow Boraboll's suggestion had truth in
it, and that the Dwellers are subterranean or
invisible creatures. Rollinger's ravings indicate
they're somewhere near."
Captain Future shook his head wearily. "It's a
hideous riddle. And two more men disappeared last
night, despite our new system of guards."
Curt had instituted a regime of guards designed
to halt the disappearances. It was evident that the
Dwellers only made their hypnotic attacks upon
sleeping men.
So Captain Future had posted guards over all the
sleepers, each night. He had instructed them: "If
you see any man get up and start sleep-walking, it
means he's in the hypnotic grip of the Dwellers. But
don't awaken him. Follow him. "
"Follow him?" the others had said startledly.
"But the Dwellers will draw him right to them!"
Curt nodded. "Which means that by following
their victim, you'll be led right to the Dwellers
themselves. At last we'll find out what they are and
where they lurk, and can take measures against
them."
But here, again, the unearthly cunning of the
mystery Dwellers showed itself. So long as Curt's
guards remained wakeful and watching the sleeping
men, not one hypnotic attack was made upon them.
It was obvious that the Dwellers were aware of
the watchers, and were too crafty to give
themselves away by drawing victims to themselves
while anyone was watching.
"Anyway, it seems to have stopped the attacks
and that's something," Captain Future said. "We
need every man, now!"
For as these short days passed, the stark
necessity of accelerating construction of the ship
was terribly evident. Time was flying -- and each
day meant Astarfall was nearer to the System and to
destruction.
Curt Newton soon began fitting the growing pile
of beams into the framework of the ship. The stout
metal girders, the curved ribs, were attached solidly
to the massive keel by means of their atomic
welders. The torpedo-shaped framework of the
vessel took definite form.
"Let's call it the Phoenix," Joan suggested. "In a
way, it's rising out of the ashes of the old Vulcan."
"We'll start tomorrow casting plates, and making
the refractory alloy for the rocket-tubes," Captain
Future said haggardly. "We've got to go faster than
we have."
57
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
HAT night two men disappeared from
camp. The Dwellers had struck again.
Curt's alarm-signal around the stockade had failed.
And his guards had failed, for they admitted they
had slept.
T
Curt had not the heart to blame them, for the
men were all now nearing exhaustion. Yet their
sleep had cost two lives, and had increased the
terror of the Dwellers. Rollinger's shrieking was
now incessant.
"I'll watch tonight myself," Captain Future
declared.
All that day he sweated at the labor of producing
the plates which would be welded onto the torpedo-
like framework of the Phoenix. But he insisted on
keeping his watch that night.
"You're too exhausted yourself," Joan pleaded.
"Grag or Simon --"
"Grag is at the Cubics' city with the party
transporting ore, and Simon is searching night and
day for calcium," he answered. "I'll be all right."
But for once, Captain Future had overestimated
his iron strength. Fagged by the superhuman strain
under which he had been laboring, he fell asleep
before midnight as he sat listening to John
Rollinger's babbling.
In his sleep, he dreamed. He dreamed that out of
depths of swirling darkness, a cold, vast, unseeable
intelligence was approaching him.
He felt the icy grip of it upon his dazed mind.
And deep within Curt's subconscious, an instinct
shouted frantic warning.
"The Dwellers -- they're seizing you!"
He knew in his subconscious that that was what
was happening. But he could not wake, he could
not struggle. The tremendous power of the hypnotic
grip upon his slumbering mind and body was now
complete.
Curt dimly felt himself rising and moving
forward. That helpless, unconquered corner of his
mind told him that he was being drawn as a
hypnotized victim toward the Dwellers. But still he
could not wake nor do anything to break the hold of
those vast, icy intelligences upon him.
There came a sudden violent shock! Curt
suddenly found himself lying on the ground,
awake.
He staggered to his feet. He had fallen to the
ground near the pile of metal struts beyond which
towered the giant cacti. And the ground was
rocking and rolling violently under him like the
waves of a sea.
"My God!" choked Curt Newton. "The Dwellers.
had me, but a sudden ground-quake knocked me
awake and saved me."
The quake was not subsiding. It was growing
every minute more violent, and everyone in the
camp was awakening in wild terror.
They were all flung off their feet, onto the
ground that rolled sickeningly under them with a
dull, tremendous roar of diastrophism. The pile of
metal struts collapsed with a clatter. Cries of terror
arose.
"Keep your heads!" Captain Future shouted. "It's
another quake."
"Look!" screamed Boraboll, pointing wildly to
the east.
The sky there was blazing with fire. Up from the
distant volcanoes were shooting huge geysers of
flaming lava that painted the heavens crimson.
Vast clouds of steam and smoke and ashes
whirled up to veil that titanic eruption. The air was
thick with sulphurous fumes, and hot ashes rattled
down upon them as the ground quivered ever more
wildly beneath them.
"The end of this world has come already!"
hoarsely yelled a terror-stricken mutineer .
HE darkness became Stygian as vast clouds
of smoke from the erupting volcanoes
filled the air. Winds were shrieking like fiends, and
the sickening heave and fall of the solid ground
beneath them continued.
T
Choking and gasping as he breathed the
superheated, sulphurous fumes, Curt Newton
struggled to the side of Joan.
"Lie down!" he yelled to her over the tumult.
"This will soon pass."
Grag's tremendous voice shouted through the
infernal uproar. "Chief, the ship's framework is
going to break loose!"
A new and appalling sound had entered the
symphony of destruction. It was the heavy rumbling
and thumping of a great mass rocking on the
ground.
The heavy metal framewrk of the Phoenix was
rocking wildly in its rough cradle as the quakes
continued. It threatened to roll free entirely, to roll
down the knoll and crush out their camp and
themselves.
"Get away!" shrieked a scared mutineer. "She'll
58
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
come loose on us any minute!"
"No!" blared Captain Future's voice. "We've got
to pin her dow ! Grag, get the sledges and some of
the smaller beams for stakes! Otho, grab those
sledge-cables and bring them!"
Not even the terrifying nature of their situation
could temper the instant loyalty and obedience of
the Futuremen. They sprang to obey.
And Curt found big Kim Ivan beside him as he
ran to help Otho unfasten the tough, strong cables
by which they had drawn the ore-sledges.
"If she goes when we're beside her, we'll never
see the Moon again!" gasped Otho as they ran
toward the ship with the cables.
Clang! Clang! Grag towered like an incredible
metal giant in the storm, using the heaviest of the
sledges to drive small, straight metal beams deep
into the ground beside the Phoenix.
The torpedo-shape:d framework, upon which
they had expended such tremendous toil and
thought, was leaning toward them threateningly
with each new heave of the quake. If it broke loose,
it would smash itself and them, too.
Curt and Otho fumbled furiously in the darkness
to tie their cables to the stakes and then to the lower
beams of the frame. Kim Ivan had found a sledge
and was helping Grag drive more stakes, while
George McClinton had groped his way to them to
help.
"Tighten those cables! Put two more on each
side!" Curt shouted.
The framework was securely lashed down to the
stakes. Now the tremors seemed subsiding a little.
But now the buffeting winds were rising to a gale
of hurricane force.
For two hours, they all lay flat upon the ground
while the raging gale swept over them. By the end
of that time, the quakes had ceased except for an
occasional quiver. The disastrophic roar of shifting
rock beneath had stopped, and the eruption of the
volcanoes seemed lessening.
AWN came as the gale died down. The
feeble, murky light disclosed a scene of
destruction in their camp. The grimed, haggard
castaways surveyed it in mute dismay.
D
The framework of the Phoenix was undamaged,
except for a bent beam which could soon be
straightened. The huge barrel-like cacti still
towered unharmed at the high central point of the
clearing. But nearly everything else was wrecked.
Most of the stockade was down, all the huts but one
had collapsed, and their cyclotrons, tools and
supplies were covered with debris.
Captain Future discovered that none of them had
been seriously injured, though there were many
bruises and minor hurts.
"By the Sun, I never thought I'd see another
day," declared Kim Ivan feelingly. "I sure thought
the cursed planetoid was cracking up."
"This is a warning," Curt told them urgently.
"We can expect more and heavier cataclysms as
Astarfall draws nearer the System. This unstable
little world is starting to respond to the
gravitational perturbations that in a couple of weeks
will shatter it completely."
"Can we finish the Phoenix in time?" Joan asked
breathlessly.
"We've got to," Curt said tightly. "And we've got
to find the calcium which will enable us to operate
it."
He detailed a small number of the men to clear
up the battered camp. The rest he drove throughout
the day with unremitting energy.
Grag and George McClinton straightened the
few bent beams of the ship-frame, by softening the
metal with atomic welders and exerting pressure
upon it with improvised jacks. Meanwhile, Captain
Future and Otho supervised the ceaseless operation
of the big smelters.
They toiled all through that day casting the big
beryllium alloy plates for the hull. The work parties
of the mutineers brought constant new loads of ore
upon their makeshift sledges. There was a quality
of scared desperation in the way the convicts
worked this day. They had been thoroughly
impressed by the catastrophic outbreak of the night.
The Brain, returning that evening from his
ceaseless search for calcium, reported that the
whole volcanic area was in violent activity.
"New craters have broken out in the eastern
section, and the Canyon of Chaos has partly
collapsed on itself and is now a large lake of lava, "
he stated.
Curt nodded grimly. "The increasing shocks are
allowing the radioactive hellfire at Astarfall's core
to gush to the surface. It'll get rapidly worse. But
what about the calcium?"
"Curtis, I haven't seen a sign of the element,"
Simon Wright confessed. "It and certain related
elements like potassium and scandium just do not
seem to exist upon this world."
59
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
"If we can only find a few pounds of the stuff,
it'll be enough," Captain Future sweated. "Even a
pound or so would at least allow us to use the cycs
long enough to take off."
That night Grag stood watch over the camp. But
since the tireless robot could not alone keep watch
over all the sleepers, young Rih Quili shared his
guard.
But the next morning Rih Quili himself was
missing. It was tragically obvious that the
Mercurian officer had fallen asleep and had been
seized hypnotically by the Dwellers.
Ezra Gurney raged. "I liked that, boy a lot! If
ever I find out who the cursed Dwellers are, I'll --
Cap'n Future, maybe them devilish tangle-trees are
the Dwellers? Maybe they're intelligent."
URT shook his head haggardly. "No, they
can't be the Dwellers. I admit that plant-life
on this world seems to have evolved further than on
any planet I've ever visited. But the Cubics, who
know more than we do, show no fear of tangle-
trees. It is this region that they dread and refuse to
approach."
C
The other castaways were less stricken by the
new disappearance than Curt had expected. Their
fear of the Dwellers was still great, but even greater
now was their terror of the coming cataclysm.
Through the next days, Captain Future drove the
work around the clock. Their last two weeks were
slipping rapidly away. And the ominously
increasing volcanic activity and recurrent tremors
showed that the final catastrophe was near.
They welded the big plates onto the framework
of the Phoenix, joining each plate to the next with
the atomic welder to form an airtight joint.
Presently, the inner hull of the torpedo-like ship
was all on. But they still must build on the outer
hull.
Captain Future put that work into the hands of
Grag and Otho, who trained the mutineers and
divided them into gangs that worked in successive
shifts. Curt himself, with McClinton and Kim Ivan,
toiled to melt sand and minerals into glassite for the
portholes and bridge-windows, to cast the inertron
rocket-tubes, and to fashion tight tanks for water
and oxygen.
Kim Ivan, mopping sweat from his brow and
staggering from sixteen hours of unresting labor,
found one consolation.
"The only good thing about it is that now we're
working day and night both, the cursed Dwellers
have let us alone," panted the Martian.
Curt nodded exhaustedly. "Tomorrow we'll
install the cyclotrons in the ship, and fit the rocket-
tubes."
"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."
CHAPTER XVII
Disaster
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
60
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
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 round.
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.
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.
A
"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
61
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
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!" Cut
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.
RASH! The hollow sound of the explosion
came from the camp behind them.C"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.
62
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
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?"
HEY looked at him, most of them, with
faces sick with hopeless discouragement."TThe 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!
That did not apply to the Brain. Simon Wright
could still fly out over the lava floor, and he did so
again and again in his quest.
"Lad, I've been almost everywhere on this
world," he reported to Curt that evening. "It's
always the same. No calcium!"
Curt's face was dripping, his red hair disordered,
his zipper-suit torn and soiled. He had been
working on getting out the cyclotrons.
"Keep at it, Simon," he urged tautly. "We don't
need much calcium, remember. A few pounds
would be enough. Even a pound to use as catalyst
in one cyclotron would be at least enough to get the
ship off Astarfall."
The Brain looked at him closely. "If I don't find
any, have you really a plan for getting calcium or
was that promise of yours just a story to encourage
the others?"
"I have a way of getting a little calcium, enough
to allow a take-off," Captain Future replied. "But I
only want to use that way if everything else fails."
The Brain seemed startled, but Curt did not
elucidate. He had already strode back to the work
with the cycs.
That night was a fearsome one. They had plenty
of light by which to work, for the surrounding,
glowing lava cast a lurid red glare. By that terrible
illumination they toiled at the task of repairing the
wrecked cycs.
Before midnight a terrific electric storm raged
across the doomed planetoid. Blue lightning danced
and flashed incessantly, and the bawling hubbub of
thunder drowned the more ominous sound of
seismic tremblings. Hot, hissing rain slashed down,
63
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
battering the half-blinded men.
Throughout the next day, the seething lava crept
slowly up the sides of the knoll. Curt and his toiling
men scarcely glanced at that inching, threatening
tide. They were becoming numb to danger.
Late that afternoon, came two violent quakes.
The Phoenix shifted dangerously in its cradle. And
the big atomic smelters were overturned, spilling
molten metal that almost engulfed Curt and Grag
standing nearby.
"Get those smelters back up!" Captain Future
shouted. "Move them into that little hollow near the
cacti. They'll be better braced there."
"This is a n-n-nightmare," George McClinton
stammered as he strained at the job with them.
"We'll w-w- wake up back in the V-Vulcan."
Over the din came the incessant, crazy shrieking
of John Rollinger . "Masters, spare us! Do not slay
us!"
"He seems to think the Dwellers are causin' all
this," Ezra Gurney said. "He's been prayin' to them
all day."
They got the smelters upright in the little hollow
near the towering cacti and soon had them in
operation again. But their molds had been cracked
by the quakes and had to be repaired before they
could go on with the work of casting new jackets
for the wrecked cyclotrons.
Men dropped and lay unconscious, during the
fearful hours of that night of labor. Joan, staggering
herself from weakness and strain, worked to revive
them.
CHAPTER XVIII
Supreme Sacrifice
KIM IVAN was a tower
of strength. The big Martian
pirate, his battered face
grimed and terrible, his eyes
a little wild, drove the
faltering mutineers on
whenever they showed signs
of halting work.
"We may be outlaws and
pirates, but we're fighters,
aren't we?" roared the
Martian, to them. "This is
the biggest fight we ever had. Nobody is going to
quit. There'll be no more traitors like Moremos. We
shall work and survive together -- or we shall die
together!"
They got the new jackets onto the cycs with
fumbling hands. By morning they had moved the
cycs back into the Phoenix and re-installed them.
While McClinton superintended this, Curt and
others wielded atomic welders to repair the rent in
the hull. Curt had not slept for forty-eight hours. He
was staggering when Joan came to him with food.
"The job's almost done," he said thickly.
"McClinton's hooking up the fuel-pipes now. Has
Simon come back?"
The Brain had been gone all through the
previous day and the night.
"Not yet," Joan answered. "Oh, Curt, maybe he's
been caught by one of the quakes when he was
exploring for calcium."
"He'll be back," Captain Future husked with
unquenchable confidence. "Maybe his staying so
long means that he has found calcium."
There was suddenly a low moaning sound in the
air. Winds and streamers of smoke whirled
frightenedly from a dozen different directions. They
felt a curious lightness on their feet, as though they
were sinking.
"Another quake!" Curt yelled warning. "Down,
everybody!"
They flattened themselves upon the ground just
as the shock hit. The ground seemed to rise and
sink beneath them with inconceivable rapidity, like
an elevator alternately ascending and descending.
A bursting, prolonged roar hit their ears. The
Phoenix bounced up and down in its cradle,
threatening to smash its keel by its own weight.
"Gods of Mars, look at that " yelled Kim Ivan.
Out there in the haze, miles away, whole new
fiery mountains were rising majestically into being.
The tortured throes of doomed Astarfall were
buckling up its crust.
Tremendous explosions of steam veiled the
distant spectacle of planetary chaos. A new, higher
wave of lava came hissing across the smouldering
crimson sea that surrounded the knoll. It splashed
higher against the sides of their elevation, breaking
in fiery spray.
Choking from the fumes as he stumbled to his
feet, Curt Newton saw vaguely that John Rollinger
had escaped from his hut. The madman, his bonds
apparently snapped by that last shock, was praying
64
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
frenziedly upon his knees.
"Masters, do not slay us! Spare us!" he was
praying insanely to the Dwellers.
APTAIN FUTURE, his brain rocking in
this hour of planetary doom, disregarded
the madman. "He had glimpsed a wavering shape
flying down through the smoke and steam.
C
"It's Simon!" he shouted. "He's come back!"
Buffeted about by the howling currents of hot
air, the Brain's glittering, transparent cube struggled
down toward them.
"The calcium?" cried Ezra Gurney to him.
"I could not find any," said the Brain. He spoke
as though with a great effort, his metallic voice
hesitating and jerky. "There is no calcium."
"Masters! Masters!" came Rollinger's wild,
insane shriek of imploration in the stunned silence
that followed Simon's fateful news.
And Curt Newton suddenly noticed that, as he
prayed, Rollinger was kneeling in front of the big
clump of gigantic, barrel-shaped cacti.
Blinding revelation crashed into Captain Future's
brain. The veil was abruptly torn from the sinister
mystery of the planetoid.
"Good God!" he choked. "The Dwellers! I've
found them out, at last!" The others looked at him,
obviously believing that the superhuman strain had
unseated his reason.
Curt ran forward to the nearest of the giant cacti
in front of which the madman was kneeling. He
laid his hand shakingly upon the fluted, spineless
side of that mighty growth which towered high
above him.
"We've been blind," he choked. "We knew that
plant life had been tremendously developed by the
burst of evolution through which Astarfall passed.
We knew that the tangle-trees and other plants had
developed the power to prey upon and ingest living
creatures. We should have known that plant
intelligence would have been developed too by that
evolutionary spurt!"
A look of awe came on their faces.
"What do you mean?" Kim Ivan asked huskily.
"I mean that one species of the mutating plants
of this world developed intelligence to the point
where it could use hypnotic mental power to draw
its victims to it!" Captain Future cried. "I mean that
these giant cacti are the Dwellers!"
"Curt, look out!" screamed Joan.
An opening had suddenly appeared in the fluted
side of the gigantic cactus-creature beside Curt
Newton. It was like a perpendicular, slitted mouth
that suddenly yawned in the elastic fiber body of
the thing.
Curt, off balance, was falling in toward the
hideous, yawning maw. By a superb effort, the
Brain flashed through the air and thrust Captain
Future aside. He fell sprawling a little beyond the
plant-monster.
The gaping slit-maw in the side of the great
growth instantly closed.
"Name o' the Sun!" Ezra Gurney cried wildly.
"All our men that disappeared -- those things drew
them to themselves and swallowed them!"
"And all this time we've been hunting the
Dwellers, they've been right here in our own
camp!" Kim Ivan was saying dazedly.
Curt snatched up one of the heavy bush-knives.
"Come on and help me!" he panted. "We're going to
cut that creature open."
"Curt, there's no time for mere revenge on the
Dwellers," pleaded the Brain.
"This is not just revenge," Captain Future
flashed. "These plant-creatures are intelligent. If
there's any calcium on this planetoid, they'll know
of it. And we'll make this one tell where it is."
HEY snatched up the heavy bush-knives
and attacked the cactus-monster's mighty
base. As they started slashing into the tough fiber,
the hideous maw of the thing opened and closed in
vain effort to snatch them.
T
"Don't!" screamed Rollinger. "You are hurting
the Master. They will destroy us all!"
Captain Future suddenly reeled as into his brain
came the impact of a raging telepathic attack. A
furious thought-order to desist.
The others felt that mental resistance of the
Dweller, too. Kim Ivan cried out.
"The thing's fighting back telepathically! This is
like a crazy dream."
"Keep at it!" pressed Curt. "We know the
Dwellers can't dominate us hypnotically when our
conscious minds are awake. It can't stop us!"
The ground under them was shuddering
violently from new quakes, as they fiercely slashed
deeper into the base of the monstrous growth.
Ten feet in diameter was the massive thing, its
outer skin of elastic plant-fiber shielding softer
plant-tissues of pale white. Severed capillaries bled
sticky sap in horrible imitation of a wounded
65
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
animal as they cut deeper.
The hypnotic resistance of the Dweller was
frantic, and their minds seemed clouded and
chaotic. Yet it could not overcome them. They
slashed ever deeper -- and the whole towering,
barrel-like mass of the creature was finally cut
through and toppled aside.
Curt Newton slashed carefully down through the
white fibrous tissues of the creature's base, until he
uncovered that which he sought.
"God, it's the thing's brain!" choked Ezra
Gurney.
Deep within the base of the giant plant-creature
nestled a pink, convoluted mass of fiber. It pulsated
and quivered with uncanny life. From it branched
strange fibrous nerve-tendrils.
Brain of the Dweller! Brain of the great plant
whose species had been evolved toward high
intelligence by that same burst of mutations which
had caused the degeneration of"the humans upon
this planetoid!
Curt Newton poised his heavy knife over that
helpless, quivering plant-brain. And he thought to
it, in a concentrated mental message.
"I can kill you," Curt telepathed. "I will kill you.
unless you give me information I require."
Back into his mind came the quick telepathic
reply of the Dweller. "What do you wish to know?"
"I must know at once where upon this world we
can procure a small quantity of calcium," Captain
Future thought. "It is necessary to us if we are to
escape from this doomed planetoid."
The answering thought of the Dweller was
sharply startled. "What ? Is it true that this world is
doomed?"
"It's starting to crack open now!" Curt answered.
"The end is close at hand. Didn't you suspect that?"
"No, for we Masters have not visual or tactile
senses with which to observe," was the reply. "We
have noticed increasing tremblings of the ground,
but had not thought that they implied a catastrophe
to the whole world."
The cold, uncannily alien thought of the Dweller
continued broodingly. "So this is the end of our
glorious, brief history! For centuries, we have been
evolving to greater intelligence and mental power,
since the first mutations chanced to change us in
that direction. We have dreamed of making
ourselves the mental masters of all this world, of
growing to such power that we could send our
thoughts far out into the universe to explore and
learn. And now that dream is ended."
There was an overtone of weird tragedy in the
thing's brooding thoughts. But Curt Newton
desperately seized upon one possibility.
OU COULD still live if you tell , us where
there is calcium," he thought, to the thing.
"We could take your plant-body or roots and brain
with us in our ship. You could grow again upon
another world."
Y
"It is impossible. Our bodies are so adapted to
the chemical conditions of this planetoid that we
could not live in a different habitat," answered the
Dweller. "However, I would tell you where there
was calcium if I could. I bear you no ill will. It is
true that we were forced to catch and devour a
number of your party, but you forced us to it by
camping here. The small animals on which we
formerly preyed would no longer approach this
place with you here. And our bodies had to have the
animal food upon which we subsist."
The Dweller continued his calm mental
message. "But though I would help you if I could, I
cannot. It is my belief that there is not, and has
never been, a single atom of calcium on this
world."
Curt felt the blood drain from his heart. "No
calcium here at all? How can you know that, when
you can neither see nor hear nor move?"
The Dweller replied. "We long ago investigated
the history of this planetoid by probing the minds
and knowledge of the degenerating human colonists
here. We learned thus that this world was a moon in
a planetary system whose sun was completely
without calcium, potassium and several other
elements. An atomic disintegration process similar
to the carbon-nitrogen cycle had burned out all
those elements before that sun ever gave birth to
worlds."
Captain Future turned toward the others. He told
them what he had just heard from the Dweller.
"The Dweller is speaking the truth," said the
Brain gravely. "That explanation of why Astarfall is
with- out calcium is scientifically probable. It
explains the silicon structure of the bones of the
jungle pigs."
"Then -- then it's all over for us?" Joan Randall
whispered, her face very pale but her eyes fixed
steadily on Curt.
At that moment a violent new quake rocked
them. They saw through the swirling haze that
66
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
immense new bulks of rock were rising with a
prolonged, grating roar from the lava nearby. The
knoll rose and fell beneath them like a chip upon
the sea. A new, higher wave of lava rolled its fiery
crest toward them.
"That new wave o' lava will cover the knoll!"
yelled Ezra Gurney.
One of the mutineers clutched wildly at Captain
Future's arm. "You promised that if everything else
failed, you had a way to at least get the ship off this
world!"
Curt Newton's haggard face set, his lips
tightening. The dreadful last expedient that he had
kept in mind all these terrible days now stared him
full in the face.
He met it unflinchingly. He knew what he had to
do -- and there was small time left in which to do it.
His voice rang like a trumpet through the din.
"Into the Phoenix, everybody. We're going to take
off."
"But, Chief!" expostulated Otho wildly. "You
know that as soon as we start the cycs without the
calcium catalyst, they'll blow again."
"I have enough calcium to act as catalyst for one
cyclotron," Curt answered swiftly. "I didn't tell any
of you, because I was hoping to get more. But one
cyc will be enough to get the ship off Astarfall."
"It's raining fire!" screeched one of the mutineers
in terror.
A fiery sleet was indeed falling upon them from
the smoke-darkened heavens as the burning ashes
of the latest continuing eruptions descended.
HEY fought their way toward the ship.
Curt steadied Joan's staggering steps, and
yelled for Grag to bring the shrieking Rollinger.
T
Inside the Phoenix, he slammed shut the door to
keep out the wave of scorching, superheated air that
was rolling up from the lava which now was
advancing to wash over the knoll.
"Up to the bridge-deck, all of you!" he shouted.
"There'll be less danger there if anything happens to
the cycs."
They slipped and tripped, for now the Phoenix
was rocking wildly in its cradle. Curt thrust Otho
into the pilot-chair, in front of which were the
space-stick, throttles and few simple instruments
they had devised.
"Otho, I want you to pilot the take- off," Captain
Future ordered. "Now listen closely. I've only
enough calcium cataylst for one cyclotron. I'll put it
in the Number One cyc. You must only use that one
cyc to power the take-off. And you must not let it
run for more than a minute, for by the end of that
time the cataylst will be used up.
"In that minute," he told the android tensely,
"you must get the ship off and start it in the
direction of the System. Then cut the cyc at once.
But do not start to take off, until ten minutes after I
have gone down to the cyc-room to put in the
catalyst."
Otho nodded his head understandingly. "I get it,
Chief. Ten minutes after you go down, I cut in the
Number One cyc, use its full power for one minute
to get the ship off, and then cut it off again."
Curt Newton paused. His gray eyes bad a queer
brilliance in them as he met the gaze of his three
old comrades.
"Simon ­ Grag ­ Otho -- just in case anything
should go wrong, I want to say that no man ever
bad finer pals. I'm thinking of the old days on the
Moon, of all we four went through together."
It was a moment of tense emotion, and that
emotion gripped Joan Randal as she clung to
Captain Future.
"Curt, do you think we're not going to make it?
Is that why you're saying goodbye?"
"We'll make it -- I'm sure we will," he told her
earnestly. His eyes searched her face with strange
wistfulness. He held her fiercely close, kissed her,
then turned abruptly away. "Remember, Otho -- in
ten minutes!"
Curt's heart was bursting with overpowering
emotion as he flung himself down the
companionway and back to the cyc-room.
George McClinton was there. McClinton
had,just unscrewed the heavy inertron top of the
massive Number One cyclotron. He clambered
hastily down off the towering cylinder as Curt burst
in.
"McClinton, get up with the others!" Curt cried.
"We're going to start, and I want everybody else up
there out of harm's way."
The lanky engineer showed no sign of obeying.
He came toward Curt, a strange smile on his
homely, spe tacled face.
"No, Captain Future." It was odd that in this
moment of superhuman strain his stammer finally
left him. "I know what you're planning to do. I
guessed it when you made that promise to the
others. And I'm not going to let you do it."
His voice was deep as he told Curt, "You mean
67
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
too much to the System's future, to do this. And you
mean too much to her."
There was a faraway tenderness that transfigured
the engineer's homely face, as he spoke of Joan.
"But I don't mean much to the System or
anyone," George McClinton continued. "That's why
I'm doing -- this!"
The engineer's right hand flashed out as he
spoke. He had a heavy wrench in that hand, and he
aimed the unexpected blow at Curt Newton's head.
Curt had no chance to dodge, so utterly
unforeseen was the attack. His skull rang, and he
sank unconscious.
CHAPTER XIX
The Call
CAPTAIN FUTURE
struggled back to
consciousness a few minutes
later to hear a bursting roar
and feel a violent shock. H e
was pressed against the floor
by brief, terrific
acceleration.
The sensation passed
swiftly. His head began to
clear and he was able to
stagger to his feet. He
looked dazedly around.
The Phoenix was out in space. Its cyclotron had
operated for the brief, prearranged moment, and the
short blast of power from its rocket-tubes had flung
it out in the take-off.. It was rushing now toward
the gleaming flecks of the Solar System. Astarfall
was a smoky, fire-shot ball receding rapidly astern.
Curt looked wildly around the cyc-room.
"McClinton!"
There was no answer. The lanky chief engineer
was gone. And Curt knew where he had gone.
The Number One cyclotron was still hot from
that moment of operation that had enabled them to
take off. Curt Newton bowed his head against the
side of the cyc, his face working.
The others found him thus when they came
down into the cyc-room. Their voices were ringing
with excitement and hope, but they were startled
into silence when Curt raised his head.
Few men had ever seen tears in Captain Future's
eyes. But they saw them now.
"Chief, what is it?" Grag cried anxiously.
"What's wrong?"
Joan was looking puzzledly around. "Where's
George McClinton? I thought he was down here."
Curt pointed back toward space. His voice was
choked. "McClinton is back there."
They read tragedy in his face. "Curt, what do
you mean?"
"I mean that McClinton gave up his life to allow
us to escape from Astarfall," Captain Future
husked. "He supplied calcium to the Number One
cyc from the only possible source, the calcium of
his own body's skeleton.
"He knew the only possible source of calcium,
since there was none on Astarfall, was in our own
bodies. The average human body contains more
than a pound of calcium. Enough to act as catalyst
in a cyclotron for at least a minute! McClinton
knew that, and gave himself so that we could
escape!"
"My God!" cried Ezra Gurney. "Do you mean
that he --"
Curt Newton nodded heavily. "Yes. McClinton
got inside Number One cyc. When it was turned on,
the blast of atomic energy reduced his body to
ashes. But in those ashes was enough calcium-
catalyst to control the flow of energy and keep it
from wrecking the cyc during that minute."
He added, "He knew I'd have stopped him. He
knocked me out; when I came down into the cyc-
room."
Curt did not tell them, would never tell them,
that he had himself had made desperate decision to
sacrifice his own life in the same way rather than
that they should all perish. But they all understood
that now. And every surviving outlaw was
humbled.
"When you said good-by to us up in the bridge-
room --" Joan began. Then, as her stricken eyes
traveled from the silent cyclotron back to the vault
of space behind the stern window, she began to sob
wildly.
"Oh, Curt, that shy, stammering boy we all
teased!"
He held her, soothing her. He heard the calm
voice of the Brain.
"It was a fine thing McClinton did. It is too bad
that his sacrifice was probably all for nothing."
"What do you mean?" cried Kim Ivan. "We're
68
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
clear of Astarfall."
"Yes, and we are rushing toward the System,"
answered the Brain. "But we still have no calcium.
We can 't operate the cyclotrons again. That means
we can't change course to land on any planet.
Unless we somehow get help, we'll fall helplessly
through the System toward the Sun."
HEY looked at each other, stunned. In all
their minds, the same terrible fact had
become obvious. If they were to operate the
cyclotrons again, another of them must die!
T
Ezra Gurney yelled suddenly. "Look back there
at Astarfall! She's goin'!"
They crowded to the windows. A we that made
them forget their own deadly peril fell upon them at
the spectacle of cosmic catastrophe they beheld.
The little planetoid had entered its final
convulsions. The veils of smoke and steam were
momentarily torn from its surface, and they looked
upon its appalling surface.
Great rifts were opening in the crust of the
worldlet, radiating outward like spreading cracks.
Up from these rifts boiled the infernal core of the
planetoid. Whole sections of the surface sank
beneath this bursting lava like ice-floes submerging
beneath the sea.
Wild streams of fire and steam shot for hundreds
of miles out from the surface. For several minutes,
the geography of the flaming sphere was fluid and
formless. Blue lightning wreathed the dying world.
Astarfall exploded! As the cloven crust let the
hydrosphere into its interior fiery core, the resulting
blast of expanding steam tore the crumbling
planetoid into fragments that hurtled out in every
direction.
"She's gone!" cried Ezra hoarsely. "That was the
end of her!"
They heard the Brain's brooding voice. "The end
of the pitiful history of the Cubics, and the strange
dreams of the Dwellers."
"Some of those fragments are coming after us!"
Kim Ivan exclaimed. " And we can't dodge 'em!"
"We'll have to take our chance," Captain Future
said tensely.
The fragments of the exploded planetoid were
rushing after them with a speed that would soon
overtake the Phoenix. They waited tautly.
They soon glimpsed jagged masses of rock
whirling past nearby. Smaller debris struck against
the Phoenix' sides and stern with a rattling clatter
that shook the ship in every beam. Then it was soon
over.
"The inner hull wasn't holed by any of that
debris," Grag soon reported.
"Then that danger is past," said the Brain. "But
we'll soon be rushing into the System. Our speed
will accelerate by the hour as we fall toward the
Sun. What are we going to do?"
Again their terrible dilemma faced them.
Without calcium, they could not operate the cycs to
reach any planet. And they had but one source of
the element, and that was their own bodies.
Kim Ivan spoke up. "Captain Future, I've been
thinking. It was your work and McClinton's
sacrifice that saved me and my boys from that
world's end. We owe you something for that. I
propose that we boys draw lots among ourselves."
"Agreed!" roared the voices of all the mutineers
in chorus.
"Oh, no!" Joan sobbed. "No more of us must die
in that terrible way! Please, Curt!"
"We'll find another way," Captain Future
promised. "We've got to -- now."
He went up with them to the bridge-room. The
Phoenix' was rushing silently on. The Line, the
edge of the System, was not so far ahead. For the
planetoid had been steadily approaching it during
all these past weeks.
The bright little disc of Pluto gleamed, ahead of
them and far to the left. Beyond lay the shining
specks of the inner planets and the brilliant, small
sphere of the Sun.
"If we could only call for help to the Patrol
somehow," Curt muttered. " A cruiser could easily
contact us before we fell in through the whole
System to death."
Ezra shrugged hopelessly. "We ain't got no way
to call -- no audiophone."
T HAD been impossible, of course, for them
to undertake the construction of a complex
audiophone transmitter when they had built the
ship. They had barely completed the ship itself in
time. But now their lack of a transmitter seemed to
spell their doom.
I
"Could we build a small transmitter?" Joan
asked hopefully:
Curt shook his head. "By the time we got it
finished, we'd be crashing in through the inner
planets to the Sun. And even then, if we had a
transmitter, we'd have no power to operate it. We
69
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
still couldn't use the cyclotrons."
The Brain, hovering beside them, spoke
thoughtfully. "There is a possible solution. You
know that my serum-case embodies a small atomic
motor which furnishes power to the generator of
my traction-beams and the pumps which repurify
the serum. You could take out that motor and
generator from my 'body' and soon convert them
into a small improvised audiophone transmitter."
Captain Future protested. "No, Simon! You
would die when the pumps and purifiers stopped
working and your vital serum became toxic!"
"I would not die at once," the Brain said coolly.
"I would live for twenty-four to forty-eight hours,
though I would lapse into unconsciousness during
that time as my serum became toxic. In that time,
you might be able to receive help in answer to your
call. You could then revive me."
"But if help didn't come soon enough, it would
be too late ever to revive you!" Curt exclaimed.
"The power of your motor would be exhausted."
The Brain's metallic voice was annoyed. "You
are being illogical, Curtis. It is certainly preferable
that I should take that risk than that we should all
perish. Remember what you had intended doing."
The logic was unassailable, yet Captain Future
still hesitated. His haggard face was deeply moved
as he looked into the lens-like eyes of his old
companion.
"Simon, if this should cost your life --"
"Come. come, you know how I abhor
sentimentality," interrupted the Brain annoyedly.
Yet his metallic voice seemed oddly softer as he
added, "Get on with it and stop wasting time."
The Brain glided to the shelf-like table beside
the instrument panel -- the navigation-desk. His
transparent cube rested there, waiting.
Sweat stood out on Curt Newton's brow as he
and Otho got their meager supply of tools and
began work. Deftly, quickly, they unbolted the
bottom section of the Brain's strange body which
contained its motive mechanisms.
They removed it, disconnecting and clamping
the tiny pipes and cables which connected with the
serum-case proper. Now the Brain was merely an
isolated living brain in a transparent box of serum.
His powers of speech, hearing, movement, had
been stripped from him.
Captain Future worked with utmost speed now.
Every minute counted, for the Brain's hours of life
were now numbered. Rapidly, he and Otho and
Grag took apart the mechanisms that had enabled
Simon to live.
The small, powerful atomic motor, with its own
compact charge of calcium catalyzed fuel, they set
aside. They dissembled the motors from the serum-
pumps and hooked them to the generators that had
produced the Brain's magnetic traction-beams.
They thus set up a complete new circuit which
would emit electro-magnetic waves in the
frequency-range of audiophone usage. The little
atomic motor was connected to furnish the power .
Curt Newton connected this little improvised
transmitter to the makeshift antenna-sphere which
Grag had prepared and attached outside the space-
door.
He used the microphonic "ears" of the Brain for
microphones.
"It's finished," Curt announced finally. "Turn it
on, Otho."
The atomic motor throbbed with power. The
generators began to hum, casting their roughly-
tuned wave out into space.
Curt spoke into the microphones. "Ship Phoenix,
Captain Future commanding, calling all Patrol
vessels or other ships! We need help in the form of
calcium supplies/ We are approaching the Line
from outer space, in the following approximate
position."
He gave the figures of their position as they had
calculated it. Then he again repeated the call.
For the next few hours, Curt repeated the
message at regular intervals. The last time, the little
atomic motor went dead on the last words.
"She's played out!" Otho reported. "Fuel's clear
gone. No wonder, when we've been running it full
load all this time."
"Do you suppose our message was heard?" Joan
asked Curt tensely.
"There's no way of telling," he muttered. "We've
no receiver. All we can do is wait."
The Phoenix rushed silently on and on toward
the Line. In torturing suspense, Captain Future
peered haggardly out into the star-flecked void.
The superhuman strain under which he had been
laboring for many days took its toll. He slept. his
head against the window.
It was many hours later that he was awakened by
Otho shaking his shoulder.
"Chief, come look at Simon!" begged the
android fearfully.
Curt rubbed red-rimmed eyes dazedly. That his
70
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
exhausted slumber had been long, he knew from a
glance at the planets far ahead. They were brighter,
nearer.
Joan and the others were sleeping druggedly.
Curt hastened with Otho to the shelf on which
rested the now lifeless cubical case of the Brain.
He looked into the transparent cube. Its colorless
serum had now assumed a dark tinge.
"What's happening, Chief?" Grag asked
anxiously.
Curt's answer was a dry whisper. "The serum, no
longer repurified, is becoming toxic. Simon is
dying."
"But Simon can't die!" burst out the great robot.
"Why, we've been together, he and Otho and I, all
my life! Even before you were born!"
Curt Newton felt an icy, utter despair. He looked
at them numbly. And then came a hoarse cry from
Ezra Gurney, watching at the window.
"Cap'n Future, I saw a rocket-flash in space
ahead of us!"
Curt and the others feverishly plunged to the
window, and scanned the vault. But there was
nothing save the cold, mocking eyes of the stars.
"I -- I guess I'm gettin' delirious," faltered Ezra.
"No !" Grag bellowed suddenly. "Look there!"
They still could see nothing. But the robot's
super-keen photoelectric eyes had seen. And
presently they caught it, too.
A long, slim cruiser with the familiar emblem of
the Planet Patrol upon its bows was driving toward
them through the void.
By the time that cruiser came into magnetic
contact with the Phoenix. and space-suited men
from it entered their ship, Curt Newton and the two
Futuremen were waiting in the airlock.
The young Venusian captain of the Patrol
cruiser, when he took off his helmet, stared at Curt
and the others unbelievingly.
"Captain Future! It's really you and Agent
Randall and Marshal Gurney, too! But tell us, what
happened to the Vulcan? We've been searching for
weeks, and then we heard your faint call yesterday."
"No time to explain now!" cried Curt. "The
calcium, man! Where is it!"
The astonished Venusian thrust a heavy sack
toward him. "I brought this much along. We have
as much more as you need in the cruiser."
URT raced back up to the bridge. His
bands were shaking as he tore open theC
sack and placed a little of the precious calcium in
the catalyst-chamber of the atomic generator from
the Brain's body.
The copper fuel was already in the mechanism.
They worked with frantic speed, reassembling the
apparatus back into the case of the Brain. They
could hear it start humming at once, operating
pumps and purifiers.
They waited for minutes that to Curt seemed
eternities. The dark tinge of the serum in the Brain's
case slowly faded away. But that was all.
"We were too late,"' Otho whispered strickenly.
"Too late to revive Simon."
Then the Brain spoke. Simon. Wright abhorred
show of emotion. He would have died rather than
to have displayed his feelings now.
He said metallically, "Well, what are you all
staring at? The experiment was a success, wasn't
it?"
The Phoenix landed on the spaceport of Tartarus
City, on frigid Pluto, two days later. With it landed
the Patrol cruiser that had brought them salvation.
Its officers came to take charge of the mutineers
and transport them out to the prison moon.
Kim Ivan and his men trooped out into the chilly
dusk and stood quietly while the Patrol guards
gathered around them.
"You won't have any trouble with us, boys," the
big Martian said tersely. "We've been so close to
death that we're not going to find Interplanetary
Prison such a bad place for a while."
Curt Newton went toward the towering Martian.
He held out his hand quietly. "Kim, will you shake
hands?"
The big pirate's battered face grinned at him as
he extended his fist. "I'm glad there's no hard
feelings, Future. We went through quite a lot
together."
"We did," Curt nodded. " And I've an idea we'll
meet up again."
"Oh, sure, when you come out to Cerberus
prison visiting," said the Martian ruefully.
"Kim, Moremos and the other men who actually
killed the Vulcan's officers are dead, and they did it
against your orders," Curt said. ."That won't be held
against you and your chaps. And there's such a
thing as commutation of sentences for men who
have had enough of outlawry and would like to
blast a straight rocket-trail."
Kim Ivan's massive face flamed. "Future, me
and my boys won't mind Interplanetary Prison one
71
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
little bit, if we have that to hope for!"
Curt Newton grinned in turn. "I'm not promising
anything, you big ruffian. But I've an idea we'll
meet up on the space-trails some day."
When the convicts were gone, Curt turned. Grag
and Otho had resumed their interminable argument.
The Brain had gone with Ezra Gurney.
But Joan was standing in the frigid dusk,
looking up at the dark vault of the heavens. She did
not turn when he reached her side.
"Curt, I was thinking," she said softly. "It's
where he would have wanted to be buried -- in
space."
He did not need to ask of whom she spoke.
He put his arm around her shoulders as he
answered slowly.
"Yes, Joan. Any spaceman would want such
burial, to have his ashes scattered out there on the
face of the deep."
And they stood silent, gazing out into the vast
vault of that shoreless sea in which a world and a
hero had perished.
72