Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

stigma.”
    “We shall have to take risks,” he went on. “For we haven’t much time. It won’t take King’s men so long to get down to the radium deposit.”
    Captain Future made his decision.
    “We’ve got to get down to that radium deposit before King’s men! If we can get to the radium first, I’ve a plan by which we can gum up King’s whole scheme. We’ll have to find a different way down to the radium deposit. We’ll have to enter one of the fissures near North Chasm, find our own way down through the caves.”
    “You know how risky that will be, lad!” warned the Brain. “You know better than anyone else the dangers of exploring those fissures.”
    Captain Future shrugged.
    “It’s a case of must, Simon.” He turned toward the door. “And we’d better start now. It’s going to be hard enough to land secretly on the Moon for our attempt.”
    “Start now?” echoed Otho in surprise. “Why, the Patrol ships will still be around here. We’ve only been here five or six hours.”
    “You forget that we’ve been living a hundred times slower than normal since we got here,” Curt reminded him. “It only seemed five or six hours to us, but actually we’ve been here about four weeks.”
    “The devil!” exclaimed Otho. “You mean to say I’ve been sleeping here for a solid month?”
    A little later, after taking leave of their Erosian friends, the Futuremen entered the Comet and rose from the surface of the asteroid. Passing its little satellite, they flashed the time-honored “salute” signal. By now they had shaken off the slower life-tempo.
    There appeared to be no patrolling squadrons now in this sector. Captain Future headed at once for the Moon, where the outlawed Futuremen must risk their perilous scheme to penetrate the dangers of a dead world.
     

     
Chapter 6: Alien City
     
    DAWN was creeping across the outer face of the Moon. The advancing day flowed like a slow bright tide over the stark, peak-ringed craters and the deathly white pumice deserts. It touched the fused Sea of Glass to blinding brilliance. In gloomy gorges of the northern mountains, packs of the weird gray Moon Dogs trotted forth in fierce search for their metallic food, as the long lunar day began.
    But in the glaring northern desert, the Great North Chasm was still a well of perpetual cold and night. Sunlight had never penetrated this forbidding abyss, which for so long had guarded its enigmatic memorials of a mysterious vanished race. Its only light was the one point of man-made illumination at its bottom. The glittering bubble of the big mining-dome down there glowed with inner radiance. The blue-white glare of clusters of krypton’s boldly revealed the interior of this precarious oasis of air and life. Droning of power plants, beating of air pumps, slap of hurrying feet were all a background to the dominating throb of machinery in the tall shaft-house.
    Larsen King turned from the window of the little chromaloy office building, from which he had been surveying the activities here.
    “Six weeks of this,” King said bitingly, “and how far down have you got? Less than a mile! At that rate, it will take a lifetime to reach the radium.”
    King’s bullet head thrust forward angrily as he spoke, his hard impatient black eyes raking the other two men. Young Gil Strike, tilted back in his chair and lazily smoking a long green rial cigarette, had a look of unconcern on his predatory face. But Albert Wissler shifted uneasily in his chair. The thin, blinking scientist seemed to squirm inwardly at his employer’s words. “It’s not my fault the tunneling has gone so slowly,” Wissler said hastily. “I can explain —”
    “Explanations are all I’ve had from you,” King interrupted brutally. “That’s why I came out here from Earth today. I want results!”
    His eyes narrowed.
    “I understand you’ve spent more time roaming over the Moon, looking for Captain Future’s hidden laboratory, than you have at