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

of their suits already held emergency rations of food tablets and water.
    “Now out of the ship, quick!” Curt exclaimed. “They’ll be coming up this valley in two minutes!”
    They emerged from the airlock door of the Comet , into the terrific solar glare of the airless Moon. Otho hesitated.
    “We can’t leave the Comet like this! Let’s stay and fight it out!”
    Curt knew how the Futuremen felt. He himself felt sharp dismay at the thought of abandoning their splendid, faithful little ship to capture. But everything now depended on their own escape.
    “We’ll retrieve the Comet later, never fear,” Captain Future pledged. “For space’s sake, hurry! Up over that ridge!”
    They plunged forward in a hard run along the wild, rocky lunar-valley toward the nearby ridge that promised temporary concealment. The scene was wild and awesome. The two lunar peaks that towered on either side of them were giant, upflung masses of rock ten thousand feet high. Cruel, jagged scarps and buttresses glared blinding white in the unrelenting focus of the unsoftened Sun.
    The Futuremen ran at top speed. Their weight, of course, was the same here as it would have been on Earth. The gravitation equalizers they and every other interplanetary traveler always wore took care of that. But they slipped and stumbled on the loose rock, all except the Brain who glided swiftly and effortlessly on his beams.
    They pitched onto the ridge and down over it. Curt Newton raised his head over its rim to look back for a moment.
    “We just made it,” he muttered. “I don’t think they saw us.”
    Two score men in space-suits, carrying heavy hand atom guns and wearing the emblem of the Planet Patrol on their chests, were hurrying into the valley from its further end. They were approaching the Comet .
    “Curse them, it makes me mad to think of those heavy handed space greenies getting hold of our Comet !” raged Otho.
    Though they were now in an airless void, Curt and Otho could converse on the secret, untappable wave of their short radius space-suit phones. The Brain had a similar short-range audio-phone built into his mechanical speech apparatus, as also did Grag.
    “There’s no help for that,” Curt answered shortly. “We’ve got to move on. They’ll soon find we’re not in the ship, and then the hunt for us will really begin.”
     
    CAPTAIN FUTURE led the way rapidly to the spot where the valley ended in a tumbled wilderness of lower lunar peaks. Then he struck out through the mountains in a general northwesterly direction. The gorge which Curt believed might furnish passage down to the interior caverns of the Moon and the deep radium deposit, lay two hundred miles northwest. They could save a tenth of that distance by cutting across the Sea of Glass, but at what peril they knew.
    The Brain, gliding beside them, turned abruptly.
    “Lad, ships are coming!” he warned.
    They glimpsed two cruisers coming across the white peaks from behind them, climbing only enough to clear the mountains as they flew.
    “The Patrol has discovered we’re not in the Comet , and is quartering out to search for us!” Curt exclaimed. “Quick, under that overhang!”
    Barely in time, they jumped under the overhang of the neighboring cliff. The two Patrol cruisers scudded by close over their hiding place.
    “They’ll comb all those mountains for us,” predicted Otho. “The Patrol may be dumb but it’s thorough.”
    “I’m not used to being hunted around like this, complained Grag.”I guess I wasn’t cast to be an outlaw, after all.”
    Curt Newton led the way rapidly on through the tumbled rocky hills, in a steady northwestward direction. Once again they had to dart into the concealment of deep shadows as cruisers went by above them. Then they came out of the last low foothills of the great chain of lunar mountains. Before them, the baking white pumice desert over which the Comet had flown stretched northwestward toward the blinding brilliance of the