Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) by Edmond Hamilton

your job here.”
    Wissler answered sullenly.
    “Future’s home would yield a lot of valuable scientific secrets, if we could find it before he comes back.”
    “You’ll have plenty of time to search for it later,” Larsen King declared coldly. “The Futuremen will never come back.”
    “I notice the Planet Patrol still keeps a lookout for them around the Moon,” said Wissler meaningly.
    “That’s just a matter of form,” scoffed the promoter. “Future’s left the System for good. It’s all he could do, now that he’s an outlaw.”
    Gil Strike laughed softly to himself, as though as a private joke. His hawklike eyes had lazy amusement in them.
    “I sure enjoy hearing people so bitter against Future for murdering the President,” he drawled. “I hand it to you for cleverness, King.”
    Larsen King’s lips thinned, and his voice was dangerous.
    “I told you to keep your mouth shut about that.”
    Strike shrugged carelessly.
    “What’s the difference when there’s only the three of us?”
    “Walls have ears, you fool,” rapped King. “And don’t you forget that it was you who actually operated that telautomaton, Strike. If you talk yourself into trouble, you’ll have nothing to prove I gave you your orders.”
     
    ALBERT WISSLER had listened uneasily to this exchange, a fidgety, half-fearful look on his thin face. He jumped when King turned to him.
    “I’m going to inspect the work myself,” snapped the promoter. “Come along.”
    Larsen King’s tall figure, impressive and commanding even in his blue silken zipper-suit, led the way across the blue-lit enclosure of the dome. Workers in grimy gray glanced at them inquiringly. These hard-bitten planetary miners had been gathered from every world. Among them were lanky, blue Saturnians, peaked-headed Neptunians, red Martians with hooded eyes, and rough-looking Earthmen.
    The noise inside the cavernous shaft-house was deafening. It came mostly from the giant revolving winches and drums at the mouth of the tunnel, and from the low metal trucks that ceaselessly rattled in and out of the shaft. The throb of air pumps, drone of atomic power turbines and bawling of orders all added to the uproar.
    The tunnel was not a vertical shaft. It was a twenty-foot tube bored obliquely downward in a westerly direction. Two parallel cogged tracks led down its steeply slanted floor into the depths. Empty metal trucks moved down into the tunnel along one track, and trucks loaded with shattered moon-rock came up the other track, to be shunted out of the shaft-house for eventual dumping outside the dome.
    Wissler raised his voice above the uproar.
    “We’re boring down toward one of the big caves, you know. Sonic probing shows there’s one not far down. Once we hole through into it, we’ll work our way on down through the labyrinth of caverns and fissures toward the radium deposit.”
    “Why didn’t you drop a vertical shaft straight down toward the cave, instead of slanting down toward it?” King demanded critically.
    “We save time this way,” Wissler assured him. “We’re following an ancient fissure that seems to have been closed by a landslide ages ago. It’s easier boring through broken rock and debris than through solid rock.”
    Larsen King was unsatisfied.
    “You’re still not making the progress you should. I can’t understand why the work’s going so slowly. Look at those trucks coming up empty now!”
    He pointed accusingly at the line of emerging metal trucks that rattled up from the tunnel. They were, in fact, all empty now.
    Wissler looked troubled.
    “Something must be wrong with the boring crews down there. I hope to heaven nothing’s aroused their superstitions again.”
    “Their superstitions?” repeated King angrily. “What are you talking about?”
    “It’s what has made the work so slow,” Wissler explained nervously. “The men have got more and more superstitious about tunneling into the Moon.”
    “Devil take them and