Captain Future 16 - Magic Moon (Winter 1944) by Edmond Hamilton

see that Su Thuar was also donning one of the sea-suits. The Venusian was going to accompany them! “I’d like to see what this Neptunian ocean is like,” he said. Curt Newton edged to Joan’s side.
    “I don’t like Su Thuar’s going along,” he whispered. “He may try to get rid of you out there. Be sure to stay close to Lewis and the others after I slip away.” The cameras and other properties, including Grag, had already been taken outside by Lo Quior and the technicians. Now Lewis gathered his actors into the big main air-lock, and its inner door was closed.
    The outer door was slowly opened. Sea-water rushed in upon them and filled the lock. They stepped out of it, one by one, onto the oozy bottom of the Neptunian ocean. Jeff Lewis’ voice came to them through the short-range telaudio built into their suits.
    “This way. Keep together, and follow our lights. Remember, it’ll be dangerous to straggle here.”
    The producer and Lo Quior led the way through the submarine polyp forest, lighting their way by krypton spotlights attached to their belts. Behind them, technicians hauled flat metal sledges on which were loaded the big cameras and other equipment that would be needed.
    Curt Newton noticed Grag lying prone one one of those sledges, and grinned to himself. Water could not hurt Grag, for the robot did not breathe. He imagined that Grag was chuckling at getting a free ride.
    “Look out for ‘swallowers,’ boys,” Jeff Lewis warned the armed men around their party. “I’m told they’re the most dangerous beast in this ocean.”
    Weird little caravan marching through the eternal dusk of the Neptunian sea-floor. In their stiff suits and gleaming helmets, they looked themselves like grotesque denizens of the deep.
    Their feet sank into the ooze for inches with each step. All about them loomed the strange polyp forest, a labyrinth of branching white and green growths whose interlaced limbs stirred in the currents with repellent semi-animal life. Shoals of “solar-fish” rocketed away startledly in front of them. A big, harmless “breather” lumbered clumsily off through the submarine forest.
    “Look out! There come a couple of ursals!” came Jim Willard’s voice in a yell of sudden warning.
     
    HASTILY the armed men leveled the heavy atom-guns which could operate as well under water as in air or space. Two of the big, black dinosaur-like reptiles were swimming toward them from straight ahead.
    “There’s something on the backs of those creatures,” said Newton hastily. “Wait.”
    The two sea-men rode their reptilian steeds right up to the telepicture party, apparently having been attracted by the lights. The two riders dismounted and approached.
    “My stars those things are half-fish and half-human,” came Ron King’s awed exclamation.
    “They’re simply an extreme evolutionary adaptation of the ancient human stock to the Neptunian habitat,” Joan Randall declared.
    The sea-men had hairless heads, and their faces were quite human in features. But at the base of their throats were open gills that pulsed regularly as they breathed the water.
    Their short, powerful arms were finished at the elbows and wrists. The two legs were almost grown together to form a powerful, tail-like limb that ended in fins instead of feet.
    They wore garments made of twisted sea-weed fibers woven upon metal strands.
    Here was a strange offshoot of humanity — a part of the ancient Denebian human stock which on this watery world had adapted itself to breathe oxygen from water and to live in these green depths.
    “They’re supposed to understand a little of the interplanetary lingua franca,” Jeff Lewis was muttering. “We’ll soon find out.”
    The producer was closing a switch at his belt, so that his voice was diverted into a resonator to set up sound-waves in the water.
    “Friends,” Lewis declared muffledly in the rudimentary language based upon ancient Denebian words, which all galactic races