Read Captain Future 24 - Pardon My Iron Nerves (November 1950) for Free Online

Who is it that tears meteors apart and pushes comets around with his bare hands?”
    “Tender!” yelled the big Digger. “Let’s have some more actinium!”
    They crowded around the Tenders. It was obvious that the Tenders had filled their own fuel-chambers with actinium for the movements of their fuel and lubricant lines were unsteady.
    I am sorry to confess that I too shouted, “More actinium!” and pressed toward the Tenders.
    But small as I was I couldn’t get through the crowd of towering Machs around the Tenders. A big Loader flung me back out of the crowd.
    Ordinarily I would have resented that bitterly. But I was too stimulated at the moment. I picked myself up and shouted again.
    “My psychoses are gone — I feel like dancing!” I cried.
    “Dancing? What’s that?” asked the Digger.
    “It’s what people do for fun — like this,” I told him.
    I had never danced before but I had often watched people doing it and had always been sure that I would be quite good at it.
    So now, in the silvery planet-light, I did a slow graceful waltz for them, circling around and humming a tune as I did so.
    “You do it like this, only in couples,” I explained.
     
    THE Machs were enchanted by my performance. “Say, that looks like fun! Let’s try it!” cried a Crusher. It extended its mighty pile-driver arm. I took it and despite the disparity in size between myself and the huge Mach we performed a waltz by no means without grace — the Crusher following my lead a little uncertainly on its rumbling caterpillar treads.
    They all started to do it. The big Digger hooked onto a Loader with its scoop and they circled unsteadily. Haulers, Tenders, Crushers — all of them were soon waltzing ponderously in the planet-light. The ground shook violently under their rumbling treads and they all bellowed out the waltz-song they had heard me humming.
     
    “Sweetheart mine,
    You are divine —”
     
    I lost my Crusher partner when I fell into a hole. But I got up and was claimed by a Tender, which gripped me with its lines and whirled me around in dizzying fashion.
    I vaguely glimpsed Gordon’s face inside the window of the shelter, peering out at us in horror.
    Then came catastrophe. The big Digger raised its voice in a reverberating thunder of anger as its Loader-partner was snatched away from it by the mighty pile-driver arm of the Crusher which had been my own partner.
    “That Loader’s dancing with me, Crusher!” roared the Digger.
    “Says who?” retorted the Crusher.
    For answer, the angry Digger with its huge scoop tore the Loader away from the other.
    Instantly the Crusher loosed a blow with its pile-driver that smashed in half the girders of the Digger’s side.
    A howl went up. “The Crushers are trying to destroy us Diggers!”
    All at once around me there raged a wild melee of battling machines, huge girder-arms and scoops and metal tusks, battering at each other.
    I, Grag, didn’t have a chance in that battle of titans. A Digger’s whirling scoop caught me and knocked me clear across the ore-barges.
    I got up, badly shaken but with no metal fractured. In the silver planet-light the combat of the actinium-drunken Machs was a nightmare of huge battering rending machines.
    My own aberration of overstimulation had left me. The shock and the fact that I hadn’t been able to get a second helping of actinium were sobering my mind rapidly.
    Instantly I realized that this was the chance to get away. I hurried to the shelter and through the airlock into it.
    Gordon, again, shrank from me in terror when I entered. “Come on — now’s our chance to find our ships and get out of here!” I told him.
    “I saw you out there!” he squeaked. “You’re as mad as those Machs — drunken — dancing —”
    “I was only doing that to play along with them,” I told him. “Get on that protective suit and hurry!”
    Still fearful he scrambled into the suit. Then we went out.
    The battle-royal was at full height.