Flash Gordon 4 - The Time Trap of Ming XIII (18 page)

“Blue men?” Flash frowned.

Zarkov filled him in quickly, identifying Sari.

“And they’re going to hook you up to a computer?” Flash cried.

“Right,” Zarkov said gloomily. “But it’s the very best one.” He tried to cheer himself up.

“Doc, you’ll blow out the fuse.”

“Come on, Flash. That’s not nice.”

“These blue men—they’re going to attack the forest kingdom?”

“Right,” Dale said. “Captain Slan has been bragging about that ever since we’ve been with him.”

“It’s strange. I happen to know that Ming XIII has sent a team of assassins from three hundred years in the future to kill Prince Barin. That’s so Ming and his descendants will rule all the planet.”

Dale shrugged. “I’m only telling you what we’ve been hearing.”

“We’ve got to get you all out of here,” Flash said, frowning. “Let me think.”

“What about those time belts you’ve been talking about,” Zarkov said. “Just give us one of them.”

“Can’t,” Flash said. “Lari and Kial still have them on.”

“I suppose you can mount an assault team and demolish Cerulea. If you can find it but then it would be too late. I’d be hooked up to the computer by then.”

Flash felt the sudden tugging at his flesh. He knew the pendulum was about to swing once again.

“Hurry up,” he snapped. “Think of something, Zarkov. The time pendulum is about to move.”

“Me!” Zarkov groaned. “I can’t think of anything. I’ve already tried everything. Nothing works.”

“Did you pick up that blaster pistol when you fought Kial and Lari on the superway?” Dale asked.

Flash began moving through the air toward the place he had left the astro-seat. “Yes!” He pulled it out of his belt “Here it is. I hope you can find someway to use it to get out.”

“At least it isn’t stuck on STUN,” Zarkov said contritely.

Flash was in the astro-seat now, and the weight in his lap was very heavy. The metal vibrated. The air shivered about him. There were purple lights.

“Flash—” Dale said. There were tears in her eyes.

“I’ll see you safe and sound,” Flash said stoutly.

Then the haze came up and he was in it.

He was at rest. The mist was only an illusion. He found himself seated in the astro-chair in the center of the dome of the Tempendulum. He was back to the present.

Outside he could hear laughter.

“Well, it’s all over, Lari!” Kial cried out. “We’ve gotten rid of both of them! Dale Arden is in the forest somewhere. And Flash Gordon is caught out there in eternity.”

“Good work, Kial. Let’s go home.”

Kial climbed, in through the port and started to jump down to the floor of the dome. His eyes came up and he saw Flash.

He froze.

Lari pushed him forward and Kial fell to the floor. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? I almost fell,” Lari said.

Then he, too, looked up into Flash’s face.

Flash stood above them, hands on hips, a faint smile on his lips.

“Well, well, well,” he said contemptuously. “Fancy meeting you two here.”

“Uh,” said Kial. “It’s Gordon.”

“It’s Flash Gordon, yes. Colonel Gordon, to you, Kial.”

“But how did you come back from eternity?” Lari wondered, sitting up and staring at Flash questioningly.

“You forget that if time is reversible, it is also doubly reversible. That is, it can go forward again, too. I simply went forward, and back, and then forward again.”

“The Tempendulum,” Kial said, “swings both ways, of course.”

“He hasn’t got his blaster pistol,” Lari said quickly. “Use yours, Kial!”

Flash reached out and gripped a handful of Kial’s tunic, hauling him up to his feet. “I think that’s mine, isn’t it?” he said, taking the blaster pistol out of Kial’s belt.

“Yes,” Kial said nervously. “Yes, it is.”

“Now I think you’d better take off that belt, too,” said Flash with a smile. “I wouldn’t want you coming back here uninvited.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kial said. He removed the time belt from his waist.

“You, too, Lari,” Flash ordered.

“I couldn’t do that.”

Flash turned the blaster pistol in his direction. “Lari?”

Lari unfastened the belt. He handed it over. Flash took the two belts and studied them.

“I see. Very neat. One pouch for time-travel. One pouch for space-travel. Put them both together and travel through time and space.”

“Uh-huh,” Kial said.

“But only through the power of this. Right?” Flash pointed to the pendulum and the hovering globe.

“Yeah,” Kial admitted unhappily. “What are you going to do to us?”

“Get in the astro-seats,” Flash said. “And I’ll tell you.”

Kial blanched. “No, not to eternity!”

“I said nothing about eternity,” Flash said softly. “I’m a firm believer in the old adage that there’s no place like home.”

“Not back to Ming XIII! I want to stay here,” Lari screamed.

“But I don’t want you two here,” Flash said. “Now move!”

Kial turned and ran out of the dome. He had reached the entry port when Flash caught him by the legs. Kial turned and struck out at Flash. Flash had laid the time belts and his blaster pistol aside. He swung at Kial and hit him solidly on the jaw, knocking him out.

When he turned, Lari held the blaster pistol on him. Lari moved backward out through the port. “Don’t touch me, Gordon. I’m going!”

Flash watched. As Lari turned to look where he was stepping through the port, Flash dove for Lari’s feet. He grabbed him by the ankles, tripped him, and sent him flying head-first out through the port onto the ground. The blaster pistol sailed through the air and clanged against the side of the big hemisphere.

In a moment, he had Lari neatly laid out beside Kial.

“Now to put these two lunkheads in their astro-seats,” Flash muttered as he carried first Lari and then Kial across into the seats under the pendulum.

Soon he had them trussed up in the astro-seats. Then he lifted the heavy heart-shaped weight and screwed it onto the end of the pendulum. Above him, he heard the globe humming and purring.

Flash walked over to the instrument console and stared at the dials and readouts.

He flicked a few switches. When he turned he saw that Kial had just returned to consciousness and was watching him with terrified eyes.

“No!” he shouted. “Not back to Ming! Please—in the name of the seven suns of Mongo!”

“Good-bye, Kial,” Flash said sweetly.

Lari woke up and began weeping. “Please, Colonel Gordon. Please let us stay in the forest kingdom. We don’t want to go back to Ming XIII.”

“Good-bye,” Flash said adamantly and threw the switch.

He watched the two astro-seats as he did so.

There was a purple haze, almost instantaneously, and then the two seats and the men in them were gone.

The globe whirred and muttered and moved about in the air lazily. The pendulum trembled.

Flash strapped on one of the time-travel belts and set the readouts to the grid coordinates of the palace.

“Here I come, Prince Barin,” he said expectantly, and pressed the space button.

A
s Flash vanished from sight, Zarkov rubbed his eyes and tugged his beard angrily.

“I never saw anything like it. Wish I’d invented that time gadget.”

“Can’t we get out of here now, Doc? There’s no use staying around any longer, is there?” Dale asked worriedly.

“I suppose not,” Zarkov hefted the blaster pistol thoughtfully. “What do we do with this? Blast our way out, no doubt. But how?”

“Whatever we do, we’d better do it quickly,” Sari said impatiently. “I’ve simply got to get in touch with the intelligence minister.”

“Dale, will you and Sari cover the cell door there? I want to try this blaster on the wall. Didn’t Flash use this to disintegrate material?”

“Yes,” Dale said. “I don’t know if it’ll work on stones, though. It has to be living matter.”

“Oh,” Zarkov said disappointedly. “Well, anyway, here goes.”

Dale and Sari moved to the cell door and looked out into the corridor. “Go ahead, Doc. There’s nobody in sight.”

Zarkov flipped on the blaster pistol and aimed it at the stone wall. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, as he was about to turn it off, he saw a tiny cloud of smoke curling up from the mortar in between the klang rocks.

“That mortar!” Zarkov exclaimed. “Look!”

Dale moved over to the wall. “That’s right! There must be something living mixed in with the mortar. Perhaps it’s a kind of reconstituted wood used for adhesive. I don’t know how this place is put together, but that mortar seems to be going all right.”

Zarkov moved closer to the wall. “Great! I’ll burn out all the mortar I can, and then we can loosen the stones and pull them out.”

A smell of burning wood and plastic adhesive permeated the air. Sari and Dale kept their eyes glued to the corridor for the appearance of any guards.

“The stench is enough to flush out every man in the colony,” Dale said anxiously.

Zarkov laid down the blaster pistol and wrestled with a stone at the lower end of the wall. It gave way and tumbled out onto the floor of the cell.

Beyond the stone lay a wall of mortar.

Zarkov aimed the blaster pistol at the mortar and squeezed hard.

Smoke rose, followed by a foul stench. Suddenly, a bit of light came in from beyond.

“Light!” Zarkov cried. “Look!”

He peered through the hole. He saw gleaming piles of metallic materials, and beyond that something resembling a large airborne saucer.

“Dale,” he whispered, moving back into the cell. “We’re right next to the flight shop. They’ve got a space saucer in there.”

Dale’s eyes widened. “Let’s go through.”

Zarkov loosened two more stones. There was now crawl-space.

After squirming through, Zarkov pulled Dale and Sari after him. They found themselves in a large deserted workroom filled with flying equipment.

At the end of the assembly line stood a roomy fourcap saucer, that is, a flying saucer with capacity for four passengers. Beyond the work area, a sliding door, made of glass and metal, folded up into the ceiling. It was now closed.

Zarkov moved quickly over to the door and peered out.

“A guard,” he hissed, pointing.

Dale looked.

A blue man dressed in the familiar crimson cloak and red skullcap stood at the end of a large flat terrace attached to the flight shop.

Zarkov pondered. “I can zap the guard with the blaster. He’ll call someone else, if he has time. By then, we should be able to get this saucer going.”

Dale shivered. “Do you really think so?”

“We’ll have to find out, won’t we?” Zarkov said cheerfully.

He climbed in the saucer and looked at the console. “It’s one of those Emperor. Ming jobs of five years ago. No problem. It burns lox. And the supply canister is full. Come on, girls, climb in. I’ll shove that door open and we’ll get out of here before you can say Jack Robinson.”

When Zarkov pressed the energizer for the door, it moved silently up into its slot in the ceiling. The movement attracted the guard, who wheeled and walked toward the open flight shop.

Zarkov aimed the blaster in his direction and squeezed the activator. The blue man staggered, threw up his arms, and fell to the ground.

Zarkov ran across the floor to the saucer, jumped through the hatch, and pushed the buttons on the console. The saucer responded, throbbed, and moved toward the doorway on the lox piles that blasted out from the rocket ports below.

When they emerged onto the terrace outside the flight shop, Zarkov saw that there was unlimited flying space all around. He activated the ascension rockets, the lox piles responded immediately, and the saucer rose into the air.

“Would you look at that!” Zarkov exclaimed, pointing out through the bubbleglass viewport. “They’ve built their whole plant in a huge pocket of the great jungle.”

It was true. The colony of Cerulea was small, but it was spread out in a flat valley that ended abruptly in towering bluffs that rose for hundreds and hundreds of feet. In short, Cerulea was built at the bottom of an enormous pit, perhaps a quarter of a mile below the surface of the earth.

Dale nodded. “It’s below the level of the trees, isn’t it?”

Zarkov glanced up and saw the sky. “Yes, you see the trees at the top of the pit against the skyline. It’s hazy there, too, but you can feel the warmth of the sun. They probably extract some energy from the sun, too.”

The saucer moved upward and was now just below the level of the forest around it. They moved into a thicker haze now. It seemed almost greenish in color.

At the landing terrace below them, Zarkov heard a saucer revving up. “They’re coming after us,” he bellowed. “We’ve got to hurry.”

Suddenly, they were in the air above the forest and there was no more mist. Zarkov glanced down to get his bearings. The city of Cerulea had vanished from sight in a cluster of trees!

Dale gasped. “Doc! The city’s gone!”

Zarkov looked down and then he saw that the forest directly below them did not look genuine when examined closely.

“Haze,” Zarkov said. “They’ve camouflaged the whole establishment of Cerulea with a kind of eternal mist.”

“And how does that work?” Sari asked.

“From the top, you can’t see down into the area where Cerulea lies. I think they’ve set up projectors on both sides of the area.”

“Projectors?” Dale repeated.

“Right. And they’re projecting a holograph of a dense woods onto the mist. The three-dimensional picture makes you see trees where they don’t exist.”

“And that keeps anyone up here from seeing the city down there—but how come we couldn’t see the picture above when we were below?” Sari asked.

“The bright sunlight above cuts through the holograph,” Zarkov explained. “But from above, looking down into a darkened pit, the holograph is backed up by a black background and all you see is the woods of the projected visualization.”

“But why go to all that trouble?” Dale asked in confusion.

“Secrecy,” Sari responded. “We’ve been looking for them for a long time, I mean, the prince’s agents.”

“Right,” Zarkov agreed. He peered down into the forest and saw a wavering silver line. “There’s the superway. We haven’t far to go.”