Flash Gordon 5 - The Witch Queen of Mongo (2 page)

Flash stared at her. “Diseased? A man’s mind might be diseased, thinking of this. But not a child’s mind, Dale. If it were a child’s mind, it could be a very healthy one.”

Dale blinked. “Doc Zarkov? Some scheme of his? Putting us into someone’s imagination?”

“I don’t know,” Flash said, shaking his head. “It’s beyond me.” He took Dale’s hand. “Come on, let’s go back to the car.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“Just drive along the road and see where it leads,” he said.

Dale thought a moment. “I guess that’s all we can do.”

They went back to the car. For a moment, Flash stood by it and then walked over to the side of the road.

“What are you going to do?” Dale asked.

“I’m going to sample this stuff and see if it’s real, too, or only an hallucination.”

Dale came over by him. “I want to try it, too.”

Flash leaned down and scooped up a bit of the ice-cream substance in his hand and began licking it slowly.

“Vanilla,” he said. “And a very good flavor of it, too.”

Dale ate some of the ice cream. “I’ve never really tasted such a fine flavor.”

Flash sighed. “Come on. Let’s get back in the car and see what’s next in this programmed little game.”

Dale turned to him. “You think—?”

“It’s Doc Zarkov, all right! I only wish I knew what he’s trying to prove.”

They climbed into the car and Flash started it up. They moved down the licorice highway for a half mile, and now they could see brightly colored lollypops on the side of the road, forming a kind of candy forest. They crossed a bridge then, made of hard-candy cane rails and chocolate logs. Under the bridge a stream of what was obviously sparkling soda pop flowed along merrily over candied boulders. A great excrescence of gumdrop rocks was strewn over a hillside that looked like pulled taffy.

Then suddenly there was laughter—booming, familiar laughter.

“Doc Zarkov, you fiend!” cried Flash, half in jest “What is this latest trick of yours?”

Dale screamed.

Flash could feel the wheel in his hand turn to licorice whips. And now he could see that the car itself had turned into a different kind of material—hard, white, Easter-egg chocolate with whipped-cream upholstering.

Yet they continued riding merrily along.

“I don’t believe it!” yelled Flash.

And next to him he could hear Dale Arden weeping in sudden fear.

“We’ve gone mad, Flash. Mad!”

The sky above them suddenly began melting and the car itself was disintegrating at the speed it was traveling. The ice-cream hills rolled down toward them, and they were both sinking down and down into a morass of sugar and cream and chocolate.

And then, quite suddenly, they were seated quietly in a familiar room.

“Well,” said Doc Zarkov, grinning at them in that maudlin and exasperating way he had, “how did you like that exhibition?”

And he threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

D
r. Hans Zarkov, a large burly man with a big black beard and intelligent dark eyes, folded his arms across his chest and smiled broadly.

“Don’t look so baffled, my friends,” he told Flash and Dale.

Flash rose from the chair in which he had just discovered himself, and advanced toward Zarkov. “Doc, is this another of your fool tricks? And if it is—how does it work?”

Zarkov lifted his head and boomed with laughter. “Pretty mystifying, isn’t it?”

The dark-haired girl shifted in her chair and snapped, “Doc, you’re a child at heart. Do you know that? You’ll never grow up.”

Zarkov’s eyes widened innocently. “What’s the matter, Dale? You seem put out.” He laughed loudly again, rubbing his fingers across his black beard.

“What was it?” Flash asked, standing close to Zarkov, almost threateningly. “Tele-hypnosis?”

Zarkov waved Flash back, his eyes betraying a fear that Flash would bodily attack him in his massive annoyance. “Sit down, Flash. Calm yourself.”

Flash stared and then retreated.

Zarkov moved about the spacious quarters of his desert laboratory’s living room, peering once out into the darkened night, and then wheeling to face Flash and Dale, muscular arms folded over his barrel chest. He was wearing a light-colored sport shirt and tapered slacks that fitted into leather desert boots.

“Well, now,” he drawled. “I could have put you two under hypnosis once you arrived here, told you to forget the last ten minutes of your drive across the desert, and made you imagine your drive through the strange land of ice cream and candy, you know.”

“Darn you, Doc,” Flash growled, half-rising from his chair. “If you’re going to play games—”

“No games,” Zarkov retorted hastily. “I say, I
could
have done the trick by using posthypnotic suggestion. Right?”

“Right,” Dale said calmly. “But you didn’t.”

“That’s right, I didn’t.” Zarkov moved across the room and stared down at his two friends. “Ever hear of psychokinesis?”

“Sure,” said Flash. “It’s the power of the mind to move objects about in space.”

“Right. It’s a kind of active extrasensory perception. Very little is actually understood about it. But it is scientifically known to exist.”

Flash frowned. “But I don’t see how—”

“Let me finish,” Zarkov said, smiling. “Closely allied to extrasensory perception is clairvoyance, the power of seeing something which is distant from one and out of his sight.”

“That’s basic science,” Flash said, snorting.

“Don’t be impatient, my friend,” said Zarkov. “Clairvoyance is the power to receive a picture of something not in one’s sight. We don’t know enough about ESP to understand it clearly, as I said, and we don’t actually know how it works.”

Dale nodded.

“And we don’t really know enough about ESP to be sure a person can’t send a message to someone else by telepathy, now, do we?”

“Okay, Doc,” Flash said. “Are you telling me you sent us a message to drive through the Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

Zarkov stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Not exactly,” he said. “But by adding up the facts of ESP, we do conclude that such a thing might be possible. Right?”

“Oh, sure,” snapped Flash. “I’ll concede it might be possible.”

Zarkov chuckled gleefully.

Dale sat up straight in her chair, her dark eyes wide. “But you have done it to us!”

“I haven’t,” Zarkov said softly. “But somebody else has.”

“Who?” Flash frowned.

Zarkov moved over to Flash and stood above him. “First, I want you to admit that you could have been involved in a kind of telepathic delusion.”

Flash frowned. “Oh, all right. I’ll concede that.”

“And then I want you to promise me not to laugh at my—my subject.”

“Who is it?” Dale asked.

Zarkov turned and looked at the far door, which Flash knew led to one of the three bedrooms in the house. “Willie!” he called.

A short silence.

The door opened slowly. Flash and Dale watched it with intense concentration.

Through the opening stepped a gangling, thin, youthful figure of a teenage youngster, about fifteen, who stood there for a moment in painful embarrassment. His face turned rapidly red and he looked at the floor shyly.

He seemed all bone and elbows, with long arms, long legs, and a long thin neck. His head was almost too heavy for his body and the ears again almost too large for the head. He had curly red hair that stood out from his skull and freckles on his rather blank-looking face. His eyes were green and vacant, almost as if his thoughts were never very clearly in focus.

He wore a tee shirt and bright-colored slacks, with a belt that was too big for his waist and pulled tight through extra loops in the pants.

“Willie,” Zarkov said. “I’d like you to meet some good friends of mine.”

Flash was surprised at the difference in Zarkov’s usual effusive, booming manner. He now seemed quite cool and polite.

The youth lifted his head and looked at Zarkov, then at Flash, and then at Dale. When he saw Dale, he colored again immediately, and looked away quickly.

“Flash Gordon,” said Zarkov, “and Dale Arden.”

Willie lifted his head and started walking across the room toward them. “How do you do?” he said awkwardly. His voice had not yet changed fully, and the words came out squeakily.

Flash stood and held out his hand. “Hi, Willie.”

“Mr. Gordon,” said Willie.

The hand that Flash gripped was strong and painfully fleshless.

Willie then turned to Dale. He made an almost courtly little bow. “Miss Arden,” he said.

Dale laughed and held out her hand. “Hello, Willie.”

Willie took the hand and blushed once again.

“His full name is William Edgar Casey,” Zarkov announced. “But he’s known as Willie. Wordless Willie.”

Willie flushed and stood back from the group.

“Worriless?” Flash asked.

“He doesn’t have any worries,” said Zarkov with a kindly chuckle. “He’s a dreamer,” he continued with a glance at Willie. Willie looked at the floor. “That’s why they sent him to me, actually. Figured I could make something out of him,”

“You’re an astrophysicist, a nuclear engineer, and a space scientist, Doc,” Dale said quietly. “Since when have you been interested in people?”

Zarkov frowned. “But that’s just it, Dale. It’s Willie. He’s got one of the finest scientific brains in the world. They wanted me to teach him everything I know about science. It was only when he came out here to the lab that I found out about his—”

“Where did you come from, Willie?” Flash asked, interrupting Zarkov.

“I’m an orphan,” Willie said with a faint smile. “I’ve been going to school at the World Science Institute in Megalopolis West. That’s where Dr. Zarkov found me.” He ducked his head.

“You see,” Zarkov boomed, “they thought Willie was an underachiever, because he paid no attention to his studies in school. But when they gave him an I.Q. test, he only missed two questions in two thousand. And so they wanted me to see him.” Zarkov beamed. “I’m considered the greatest astrophysicist in the country, anyway, and it was only natural that they would send him to me for instruction.”

Dale smiled wryly. “Naturally.”

“And it was when Willie got here that I found out why he underachieved.”

“Why was that?” Flash asked, looking at Willie.

Willie grinned.

“He’s a dreamer,” said Zarkov. “Because problems are so easy for him to solve, he simply spends most of his time daydreaming.”

“But I don’t understand yet about this psychokinesis and extrasensory perception you were talking about in relation to him,” Flash said, puzzled.

Zarkov settled back in a chair he had taken, motioning to Willie to be seated near them. “Willie doesn’t know how it started, either,” he explained. “But one day when he was daydreaming, Willie suddenly—” Zarkov broke off. “Why don’t you tell them, Willie?”

Willie nodded, looking embarrassed. “The first time it happened, I was in school at the World Science Institute. I had finished the lesson, and was simply dreaming, looking out the window. I happened to see a mountain peak in the distance. I think it’s called Old Baldy. And I wondered what it would be like up there on the top of the mountain. I kind of wished I was there,” Willie said slowly. “And all of a sudden, there I was!”

Flash sat up straight. “You mean, you wished you were on top of the mountain, and suddenly you were?”

“Right,” Willie said with a sheepish grin. “I was really there, too,” he said, chuckling. “I walked around in the trees and brush and reached out and touched the ground. That kind of thing. I even pinched myself.” He giggled. “Yeah, I was there.”

“But then how did you get back?”

“I decided I had had enough of the mountain, and I kind of—well—I kind of let go of the idea, you know, and I was back in the classroom.”

Flash looked at Zarkov. Zarkov laughed. “You see?”

“What about the classroom? Did anybody notice you were gone?”

“I don’t think so. I guess that when I was gone I was still there,” Willie said slowly. “Or maybe I imagined myself on the mountain in a split-second of time. You know?”

Flash nodded. “Sort of.”

“Then I began to take more trips like that,” said Willie.

“Did you tell anyone?” Dale asked.

“No,” said Willie, ducking his head self-consciously. “Do you think I’m crazy? They’d all say I was nuts.”

“I guess they would, at that,” Flash said, laughing.

“Then when I came out here to the desert, I kind of imagined myself up on Black Hat Mountain one day, and there I was. Dr. Zarkov didn’t even know I’d gone.” He chuckled mischievously.

“But how did you find out about this power of Willie’s, Doc?” Flash asked.

Zarkov smiled ruefully. “One day Willie and I were working at the big telescopic mirror in the lab, jotting down notes on what we thought was a new quasar sighting, and—bingo!—suddenly we were both on another planet!”

Flash sat up straight.

“That’s right,” agreed Willie. “I just wished I was there with Doc.”

“Ill be darned,” Dale said wonderingly.

“But how did you get back?” Flash asked Zarkov.

“Willie finally let go of his idea, as he expresses it, and we were back here in the lab.” Zarkov shook his head and pulled at his beard. “It was a scary moment or two, I’ll tell you that! I made Willie promise never to do that to me again.”

Willie laughed.

Dale looked up. “What’s funny, Willie?”

“I can promise all I want, Miss Arden, but when I begin to imagine, it doesn’t do any good. I go there—and so does Doc, now.”

Zarkov tugged at his beard again. “That’s why I sent for you two. Not only to let you meet Willie, but also to try to sit down with me and get Willie’s power under control.”

“You mean, work on the power with Willie until he can accurately determine how he manages to move himself and other people from one place to another?”

“Right,” said Zarkov.

Flash turned to Willie. “How did you do that to us on the way out here, Willie? I mean in the car?”

Willie flushed and looked at the floor. “I was hungry, you know, but Doc wouldn’t let me have a second dessert tonight. I was mad at him. And when I looked out the window and saw the headlights of your car coming across the desert, I suddenly thought dessert, and I imagined myself in a place where I could get all the dessert I wanted. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. And I was there, and then I wished you were there, too, because I had just seen your car coming toward the laboratory. And you were there, driving through the ice-cream sundaes and lollipops with me.”