Flash Gordon 3 - The Space Circus (2 page)

“Guess they don’t want me to touch the car.”

Several more silent minutes passed.

Then a small square in the high ceiling slid aside. Something was shoved through the opening. It fell, landing with a plop at Flash’s feet.

He looked down at it. “What in blazes does that mean?”

Someone had thrown down a large and bloody chunk of raw meat.

W
ith an annoyed grunt, Dr. Zarkov sat up on his circular aircushion bed. “I heard you,” he growled in the direction of the pixphone screen on the opposite wall of his bedroom.

“Phone call,” repeated a soft voice from a speaker grid immediately below the picture screen of the wall phone. “Phone call.”

Zarkov leaped out of bed, landed on both feet at once, and strode to the phone. He always slept in a suit of all-season underwear. He poked at the answer button. “What?” he bellowed into the talkpiece.

An anxious face appeared on the screen. The lean blond young man asked, “Is that you, Dr. Zarkov?”

“This is Zarkov.” Being in his underwear, the bearded scientist hadn’t flicked on the picture-taking device on his end of the pixphone. “What time is it anyway, Agent Cox?”

“Eleven-forty-six,” said the phone’s voice box.

“I didn’t ask you,” boomed Zarkov.

“Nearly midnight,” said the Interstellar Intelligence agent. “Which is why I took the liberty of calling you, Doctor. Flash Gordon was supposed to come over to see me tonight.”

“What do you mean supposed to? He left here a good three hours ago.”

“Well,” answered Cox, “he hasn’t turned up yet.”

Zarkov tugged at his tangled beard with both hands. “I don’t know why not.”

“I was hoping you would,” said Cox. “How was he planning to get over here? I thought perhaps he might have had some kind of accident.”

“He used the landcar,” said Dr. Zarkov, “and I just gave that baby a tuneup myself the other day. It’s not likely to have an accident, but that’s beside the point, Cox. The car’s a black one-dome, last year’s model, license number Z101. You better check with the Highway Authority, see if they have anything to report. Then call me back.”

“Okay, Doctor.” The screen went black.

Zarkov grabbed his crimson bathrobe from the floor. Shrugging into it, he headed for the door. I’d better wake up Dale and let her know, he decided.

Dale, still dressed as she had been when Flash left, was standing in the hallway immediately outside the doctor’s door. “Was it something about Flash? I’ve had a strange feeling all evening.”

“He hasn’t shown up for his meeting with Cox.” Zarkov put a hand on her arm. “Don’t start worrying yet, Dale. That was Cox on the phone. I put him to checking with the Highway Authority.”

“You think Flash has been hurt in an accident?”

“A car Zarkov’s worked on doesn’t have accidents,” he assured her. “But it is possible something went wrong with the road. That might explain Flash’s being delayed.”

“But it’s been hours.”

“We’ll wait and see what Cox can find out,” said Zarkov. “If he hasn’t got anything to report, then I’ll go out with the aircruiser and check over Flash’s route.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Zarkov nodded as the phone in the room announced, “Phone call, phone call.” With the dark-haired girl at his heels, he went back in and answered it.

“No accident of any consequence on any road leading from your place to us,” said Agent Cox on the screen. “No report of anyone seeing the landcar Flash was driving, either on the road or here in town.”

“So where is he then?”

The EII agent hesitated, then said, “There are a couple of odd things. I don’t know if they tie in or not.”

“Tell me and let me decide.”

“Well, Doctor, we’ve had several reports of people saying they’ve seen unidentified flying objects over your way tonight.”

“Hallucinations,” said Zarkov. “Some nitwit’s hallucination isn’t going to help us locate Flash.”

“There’s one more thing,” continued Agent Cox. “A Highway Authority land patrol has reported noticing a place about forty miles south of you where a car had gone off the highway.”

“Was it Flash’s car?”

“There’s no sign of any car.”

“Where do the tracks end then?”

“In the middle of nowhere, apparently. Then suddenly there are no more tracks, as though the landcar vanished into thin air. That’s according to the Highway Authority report I’ve seen, anyway.”

“More fantasizing,” boomed Zarkov.

“Want me to get you more details on those tracks?”

“I’ll take a look at them myself,” said Zarkov. “Give me the exact location.”

Cox did, wished the doctor good luck, and signed off.

In a quiet voice, Dale said, “He’s been taken.”

“We don’t know what’s happened to Flash,” said Dr. Zarkov. “Don’t become more upset until I do some looking around.”

“We’re not going to find Flash,” said Dale in that same faraway voice.

She was right.

A
fter a while Flash tried shouting again. “Hey, where are we going? Somebody come and talk to me!”

They threw him down another chunk of raw meat.

Flash kicked it aside.

He knew the ship had long since left the gravitational pull of Earth. And he was fairly certain that a few minutes ago they had made some kind of jump, a jump through time and space, which meant they were probably heading for a planet far beyond the Earth’s universe.

Well, Flash thought, I’ve visited quite a few planets and I’ve got nothing against seeing one more. But I like to make my own travel arrangements.

We walked once again around the metal room.

Frowning, Flash halted near the two pieces of raw meat. Why do they toss that stuff down to me? he mused. That’s how you’d feed a wild animal.

The ceiling made a loud grating noise, then a much larger section than before opened.

Flash could see pale-blue light glowing above, but nothing of his captors.

Something large was being lowered through the ceiling: a big heavy metal box, judging by the underside of it.

“No, it’s a cage,” Flash said aloud when the thing had come down farther.

The big cage was lowered to rest a few feet in front of him. Its barred door hung open.

The metal floor a yard or less behind him began to sizzle, glowing a flickering red.

Flash had to step closer to the open cage to get clear of the heat. The sizzling glow followed him.

“Okay, I get the point,” Flash said to the opening above him. With a mock salute, he stepped into the cage.

The door clanged shut behind him.

“Much more docile than some of the other creatures we’ve trapped on Earth,” said the blue man in the silver chair. His lips did not move.

“But he roars like all the rest of them, Thelon,” answered another blue man standing across the cabin from him. He, too, did not move his lips nor open his mouth.

They both were small, hardly five feet in height. Their heads were round, melon-shaped, and seemed, if judged by Earth standards, somewhat too large for their slim wiry bodies. Each man wore a dark one-piece flying suit and a soft leather helmet covering their ears. On a bank of viewscreens on the wall of the spacecraft cabin, they watched Flash in his cage.

Thelon had a scarlet circle on the left sleeve. “I notice, Ern, the creature has refused to eat thus far.” He and the other blue man communicated not by actual speech, but through thoughts transmitted from mind to mind.

“Most animals are restless when first caught,” reminded Ern. “They think more of escape than of food.”

Thelon smiled, a thin smile with his lips pressed tightly together. “He’d do better to think about eating,” he said. “Since he’ll never escape from the planet of Mesmo.”

“Each creature we capture reacts differently.” Ern stood with hands behind his back, watching the electronic images of Flash. “Some can be tamed at once; others require a long time, and much effort.”

“This one,” observed Thelon, “seems quite willing to obey orders.”

Ern’s round blue face frowned in concentration. “I’m not certain.” He tapped absently at the earpiece of his helmet. “He may give more trouble than you expect.”

“You can’t read his thoughts, can you?”

“Obviously not,” replied Ern. “That portion of his brain is, as in all other lower animals, not developed. Which is why he howls and makes noises when he wishes to communicate.”

Thelon folded his blue hands over his stomach, which was as round and melonlike as his head. “He’ll fetch a good price at the bazaar, at any rate. That’s all I’m really concerned about.”

“We’ll be landing on Mesmo very shortly,” said Ern. “All in all, we’ve done very well these past few days of hunting on Earth.”

“Time to move on to another planet. Want to try Jupiter next?”

“The pickings on Jupiter are never very good.” Ern rubbed again at the earpiece. “Besides, Thelon, the solar system tends to bore me. It’s very annoying as well—so much noise and hardly anyone capable of communicating directly.”

Thelon took another look at the image of the caged Flash. “Yes, we should get a handsome price for this one.”

“And yet,” reflected Ern, “I can’t help feeling he’s going to bring considerable trouble to whoever buys him.”

H
is cage was put on a wheeled platform and Flash got his first look at the capital city of the planet Mesmo and at his captors. It was midday, bright but hazy, as the two small blue men supervised the trundling of the cage from the spacefield and through the redstone streets of the city.

“I could just as easily walk to wherever we’re going,” he suggested to one of the blue men.

The man frowned. He thrust a shockstick at Flash, who was holding onto the bars of the rolling cage.

The electric jolt was sufficient to make Flash let go, grit his teeth, and double up.

“Okay, I’ll ride,” he said when he could stand upright again.

The other blue man, who had been walking in front of the land truck that was pulling the cage, came back to squint in at Flash. He then scowled at his partner and moved away.

He knew his sidekick gave me that jolt, mused Flash. How’d he see that from where he was?

The streets of the city were narrow, twisting and turning in every direction. The buildings were low, topped by round turrets, painted in soft pastel shades. There were few windows at ground level, and what windows there were at all were small, round, and composed of jigsaw fragments of tinted nearglass. There was a tropical feel to the city.

Don’t think I’ve been on this one before, Flash thought. Must be a planet system remote from any of the systems I’m familiar with. I’m pretty sure these fellows took us through a space warp, so there’s no way of telling where I am. I’ll need more bearings and facts to find out.

There were signs on some of the buildings; they apparently used some complex cuneiform system of writing here. Flash was unable to read it. The narrow streets were more crowded in the part of the town they were now rolling through. All the people, male and female, were of the same type as his captors—small, round-headed, blue-skinned.

Looks like they’re only outside visitors, thought Flash, come in cages. I don’t see any strangers or any tourists from other planets.

The citizens noticed him, too. They waved, smiled, and some of the younger ones made faces. But it was all silent. No sound of talk or laughter reached him.

“I wish Dr. Zarkov hadn’t set aside that thought-reading gadget he was working on a couple years back,” Flash muttered. “I’m starting to get the impression that my hosts may communicate telepathically. Either that or they’re extremely taciturn.”

The cage, pulled by the landtruck, rumbled on through the redstone streets.

Flash wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. He was perspiring freely in the muggy heat.

Then he began to hear something: it was speech, human speech, from ahead somewhere. Someone was shouting.

His cage went rattling around a corner, heading for an arched doorway set in a pale-blue wall.

Flash could make out words.

Someone was yelling. “I haven’t done anything to you guys. Come on, please. Let me go. Let me out of this thing.”

The cage entered a vast circular room. The air in there was cool and clear. The illumination came from light beaming down from the ceiling. Each beam formed a circle of pale-yellow light around a cage and there were twenty or more cages in the huge room. Everything else was in darkness.

At least fifty blue men were roaming the room, many of them wearing embroidered cloaks of what looked to Flash like genuine silk.

Flash’s cage was rolled into a stall next to that of the shouting man.

“Please give me a break,” the man was pleading, “Let me out of here. Maybe we can make some kind of deal.” He was a black man, in his early thirties, dressed in a one-piece worksuit.

The roaming men noticed Flash’s arrival. Many of them came over to gaze at him appraisingly.

The black man in the next cage turned to get a look at Flash. “You from Mars?” he called in his unhappy voice.

“Earth,” answered Flash.

“Well, at least you talk my language. I can’t get a word out of these guys.”

“They probably communicate telepathically,” Flash told him.

“Think so?” The black man rubbed a knuckle over his stubbled chin. “I thought maybe they were snubbing me. I’ve been here since last night. You got any idea what planet we’re on?”

“We’re a long way from Earth and Mars.”

Blue men were crowding close to Flash’s cage, smiling and nodding approvingly.

“They feed you?” the black man asked him.

“I was tossed some raw meat. I suppose it was meant to be food.”

“That’s all they’ve given me. My name’s Booker, Philip K. Booker.”

“I’m Flash Gordon.”

“Hey, I’ve heard of you,” said Booker. “You’re a celebrity on Mars.” He rubbed at his chin. “I didn’t figure they’d be able to keep a guy like Flash Gordon in a cage.”

“They won’t,” answered Flash.

“T
his is the place,” said Zarkov. He hunched in the pilot seat, punching out landing instructions on the control panel.