Flash Gordon 4 - The Time Trap of Ming XIII (6 page)

Lari nodded. Then he sniffed the air. “Hey, Kial. What’s that awful smell? You?”

“I don’t care to discuss it,” responded Kial.

“You know, that inn girl, Magg, guessed that we were thieves.”

“Better thieves than royal police from Ming XIII,” said Kial with a sigh.

“Did Gordon see you?”

“Of course he saw me, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll fix him as soon as we get back to the superway.”

Lari got up and started walking.

“Dummy,” snapped Kial. “Come back here.”

Lari turned, puzzled.

“We don’t walk! We go by time-travel.”

“Oh,” said Lari.

“Set your time-travel pack to . . . let’s see.” Kial closed his eyes. “Plus seven aitch one five em three aught ess. And your space-travel pack to Mongo grid coordinates Latt plus one two seven degrees, two hours, five minutes, three seven seconds, and eight milliseconds; long plus eight aught degrees, five hours, five seven minutes, two seconds and one aught five milliseconds. Right?”

“You tell me, Kial,” said Lari.

“I am telling you, dummy!” yelled Kial.

They set the digital readouts on their belts together.

And then both vanished.

F
lash studied the forest growth and the terrain briefly, and then turned to Dale.

“The origin of that ray is around here somewhere, but we haven’t really got the time to search it out now. Not with those two at large. Let’s get back to the jetcar.”

“It won’t do us any good,” Dale said grimly. “It’s obvious you can’t fix the car. Do you think we can get a ride on the superway?”

“I have no idea,” Flash answered thoughtfully. “I just don’t like what’s going on around here. I’m armed.” He patted the holster at his waist. “But I want you to have a weapon, too. I’ve got an extra blaster pistol in the car. I always carry one spare.” Flash peered grimly into the shadows behind the lavender-and-orange foliage. “I have a strange feeling that we haven’t seen the last of that disintegrator ray or the two men who operated it”

“So have I,” said Dale, shivering.

Together they walked through the scrub brush toward the wreckage by the superway. A scarlet alardactyl wheeled into view and then spun out of sight in the mustard sky.

“The birds are returning. I think our guests have departed,” said Flash with a faint grin.

“But they might come back.”

“You can be sure they will,” Flash observed.

“What do they want?”

“Us.”

“Why us?”

“That’s for them to know and for us to find out” Flash said playfully.

Dale smiled. “It can’t be any of Prince Barin’s people.”

“Dressed in that weird garb?” Flash snorted. “Not on your life! They don’t look like your ordinary Mingo type, either.”

“I’d say they came from some other environment entirely,” Dale replied.

“From another planet in the Mongo System?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why attack us then?”

“And why disappear before our eyes!” Dale wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself. “It’s spooky. I’m beginning to believe in witchcraft.”

“There’s got to be some scientific explanation,” Flash insisted.

They came to the wreck of the jetcar by the side of the superway. Flash climbed in, opened the driver’s door, and fumbled in the side pocket for his spare blaster pistol.

“It’s gone,” he said, looking up in surprise.

“What’s gone?”

“The spare blaster.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you left it in the console compartment instead.”

Flash leaned over and opened the compartment on the dash. It, too, was empty.

“Not there, either.”

Dale looked around uneasily. “It’s getting spookier and spookier.”

“I don’t like it one bit,” Flash said grimly. “Dale, you said the laserphone was out?”

“Yes.”

“There’s got to be some way we can signal Arboria and get in touch with Prince Barin. Maybe he’ll have some clue to this strange business.”

“I think we’re going to have to walk the whole distance to Arboria.”

Flash shrugged. “We can’t be too many mongometers from the city. We were due to arrive in fifteen minutes. At our ground speed of 1,700 mongometers per minute, I’d guess about 25,000 mongometers, give or take a few.”

“Flash, I can never remember how long a mongometer is.”

Flash laughed. “Well, a mongometer is just about half the size of an earthmeter, and is measured in the same manner. One ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, measured along a meridian. Since Mongo’s diameter is exactly half of Earth’s, that cuts the circumference in half, too.”

“Flash! You’re beginning to sound just like Dr. Zarkov! How long is a mongometer? In feet?”

“Just over a foot and a half. Eighteen, nineteen inches.”

“How many miles to Arboria?”

“Well, maybe six or seven miles.” Flash frowned. “Beginning to sound like Zarkov, huh?”

Dale laughed,

“If we’re going to walk, I’d better make sure my blaster pistol is in working order. I had some trouble with the firing pin last time I used it.”

Flash unbuckled his holster and reached inside. He removed the blaster pistol without looking down at his hand, and then glanced at it.

His hand was empty.

He had felt the weapon. But now it was not in his hand.

“You should see the expression on your face!” Dale said, chuckling.

Flash stared at her. “What?”

“I mean, you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

Flash looked down at his empty hand. “It’s gone, Dale.”

“What’s gone?”

“My blaster pistol.”

“But you said you had it in your holster.”

“Dale, I took it out of the holster, and was just looking down at it to check the pin. It disappeared, but I felt it.” Flash closed his eyes. “Maybe it was autosuggestion.”

Dale stared. “You’re just imagining it, Flash. It’s all this talk about witchcraft and magic.”

“No,” said Flash. “I had it in my hand. And it’s gone.”

Dale looked around at the ground near the wreck. “You dropped it. That’s all.” Her voice rose.

“I had it and it vanished,” snapped Flash. He looked around once more at the forest that surrounded them, with its paleozoic plants frozen in time, the weird lavenders and purples and oranges from Mongo’s soil content. “I can feel someone out there, watching us.”

“The first blaster pistol stolen from the car. The second stolen from your hand.” Dale shivered again.

“Come on,” demanded Flash. “The sooner we get out of here, the better I’ll like it!”

“But where—?”

“To Arboria. Shank’s mare.”

Dale looked around once more at the suddenly unfriendly forest and hurriedly caught up with Flash. They walked rapidly over the weed-covered terrain to the lip of the superway. In a moment they were striding along the smooth surface of the pavement. In Mongo’s lower gravitational pull, their steps were a bit longer than an average Earth step.

A sound in the forest off to the left brought Dale up short.

“What’s that?”

Flash halted beside her on the superway, frowning. “I don’t know.”

The sound in the forest came again, exactly as it had come the first time. Now Flash recognized it as a high-pitched, screeching resonance, entirely inhuman.

“It’s not a person, but it almost sounds like someone having hysterics,” said Dale in hushed tones. “I mean, hysterics from laughter.”

Flash glanced uneasily up and down the superway. “I don’t like this being without any weapon.” He sighed. He stared into the forest along the way. The superway wound through a stand of enormous lycopods, over two hundred feet in height. A lycopod was an evergreen mosslike herb. It had creeping stems, small, scaly leaves, and club-shaped candles. This particular variety resembled a ground pine, in Earth nomenclature.

Now an air-shaking crash reverberated inside the foliage, as if some enormous, massive, bounding creature were smashing trees and brush in its flight through the woods.

“There’s something coming at us!” cried Dale.

Flash glanced around. There was a large round boulder behind a giant fern on the right side of the superway. “Take cover,” he told her, pointing.

Dale ran across the superway and crouched down behind the rock.

“Come on!” she called to Flash.

Reluctantly Flash followed, glancing back over his shoulder at the stand of ground pines. He saw the needles and branches of the trees shaking as the weight of the unseen thing crashed through the foliage.

Flash crouched beside Dale. “Maybe that’s what wrecked the jetcar,” she said softly.

“No,” said Flash. “The sound of that ray was different.”

Dale shrugged.

“This is one of the forest kingdom’s arrested species, I’ll bet,” Flash muttered. “It’s too heavy for a salamander—we’ve had trouble with them before—and it doesn’t sound like one of the rogue rodents. We’ll have to wait for it to pass.”

“If it doesn’t smell us out, that is.”

“I thought Zarkov had promised Prince Barin to clean out the timber around Arboria! It’s still not safe to walk a mile outside the city walls. Last time I saw Doc he was working on a spray that would turn them all into docile cattle—salamanders, giant spiders, the aphids, and the killer beetles. Guess the formulation didn’t work.

The giant lycopods began progressing slowly across the superway. Flash peeped over the edge of the boulder and suddenly saw an enormous and hulking mass press through a curtain of wavering club moss and squeeze out into the clearing by the superway.

Dale stifled a shriek.

Flash gripped her shoulder hard.

The creature was a hulking, eight-foot-high magnified version of an aphis-type insect of some kind, composed of a gelatinous substance that gave off a violet iridescence. As it stood there, its shape altered slightly, and Flash saw that it resembled an ordinary aphid, greatly enlarged.

“It’s an aphid,” whispered Flash. “I’ve heard about these murderous things. They don’t subsist totally on vegetation, either. They like people.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Dale.

The iridescent purple aphid extended the head of its body from the thorax and seemed to study the forest. Finally, its gaze centered on the boulder behind which Flash and Dale crouched.

It opened its mouth and a hideous screech echoed through the forest, a screech that approximated, as Dale had said, the laughter of an hysterical woman.

“I never heard them mention the laughing aphid,” Flash whispered. “But that’s what it is.”

“Maybe it’s another mutant,” murmured Dale. “I tell you, I don’t like this primeval forest. I don’t see why Prince Barin lets it exist this way.”

“It’s his ecology minister who’s behind it. He wants to keep it primitive as a kind of nature preserve. Besides, they can’t level the forest. They need the wood, Dale, not only for their city, but for everything they make. Even their clothing is fabricated from reconstructed wood fibers, you know.”

Dale frowned. “Well, I don’t like it one bit. Flash, the thing is staring right at us.”

“If those are eyes, I guess you’re right,” said Flash.

Indeed, the laughing aphid was looking at them. It seemed to arch its body and get its long spiky legs moving, propelling its massive, purple, gelatinous body toward them.

They smelled a musty odor emanating from the giant aphid. It was the smell of old swamps, moldy figs, and human waste.

Flash gripped Dale’s upper arm and lifted her quickly to her feet. “Run. Into the forest. It’s our only chance. The thing is going to attack!”

“Attack? How?” Dale asked.

Flash shook his head. “I don’t know. I wish I had my blaster pistol!”

“You haven’t, so don’t waste your time.”

They were both on their feet and running for the club moss stand to their rear. The giant aphid stood in the middle of the superway; its gelatinous head rose, its eyes moved, and then it thrust its head forward and its enormous almost unseen mouth opened. A purplish quivering flame lashed out from the oral opening.

Flash experienced instant paralysis.

Dale was frozen beside him.

An enormous glob of sticky purple sputum had flashed out of the aphid’s shapeless mouth—a glob as large as Flash was tall—and it had fallen on the two of them, trapping and paralyzing them where they stood.

Flash could not move his arms. He could not breathe. He could not move his feet.

Through the jellied purple substance that surrounded him from head to foot, he saw that Dale, too, was imprisoned, unable to move. Together they stared helplessly at the giant aphid.

The aphid screeched its battle cry and the forest echoed with the sound of maniacal laughter.

Flash could feel the purple jelly tighten around him, squeeze in on him, press the air from his chest, and press on his ribs. Everything seemed to congeal around him. He experienced total suspension of all life functions.

H
igh in the treetop city of Arboria stood the spacious palace of Prince Barin, ruler of the entire forest kingdom. Inside the throne room a tall, black-haired man with a thick black beard raged up and down the lengthy celluloceram floor.

“All right, then, where are they? They should have been here a half hour ago!” he cried, flinging his long arms into the air.

“Calm down, Zarkov,” said the man who stood with him in the middle of the large chamber, “You’re always asking for trouble.”

“I don’t ask for it, Prince Barin,” snapped Zarkov. “But I always get it!”

Dr. Zarkov was dressed in his usual high-buttoned laboratory robe, which he habitually wore both for scientific work as well as exploratory work.

In contrast, Prince Barin, ruler of the forest kingdom of Mongo, was attired in a three-piece sumptuously rich full-dress regalia fit for receptions, formal affairs, and other kingly functions. His mantle was trimmed in rich gold-and-green embroidery, with a tunic of crimson and trousers of silver. He was shorter than Zarkov, but stood very straight. His black hair was crew-cut in an old-fashioned Earth manner.

“I just talked with my traffic minister, Zarkov,” Prince Barin continued. “He assures me there is no trouble of any kind on the superway through the forest.”