Flash Gordon 3 - The Space Circus (4 page)

“Even so . . .” thought the bent man as he went shuffling away.

T
he meal chair reverberated when Dr. Zarkov dropped down heavily into it. “Anything new?”

Agent Cox was sitting on the edge of his rubberoid desk. “You look as though you’ve been up all night, Doctor.”

“I have been up all night,” Zarkov boomed. He slapped a handful of thermopaper sheets down on top of the Interstellar Intelligence agent’s desk. “Why are you perched there like that?”

Dropping to the floor, Cox replied, “You lead a much more active life than I do, Doctor. I spend a good deal of my life in this office. To give some variety to things I try to sit in different places. Behind the desk, beside it, over in the—”

“If you’d get yourself behind it now,” suggested Zarkov in his booming voice, “you could read what I dug up at the spot where they snatched Flash Gordon.”

Cox obliged. “We haven’t, by the way, had any further reports of mysterious spacecraft in nearly twelve hours.”

“They’ve all gone home.”

The blond young man looked over the bundle of notes Zarkov had brought him. “Your robot typer needs overhauling, Doctor.”

“I typed those out myself,” said Zarkov. “The fewer useless gadgets in our life the better. The trouble with most of the inhabitants of the solar system is they don’t know the difference between a useless gadget and a useful one.”

The EII agent had the top sheet of paper held up close to his slightly tilted face. “You’re sure of this, Doctor? Flash Gordon was picked up by an alien spacecraft?”

“Flash and the landcar he was driving.”

“How’d they do it?”

“Swooped low, dropped some kind of large metal claw down, and scooped up the car,” explained Zarkov as he twisted an end of his beard around his forefinger. “I found minute traces of the metal around the spot where they snatched the car. Plus flecks of paint which fell off on each side of the car when the claw teeth took hold.”

“You’re very thorough, Doctor. A lot more so than the Highway Authority.”

“Of course,” agreed Zarkov. He bounced out of his chair. “I want to talk to your computers here. They may not be good enough for my purposes, but I’d like to give them a try and maybe save myself a trip to the Planetary Data Center in Houston.”

“EII can tell you as much as the PDC.” Cox was spreading out several pages of Zarkov’s report side by side. “You’ve got a lot of speculative stuff here about where this ship may have come from.”

“It’s not speculation,” Zarkov informed him in his booming voice. “It’s a fact—plus maybe a smidgen of brillant intuition.” Bending over the desk, he poked at various passages on several sheets. “This, this, and this—to name just three—are all facts I’ve verified.”

“You got all this information from traces the spacecraft left behind?”

“Zarkov isn’t the Highway Authority or the EII,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. Flying that close to the ground the damn crate left strong radiation patterns behind. I used a parascintillator that I whipped up myself, as well as a damn good Swedish-made heat-wave analyzer, to mention only a few of Zarkov’s many tricks.”

Agent Cox looked up into the doctor’s face. “You seem to imply, if I’m reading this material correctly, that you’ll be able to tell exactly which planet this ship came from.”

“That’s why I want to talk to your nitwit computers,” Zarkov told him. “I’ve got it narrowed down, using what info I’ve got stored in my head, to a dozen or so planets in various spots around the universe.” He wandered away from the desk, slapping his palm against his thigh. “I’ve got to shave the list down more than that.”

“You’re welcome to use any of our EII facilities, Doctor,” said Cox. He hesitated a few seconds before asking, “But even if you do get the name of the planet, what then?”

“Then I go there,” answered Zarkov.

T
he high narrow windows tinted the late-afternoon sunlight. The walls of the room were a pocked white, made of some kind of gritty plaster.

Flash was examining the length of heavy chain which connected his shackled right ankle to the wall.

“Ten feet,” said a voice nearby.

Flash looked up. It was the hawkman he’d seen in the arena earlier. “Yes, I was wondering how long the chain was.”

The hawkman had two sturdy wings, thick with gray feathers, growing out of his back. “I never expected to see you here, Flash Gordon.” Lowering his voice, he added, “Or is it that you have allowed yourself to be captured in order to rescue us from this place and from this planet?”

Flash answered, “They caught me sure enough, but it wasn’t part of any plan, I’m afraid. How do you know me?”

“As you must know, I am from Mongo,” said the hawkman, who was chained to the wall ten feet away. “There is not one on Mongo who doesn’t know Flash Gordon. You’re a hero to everyone on our planet, a true liberator.”

A chain rattled on the other side of the room. “Ah, would that these chains were longer so I might obtain a closer view of such a prodigious hero,” said a heavyset man with white hair.

“That’s Professor Zumm,” said the hawkman. “Fittingly enough, they have cast him in a clown’s role.”

Zumm grabbed his chain in both hands and gave it another tug. “If only it had been my destiny to be a liberator. I’d, therefore, have no trouble in at least liberating myself.”

“Now that I’ve introduced our resident clown,” said the winged man, “I may as well introduce the rest of our group. I am Huk. The lanky fellow next to the professor is Jape. On his native planet of Anterra, he was a physicist.”

“Here, on Mesmo, I’m a juggler in Barko’s Interplanetary Circus.” Jape had four arms.

“Where I come from,” said the short pudgy young man chained next to the juggler, “we don’t go in for names. I am called 606-27. They call me Sixy around here.” His prehensile feet were bare. “I do a wire act.”

The last member of the group was a fair-haired young girl. “My name is Narla,” she said. “Welcome to the gang, Flash Gordon. I do an equestrian act. I watched you out there this afternoon. You looked pretty good.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” said Flash, returning her grin. “How many prisoners do they have in this circus?”

Jape, the four-armed man, answered, “At present Barko owns nearly fifty of us.”

“Is Barko the fat one who does the bidding at the auctions?”

“That’s him,” said Sixy.

“A renowned liberator,” said Zumm, “must have fetched an impressive price.”

“I can only guess at the price tag they hung on me,” said Flash. “Since they never got around to mentioning it out loud.”

Huk said, “The blue men apparently communicate only through thought waves.”

Rubbing at his chin with one of his four hands, Jape shook his head. “I’m not certain, Huk, if that’s exactly it.”

“Jape has a theory,” explained the hawkman to Flash, “that the helmets they all wear aid their telepathic communications in some way.”

“However they do it,” said the pretty blonde Narla, “they think anybody who doesn’t is pretty low on the chain of evolution. People who communicate by talking are no better than yapping animals to them.”

“A theory not completely lacking in merit,” said Zumm. “In the abstract, I hasten to add. In practice it has forced me to modify my dining habits considerably.”

“That explains the raw meat,” said Flash.

“Yes,” said Huk, “they assume we eat like the lower animals of their own planet.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Myself, six months,” replied the hawkman. “But Sixy is our veteran.”

“A year and a half,” said the pudgy high-wire man.

“Seems to me,” said Flash, “they’d have noticed raw meat wasn’t your favorite dish by now.”

“Perhaps they have,” said Jape. “But they probably also consider us stubborn.”

“Animals in captivity don’t always behave the way they do when roaming free,” said the girl. “That’s probably what they think.”

“Do they make any attempt to communicate with you?”

“Only with those shocksticks of theirs,” said Huk, ruffling his feathers.

Flash began pacing as far as his ankle chain would allow. “And when we’re not performing, we’re kept here?”

“They allow each of us an exercise period once a day,” said Jape, “to look after our personal needs. The rest of the time we spend in chains.”

“Is the circus permanently quartered here?”

“We move around,” said Sixy. “I’ve been all over since they grabbed me. The whole planet is a hothouse.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the climate,” said Flash. “They chain us for the trips, too?”

“Most travel on Mesmo is done by monorail,” said Huk. “Barko has several special railroad cars for us.”

“Each of us is chained to a seat,” said Narla.

Jape rubbed two of his hands together. “You’re thinking, Flash, that it might be easier to escape while the circus is moving.”

“Yes,” answered Flash.

“We’ve thought of that, too,” said the hawkman. “So far there’s never been an opportunity.”

“Those chains are as strong as these,” added Sixy. “Even Mallox can’t snap them.”

“Who’s Mallox?”

“Our strongman,” said Sixy. “He’s a real wild man. They captured him in the forest of the planet, Anmar.”

A door opened. Two blue men entered, dragging a battered Booker with them, bleeding from several gashes and cuts. The two men chained him to the wall and left, not paying any attention to the other captives.

With a groan, Booker sat up. “What the devil is this anyway?”

Narla was closest to the new arrival. She went to his side; her chain was long enough for that. “They put you in the wrestling cage, huh?”

“I guess,” said Booker, wiping a tattered sleeve of his tunic across his bloody face. “Had me tangling with a bear and some other hairy thing I couldn’t identify. What is this place?”

“Barko’s Interplanetary Circus,” said Huk. “Welcome.”

“A circus? You mean that fat guy bought me to be a circus freak?”

“It is a fate similar to that which has befallen all of us,” said Zumm.

“It’s not fair,” said Booker. He noticed Flash now and held out a bloody hand toward him. “You got to get me out of here.”

Flash said, “We’ll all get out.”

T
he bent blue Nord nodded his round head approvingly. “He grows better each day.” His eyes were on Flash, who was performing high above the arena. This was an evening performance of the circus, and a humid, misty darkness hung over the amphitheater.

The dozens of bright night lights caused Barko’s new yellow-silk cloak to glow. “The audiences continue to like him,” he admitted. “My notion of raising his platform another hundred feet higher has, despite your objections, improved the act.”

“I merely pointed out that putting him three hundred feet above the crowd added greatly to the danger.”

Barko spread his blue hands wide. “That’s what makes a circus what it is—danger. Look at the audiences—they love it. The idea that someone, even a lowly outlander, may fall to his death at any moment is thrilling to them. The life many of them lead, you must realize, is dull and conventional, not at all like our circus life.”

Nord’s attention turned from Flash to the center of the arena. A piebald man was working in a large fenced-in circle with five big lions. “Something is wrong with the lions.”

The animals were ignoring the whip and the shockstick the lion tamer was working with. They huddled in one corner of their pen, snarling, tails twitching.

“It’s not the lions,” came Barko’s mental reply, “it’s that fool tamer. He doesn’t know how to handle them.”

“These animals only recently arrived from Anmar, remember,” Nord reminded. “The arena lights still bother them.”

“I’m inclined to leave that speckled fool and the whole pack of lions behind when we go on the road next week.”

“They’re the only lions we have in the show at present. When we hit the small towns the lions are always one of the biggest draws.”

“True, Nord, but—”

The greatest shaggy horse Narla was riding had stumbled. It fell hard against the wooden pickets which fenced in the lions. There was a crackling sound. Part of the fence gave way.

The audience was not silent now. A stunned inhalation of breath, coming from thousands of throats, could be heard.

Two of the snarling lions leaped free of their enclosure, then a third.

This one attached itself, claws digging deep, to the flank of the horse Narla was riding. The horse whinnied with pain and dropped to its knees. The girl cried out.

The lion let go of Narla’s mount, turning its massive head toward her.

Flash went sailing through the humid night air. “A few new tricks up their sleeves tonight,” he said as he glanced briefly at the metal tower from which the ropes and trapezes used in his act were controlled.

When the lions broke free, Flash was grabbing hold of a trapeze which came flying at him a hundred feet from the ground. The sudden gasp of the audience reached him.

“What’s going on down there?”

The metal bar he was gripping began to sizzle with an electric charge. Flash let go, when the trapeze was at the high point of its arc. As he fell, he twisted so that he could see the glistening arena below him.

“That looks like Narla in trouble down there.”

A rope came swinging at him. Flash ignored it. He kept plummeting downward.

“Let’s hope this thing will hold my weight.” He threw his arms out and caught hold of a cord which held decorative pennants.

In the week he’d been a captive performer in Barko’s Interplanetary Circus, Flash had studied the arena from every possible angle. His particular act afforded him several unique views. He’d filed in his head a half-dozen ropes and railings he could grab onto in case of an accidental fall.

The rope dipped low. One of the wooden poles which held it cracked.

Flash let go and dropped to the ground. He went down to his knees, sprang up, and ran toward Narla who was some thirty feet away.

The girl had apparently twisted an ankle when her mount fell. She was trying now to drag herself away across the sparkling sawdust.