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

There was something a little bit annoying about it all; really. It seemed that everyone wanted Willie to use his imagination all the time to propel himself and them through space to other worlds and places, so they could write it down in a magazine, or turn it into a scientific monograph.

Willie had just about had it with all that guff.

Once they got back to Earth, he was going to talk to Dr. Zarkov about it. No more experiments with Willie. Willie wanted to go back to his friends and be the way he was before he imagined himself into a scientific oddity.

It was with a feeling of real shock that Willie suddenly realized that his mind had been wandering once again. He was daydreaming, as they used to tell him in school. And what was happening right next to him was utterly terrifying.

He had to get out of this place immediately! He was in danger.

He opened his eyes and felt the world turning swiftly under him. And instantly he remembered where he was and what was happening. It was a rude awakening to Willie, coming out of a beautiful dream and finding reality stark and cold and terrible right there in front of his eyes.

The hooded figure had him around the throat, squeezing him and cutting off the air from his chest. Willie saw small black dots dance in front of his eyes, and his vision suddenly began to go red. He knew he was on the brink of losing consciousness. He had lost consciousness once before, when he had been very tired after running around the track because he had not eaten enough beforehand. He knew what that was like.

He could feel the black waves breaking over him now, like combers at the beach.

He knew what to do. He would think himself back to Dr. Zarkov’s lab.

He did so.

And there he was—in the laboratory, looking out across the darkened desert. He turned. Where were the others?

Then he realized that none of the rest were there with him. Somehow he had not thought enough about them to bring them with him. He had been incredibly and inexcusably selfish in wishing only himself safe from danger.

Beside that, Dr. Zarkov had not been with him when he and Mr. Gordon were captured by the hooded figures. He could not wish him and Miss Arden back with the two of them.

How could he leave Dr. Zarkov and Miss Arden on Mongo like that? And Mr. Gordon?

He did not want to go back to that hooded figure with the strong hands, either, but he knew he had to. It was a duty, more or less. After all, it was because of Willie that Dr. Zarkov and Mr. Gordon were on Mongo. And he had said he wanted to stay around and look the planet over.

The rest of them had wanted to go home.

He had made the decision. He could not cop out on it this way, and leave the rest of them stranded there, helpless—and Mr. Gordon about to be split down the middle with the ax Willie had seen the hooded man throw.

No, he would have to return and see what he could do about it.

And he was back, the air squeezed out of his chest, his vision blurring, and the sound of heavy breathing in his ears.

Stop! he thought. Stop!

Immediately, the hooded figure who was strangling him froze.

Willie opened his eyes, trying to see what had happened. He had thought Stop!, but he did not know what he had actually caused to happen.

He saw Flash Gordon frozen in position, waiting for the ax to hit him. He saw the ax frozen in the air. He saw the two other hooded figures standing like statues in exactly the position they had been in when he thought Stop!

Willie scrambled out of the tight grasp of the hooded man and fell to the ground. He crawled up onto his knees and stared about him.

Yes, he had stopped time. He had frozen them all in time: people, objects, and the planet of Mongo itself.

It was simply one more aspect of his astonishing power. He smiled brightly.

“I did it,” he cried out. “I did it!”

But this wasn’t helping Mr. Gordon at all. He stared at Flash Gordon, wondering what to do about him. Then it came to him. He simply willed Flash Gordon to continue to do what he had been doing.

Flash ducked involuntarily, as he had been going to do at the first glimpse of the ax flying toward him. Now he stared at the ax frozen in flight, and then his eyes turned to Willie incredulously.

“Willie,” he said. “How did you do that?”

Willie ducked his head. “I just kind of imagined it, Mr. Gordon.”

Flash smiled faintly. “You saved my life, Willie.”

“Saved my own, too,” Willie said with a grin.

“I’d guess by looking around us that you can make time stand still, Willie.”

“I guess so, Mr. Gordon.”

“It was very brave of you, Willie, to save my life that way.”

Willie thought about the way he had really thought first only of himself, and had imagined himself back in the safety of Dr. Zarkov’s lab, and he was ashamed.

“Well, I really guess I wasn’t so brave, Mr. Gordon.”

Flash frowned.

“I just imagined myself home, first of all, and didn’t think about anybody else at all.”

Flash put his hand on Willie’s shoulder. “But you did come back to help me, Willie,” he said kindly.

Willie felt his face turn red. “Yes, sir.”

“And that’s what counts.”

Willie felt warm and happy suddenly. He turned toward the hooded figure who had been strangling him. “What’ll we do now, Mr. Gordon?”

Flash looked at the three hooded men and walked over to the one who still held an ax. He pulled it out of the man’s hand and held it for a moment.

“It looks like some kind of ancient adz,” he said musingly. “Must be out of an era equivalent to Earth’s Iron Age.” He frowned. “Still those hoods and robes look familiar to me in a strange way.”

“Do you know these people?” Willie asked.

Flash shook his head briefly. “I don’t think so, Willie. It’s hard to tell. Still, they might be . . .” Flash shook his head finally.

He reached out and pulled the second ax from the air, and then helped Willie pull the concealed ax from the third hooded figure’s robe. The two of them walked over to the edge of the rocky cliff and threw the three weapons over.

Flash turned to Willie and winked.

“Guess that evens things up a bit. Now we can go at it again.”

Willie nodded. “You sure you don’t want to leave them here, Mr. Gordon?”

Flash grinned. “Never leave a job unfinished, Willie. Remember that.” He rubbed his hands together and stood waiting for Willie to unfreeze time.

Willie closed his eyes and thought, Go!

The hooded figure who had been shaking Willie turned quickly in surprise, and reached out for Willie where he now stood, but Willie was waiting for him and ducked. When the hooded figure stumbled past him, Willie reached out, grabbed his booted leg, and flipped up hard.

The hooded figure crashed into the flat stone cliff by the pathway and slumped to the ground.

Flash, in turn, jumped toward the hooded figure who had thrown the ax at him. The hooded man, surprised to see that the ax had vanished before his eyes, was momentarily taken off-guard.

Driving hard with his legs, Flash grabbed him around the waist in a football tackle and pushed him toward the edge of the cliff. The hooded figure cried out in terror, looking back over his shoulder.

The two of them fell struggling onto the ground, and Flash quickly subdued him by pulling his arm into a tight hammerlock.

“Look out!” cried Willie.

Flash turned just as the third attacker loomed over him, ready to strike him with a rock. Quickly, Flash kicked out and lashed the hooded man across the upper thigh. He screamed and twisted aside. The rock fell harmlessly to the ground.

With a curling motion, Flash rose and grabbed the man around the shoulders, bearing him to the ground. The hooded figure threw Flash off, and Flash gave him a quick karate chop to the neck.

The third man went down.

Flash stood and grinned at Willie.

“Gee, that was great, Mr. Gordon! What are we going to do now?”

Flash considered. “I’ve got a hunch about where these hatchetmen come from.”

“Where, Mr. Gordon?” Willie asked, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Never mind,” said Flash. “I think it means trouble, though. I think we’d better go look for Doc and Dale.”

Flash was staring about him carefully.

Willie walked over to the edge of the cliff and looked over. It seemed miles down to the bottom of the drop. Willie blinked.

“It’s a long drop!”

Flash joined him. “That’s right, Willie.”

“Hey, Mr. Gordon,” Willie said suddenly. “Look.” He pointed past a group of boulders where the three hooded figures had first attacked them. In the rock face behind them was an opening like the mouth of a cave.

Flash peered past the rocks. “It’s a cave.”

“Yeah,” Willie said, taking a deep breath. “And it’s really creepy-looking, isn’t it?” He was studying the blue rock around the cave mouth, and the shimmer of stalactites and stalagmites dimly seen inside the blue mistiness of the cavern beyond.

Flash nodded grimly. “Yes, it is that, Willie. And now I do know where we are. We’ve got to get back to Doc and Dale before it’s too late.”

“Too late?”

“Yes. If I’m not mistaken, that entrance leads to the Kingdom of Blue Magic.”

“Wow!” Willie said. “The Kingdom of Blue Magic. Why don’t we go there, Mr. Gordon? Why don’t we go inside the cave and take a good look around?”

“No, Willie. We’ve got to make tracks out of here, and get Doc and Dale.”

“Look!” cried Willie. “There’s something coming out of the cave mouth. It’s a kind of mist.”

Flash peered ahead. The mist was rolling slowly and majestically from the mouth of the cave, coming right up over the rocks and into their eyes.

Willie smelled a very faint perfume, a delightful smell, like some kind of spicy shaving lotion.

Flash started to speak.

“Willie, we’ve got to get away from this stuff. It’s—”

Willie turned. He saw Flash staring at him, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. And Willie realized that he could not move a muscle of his own body.

He was powerless.

The blue haze surrounded the two of them, wrapping them in its tentacles and then rising all around them to cover them like a shroud.

Willie could not imagine himself away this time because even his willpower was taken from him.

D
eep within the inner core of the planet Mongo were located the subterranean caverns of a strange and sunless world—Azuria, the Kingdom of Blue Magic. When Mongo’s crust had first formed many millions of years ago, subterranean gasses had erupted, blowing out mountains and hills among the oceans and seas that had formerly made up the entire surface of the planet.

A great part of the core of Mongo had been formed of a type of petroleum mass similar to Earth’s oil, and it was this enormous deposit that had caught on fire during the eruptive process of the planet and burned out through the vents and fissures caused by the eruption of the volcanic pustules.

Eventually this enormous inner conflagration had burned itself out, leaving a tremendous area in the middle of the planet without any sign of vegetation or life even though it was all empty space. The giant chamber was reached through the vents and fissures caused by escaping gasses from the fire that had formed the inner endoglobe, called the Caverna Gigantea by scientists when it was discovered.

Sunlight penetrated the inner chambers of this vast area only in refracted or re-refracted rays, which made their way to the inside with only a trace of their original illumination intact. What remained was a strange bluish glow more like the dying dot of light on a vidscreen than a diminished ray of sunlight.

The geologic formation that encased this strange Caverna Gigantea was a type of rock existent only on Mongo, called oceanite for its bluish color. The lode of oceanite extended all the way from the center of the planet to the small chain of mountains that was upthrust in the middle of the Great Mongo Desert, the land that separated Arboria, the Kingdom of Prince Barin, and the Volcano World and Jungle of Barbaran.

It was in the middle of the Caverna Gigantea, the absolute dead center of the planet of Mongo, that an enormous jeweled city had been built by the first members of the Azurian race. The Azurians were named for the indigo-pigmented skins, which had resulted from an early cataclysmic scientific experiment controlled by the scientific council of the People of the Desert, as the Azurians were called before their mutation, who had been trying to revitalize the Great Mongo Desert for colonization.

The experiment had been subverted by a group of power-mad scientists in the pay of a would-be dictator whose name has been lost in the annals of Mongo. After altering the reclamation project into a vast nerve gas and biological-warfare department—all quite secret from the leaders of the planet—the scientific cabal had invented the perfect nerve gas along with its antidote.

The project had been discovered, however, and when the scientific cabal had turned the newly perfected nerve gas on the security people who had come to close the project down, the entire population had been afflicted and put to sleep.

Later, when the effects of the gas had worn off, the People of the Desert awoke to find themselves changed in appearance from a tanned outdoor color to a very light-intensity indigo which could not stand the direct rays of the sun.

It was assumed that the indigo color in the pigmentation of their skins had come from the mineral oceanite used in the formulation of the nerve gas.

After putting the scientists to death, the People of the Desert, now calling themselves Azurians after the color of their tinted skins, had hidden from the sun for years in subterranean abodes dug deep in the sand and rock of the Great Mongo Desert. Then, when one of their adventuresome tribe discovered the caves in the great chamber beneath the surface of Mongo, the Caverna Gigantea, they had migrated there and built an enormous city in the middle of the planet’s endoglobe.

But science was still the favorite pastime of the Azurians. Inside the planet’s core their most intelligent practitioners continued to perform their scientific experiments, inventing drugs and potions of all kinds, and building luxuries for their beautiful jeweled homes.