Flash Gordon (16 page)

Unfortunately, he was unable to distract himself by looking into the labs. The possibility of exposure was too great. In addition, he was not certain he wanted to know exactly what was transpiring below him.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked, hoping they would leave this tunnel soon.

“To the moon Arboria.”

“Arboria? I don’t want to go to any moon. I’ve got to rescue my friends and save the Earth.”

“Isn’t it pretty risky telling that to Ming’s daughter?”

“Wasn’t rescuing me a pretty rash thing to do just for a thrill?” When he realized that Aura’s only reply would be a provocative smile, he asked, “What’s in Arboria?”

“People who’ll help you.”

“Why?”

“Prince Barin does anything I ask.”

I doubt it,
Flash thought.

“Trust me,” she said with all the sincerity she could muster. In Flash’s opinion, it wasn’t quite enough.

Flash caught a glimpse of a cylindrical machine through one of the soundproof windows. The machine made him curious. He chided himself for being too cowardly to have peeked into the labs before. What he saw caused him to grip Aura’s shoulder and squeeze hard.

“You’re hurting me,” she said, not without some approval, as she removed his hand.

But Flash paid no attention to her. In the lab below, Zarkov lay strapped to a table, the tip of the cylindrical machine less than a yard from his nose. Green discharges of radiation danced between circular metal bands surrounding the lower third of the machine. With Zarkov were Ming, Klytus, a technician, and a busty woman who seemed to have a position of authority, if the manner in which she slapped her whip against her tight leather trousers was any indication. Though a large woman of an imposing height, she had a figure a Buddhist monk could not help but notice. Frozen with horror, Flash did not attempt to conceal himself as they passed by.

“It’s nothing,” said Aura, pulling him down. “They’re just conditioning him to our climate.”

“Right! You actually expect me to believe that!” replied Flash as he struggled to keep Zarkov in view as long as possible.

“Keep out of sight! Do you want us both killed?”

Knowing she was correct and resenting her all the more for it, Flash grabbed her by the arms; he restrained himself from shaking her. “Don’t you understand? I’ve got to help him.”

“There’s nothing you can do for him now. You’ve got to go to Arboria. What’s so important about saving him anyway?”

Flash released her, glared at her. “Life is pretty cheap to you people, isn’t it?”

“He is only a common scientist, no one to be truly concerned about.”

‘Let me tell you something about us Earthlings, Aura. Zarkov may be a weird bozo, he may have brought Dale and me here against our will, totally wrecking our lives, but his heart’s in the right place and he did what he thought he had to do. I have to stand by him because he’s my friend. With the exception of saving Dale and the Earth and a few other matters I can’t think of at the moment, saving Zarkov is the most important thing in the universe to me. You understand?”

Aura pursed her lips. “I must think about it.” Suddenly she smiled and her eyes glowed. “Have I told you I like you a lot?”

“Do your worst, friends!” proclaimed Zarkov. “Someday I’ll see if you can take it as well as you dish it out!”

Briskly slapping her whip on her calf, Kala leaned over and inundated the scientist with her hot breath. “I sincerely doubt it,” she said in a sultry voice. “And rest assured, we shall do our worst.” Kala had an oval face with classic bone structure, which she deliberately accentuated by concealing all her hair beneath her ornate gold headdress (Zarkov suspected she was merely bald). Her glittering black blouse had loose, slashed sleeves. Over it she wore a vestlike lamellar structure with wide gold borders that rose in curved peaks on her shoulders. In the black middle of the lamellar was a circular gold insignia. The leather of her knee-length black boots had been treated in a manner identical to the leather of the tassels creating the whip at the ferrule of a narrow black cudgel.

“Please, Kala, we should derive no personal pleasure in our work,” said Klytus, concealing his hands in his sleeves.

“I realize that is your goal,” said Kala harshly.

Why is she so hostile to him?
thought Zarkov.

“But there are others who believe finding pleasure in one’s work is a virtue,” she continued.

“And what possible pleasure could there be in reprogramming this Earthling?” asked Klytus.

“The pleasure of serving Ming and the state of Mongo for one,” replied Kala, boldly exhibiting the note of triumph in her voice.

Klytus remained silent. Ming covered his mouth with his black glove. Seeing this, Zarkov scowled. Why would Ming suppress his unholy mirth about those two, why would he permit them to use his name openly in a petty disagreement unless . . .

Oh my God!
thought Zarkov.
She and Klytus must be rivals!

And Ming had no qualms against seeing Klytus squirm; Zarkov had noticed that during the audience in the palace hall.
Their political situation must amuse Ming to no end. But it bodes ill for me.

Ming paced back and forth in an area where Zarkov could watch him between his feet and the tip of the cylindrical machine. He wore an ebony robe, highlighted and decorated in gold. “As one scientist to another, Doctor, I must tell you something I trust you will find interesting. Due to the curvature of space, time passes very slowly here in the eye of the cosmic whirlpool. Subjectively, it is the same, of course, but objectively, well, you’ve already been away from Earth for many weeks. Periodically, or every thousand years Earth time, I test each civilization our sensors have detected. I create structural disorder in its solar system, causing earthquakes, tidal waves, and unpredictable eclipses. If there is no response to speak of, I judge that system harmless; I spare it. But if the attack is countered in any way whatsoever, I conclude the civilization has reached a dangerous technological level. And then I call upon the vast spiritual resources inside me, my astral self contacts the ineffable oversoul of the universe, and I pervert it to my personal will. I destroy the civilization! I destroy its homeworld—utterly!”

“My God! I was the one who . . .” said Zarkov.

Ming smiled, nodding almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”

“You’re saying it’s my fault Earth is being destroyed!”

“You penetrate to the essence rather quickly, Doctor. I thought it might amuse you to know this before your mind is gone.” Ming turned to Klytus. “Proceed with it.” With a mock bow in Zarkov’s direction, Ming disappeared from view. Doors hissed open, then closed.

“What are you going to do to me?” asked the pale scientist. He feared the truth as much as he feared ignorance.

Perhaps there was a faint note of glee in Klytus’s voice as he replied, “We shall empty your mind.”

Zarkov tensed. He imagined himself sitting up and breaking his bonds with a strength born of adrenaline. But his appraisal of reality promised no hope. “What?” he mumbled, praying he had not heard correctly.

Kala’s note of glee was anything but faint. “We are going to empty your memory as we might empty your pockets, Doctor.”

“No! Don’t do that!” Despite the futility of it all, Zarkov struggled mightily against his bonds. “Please, I beg you, my mind is all I have. I’ve spent my life trying to fill it!” When he realized that the obviously unmoved Klytus and Kala perceived him much as the Nazis perceived the prisoners in concentration camps, he became angry and indignant. “All right, I’ve had just about enough of this. Your unoriginal emperor is going to treat Dale like a two-dimensional character in a spicy pulp story. You people execute Flash who was a little stuffy but was definitely a right Joe. Now you’re going to brainwash me!
That is the last straw!
I’m not going to lie here and take this any longer! And I must say that you Mongians are perhaps the rudest people I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter!”

Kala purred, “Yes, Doctor, you are most misfortunate.” Her voice froze him with horror.

Klytus nodded at the technician. “Begin.”

The green radiation dancing between the metal bands amplified. A loud crackling like a thousand chitinous shells being crushed underfoot drowned all other noises. A purple ray oozed from the tip of the cylindrical device like an ectoplasm escaping from a mouth; it absorbed Zarkov as he increased his frenzied struggles, it tightened about his skull, it seemed to draw substance from him.

Klytus and Kala looked to a screen where flashes and flickers from Zarkov’s life passed by like specters reborn. Though the pictures generally regressed toward his childhood, they were intermittently interrupted by sensuous visions of Zarkov’s liason with his second wife, perhaps the high point of his amorous adventures; for in an attempt to draw his attention away from the purely intellectual pursuits which, inevitably, demanded the greatest amount of his time, she led him down a progressively kinkier and kinkier path, eventually giving up in disgust and taking up with an accountant whose desires were as prodigious as her own. It was clear from the visual record unfolding on the screen that Zarkov’s memories of this time took precedence over his childhood impressions. An especially enticing scene from his point of view—involving black stockings, a whip, transvestism, half a lid of marijuana,
Volunteers
by the Jefferson Airplane, and a rocking horse—was revealed to his torturers just before the purple ray took him back to the womb, whereupon Klytus signaled for the technician to shut off the ray.

Breathing hard, staring at the screen as if it was still disclosing perverse delights, Kala said, more to herself than to Klytus, “Remind me to revise my opinion of these Earthlings sometime. Perhaps they aren’t so primitive after all.”

“I suppose that is true,” said Klytus, “if your definition of civilized creatures includes those with predilections for freely indulging in barbarous, sensuous, mindless pastimes of lust.”

“What would you know about it?” inquired Kala in a tone which implied that in her opinion, he knew nothing about it. When she received no reply, she calmed herself with an effort and asked, “Shall we reprogram now?”

“Yes, but don’t fill him with anything above Level Three. I doubt if the human mind could take it.”

“Is that a veiled reference to your Level Five and your so-called superiority since—the accident?”

“Kala, remember the chain of command. I am still your superior. And I said Level Three.” Putting his hand beneath her chin, he turned her face toward him.

“I understand,” said Kala, demurely closing her eyes. “Level Three only.”

“I will return after hearing reports from our spies among the people,” said Klytus, walking through the entry as the doors hissed open.

Kala stared at the closed doors for several moments. She cracked her whip on her thigh; she placed her other hand on her
derriere.
She thought of years past, of how she had openly declared her undying love and passion for Klytus after the accident that had increased his sexual potential even as it had squandered it, of the chemicals that had caused the glands regulating his emotions to go into a kind of hibernation that verged, if not on dormancy, than on deterioration, and of the many deaths that had befallen her when, after she had brazenly supplicated and humiliated herself before him, demonstrating in graphic details her proposals for their immediate future, he had matter-of-factly declared her body held no possible interest to him; even if he permitted her to touch it in the provocative ways she dreamed, he would be unable to feel the sensation. The rhythmic sting of her whip now caused her leg to throb with a stimulating heat. Her smile was cold and grim when she turned it on Zarkov. The indifference in her voice fully matched that of Klytus when she said to the technician, “Level Six.”

The ebony night of Mongo was ending when Flash and Aura walked onto the spacecraft dock nestling between the tallest towers of the castle. Seeing the size of the red tower nearly a hundred yards away, directly in front of him, Flash came close to comprehending, for the first time, the mighty fortress that was Ming’s. Beyond the tower, great shards of red-tinged and blue-tinged light broke through the thinning space clouds, exposing portions of the barrenness below. Though the scene was magnificent, it did not awe Flash. The Mongian landscape was a drab parody of sterility, and there could be nothing awe inspiring about seeing it stir to its vague half-life. Of course, a Mongian might discern a certain grim beauty in it, but none of the soldiers in the sleek uniforms of Ming’s space corps, who milled about and occasionally smoked a particularly odorous type of cigarette, noticed the concluding moments of the night.

The uniforms which most closely matched Flash’s red jacket and black trousers seemed to belong to men in authority.

Flash had already stood on the port for several moments before he realized what he was doing: coolly exposing himself to men who would surely recognize him. The muscles of his neck tensed like coils of rope, but he struggled to keep his mouth impassive and to quell the panic in his eyes.

One by one, the men saluted Aura. She returned their salutes and they smiled as they stood at attention. Flash saluted as few times as possible, as many men as possible at a time, in an attempt to avoid notice in case he was committing a grievous error. In addition, he realized that if he created a steady movement, more men would be predisposed to study his features.

“What are you trying to do?” Flash asked between his teeth as he and Aura walked toward one of the rockets. “I’m going to be recognized!”

Aura unfastened a button near the threshold of her bosom, and now her breasts strained desperately for freedom from her tight red jumpsuit. “I doubt they’ll be paying much attention to your face,” she said imperiously. “Fall three steps behind me. Only Ming himself may walk by my side!”

Flash resisted the urge to snap back at her. Of course she was correct. He could not deviate from custom. He could not permit his pride to be his downfall. He complied with her instructions.