by Alex Raymond
“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.”
“G
ood 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.
CHAPTER 9
High 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.”
“You should have let me clean out that area last month when I finalized that neurogas formula I made for the pig men of Pogoland. I could have wiped the place clean of all potential danger. If Flash and Dale have fallen into the hands of the golden ants or the salamanders, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Defoliation is not our way here in the forest kingdom, Zarkov,” Prince Barin replied patiently. “We just don’t believe in that kind of thing.”
“You’d rather have anyone who drives through that section take his life into his hands—is that it?” demanded Zarkov, his flesh turning slightly pink.
“Come now, Zarkov.” Prince Barin smiled. “I don’t think anything has happened to them.”
“Then where are they? We know they left the spaceport over five hours ago! Why you have to keep this city so damned isolated is beyond me!”
“Roads were invented by generals bent on conquest,” Prince Barin reminded Zarkov. “Keeping ourselves isolated here has saved us time and again from the depredations of Ming the Merciless and his armies.”
“The spaceport could have been built closer to the capital,” said Zarkov, grumbling. “I tried to construct one on the slopes overlooking the city, but your minister of ecology voted me down.”
“And well he might,” Prince Barin responded. “You’d have us ripping out trees to clear airfields, polluting the air with burning wood, and ruining the water table throughout the kingdom. We’d be a desert, Zarkov, a desert!”
“Better a desert than a tangled wasteland,” muttered Zarkov, “crawling with all kinds of goblins and beasties.” There was a pause. “Besides, I still maintain that a forest is the perfect place for an invading army to hide out. You’re too decent a person, Prince Barin, to believe in all the evil things that lie in wait out there around you. It’s the good who wind up paying for the bad.”
Prince Barin laughed heartily. “You’re really testy today, Zarkov. I don’t know what’s got into you.”
Zarkov slammed his fist into one of the plyoform chairs. “I’m worried about Flash and Dale. It just isn’t like them to be late.”
“We could set out on the superway and meet them,” Prince Barin suggested.
Zarkov shook his head. “It would take too long.”
“Then how can we help find them?”
“The airscout,” said Zarkov.
“Not the new one,” Prince Barin replied nervously.
“Why not?”
“It hasn’t passed its emission, tests yet. And you haven’t flown it, either.”
“Listen, when I design a new rocket, it stays designed!” barked Zarkov. “You think we have to go through those tests all the time? Not with Zarkov’s solid-state circuitry! I’ve got that flailing problem licked, I tell you. Just because the prototype went down into the Sea of Kyrile—”
“Putting three of my best scientists in the hospital for months on end,” interrupted Prince Barin.
“—doesn’t mean it’s going to crack up this time! Besides, this airscout is a one-man affair. It can’t go wrong.”
Prince Barin waved his hand despairingly. “Take it then. I see you’re bent on looking for Flash and Dale—and good luck to you.”
Zarkov sulked. “I don’t think your heart’s in this, Prince Barin.”
“Zarkov, what do you want from me? Hymns? Best wishes? Soft soap? I can give you anything. I agree that you should try to find them. There. Is that better?”
Zarkov brightened. “I’ll check the stations along the superway again. Then, if there’s no news of them, I’ll take up the airscout.” His eyes gleamed. “You want to come along?”
Prince Barin blanched. “Next time, Zarkov. Next time perhaps.”
Zarkov shrugged. “Well, I know you’ve got to prepare the palace a
nd the public square for the anniversary celebration of Mongo’s liberation from the tryanny of Ming the Merciless. I don’t want to tire you out with my little scouting expedition.”
The door at the far end of the throne room opened abruptly. Prince Barin turned from the center of the room and beckoned to the man in the door.
“Approach, Minister.”
Zarkov watched the stolid, muscular minister of intelligence approach. Hamf was a bleak, gray-eyed man with absolutely no expression and an enormous bald forehead. He seemed to have no eyebrows. All there was of him seemed caged in the bulbous skull above the small, pinched, chinless face.
“Thank you, Your Excellency.”
“Well?” Prince Barin looked over his shoulder at Hamf as he came up to him.
“Sire,” said Hamf, glancing at Zarkov covertly, “I have a confidential report.”
“Zarkov won’t leak it,” Prince Barin said confidently. “Speak up.”
“Yes, sire,” Hamf said nervously. “We have intercepted a message from Mingo to an outpost near the Mingo-Arboria border.”
“Is it important?” asked Prince Barin. “You always bring these notes to me. I like to read the ones dealing with the spicy amours of Mingo’s minions, but I’m tired of hearing about the latest military appropriations at their palace.”
“This is a bit more important, sire,” said Hamf. “We’ve translated a code message and interpreted it. Sire, a force of undesirables is building up on the Mingo-Arboria border near Outpost Daj.”
Zarkov glowered. “Undesirables?” he boomed out. “What does that mean? Have they got chicken pox? Mumps? Poison ivy?”
Hamf gave Zarkov a withering glare. “It’s a euphemism for enemy troops, Dr. Zackov.”
“It’s Zarkov, and don’t you forget it,” snapped Zarkov. “Enemy troops, eh?” He turned to Prince Barin. “Do you believe this?”
Prince Barin rubbed his chin slowly. “I’m inclined to be skeptical. We’ve had no other hint at all of activity in that region. I’m going to think it over, Hamf. Thank you very much.”
Hamf glanced from Prince Barin to Zarkov and started to back away. “Yes, sire.”
“I believe it,” Zarkov said suddenly, eying Prince Barin. “You’re too optimistic, Prince Barin, about people. I never will understand you. You don’t trust machinery at all, but you trust people. Me, I’m the opposite. I don’t trust people as far as I can throw them. But I do trust machinery. Now, what kind of a madman is it who trusts Mingolites?”
