Flash Gordon 3 - The Space Circus Read online

  As Booker went to do that, Zarkov asked, “We’re taking him with us?”

  “Seemed like the safest thing to do,” said Flash, grinning. “I have the feeling Sixy would leave him in the middle of space somewhere.”

  “On a very comfortable asteroid,” said Sixy. He glanced around. “What’s become of Narla?”

  Jape replied, “Already in the ship.”

  Flash left Dale’s side and climbed up inside the Mesmen craft. He saw the blonde girl sitting on the floor against the cabin wall. “I wanted to say good-bye to you, Narla.”

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “And I wanted to wish—”

  “Are you and that girl—Dale, is it?—well, I don’t know what the custom is on your planet. Are you engaged or promised to each other or espoused or anything like that?”

  “I guess you’d say we’re informally engaged.”

  The blonde stood up. “Well, that doesn’t sound very serious.” She walked over to him, put one hand on each of his shoulders. She kissed him once. “Good-bye, Flash.”

  CHAPTER 38

  “This ain’t my idea of fast,” said Booker. He was sitting beside Flash in the cabin of Zarkov’s ship, “Seems like we’ve been traveling for hours.”

  “We’ll be making our final space-time jump any minute now,” said Flash. “Then we’ll be back in the solar system.”

  “Where you going first?” Booker asked. “You going to stop off at Mars first?”

  “We most certainly are,” boomed Zarkov from the control seat. “The sooner the better.”

  “Because I don’t see any sense going all the way to Earth with all of you and then having to catch a shuttle back out to Mars. I been wasting enough of my time.”

  “I’ve got,” said Zarkov in an especially loud voice, “this crate set to pop back into the solar system relatively close to Mars.”

  “That’s good.” Booker leaned back some in his chair. “You really think you’re going to get the planets in our system to do anything about Mesmo?” he asked Flash.

  “Yes, I’m sure we will,” said Flash. “The Earth Interstellar Intelligence people will do something. And so will the United Planets. That’s part of their charter.”

  “Charter is just a piece of paper,” said Booker. “You figure they’re going to send ships and men way out to Mesmo.”

  “Sure,” answered Flash.

  “Going to be—”

  The ship crossed over at that moment, making a great leap through time and space. The side effects of that kept Booker silent for the next several thousand miles.

  CHAPTER 39

  Zarkov paced in front of the view window of his living room. Twilight was coming on, the light of the day was rolling away across the flat dry desert. “I was absolutely right,” he said.

  Flash had just entered the big room. “About what, Doc?”

  “Does it matter?” said Dale from the pseudo-leather couch. “He’s absolutely right about everything.”

  “The last time we were all gathered here,” continued the bearded scientist, “I told you both that there was no such thing as an unidentified flying object. And I was correct, one hundred percent correct.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Flash, “we sure identified those flying objects all right.”

  “Granted,” said Zarkov, “that it was a little rough on you, Flash.”

  “Not that rough,” Flash said with a grin. “And I met quite a few interesting people.”

  “Especially that interesting blonde girl,” said Dale.

  “You still haven’t told me all about your life in that circus,” boomed Dr. Zarkov into the silence which followed. “I want to hear everything.”

  The squat, square, robot bar in the corner of the living room made an odd noise.

  “What’s the matter with you, nitwit?” demanded Zarkov.

  “I was clearing my throat,” said the voice box of the servomechanism.

  Dr. Zarkov took a few steps toward the bar. “Why?”

  “Preparatory to interrupting you.”

  “And why were you going to do that?”

  “To tell you there’s a phone call for you,” explained the voice of the robot bar. “Now before you fly off the handle, let ask me to explain that there’s something a wee bit wrong with the summoning and annunciation system at the moment and so the phone asked me if I’d be so good as to—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Zarkov. He stalked to the phone and jabbed the answer button.

  The lean blond young man who appeared on the phone screen said, “Good evening, Dr. Zarkov.”

  “Flash is on vacation,” said Zarkov. “He’s not available for any more EII conferences.”

  Agent Cox smiled. “I only wanted to tell you that EII has voted to send an expedition of six ships out to the planet Mesmo. If you could come in and give us the benefit of what you found out during your brief stay we’d—”

  “It was brief,” said Zarkov, “but it gave me more than enough time to gather a good deal of data about the planet and its people. I can also give you, thanks to a discussion I had with a fellow named Jape, some hints on how to communicate with the Mesmen. Not only that but . . .”

  While the doctor went on talking to the EII agent, the robot bar said, “Sir?” to Flash.

  “Yes?”

  “The door chimes are on the fritz tonight, too, and they wanted me to tell you that there’s someone ringing out on the front-porch area.”

  Flash rose from the position he’d just taken beside Dale. “I’ll check on it.”

  The porch scanner mounted above the door showed him a picture of a small silver-plated robot with a blue cap standing out there in the dusk.

  “Spacegram for a Mr. Flash Gordon,” said the robot in a high-pitched voice.

  Flash opened the door. “I’m Flash Gordon,” he told the robot messenger.

  “Actually, Mr. Flash Gordon, I have two messages for you,” said the spacegram robot. “First, here’s one from a Mr. 606027—that’s a funny name, isn’t it? Well, I’ll read you the message. Hum. ‘Just a line to let you know I’m back home safely. All the others are, too. Maybe someday we’ll meet again. Your friend, Sixy.’ Would you like a printout on that, Mr. Flash Gordon?”

  “Might as well have one.”

  A ticking commenced inside the robot. Then a thin blue slip of paper slipped out of a slot in its chest. “You’ll have to tear it off. Tear hard because sometimes they stick if you don’t.”

  “You said something about a second message.”

  “You’ve got that first one out? Good. Here’s the second one. Comes from someplace called Mongo, from a Mr. Huk. He says, ‘Arrived home and found everything was well. I owe a good deal to you, Flash. I’m sure you’ll be returning to Mongo someday. Until then, all my best wishes to you. Huk.’ And I suppose you’ll want a copy of that, too?”

  “Yes.”

  When he had his two thin blue messages, Flash went back into the living room.

  Zarkov was still on the phone with Agent Cox. “No, like this,” he was saying. “They talk through their ears. There seems to be a certain amount of extrasensory perception involved.” He squeezed his nose with one hand, clamped another over his mouth for a few seconds. “You try that for a while and you’ll find you can talk through your ears, too. Now the little gadget I can whip up for you will let you amplify what your ears are saying. The Mesmo language itself is merely a vulgarized version of—”

  “Spacegrams?” asked Dale.

  “From Sixy and Huk,” replied Flash. He went to the wide window and watched the darkness filling the sky. “Seems everyone got home.”

  “Even Narla?”

  “I imagine so.” He turned to look at her. “Let’s go for a drive. I’m anxious to try out that new landcar Zarkov bought this morning.”

  Dale stood. “I don’t suppose there’s any danger of getting hauled off to Mesmo again,” she said.

  “Very little.” He took her hand and they quietly left th
e living room.

  “You’re not holding your nose the right way,” Zarkov was telling the EII agent. “Try it again and grab it like this. No, like this . . .”

  The robot bar sighed.

  Table of Contents

  Back Cover

  Books

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  THE SPACE CIRCUS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39