by Alex Raymond
THE LION MEN OF MONGO
THE LION MEN OF MONGO is the first of a series inspired by the world famous comic strip FLASH GORDON, read daily and Sunday by millions of fans throughout the world.
After crash landing on the planet Mongo, Flash, Dale, and the eminent scientist, Dr. Zarkov, fight against the evil forces of Emperor Ming, who seeks to perpetuate his rule by ruthless and savage methods.
OTHER FLASH GORDON ADVENTURES
from Avon Books
#1 The Lion Men of Mongo
#2 The Plague of Sound
#3 The Space Circus
#4 The Time Trap of Ming XIII
#5 The Witch Queen of Mongo
#6 The War of the Cybernauts
THE LION MEN OF MONGO is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form.
AVON BOOKS
A division of The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1974 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Co-published by Avon Books and King Features Syndicate, Inc.
ISBN: 0-380-18515-6
Cover art by George Wilson
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Avon Books.
First Avon Printing, March 1974
Printed in U.S.A
THE LION MEN
OF MONGO
CHAPTER 1
Everything went well until ten minutes before set-down time.
The interplanet survey ship then began to have trouble. The temperature in the oval control chamber started to climb rapidly, at first half a degree at a time, then in jumps of five and ten degrees. The central control panel grew stove-hot, tiny wisps of acrid blue smoke uncoiled from some of the grids and rows of bubble lights.
Dr. Zarkov, a big burly man with a furious black beard, had been bent over the scanning monitors studying the multiple views of the terrain of the planet they were about to land on. “Palmaceae,” he had said in his booming voice. “Excessively large, but palm trees nonetheless, exactly as I expected. And there are stands of large cypress-like trees. Yes, what I anticipated. What’s this now?” He squinted, putting his broad face nearer to the center viewing screen in the bank of five. “Yes, chrysopsis mariana and hieracium scabum. But unlike those of our own Earth System of planets, where they grow to heights of eight or ten feet, these devils are twenty feet tall if they’re an inch.” He gave a chesty chuckle, rubbing his knobby hands together.
“Did you also,” asked Dale Arden, “expect trouble with our ship?” She was a slim girl in her middle twenties, dark-haired, wearing a lightweight, pale blue jumpsuit.
Zarkov blinked, looking up at his research assistant, “What’s that?”
Dale, seated on the edge of her inflated plyochair, pointed in the direction of the control panels. “How serious is it, Flash?”
In the piloting seat, Flash Gordon shook his head, keeping his eyes on the controls in front of him. “Don’t know,” he said. “I’m switching over to the backup systems and we’ll see.” He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, a year away from thirty, with blond hair and an even, outdoor tan.
Zarkov bounded across the cabin, his work boots thumping on the noryl-plastic flooring. “There can’t be anything wrong,” he boomed. “I designed this ship myself, equipped it especially for this pioneer exploration of Mongo.”
The heat in the metal-walled room kept jumping higher. More smoke was pluming up out of the control panels.
“I can’t get any response from the landing mechanisms, can’t punch up a landing pattern, though I don’t see why.” Flash made one further jab at a series of toggle switches to his left. “All frozen, including the backups.”
“Impossible,” said Zarkov as he dropped to his knees. “But since the impossible seems to be happening, we’ll have to use our second set of backups.” He pushed down a row of switches below the ones Flash was struggling with. “There.”
“Still nothing,” Flash told him after a second. “We don’t seem to have any control over the ship.”
Stretching up and whipping an electric screwdriver out of a hip pocket in his one-piece worksuit, Zarkov attacked a panel in the cabin’s low ceiling. “I made test flights in this damn ship myself, back on our base planet. I can’t . . .” He got the plate unscrewed, tossed it aside and thrust one big rough hand into the opening. “This is something akin to open-heart massage. It should, I believe, get our landing mechanisms going again.”
Flash waited five seconds more, then said, “Everything’s still frozen, Doc.”
Dale had risen and was standing beside Flash. She touched his shoulder with one slender hand. “Looks like we’ll have to ditch.”
“Ridiculous,” snorted Zarkov, holstering his screwdriver. “I designed this craft to be foolproof, which I guarantee it is.” He gave his ample beard a tug. “Besides which, I sank nearly all of the PlanExplo Foundation’s last grant into building this crate. If it smashes up, there’s twenty million bucks in a pile of rubble.”
“Dale’s right, Doc,” said Flash. “It’s either ditch or crash.”
“I can’t let—”
“Okay, look,” cut in the tall blond man, “you and Dale get out. I’ll keep fiddling. That way you two are safe and maybe we can save the ship, too.”
The girl’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “There’s no point, Flash, it’s too dangerous,” she said. “Even if we lose the ship, all we have to do to get off the planet is radio back to Dr. Zarkov’s orbiting workshop and one of his robots will—”
“If it looks like I can’t save the ship, I’ll radio and get them to send a rescue craft,” Flash assured her. “But I want to try to save this thing first. Now you and Doc get ready to use the escape tube.”
“This isn’t right, Flash,” protested Zarkov in his booming voice. “As the designer of the ship, I should stick with her.”
Flash grinned. “It’s the captain who’s supposed to go down with his ship.”
Dale had sprinted to a wall cabinet and was breaking out three flying safety belts. “There’s one here for you, Flash.”
Reluctantly Zarkov strapped on the device. “These belts are based on my own designs, remember? So they’ll register the exact place where Dale and I land on your rescue monitor there.”
Nodding, Flash said, “Once I get the ship safely down, I’ll come back for you.”
“Good, good,” boomed the bearded scientist. “We’ll stay exactly where we land and wait for you.”
After strapping on the flying belt, Dale bent and kissed Flash gently on the cheek. “We’ll see you soon.”
“I guarantee it,” he said, using one of the doctor’s favorite phrases.
The slim girl crossed to the trap door of the escape tube. She dropped from sight and was ejected from the craft.
“Twenty million isn’t everything,” reminded Zarkov as he approached the tube hatch. “So don’t be too foolhardy, Flash. If you figure you can’t bring her down, jump too.”
“Don’t worry, Doc.”
The heat inside the survey ship’s cabin was now up to a hundred and twenty degrees, according to the temperature gauge on the control panel. Smoke was swirling thickly.
Flash continued to struggle with the buttons, switches and toggles of the intricate control board. There was still no response.
Five minutes after Dale and Zarkov had jumped free, Flash finally pushed up out of the piloting seat. “Doc and PlanExplo won’t like this, but I’m going to have to give up and get out.” He noted the positions where Dale and the doctor ha
d landed. Then he strapped on his flying belt and started toward the radio-communications panel in the far wall to get in touch with the robots on their orbiting workshop.
But before he reached it, the ship began to wobble wildly, flames howled out of the control board, and then the ship was plummeting down toward the ground.
CHAPTER 2
They were coming in through the gaps and rents in the twisted metal, in through the sprung emergency door.
Slithering down the pocked walls, crawling over the black smeared control panels toward the blond man stretched out on the cabin floor. Snake-like, but a watery orange in color with red-rimmed suction pads running up and down their doughy bellies. Two dozen of them, each six feet long, oozing across the floor of the crashed survey ship, forked tongues flicking out through jagged fangs.
Flash groaned, stirring, his left hand flexing and unflexing. He lay sprawled on his back.
The lead reptile was now within a yard of him. It began to form an angle, its head rising up and swaying.
Opening his eyes and seeing this nightmare, Flash murmured, “I wonder if Zarkov was expecting anything like this.” Very carefully he worked his right hand down to his holster. He eased out his blaster pistol and pointed it at the swaying creature. “Back,” he warned.
The reptiles head jerked as it prepared to strike.
Flash fired the pistol.
There was a sizzling crackling sound and the head that had been jabbing through the air was gone. For an instant, a sooty image hung there, then it vanished to nothing.
A second dull orange reptile poised to attack Flash. Again the blaster pistol crackled.
The other creatures halted. In another moment, they were quivering away, squeezing out of the ruined ship through the holes and tears in its metal sides. Each of them left a wide trail of pale blue slime behind.
Dodging the crisscross of slimey trails, Flash went to the radio-communications wall. “Not exactly a perfect setdown,” he said as he surveyed the wrecked cabin.
He found that the communications equipment, too, was ruined, meaning there was no way to report the crash. The robots in the orbiting lab were not programmed to initiate a rescue on their own. An economy measure Dr. Zarkov had reluctantly decided on.
Flash swiftly made a circuit of the cabin, determining what equipment could be salvaged. There was nothing, unfortunately, to enable him to communicate with the flying workshop. He decided he would leave most of the portable equipment and food supplies here for the moment. In a plyo rucksack, he packed emergency rations, two extra blaster pistols and a few other gadgets. They could come back for the rest later. He attached a hunting knife to his belt.
It was midafternoon outside. Flash guessed he’d been unconscious for an hour. “Dale and Doc should still be waiting for me, though.”
Walking to the emergency door, which hung lopsidedly open, he looked out. He saw a stretch of tough brownish grass, the boles of huge palm trees. Dozens of gold insects were swirling low to the ground. There was no sign of the reptiles who had made a try for him.
Flash took a deep breath before dropping out of the ship and down to the soil of Mongo.
The air was humid, fuzzy.
He stood on the rough grass, looking up at the bright alien sun. Then he checked his compass, nodded to himself, and set off to find Zarkov and Dale.
A new spacewarp process, perfected in part by Dr. Zarkov himself, had recently opened up the Mongo System of planets to exploration. Prior to that, they had been too distant from Earth and the other planets who shared her sun.
With Dale and Flash, Zarkov had already explored one of Mongo’s sister planets. He had determined that all the planets in this system were life-supporting and that all of them might have humanoid inhabitants and fairly advanced cultures.
“He didn’t say anything about those snakes, though,” Flash said to himself as he worked his way through the twisting, twining underbrush which cluttered the spaces between the enormous palm trees.
High above him, a hundred feet or more, giant palm fronds met to make a bright green roof over much of the jungle below. A profusion of giant butterflies, hundreds of them, wheeled and glided high up. They were scarlet, silver, bright blue, and glaring white, passing through dark shadows and stripes of intense hazy sunlight. Near and far, birds called in falsetto hoots and tinny squawks.
After nearly fifteen minutes, Flash noticed he was approaching some kind of trail. “Manmade, too,” he guessed.
The road cut through the thick jungle. It was roughly thirty feet wide, dusty.
He calculated this road should lead him fairly close to the spot where Dr. Zarkov should have come down. “Provided his flying belt is working a little better than his survey ship.”
A sad-eyed monkey calmly watched him pass. It hung by its tail from a low branch of a gnarled tree beside the roadway. It was the size of a three-year-old child, covered with fine silvery hair.
When Flash had been traveling for over an hour, he paused. “I covered quite a bit of ground before the ship cracked up,” he said to himself. “Looks like I’m not going to hit the first rendezvous spot for a while yet.”
From up ahead, he heard something. The road curved and he couldn’t see around the bend. There came a dry creaking sound and a forlorn rattling.
Flash moved into the brush again, working his way cautiously around the bend.
On the far side of the road, he saw a huge twisted oak-like tree.
A dead man was hanging from the tree.
CHAPTER 3
The dead man had been hanging there a good while. Birds and insects and time had been at work on him. The thick chains which held his wrists and ankles together were rusted, the rope which had broken his neck was now a greasy black. His clothes had lost most of their resemblance to clothes and were filthy strips and tatters.
But the sign in crude black letters tacked to his chest was still quite legible: He possessed a forbidden weapon.
Flash stood looking up at the gently swaying corpse. “So there are men on this planet,” he reflected. “They don’t treat each other very well, and to have a weapon is a hanging crime.”
He resumed his trek. He tapped the holster at his side. “I wonder what kind of weapons are forbidden.” He unfastened the holster, removed the blaster, and thrust the holster back into his rucksack. The gun he stuck in his waistband where his tunic hid it from sight.
Five miles further along the road, he saw another dead man hanging from a tree. This man had not been dead as long as the other one. He had been hanged and chained in the same way.
The sign on his chest announced: Executed by order of Emperor Ming. He stole food.
“A very harsh society we’ve dropped into,” Flash said to himself. “To kill a man for taking food.” He walked on, looking back once over his shoulder. “Be interesting to see what kind of reception this Emperor Ming gives us if we ever meet him.”
After a few more minutes, he added, “At any rate, Zarkov will be happy to know his lingual-translator works.” Prior to the initial trip to the Mongo System of planets, the doctor had had a microminiaturized device implanted in Flash, Dale, and himself. He guaranteed it would translate any written or spoken language they encountered and enable them to respond in kind.
Eventually, the light of the late afternoon began to fade. A fuzzy darkness slowly filled the jungle.
Flash halted. “This should be just about the spot Zarkov came down,” he said as he glanced around. “Dale will be further on.”
The flying belt was designed so that the wearer could control his descent. Unless something had gone wrong, the doctor would have been able to set himself down on a clear spot on the road and not in among the tangle of trees and brush.
But he was not here.
“Zarkov,” Flash called through cupped hands. “Doc, are you around? Hey, Zarkov.”
Three crimson birds rattled up out of the brush, flew off into the gathering dark.
“Zarkov. D
oc.”
Flash noticed something stuck on a thorny bush at the roadside. It was a shred of cloth. He plucked it free, a tough tan material. “Torn from Zarkov’s worksuit,” he said. “And this looks like a splash of blood on it.”
From his rucksack, he took a small round flashlight which fit into the palm of his hand. Near the place he’d found the bloodstained swatch he discovered footprints. “Yes, Doc’s boot made that one for sure. These other ones, though, they’re sandals of some kind.” A few yards further along were signs of a struggle, footprints intersecting, brush trampled, branches broken. “But no more blood, which is maybe a good sign.”
Flash bent to study the footprints. “Two or three big men at least. Well, it would take that many to overpower Zarkov.” He swept the beam of his palm-light over the road. “Now let’s see where they took him.”
There were indications the men who’d attacked Dr. Zarkov had carried him across the road. Brush and tall ferns had been pushed aside to allow passage into the jungle.
Shining the light into the thickness of the darkening forest, Flash decided, “That’s going to be a tough trail to follow. I’d better find Dale first. This jungle doesn’t seem too hospitable a place even in broad daylight. No telling what it’ll be like after dark.”
He clicked off the light and started to run, at a steady jog, along the road.
The night closed in, killing the last of the twilight.
There was a clearing to the right of the road at the location where Dale should have landed. An oval pool lay in the center of the clearing. Frogs croaked hollowly beyond the pool’s far edge.
“Dale, it’s Flash. Are you here?”
A rustling commenced along the trees next to the pool.
“Dale, is that you?”
Out of the dark, a raspy voice said, “If you seek the young woman, I can tell you where they took her.”
CHAPTER 4