Flash Gordon 6 - The War of the Cybernauts

by Alex Raymond

  “Cybbies?” Zarkov repeated.

  General Ild frowned. “You are trying my patience, agent. Don’t push me too far.”

  Zarkov shook his head. “I would never push you too far, General Ild. You’re a beautiful woman, and I have strong scruples about women and normal decency.”

  General Ild’s beautiful face was suddenly frowning in annoyance. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  Zarkov winked at Flash. “We’ve really stumbled onto a Women’s Lib planet, pal.”

  “Looks like it,” grinned Flash.

  General Ild put her hands on her hips and glowered at Flash. After a moment her frown melted, and she was watching him with interest. Then she turned to Zarkov. “The cybbies, of course, are the robots we have constructed. I thought you had met several of them.”

  The second in command approached General Ild. “I believe we should put these two in the cerebroscan before we waste any more time, General, Madame.”

  The girl snapped her fingers. “I had momentarily been diverted. Get them into the chair, proggies.”

  “Proggies?” Flash repeated.

  “Programmers,” snapped General Ild. “The rulers of the machines, the men who man the computers.”

  Two orange-uniformed hairless proggies grabbed Flash, and the other two took Zarkov by the arms. Neither earthman straggled. It was pointless. They all marched out of the room in which they had been talking: At the end of a rectangular laboratory stood a metal chair with a transparent helmet dangling from the back.

  “That’s it?” Zarkov asked.

  General Ild nodded. “That’s it. The cerebroscan.”

  “Put the one with the chin hair in first, Alp,” General Ild commanded.

  Alp nodded and prodded Zarkov. “You heard?”

  “I heard, proggy,” growled Zarkov.

  Flash watched as Zarkov was strapped to the chair by the progs and had the transparent helmet fitted over his head.

  He turned to General Ild. “General,” he said, “you’ll find that we have been speaking the truth. We are earthmen, from another planet in the solar system into which your own gypsy planet has wandered.”

  “But we are a wandering planet,” said General Ild in surprise, more than half convinced. “We have no sun. Therefore we have built our own technoid sunettes and have spent the centuries of our existence traveling through other solar realms. It is our purpose in life. Or was. We call our planet Errans.”

  Flash nodded. “Then you will find we speak the truth,” he said forcibly.

  “I hope so, stranger,” said General Ild, with a long lingering glance at him.

  Flash flushed slightly.

  “Unhand him,” said General Ild to the two orange-uniformed progs who were holding him.

  “Yes, General, Madame,” one said, and the two bald-headed progs stepped back from him.

  General Ild motioned Alp. “Turn the cerebroscan on, Alp.”

  Zarkov peered out at Flash, lifting his right thumb and winking. Flash nodded.

  Suddenly there was a humming and buzzing as the electronic power sped through the coils of the sophisticated brainscanner.

  “Increase the voltage,” snapped General Ild.

  Alp twisted another control.

  Zarkov seemed to turn white in the chair. And then, with a crash and a shudder, the computer to which the chair was attached showered sparks and pieces of metal out into the room. Clouds of smoke puffed up and rolled toward the ceiling. Then all the lights on the machine went out.

  General Ild folded her arms over her breast and turned to Alp. “Well,” she said softly. “The cerebroscan has blown.”

  Alp frowned. He glanced over at Zarkov, still in the chair, now grinning out through the transparent helmet.

  “Release him, fool,” snapped General Ild.

  Zarkov stood up, flexing his muscles. He grinned at Flash. “That’ll teach them not to fool around with my brain!”

  Flash nodded. “Your will was too much for the machine, Zarkov.”

  “Nonsense,” said General Ild. She turned to Flash and smiled, offering her hand. “However, it does prove one thing. You are not Green agents, neither one of you. You are what you said you were. Aliens to this planet.”

  “Earthmen,” said Flash.

  Zarkov turned to the computer. “An inferior piece of equipment, certainly,” he said. “Would you like me to repair it for you?”

  Alp straightened angrily. “It is not inferior equipment. We programmed it ourselves. It is simply set to the brain waves of those who inhabit our planet. Aliens like you destroy the configuration. The feedback overheated the elements and the power shorted out. That is all that happened.”

  General Ild waved her hand wearily. “Oh, stop with the rationalization, Alp. You’ll have to get your progs on the machine. But please, no more arguments with the Aliens. They’re coming with me.”

  There was a sudden buzzing at the far door.

  “General Ild, it’s the cybbies!” one of the progs cried out. “We can’t let them see this machine. They’ll steal the elements.”

  The girl moved quickly toward the door. “What is it you want, cybbies?”

  A metallic voice sounded through the doorway. “We heard a noise. Is there trouble, General Ild?”

  “No trouble whatsoever, Cybby Number One. We are all right.”

  “I must enter.”

  “No entry,” said General Ild, her eyes narrowed. She turned to Alp. “Get that damned machine out of here. They’ll know we’re doing something they don’t know about.”

  Alp saluted by patting the top of his bald head and immediately snapped out orders to the other orange-robed progs. They gathered up the parts of the computer and quickly carted them into another portion of the palace.

  The steel door opened and two cybernauts came in. They stood there, lights blinking at General Ild.

  “There is smoke in the air,” the first cybby said. “Shall we turn on the fans, General?”

  “Yes, Cybby Number One,” said General Ild, her face tight.

  “Sparks have flown,” said the other cybby, turning around and blinking its electric lights at Flash and Zarkov, “Who are these agents?”

  “These are not Green agents, they are Aliens,” snapped General Ild. “They are from another planet. Orth,”

  “Earth,” Flash corrected.

  “Yes,” said General Ild. “Urth.” Her eyes lingered on Flash. Then she waved her hand at the two cybernauts. “Get back to the Giant War Computer instantly, Number One. You keep forgetting, there’s a war on.”

  “Yes, General Ild,” said Cybby Number One, and turned. The other followed the first, and the two cybernauts loped out through the steel door, their flexible cable arms and legs waving, as they glided through the corridors.

  Flash was puzzled. He took General Ild’s arm. “Wait a minute. I don’t understand this at all.”

  General Ild smiled at Flash, touching his hand gently. “What don’t you understand, Alien?”

  “Call me Flash. I’m Colonel Flash Gordon. My colleague is Dr. Hans Zarkov. I’m an astronaut. He’s a scientist.”

  General Ild nodded. “What don’t you understand, Flash?”

  “Those robots.”

  “Cybernauts,” said General Ild. “A programmed bodily unit with full independence except for input from us.”

  “All right. Cybernauts. You control them, don’t you?”

  “Yes. They were constructed by us thousands of years ago to do our labor. And?”

  “But you hid the cerebroscan from them. Don’t they obey you?”

  “They obey us, but they carry on their own destinies, too. In fact, they exist and are programmed to keep the war going. In turn, they have built and programmed a second generation of cybbies, called technoids because they do small specific units of work, to do the actual destruction. The technoids are in the complete control of the cybbies. The cybbies have run the war for so long, no one of us would think to question
them. They would not disobey a prog’s order, but they would destroy any proggy who accidentally usurped a function of a cybby.”

  Flash whistled. “So that’s what happens when the machines get out of control.”

  “They are not out of control,” snapped General Ild, stamping her foot.

  Flash shrugged.

  Suddenly General Ild laughed. “Come with me, Aliens. We will go into my own private rooms. In there the war is far away, and we can talk; we can eat; we can become acquainted.”

  Her eyes rested on Flash’s face.

  “Right,” said Zarkov. “I could do with a good steak and french fries.”

  General Ild frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’ll eat whatever you offer us, Queen—”

  “General!” snapped the girl.

  “—uh—General Ild,” Zarkov finished. “Don’t mind me, General Ild, it’s just that I can’t get used to a woman running a war.”

  The girl turned to him in astonishment. “Why not?”

  “In our—uh—culture,” Zarkov said, “the men fight the wars and the women tend the homes.”

  General Ild lifted an eyebrow. “They women are cybernauts?”

  “Hardly,” laughed Flash. “We don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “Odd,” mused the girl. “Who goes out and makes the tanks and the airplanes and the munitions?”

  “The men,” said Zarkov.

  “I mean, who fights? Who goes out and destroys the enemy?”

  “The men,” Flash explained.

  “You waste your human beings on the war?” General Ild was horror-stricken. “What a terribly barbaric and inhuman planet you come from!”

  Flash stared at Zarkov. Neither said anything.

  “Ah!” said the girl. “Here we are.”

  She opened a steel door and they all stepped into what she had called her private rooms.

  It was something out of a culture the earthmen had never seen. The walls and ceiling and floor were made of the same material as the rooms they had seen before.

  But there were lounges and chairs and tables and furnishings that were not like Earth-furnishings at all. The chairs were shapeless masses, the lounge was flat and soft, the tables were of no particular shape either.

  Tapestries of nuts and bolts and screwdrivers hung from the walls. The designs on the carpets were circles and squares and triangles. The ceiling lights were recessed in the corners of the room, sending down a faint glow of artificial light.

  General Ild sank into a chair which immediately took its shape around her and supported her in almost weightless fashion.

  Flash reclined in one opposite her at her invitation. He was amazed at the way the material fitted itself to his body and supported him in the air as if he were, indeed, weightless. It was most restful, but at the same time it was unnerving.

  Zarkov sat on the chaise longue, which immediately conformed to him and had him instantly reclining like an ancient Roman at a meal.

  “What kind of material is this?” Zarkov asked.

  General Ild was bored with recitals of technical facts, but she obliged. “It’s a protean type of silicon-based polymer,” she explained. “It was developed years ago by our cybbies.”

  Zarkov whistled. “They do a good job.”

  “They are well programmed.”

  “An ideal society,” Flash commented.

  “Ideal?” Zarkov repeated, frowning.

  General Ild sighed. “But now, with the war raging fulltime, all the comforts of life have been curtailed, and everything that is brought in is turned into materials for the war.”

  “Hey, Doc,” said Flash. “Maybe that’s what happened to the Four-Ess probes. You think so?”

  “Why not?” Zarkov said. “General Ild, is that true? Could the cybbies have seized and turned into scrap metal the twelve satellite probes sent up from earth?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” said General Ild.

  “And that brings us down to the big question. Who are your enemies, and what is the war about?” Flash asked.

  General Ild smiled at Flash. “Of course our enemies are the Greens.”

  “And the Greens are . . . ?”

  “The people who inhabit the other half of Errans. This is Ildhaven, this part of the planet. The other part is Zenohaven. It is very simple.”

  Flash looked at Zarkov. “It is very simple, but you haven’t answered the second part of my question. What are you fighting about?”

  The girl waved her hand in the air. “Nobody seems to know what started it all. We had it in the books years ago, but there was a raid and all the books were destroyed.” A far-off look came into the girl’s eyes. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. The war goes on. And the cybbies and the technoids fight for us.”

  “And you’ve had to build your cities underground because of the danger of raids, right?” Zarkov said.

  “Yes. I think we went underground a thousand years ago. The entire surface of the planet has been a battleground for many generations. So there is nowhere to live but below the level of the rock.”

  “But trees, and vegetation?” said Zarkov.

  The girl frowned. “There are no such words in our vocabulary.”

  Zarkov turned to Flash triumphantly. “I told you! A totally mineral planet!”

  “Yes. We make everything from minerals and particularly of the petroleum-derived materials. Everything.”

  There was a discreet rap on the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Alp.”

  “Enter,” said General Ild.

  The slender prog entered the private rooms of General Ild and stood at attention.

  “General Ild, we must make a decision regarding the Aliens,” he said. “The Cyb War Council has sent me for your orders.”

  General Ild yawned. “The damned Cybby War Council. Well, sit down, Alp. I’ll make up my mind in a minute.”

  Alp was restless. “I beg of you, General Ild. We must have an answer soon! The cybbies have sent in the latest battle estimate. We have had some serious reverses. We must allocate more strategic materials to the construction of tanks and guns. That means that the mining operations must be speeded up.”

  “We’ve already made a honeycomb of this entire planet,” said the girl in annoyance. Her eyes drifted to Flash Gordon. “You see how difficult it is?”

  “The Aliens,” snapped Alp. “The War Council can use them. We need all the warm bodies we can get.”

  General Ild nodded. “Very well. They are neutrals. The cerebroscan has proved that. And they will be fit to serve.”

  Zarkov rose to his feet. “Wait a minute! I’m a scientist. I don’t fight wars for anybody. I’m no mercenary.”

  “You’ve just been drafted. Dr. Zarkov,” said Alp with a slight bow. “We understand you are a great scientist back in your home planet.”

  “None greater,” boomed Zarkov. He blinked. “Well, I suppose if you think you can use some of my more ingenious schemes—”

  “We’d be delighted to use your genius, Dr. Zarkov,” said General Ild. “There, Alp. Go tell the Cybby War Council you have a genius from another planet to help wipe out the People of the Green.”

  Alp nodded. “But what about Colonel Gordon?”

  General Ild leaned over and touched Flash’s cheek. Flash stared at her in shock.

  “I have other plans for Colonel Gordon, Alp. Tell the War Council of Cybernauts that the General is about to take a consort.”

  “Hey!” cried Flash. “I’m—I’m—engaged, you know. I already have a fiancée, back on Earth.”

  General Ild was shocked. “But she is there, and you are here, Colonel Gordon. Flash.” She ran her fingers through his hair.

  Zarkov waved his hand. “It’s better than climbing over tanks and getting blown up with bombs, Flash.”

  “Is it?” Flash wondered.

  “Far better,” whispered General Ild, and kissed him.

  “That’s
the first time I’ve ever been kissed by a General,” muttered Flash Gordon. Not half bad, either, he thought.

  CHAPTER 10

  General Ild lounged in her private boudoir staring at the vidscreen on the wall. The news flashes were not all that good. Another sector of Ildhaven had fallen to the Greens. But it was not all bad. General Heid of the Green Army had been killed in a bombing raid on the Zenohaven capital.

  She yawned. It was always the same—war, war, war. Her mind turned immediately to Colonel Flash Gordon and she closed her eyes to let fantasies of him fill her mind. He was strong and muscular and so very alive. Even Zarkov, his companion, was unlike the progs she was used to.

  Oh, well. It would only be a matter of time. Neither of them would ever see their beloved Orth again. They would stay. General Ild would marry Flash Gordon, and possibly she could make a match between Zarkov and Brigadier General Unp. Some said General Unp was almost as beautiful as General Ild. Of course, they were exaggerating, merely to be kind to General Unp. But she was attractive.

  It would be nice to have the two Aliens live among the Oranges. It lent a certain fascination and variety to life, which had become somewhat dull in the past few years. Besides, she was young and she needed some excitement, some companionship.

  She stood up, shaking her fists. She felt restless and lonesome, she who had always prided herself on her coolness and self-sufficiency.

  She paced back and forth.

  The vidscreen continued to play scenes of the war in the battle sector. Tanks blew up, airplanes smashed, and bombs burst everywhere.

  She shut it off.

  There was another vidscreen, dark now, on the other side of the chambers. She had almost forgotten the internal scanners installed by one of her predecessors during a very juicy court intrigue a good forty years before. There was some story about the General’s consort and one of the lesser Colonels in the army. The General had eventually killed the Colonel who was involved with her consort. How the interior scanner had figured in the intrigue was not known to her.

  General Ild stared at the scanner. With the master control, she could watch any room in the palace. For a moment, she debated, wondering if she should invade the privacy of the Aliens. After talking with them, she could discern a strange sensitivity and ego in them. They seemed to maintain that their persons were their own private property. It was an odd idea, to General Ild, but then, of course, she had her privacy. But that was because she was Commanding General. She deserved it.