by Alex Raymond
“We’re not away yet, Flash,” Zarkov reminded him, wiping the perspiration off his forehead. “We’ve just about run out of air.”
“So maybe we won’t have to worry about the interceptors, at all,” Flash observed.
They both peered out the porthole and waited.
“Maybe I should have armed this thing with a missile,” Zarkov mused.
“What good would it do to destroy a handful of interceptors and go out choking?”
Zarkov shrugged.
Suddenly there was a blinding purple flash in the sky near them. Flash blinked.
“Hey! One of those interceptors blew up right in front of my eyes.”
Zarkov frowned. “Malfunction?”
There was another explosion. Flash stared. The second interceptor had vanished.
“No malfunction—those ships were hit.”
“What’s happening?” Zarkov asked. “You think the Oranges have begun to destroy the Green interceptors?”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Flash growled.
Then the third, fourth, and fifth interceptors went up in flames and vanished.
“They’re all gone!”
“They’re gone,” Zarkov said, “but we’ve got visitors.” He pointed into the heavens where a strange craft was hovering above them.
“Hey!” cried Flash. “It’s—it’s an Earth craft!”
“You kidding?”
“Not at all. Look at those beautiful colors—red, white, and blue.”
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Zarkov grumbled.
“I’m the pilot, remember,” laughed Flash. “Warm up that communications system, will you?”
“Right,” said Zarkov, leaning over the console and flipping the toggles. “I’ll put it on total scan and see if we can pick up a signal somewhere in the HF, VHF, or UHF sectors.”
There was a crackle in their headsets and more static and an explosion picked up from the battelfield below, and then there was a human sound.
“—come in, Orbiting Craft, come in,” said a faint voice that was unmistakably American.
“Hey, baby,” cried Flash. “Orbiting Craft responding,” he said into the microphone. “Back to you, Hovering Spacecraft.”
“Who is this?” the voice in the headset asked in a calm, dispassionate tone. “Identify yourself, please.”
“Colonel Flash Gordon and Doctor Hans Zarkov.”
“Roger, I receive you, Colonel Gordon,” said the voice, now minimally excited. “This is Colonel Ed Hardwick, US Space Force, skipper of the Spacecraft Ulysses. Do you read me?”
“We read you,” said Flash. “Man! How’d you guys get here?”
“We’ll clear all that up when we get you aboard—unless you’re prepared to try for Earth in that rig of yours.”
“Negative,” snapped Flash. “This thing’s leaking like a sieve and we haven’t any oxygen.”
There was a whistle in the headset. “Was going to suggest you moor alongside us and we’d take you aboard, but there isn’t time.”
“No,” Flash said. “And besides that, we couldn’t hold steady enough to make the transfer in this jerrybuilt hardware.”
“Stand by, Orbiting Spacecraft. We’re going to send out an escape mini-rocket. You latch onto that and we’ll get you aboard.”
“Roger,” said Flash.
Flash and Zarkov were gasping and choking when they saw the small rocket-like missile issue forth from the ventral hatch of the big spacecraft and then descend gently from a parachute device above it as it fell into the gravitational field of Errans.
Flash maneuvered Zarkov’s rig toward the mini-rocket so it would hang up on their dorsal surface as it came down toward the planet.
“Keep it steady, Flash,” said Zarkov, watching the descending mini-rocket. “Left. About two points. Now! Okay. Hold!”
They could hear the rasping of the rocket as its skin rubbed the topside of their own craft and settled down.
“That’s it!”
“Come on,” Zarkov called out, gasping. “I’m strangling to death. Crack that hatch and let’s get out of here.”
Flash cracked the hatch and climbed out onto the topside skin of Zarkov’s rocket, his helmet secured and his face covered with sweat. Zarkov followed, his face showing the effects of his rapidly dwindling oxygen supply.
The mini-rocket was small, but easily opened, and the two of them quickly wedged themselves inside.
“Secure the hatch.”
“Roger.”
“Good!” said the voice of Colonel Hardwick. “We can see you in there. We’ll read out burn information. You understand the system?”
Flash looked at the very small console. “Roger. Perfectly clear.”
“Excellent. As you hear the burn figures, please comply. You affirm?”
“Affirmative.”
Flash and Zarkov hovered over the controls and quickly applied the proper burns to the mini-rocket, and the rocket zoomed upward toward the big spacecraft.
“Mooring posture,” snapped the voice in Flash’s headset.
“Mooring hatch set in receive posture,” said another voice.
“Okay, mini-rocket. I want you to steer eight degrees to port and burn eight-five. Got that?”
They had it, and conformed. Flash could almost feel the nose of the mini-rocket lock into the mooring hatch of the big spacecraft.
“Lock,” snapped the voice in the headset.
Zarkov flipped the LOCK switch.
“Okay,” said a relieved voice from the spacecraft. “We’ve got a lock. You’ll have oxygen in exactly one second. Count—now!”
Flash flipped off his helmet and saw that Zarkov, looking very pale and exhausted, was doing the same.
The oxygen flowed in and it was the sweetest thing they had ever experienced in their lives. For a long moment they lay there, simply breathing deeply and letting their bodies relax in that wonderful fresh air.
“Okay, men,” said the cheerful voice of Colonel Hardwick. “Now crawl through the front port and we’ll have a little food and rest for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Flash enthusiastically. “Go ahead, Doc. You’re first.”
Zarkov looked haggard. “Roger.”
And he crawled through.
Flash followed.
Colonel Hardwick was a jovial, middle-aged man, with a lot of military savvy and plenty of good cheer. Later, as they sat in the big skipper’s cabin of the spacecraft and gazed out the wide porthole scan at the planet Errans, they sipped at cups of coffee and finished their briefing, all taken down on tapes that would be sent immediately back to the Secretary of Space Development in Washington.
The planet Errans was enormous, but gradually diminishing as they sped away from it. Occasional flashes of light showed on the rock’s darkened surface.
“Just one more sign of their damned war,” said Zarkov philosophically. “It should be a good lesson for any earthman, let me tell you.”
Flash shook his head. “They know nothing but war there and they’re very good at it. You can see by those explosions down there—visible to the naked eye—that they’re never going to give up.”
Hardwick grinned. “Well, I don’t mind a little combat once in a while, but I think I’d like a reason for it.”
“If there is a reason for combat,” said Flash seriously.
Hardwick laughed. “Right you are, Flash. I’m beginning to think all war’s pointless.”
“Like that damned planet,” said Zarkov. “Two races of people there, completely intellectual, completely independent. And all they do is fight. You begin to wonder about intelligence and its relationship to peace, don’t you?”
“A very spooky thought, Doc,” Flash said. “Still . . .”
Zarkov leaned forward. “We’ve done all the talking while we’ve been eating that marvelous meal you gave us. Now you tell us how you got here and saved us.”
Hardwick chuckled. “Well, you can imagine the flap there was in
Space-Probe Ground Control when you guys went off the scope. Then the communications died. It was a dead end. Right?”
Flash shuddered. “I don’t even want to think about that!”
“Well, the immediate rationale was to send up another probe, which was done. Naturally, that disappeared too.”
Zarkov interrupted. “You know what was happening? Those cybbies were neutralizing the signals, rendering the controls inoperative, and directing the probes right into their own hands. They simply grabbed the electronics parts from the material, cannibalized it for whatever they wanted, and dumped the remaining metal in the scrap pool for later reprocessing into steel.”
“Interesting,” said Hardwick. “They seem very bright.”
“Yuck,” said Zarkov. “I’ve lost my faith in electronics.”
“Go on, Colonel,” said Flash.
“Okay. After the Four-Ess probe went up and vanished just like you guys did, the Secretary—”
“Secretary St. George?”
“The Honorable Madison M. St. George of the Department of Space Development,” Hardwick said with a nod, “called in Doctor Martin and did the obvious.”
“Chewed him to bits?”
Hardwick nodded. “And swallowed him whole. The Honorable Secretary is an old Navy man, you understand, and he just acts that way. Whatever, it was Martin of the Space Research Lab who suggested that all manned space probes be contacted immediately and sent in the direction of the gypsy planet. Errans, you call it?”
“Errans,” said Flash.
“Okay. I got my message almost immediately. We are on a four-year circuit of the solar system, a sort of freelance, roving probe, checking out various planets, serendipity-type, and we were sent directly to Errans. We got there two days ago, and kept beaming signals down, but nothing happened.”
“You were lucky the damned cybbies weren’t active then. They were building up their war machine again.” Zarkov shook his head. “Damned lucky. They would have neutralized your power and grabbed you off just like they grabbed us.”
Hardwick nodded. “Anyway, here we were, watching everything down there, when we saw this enormous weird jerrybuilt piece of nonsense slapping up into the sky.”
“Right,” said Zarkov happily. “My cannibalized rocket.”
“We tried to contact you, but you weren’t on the air.”
“Bit of a hustle there, trying to keep breathing,” said Flash. “Sorry about that.”
“No sweat. Anyway, when those interceptors came zooming up, we lobbed a couple of missiles at them to take care of them. And that’s when you came on the air.” Hardwick spread his hands. “That’s the bit.”
“And damned glad we were to see you,” said Zarkov.
“It was just in time,” Hardwick added. “According to our calculations, backed up by those at SpapGroc on Earth, the planet Errans is beginning to leave our solar system. You’d never have gotten back if you’d waited a day or two longer.”
Flash and Zarkov stared out at the dark planet. The three sunettes were just appearing around the edge. It was another day on Errans. Time for breakfast.
Zarkov cleared his throat. “You know, if it isn’t asking too much—do you think you could whip up another one of those marvelous steaks for me?”
Flash sat back and laughed.
“By the way,” Zarkov said, reaching into his pocket ruefully. “Send these to the Martin’s Space Research Lab for analysis. I want to be sure no Earth scientist ever manages to whip up such an unappetizing piece of bilious idiocy as these damned tasteless vitamin pills.”
He threw them on the table with a snort.
“Now, bring on the food!” he boomed, giving his beard a tug and adjusting his belt.
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Books
Titlepage
Copyright
THE WAR OF THE CYBERNAUTS
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