THE WAR OF THE CYBERNAUTS

THE WAR OF THE CYBERNAUTS is the sixth in the series of fabulous novels inspired by the famous comic strip FLASH GORDON, read daily and Sunday by millions of fans throughout the world.

Twelve detection satellites mysteriously vanish while on routine space probes. Dr. Zarkov and Flash Gordon are sent to investigate. They encounter an amazing series of adventures when their space ship crashes on a gypsy planet inhabited by robots and plagued by an endless war. Two beautiful queens cast interested eyes toward Flash’s visage. Zarkov’s scientific genius saves our heroic pair from certain annihilation.

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 WAR OF THE CYBERNAUTS 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 © 1975 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Co-published by Avon Books and King Features Syndicate, Inc.

ISBN: 0-380-00206-X

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, January 1975

Printed in U.S.A

THE WAR OF

THE CYBERNAUTS

CHAPTER 1

The United States Secretary of Space Development was in a towering rage. In his office high above Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., he pounded the top of his large desk with his fist again and again as he verbally assailed the man seated in the chair opposite.

“Vanished without a trace?” he repeated, shaking his handsome mane of white hair in disbelief. “You are a scientist, a man of intellect, Dr. Martin,” the Secretary howled. “How can you lapse into medieval jargon like that? Vanished without a trace! It’s twentieth-century witchcraft!”

Dr. Horace Martin writhed in his chair. He was a fairly small man, no more than five-foot-nine, with a bland face, light wavy hair, and wide-rimmed tortoise-shell glasses.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary, but I’m simply reporting the facts.”

“Facts?” roared the Honorable Madison M. St. George, smashing the desk top with his fist again. “I won’t accept that from you, Dr. Martin.”

He hunched there, his six-foot frame curved slightly, like a crossbow tensed for the kill, and glowered at Martin with his brows lowered over his bright black eyes.

“Sir,” said Martin, taking a deep breath, “I have only to report—”

“Twelve super-sophisticated space-probe satellites,” snorted St. George, rattling a sheaf of papers in front of him. “Twelve SSSSs! Do you keep the cost of one supersophisticated space-probe satellite, Dr. Martin?”

The scientist straightened. “One million, seven hundred and thirteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars and seventy-five cents,” he answered promptly.

“Each,” growled St. George, again banging the desk top. “And that means a dozen—a full dozen, Dr. Martin—cost—”

“—twenty million, five hundred and fifty-nine thousand, and nine dollars,” Martin said.

“Exactly!” cried the Secretary of Space Development, jumping up from behind the desk and pacing back and forth behind it like a white-headed lion testing the bars of its cage. “Do you realize, Dr. Martin, that we have to report these figures to the congressional budget committee when appropriations time comes around?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” said Martin contritely.

“There’s a big economy drive on, if you haven’t heard it, Dr. Martin,” St. George howled. “And there’s an energy crisis, and an inflation crisis, and an enormous deficit-spending crisis. Every penny spent by anybody is checked over and probed with a fine-tooth comb.”

“I know that, Mr. Secretary, but—”

“There’s talk of a Congressional Investigation on the loss of those SSSSs,” snapped St. George. “Do you know what that means, Dr. Martin?”

“Yes, sir, I—”

“Television cameras, hot lights, questions and answers, talk, talk, and more talk, accusations, suspicions, derogatory comments about scientists—oh, it won’t be pleasant, I assure you!”

“I’m sure it won’t—”

“But you won’t have to sit there and listen to them tear you apart. You know why? It’ll be me—I’ll be the one under the hot lights! I’ll be the one who has to suffer!”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Martin said.

There was an unexpected silence. The Secretary of Space Development sat down quietly at his desk. He stared across it at the mild man seated there. “Well? What have you got to say?”

“I was going to say, sir. that we are doing everything we can to find out where those twelve Four-Esses went to. You see, sir—”

“You’re just mouthing words, Dr. Martin!” snapped the Secretary of Space Development. “You should be out there doing something about it. All I hear are words, words, words. I never see any action.”

St. George swung up out of his chair again and moved back and forth, waving his arms dramatically.

“I want results! I want something besides speculations and excuses. I want—I want—”

Martin looked up.

“Why don’t you say something, Dr. Martin?”

“I’ve talked it over with the staff, sir, and we do have a plan of action. If you’d like to hear it, I have it right here in my briefcase.”

“More words, words, words,” snorted St. George. He stared a moment at Martin, and then wandered over to his chair and slumped in it, a defeated combatant from some unnamed war.

Martin reached down and opened his attaché case. He was Director of the Space Research Laboratory in Megalopolis West, located in the California Desert. It was from the enormous complex developed originally for the Venus probe that the first of the super-sophisticated space-probe satellites—called the Four-Ess by everyone in the scientific community—had been launched some nine months before.

That one had come back, after accumulating a great deal of valuable data on space conditions. The next five had gone out and likewise had returned with excellent results. Number Seven was the first in a long line of SSSSs that had never returned.

Martin ruffled the sheets of paper in his hand. “The Board has spent a good deal of time considering all the alternatives open to us, Mr. Secretary. And I think we’ve come up with a pretty good solution to the problem.”

“Good, good,” snarled the white-haired old curmudgeon, staring down his nose at Martin.

“If you’d like to look at it, sir?” Martin hesitated, and then extended the sheaf of papers across the desk to the Secretary of Space Development.

“You know I don’t like to waste my time reading words!” snapped St. George. “Give me a capsule account of that report—in fifty words!” The bright black eyes gleamed maliciously.

“Fifty words,” Martin leaned back to close his eyes. “Very well, Mr. Secretary. We’re planning to send the new Pandora Probe—originally intended to explore the Milky Way—with the two men aboard to find out what happened to the twelve missing Four-Esses.”

“Thirty-two words,” muttered St. George. “Not bad, not bad, for Washington, D.C.” He leaned forward. “Now why in hell couldn’t you have told me that in the first place?”

“You didn’t give me a chance, sir,” said Martin, his face flushed.

St. George leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I guess I didn’t, did I? I suppose you think I come on pretty strong, huh?”

“Yes sir,” said Martin, regaining his composure and stuffing the report back in his attaché case.

The laughter stopped. The eyes hardened. “All right, Dr. Martin. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. All that hardware is out there floating around in space somewhere—twenty-million-plus dollars’ worth of it! You didn’t send it out there to bring back random information, did you?”

Martin flushed. He ran his finger around his collar.

“Answer me, Dr. Martin?”

“Well, sir . . .”

“Come on, now. You fellows out there work for me, you know. I’ve heard rumors. Oh, they’re pretty vague ones, of course. But they’re fairly accurate, usually.” St. George leaned forward. “Come on, Horace. Level with me. What is out there?”

Martin took a deep breath. He put the attaché case down beside his chair and straightened his tie. He usually worked in a sport shirt at the lab, and he was not comfortable in the confines of a suit and tie.

“It was Number Eleven that sent back the picture, sir. That is, Number Eleven of the twelve that vanished. It would be Number Seventeen of the lot.”

St. George’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”

“We wanted more information before we prepared a report, sir. This only happened two days ago, you know. We sent Number Twelve out last night.”

“I know. I know.”

“There is something out there, Mr. Secretary.”

St. George slid a little lower in the chair and stared across the desk top at Martin. “You should really have alerted me right away, Dr. Martin. Although I can understand your reluctance to do so.”

“Thank you,” Martin said with relief. “It was a most difficult decision to make.”

“But I’ve got to know the truth if I’m to fend off these damned Foggy Bottom rumormongers, you know.” He smiled crookedly.

Martin sat up straighter. He reached out his hand and snapped open the attaché case once again. This time he opened the case on top of the Cabinet Minister’s desk and laid it down flat. Removing the report he had already capsuled, he moved his fingers around on the bottom of the attaché case, twisting an invisible release. The false bottom lifted up.

With that he took out another manila envelope. This he opened and, with a glance around at the door to be sure no one was watching, withdrew a half dozen photographs.

“Probe Number Seventeen flashed back this picture before it—uh—failed to return,” Martin said slowly, handing the first of the photographs across the desk to the Secretary of Space Development.

Martin watched as St. George squinted at the blowup of the unidentified object and whistled through his teeth.

“What is it?” he asked slowly.

“We’ve put it into the computers, but so far the computers haven’t been able to come up with the slightest bit of analysis.”

“Where is the damned thing?” St. George asked in awe, turning the photograph upside down and sideways, assessing it carefully but with puzzlement.

“Where? We can isolate the exact spot. It’s in our solar system, out toward the edge, actually. With all planets changing position so fast, it’s hard to pinpoint it off the top of the head, but we know where it is. The astrophysical computers have analyzed it exactly from the positions of the stars and galaxies behind it in the pictures.”

“You don’t need to spoon-feed me with that kind of talk,” said St. George testily. “Okay, So we know where it is. Is it moving?”

“From the position in these six photographs, taken at Intervals of three minutes each, we know exactly how fast it’s traveling. It’s going—”

“Don’t give me doubletalk, now, Dr. Martin,” snapped St. George. “Compare it to earth’s speed through space.”

Martin squinted. “Um. It’s moving slower than earth, actually.”

“I see.”

“From the position and the direction, we ascertain it will not intersect with earth’s orbit but will pass on out of the system and into another galaxy eventually.”

St. George nodded. “No big collision with earth is anticipated, then.”

“None, sir.”

“Good,” said the Secretary of Space Development. “I had anticipated a hideous flap and then accusations of not learning of this potential catastrophe sooner.”

Martin handed over the remaining photographs. “Here they are, sir. None are clearer than the first.”

There was a long silence while the big white-haired man flipped through the pictures one by one, comparing each with the other and turning them to all sides.

“The damned thing looks like a big baseball, or something, doesn’t it?”

Martin laughed. “Our own planet looks like a big green and blue ball of light to our men in space,” he reminded the Secretary.

“But this one’s dark.”

“Right. Yet look at those three satellites.”

“I have looked at them,” St. George said. “What in the world are they?”

“We’ve had them through the computers too, and the computers simply don’t know what they are.”

Martin took the photos St. George had handed back and fanned through them. The picture showed a large round dark-gray sphere of some kind whirling through space. There were no clear indications on the sphere of water, or vegetation, or life of any kind.

Placed around the large object were three smaller balls, each less than one-twenty-fifth of the diameter of the big object, but each brightly lighted.

When scientists at the Space Research Lab first saw the photographs, they dubbed the satellites as “suns,” knowing of course that they were not suns at all, but possible “moons.” However, since it was not apparent where the light emanating from them in such a low-keyed way originated, they dropped the appelation “suns” in favor of “satel-lights.” The pun survived the first panicky hours of analysis.

“There’s obviously no sign of the missing Four-Esses in those photographs, is there?”

“That was the first thing we asked the computer to isolate. Not one of them is in sight, sir.”

“That figures,” muttered St. George wearily.

Martin looked up. “Do you want a copy of this photograph, Mr. Secretary?”

St. George frowned. “Better keep it with the rest of your reports. Dr. Martin. I understand your reluctance to release the information to the public. The press would have a field day. ‘New planet in solar system!’ ‘Collision with earth hypothecated!’ All that kind of nonsense. No. Let’s keep it veiled in a shroud of mystery.”

“Not afraid of being accused of a cover-up?” Martin asked gently.

“I’m in charge of this cabinet post,” snapped St. George. “You let me take care of it!”

“Yes sir,” said Martin with a smile.

“Who’s going up in the Pandora Probe?”

“One scientist and one astronaut.”

“Who are they?”

“We got a list of potential names from the computer.”

“May I see it?”

Martin shook his head. “I’ve committed it to memory, Mr. Secretary.”

“Discreet to the end,” murmured the cabinet minister. “Just give me the first two, please. Scientist first.”

“Dr. Hans Zarkov,” said Martin carefully.

St. George snorted. “I know him. Talks too much—but very brilliant, scientifically speaking.”

“Yes, sir,” said Martin, hiding a smile.

“The astronaut?”

“Colonel Flash Gordon.”

“Aha!” St. George’s eyes lighted up. “Where’s he these days?”

“On detached service to the Moon Stone Analysis Center in Houston, Texas.”

“Any more names?”

“Yes sir.”

Martin named five more.

St. George held up a hand. “I’ll go with the first two.”

“Yes sir.”

“If they can’t be had, let the computer name alternates. Do you have that?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary.”

“Have you contacted Zarkov and Gorden yet?”

“No sir.”

“Get on that immediately.”

Martin nodded and stood, carrying the attaché case as if it contained the atom bomb.

CHAPTER 2

In the Space-Probe Control Center of the immense Space Research Laboratory just outside Megalopolis West, two men were standing, staring up at a small mock-up of the Four-Ess missile which had become something of a cause célèbre to the National Outer-Space Program.

One was a tall, muscled man with a long straight nose, curly black hair, and a fierce black beard. He could not keep still, but moved around the large room, glancing at the computer readout on the giant computer, then peering out the porthole at the immense electronic telescope on the balcony outside, then wheeling about and staring once again at the Four-Ess on the pedestal.

He was Dr. Hans Zarkov.

The man with him was Dr. Horace Martin, freshly returned by jetliner and helicopter from Washington, D.C., and his dialogue with the Secretary of Space Development.

“Well, at least you’ve done the intelligent thing,” Zarkov said finally, turning and staring at Martin.

“Beg your pardon?” Martin said, blinking rapidly. “My mind was a million miles away.”

“I said,” boomed Zarkov, “at least you’ve done the intelligent thing.”

Martin was puzzled. “What’s that, Hans?”

“You’ve brought me into the thing.” Zarkov turned and paced up and down. “Could have told me sooner, you know. I’m not completely new to these crises. I’ll never forget the time the Moon Probe went haywire and landed in Batej in the Lake Baykal Region of Eastern Russia. Saw the damned Russians looking in at the camera eye and figured the Reds had reached the moon before we even knew they had lifted off!”

Martin murmured an amused comment.

“And then there was the time Colonel Gordon and I were involved in a space probe around the Galaxy Aleph. Cracked up on the polar ice cap of an infant planet a dead ringer for Earth, but only one thousandth the size of it. People were the darnedest things you ever saw. Felt like Gulliver, I tell you.”

“Yes, indeed, Hans. Well, we really couldn’t tell you about the Four-Ess thing because of security.”

Zarkov stared. “Oh. Well, we’re on the right track now. I’m sure I can do the job.”

“The Secretary of Space Development thinks very highly of you.”

“St. George? Madison St. George? Humph,” snorted Zarkov. “Okay in the science department, but he talks too much. You know?”

Martin suppressed a smile. “Now, I’m to brief you before our pilot arrives, so if you’d like to sit down with me over here, Hans—”

“Sure, sure,” said Zarkov, following Martin to two chairs along a trestle table piled with photographs, graphs, and computer readout rolls.

Martin lit a pipe and puffed a moment. “Well, the first of the Four-Ess probes went up some time ago. It was a success from the beginning. We got data every minute of the time the first six probes were out until we brought them down.”

“Read about it,” boomed Zarkov. “You don’t need to treat me like a novice, Horace.”

Martin nodded. “What you don’t know about—or at least have only assimilated by rumor—is the fact that the last twelve super-sophisticated space-probe satellites have simply vanished without a trace in the atmosphere.”

Zarkov nodded. “Heard about that, of course, but this is the first official word. Vanished, huh?”

“That’s right. Vanished without a trace.”

“How did the others—the first six—react to our controls?” Zarkov asked.

“You mean the ones we got back?”

“Yes.”

“They responded immediately. We simply manipulated the drone navigational system from here, on this very computer”—Martin pointed to a large machine in the corner of the laboratory—“and brought the Four-Ess down within hours after summoning it.”

Zarkov nodded. “When were you aware there was a malfunction in the first one that disappeared?”

“We weren’t aware of a malfunction,” Martin explained. “All systems were being monitored routinely when suddenly the entire communications pack went out.”

“Just like that?” Zarkov said, snapping his fingers.

“Just like that,” Martin repeated.

“But it could have been a malfunction,” Zarkov persisted.

“I think we would have gotten the red light on one or another of the control panels,” said Martin, glancing across the room at the big Four-Ess console.

Zarkov nodded. “Okay. I’ll buy that. Then, in other words, what you’re implying is that something outside of the drone navigational system cut off the power.”

“We’ve analyzed it that way.”

“Okay. And now we come to the Unidentified Moving Object that has intruded into our solar system.”

“Yes,” said Martin. “You’ve obviously heard those rumors?”

“Oh, yes. But what you’ve told me is the most complete information I’ve heard.”

Martin rummaged in the papers on the trestle table and came up with one of the photographs taken by SSSS Number Seventeen before it vanished.

“Here.”

Zarkov stared at the photograph. “What does the computer readout say on this?”

“It won’t give us an answer.”

“Certainly it won’t give you an answer on identity or purpose. What I mean is, is there a chemical and physical breakdown of the object?”

“Sure. It’s around here somewhere.”

Martin stood up and burrowed through the rolls and finally came up with a bulky computer sheet.

Zarkov studied it carefully for a long silent moment. “Humph,” he said finally, throwing it aside. “Mineral and water and atmosphere. Not too different from us. But there’s no sign of vegetation.”

“Right.”

“Computer says there’s water and rock.” Zarkov frowned, picked up the sheet again. “Look at that! Plenty of iron! And look at the salts and oxides! And carbon! Fascinating!” Zarkov frowned and scanned the readout. “Look at that! There’s gold on the damned UMO, too! Gold!”

“Most of the elements we have on Earth,” said Martin.

“What I’m interested in is the magnetic field. And it’s very strong, Horace, I see here. Very, very strong.”

“You think the UMO attracted the Four-Esses and crash-landed them on the surface?”

“Could be.”

Martin nodded. “Not an illogical hypothesis, actually. I think Dr. Hendricks once proposed that.”

“Hendricks sounds like an intelligent man,” said Zarkov. He stood up and paced back and forth, glancing out through the porthole toward the giant electronic astro-telescope mounted outside the Space-Probe Control Center. He stood stock still. “Does that thing work?”

Martin smiled. “Sure, it works. But it isn’t powerful enough to sight the UMO.”

“Okay. It was just a thought,” boomed Zarkov. He resumed his pacing. “We’ve got twelve space probes that have been dragged into the magnetic field of a roving UMO which has invaded our solar system. Right?”

“Right,” said Martin.

“And the government’s howling at the expense. So we’ve got to do a little human investigation—a little eyeball-to-eyeball probing, if you will—and find out for ourselves—one, what happened to the wandering SSSSs, and two, who’s living on that Unidentified Moving Object in our system.”

“That’s it.”

Zarkov turned quickly to Martin. “How far have you tested the Pandora Probe?”

Martin blinked. “It’s gone through the first phase tests, Hans. It’s performed abnormally well. And it’s passed its Phase Two requirements. That leaves Phase Three relatively untested.”

“It’s Phase Three that checks out the electronic applications,” Zarkov said absently. “And you’re sending me up there without knowing if Pandora will be able to resist the magnetic field of the UMO?”

“Hans,” said Martin uneasily, “there’s nothing else we can do. Washington wants that probe started immediately. And we haven’t got the time to run through the whole checklist of the Phase Three tests.”

“But I’ll be sucked into the gravitational grip of the UMO and that’s the end of it. You’ll know back here what it’s all about through my communications system. But I’ll be stuck there to the end!”

“Pandora is a two-man rocket system, Hans.”

Zarkov looked startled. “I didn’t know that. Who’s going with me?”

“Colonel Gordon.”

“Flash?” Zarkov’s eyes lit up. “Great! I haven’t seen him in months.”

He wheeled around.

“Pandora! Isn’t that the girl in mythology who was curious about the contents of a box she carried around with her?”

“Right.”

Zarkov shook his head. “I had a feeling that’s who it was.”

One of the computers suddenly came to life and chattered and chattered, unrolling readout paper from its output slot.

Martin strolled over and glanced down at the writing.

“Hans! It’s Number Eighteen.”

Zarkov came over fast. “You mean Number Eighteen Four-Ess that was lost?”

“Yes!”

“What does it say?”

Martin frowned. “Well, it doesn’t say anything actually. It’s just a series of minuses and pluses.”

Zarkov stared at the sheet, trying to decipher the message. Suddenly he blinked and held the sheet from the readout away from him, squinting at it with one eye.

“Horace!”

Martin turned to him, startled.

“Look at this!”

Martin took the sheet and stared at it uncomprehendingly.

“It’s not a message. It’s—it’s—a picture!”

“A picture?” Martin repeated, weakly.

“Yes! Look!”

Martin stared. Then he saw that the repetitions of the two different figures all taken together did form a sort of shadow silhouette of a—of a human being!

“It’s a man!” said Martin.

“Not necessarily a man,” said Zarkov. “It’s more like the kind of stick figure a child would draw.” He stared at it thoughtfully. “What do you make of it?”

“Somebody’s trying to communicate with us,” said Martin in a hoarse voice.

“Somebody? But they don’t seem to be very advanced intellectually. This is the drawing of a six-year-old.”

“Well, maybe it’s a planet of babies,” said Martin.

Zarkov chuckled with glee. “Oh, fine. They’ve stolen our satellites and now they’re using them for toys.”

Martin shook his head. “How did they transmit this message, anyway?”

“Obviously from the downed Four-Ess,” said Zarkov. “That means the Four-Esses haven’t been wiped out, but have been captured. Maybe they’re all there, functional, but not working. And one who used to transmit this ideograph to us.”

“Well, you’ve simply got to get up there in space and find out what’s going on.”

The computer began chattering once again.

Martin and Zarkov moved to the output slot, staring in astonishment.

Finally Zarkov pulled the sheet off at the end of the message. They both looked at it. It was obvious what it was this time. There were lightning bolts and a burst of energy.

“Explosions,” said Zarkov. “A warning?”

“Seems like it to me.”

Zarkov tugged at his beard. “Nobody can scare me. The more it’s tried, the less I scare.”

Martin nodded.

Zarkov was moving around again, striding up and down the room. “When are we going to get going, Horace? I’m sick and tired of all this waiting around!”

“You only just got here,” Martin smiled.

The computer began chattering again.

This time the readout showed the little man lying on the ground.

“Son of a gun,” said Zarkov. “It’s a warning, all right.” He frowned. “I don’t scare easy, punk,” he growled at the unseen being on the invisible UMO. “You wait and see.”

CHAPTER 3

Inside the spacious cabin of the Pandora Probe rocket sat two men, calling off items from the blast-off checklist to one another.

One was tall and slim, with athletic shoulders and a muscular build. He had a permanent tan, blue eyes, and curly light blond hair. Although he was hardly a youngster anymore, he had a boyish grin that was disarming and candid. Yet now Colonel Flash Gordon was all business inside his blue astronaut suit, his gloved hands moving quickly over the controls and buttons at the console in front of him.

Dr. Zarkov sat opposite him, pressing buttons and flicking toggle switches on and off as the reading of the checklist continued. Occasionally a red light would flash somewhere in the maze of instruments on the panels and one of the two astronauts would call back to Space-Probe Ground Control for a readout on the trouble.

Generally speaking, there was really nothing wrong with the big spacecraft. Soon the checklists were finished and Flash and Zarkov leaned back in their seats, spun around, and grinned at each other.

“I guess that does it, old buddy,” said Flash.

“Right you are. Hey, SpapGroc,” called Zarkov on the outside line. “What’s the countdown?”

“Two minutes and forty seconds, Doc,” said the voice of Dr. Martin, manning SpapGroc. “Anything you guys want in there?”

“Give us a good burn, Doc,” said Flash with a grin. “I’m anxious to get up there and take a look at that weird UMO.”

“Aren’t we all,” said Martin.

Zarkov flicked a button or two and Flash turned to read a figure on a digital tape to Control.

“Minus five seconds and counting,” said a monotonous voice from SpapGroc.

“Here we go, Doc,” said Flash to Zarkov.

Zarkov stuck his right thumb up.

“Three, two, one, and—”

The force of the suddenly ascending rocket smashed them into their seats and for a moment Flash lost vision, hearing, and consciousness. Almost instantly, he was back in control of himself, and glanced around the cabin at the rows and rows of dials and buttons.

Zarkov turned and winked. “How does it look, SpapGroc?” muttered Zarkov to the Space-Probe Ground Control.

“You’ve got a lift-off there,” said SpapGroc. “It looks real good. The computers are purring right along. No sign of any red.”

Flash nodded. “How is our flight direction, Ground Control?”

“We’ve calculated a correction coming up in about five minutes, Colonel Gordon. Otherwise you look real pretty.”

Zarkov chuckled. “Routine, routine,” he growled into the rocket-to-ground radiotelephone.

“Just sit tight, guys, and we’ll let you know when we want that burn. You read me?” Martin asked.

“We read you,” said Flash.

And it was like that all the way into the outer atmosphere. They broke earth orbit several revolutions later, and soared out into the path laid out for them by the computers in the big Space Research Lab. Flash could see the stars and several of the planets when he looked out the porthole, and he could see the big green and blue Earth they had left down there behind them, beaming like a big happy smile in the dark and dreary sky.

Zarkov decided to play chess with Martin, and Flash watched with interest as the two men kept a game going through the first twelve hours of flight—one move every fifteen minutes. There was not much else to do except fire a correctional burn every four or five hours. Flash turned on the stereo tape and listened to some orbital music, and then dozed briefly.

The second chess game started after Zarkov trounced Martin late that night.

It was during the third game—just when it was getting exciting and Zarkov was one piece ahead of Martin—that it happened.

Actually, it had begun to happen a little before that moment. Flash had visually sighted the dark, mysterious UMO out there earlier on, during the first moves of the third game.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “Take a look.”

Zarkov was annoyed at having his concentration interrupted, but he took the infrared glasses Flash handed him and peered through the forward porthole.

“About nine-o’clock medium,” said Flash.

“I see it,” said Zarkov. “Dark as a pit.”

Flash nodded. “But those balls do look like lights around it, don’t they?”

“I can’t see that well yet.”

And Zarkov went back to his game.

Finally Flash shook him by the shoulder. “What about it? Do you think we should turn on the electronic telescope and take some photographs?”

“Wouldn’t hurt,” Zarkov muttered.

He got up and moved over to the telescope’s control panel. As he did so a red light flickered for an instant on the main console.

“What was that?”

Flash stared. “Power pack failure? It just flickered and then came right back on.”

“What’s wrong with the power pack?” Zarkov asked, his voice tight.

“Nothing,” said Flash soothingly. “Take a look through that electronic scope and see if you can make out the shape of the thing.”

Zarkov peered into the eyepiece and moved the digital dial for a proper setting.

“The infrared filter helps, but it still doesn’t look like much,” said Zarkov. “Want me to shoot a few?”

“Yeah. I’d like to see what that baby looks like on paper.”

Zarkov nodded and flicked the photographic lever several times. Three film packs slid out of the readout. Flash waited the requisite thirty seconds and broke the first Polaroid shot. He stared at it. The UMO was obviously a planet of some kind.

“We were right. It’s a gypsy planet that just wandered into the system.”

Zarkov leaned over his shoulder. “Yeah. That’s pretty much what it looks like.” He peered closer. “What do you think of that?”

“What?” Flash asked.

Zarkov pointed to what looked like flashes of white in the picture. “Well?” Flash said. “What about it?”

“What do you think those marks are?”

“Some imperfection in the film, maybe.”

Zarkov shook his head. “I don’t think so. Open up another and see if the same spots are there.”

Flash opened the second film packet and peered at it closely. He realized now that Zarkov was right: the white flaky spots were not imperfections, after all. The same “imperfections” were in the second photograph.

He handed it to Zarkov silently.

“What makes those white flashes?”

Flash shook his head. “Beats me.” He studied the first picture again. “The planet’s dark all right. It doesn’t have any light at all. Those pinpoint flashes might be light, but I doubt it. It looks more like—oh, say a burst of energy.”

“Like a puff of rocket exhaust, maybe,” Zarkov mused. “Perhaps that’s the way the UMO propels itself through space.”

Flash snorted. He opened the third pack and removed the inside covers. The same little puffs of light were there too, covering the surface of the gypsy planet like tiny and weirdly shaped pockmarks.

Zarkov was looking at the first picture again. “Those big satel-lights are plenty strange,” he punned, stroking his beard through his open astro-helmet.

“Right you are,” Flash agreed. “Since the planet doesn’t have any light, I suppose they might be a kind of three-dimensional lighting system. What do you think?”

Zarkov shook his head.

Flash glanced over at the cabin vidscreens that scanned the stern of the rocket and straightened with shock.

“Doc!”

“Huh?”

“The rear-vision vidscreen scanners have gone dead! All of them!”

“I’ll be damned,” snorted Zarkov, turning from the photographs and staring at the vidscreen panel. “Now what do you think caused that?”

“I don’t know,” said Flash, “but I don’t like it. According to our briefings, the space-probe satellites suddenly all lost their power just like that!”

Zarkov stared. “You think—”

“Hey,” Flash said. “The portside vidscreen scanners are out, too.”

Zarkov stomped over to the vidscreens and stared at them with a jaundiced eye. “What in the devil is going on around here?” he boomed out. “A moment ago all systems were go, and now—” He growled. “Two systems out completely. And no sign—”

“What do you think about the forward vidscreens? If they go out we can’t tell where we’re headed.”

Zarkov was standing bemused over the vidscreen readouts of the electronic telescope.

“Now it’s the damned electronic telescope!” he bellowed. “We were just about to use it to view our friend the UMO, but now we can’t.”

“It’s out?”

“Completely,” snapped Zarkov.

Flash frowned. “Doc. The outer detectors haven’t flashed an alert yet, you know. Why not?”

“I don’t get it,” Zarkov said. “You’d think they’d be the first to react!”

Flash stared at the console where the detector buttons were located. There was no signal at all. “Doc, do you think these are out? I mean, if the power isn’t flowing through them, the sensors won’t detect a thing!”

Zarkov shrugged. Then suddenly, as he stood there, his eyes focused on something outside the starboard porthole.

“Flash!” he managed to say, although his voice was hoarse.

Flash was flipping switches on the antennas and probing devices mounted to the outside skin of the rocket.

“No sign of any current moving through these circuits, either, Doc. What’s going on, anyway?”

“Out there!” Zarkov gulped.

“What?” Flash asked absently, staring down into the array of suddenly worthless equipment—millions of dollars worth of it.

“Look! It’s a nightmare. An impossible nightmare. Tell me—” Zarkov hesitated.

Flash turned slowly, still frowning, and glanced out the starboard porthole. His eyes widened and he could feel his breath choke off.

He was staring out into the blackness of space, with the gypsy planet in the background, its three moons circling it in spatially stable positions, but in the foreground, very near to the spacecraft Pandora, was an enormous sphere of luminescent white composition resembling nothing so much as a terribly enlarged human eyeball! And, past it, there was another—and another—and yet another!

“My God,” gasped Zarkov.

“Amen to that,” said Flash in a soft voice.

“They’re enormous—enormous eyes—”

“Or detector devices from our friend the gypsy.”

“There are dozens of them,” Zarkov croaked, peering out the porthole and counting. “Fifteen, sixteen—”

Flash quickly slid the transparent visor of the helmet over his face and flipped on the portable life-support system inside his astrosuit. He could feel the oxygen blowing coolly on his face.

“I’m going out,” he told Zarkov.

“You’d better be damned careful,” snorted Zarkov in Flash’s earphone.

“I will be,” Flash assured him.

“Do you think you can scare them away?”

“It’s reconnaissance. I want to find out if those things have something to do with the fact that all our electronic circuits are out.”

“Okay. I agree it’s necessary at this point in time.”

Flash nodded grimly and pressed the button on the space lock. There was a moment’s hissing outside, and then the bulkhead parted and a metal panel slid aside.

Zarkov held up his right thumb. “Luck.”

Flash stepped through the hatchway into the space lock, and the metal panel slid closed behind him.

There was a hissing around him in the lock as the air was sucked back into the rocket’s internal system. The space lock was empty of air now. A red light blinked behind Flash. He pushed the large button on the outer hatch panel and waited. There was a pause and the panel slid aside, leaving Flash in the space lock with nothing between him and empty space.

He moved through the hatchway and found the ladder rungs mounted to the outer skin of Pandora beside the hatchway. Gripping each rung tightly, he climbed upward over the side of the rocket until he was on Pandora’s topside dermal layer, adhering to the metal with his magnetic space shoes.

He heard a loud buzzing in his ear and turned to one side, trying to isolate the source of the sound. What he saw made him freeze in his tracks.

In the light focused on the outer skin of the spaceship by one of the huge luminescent eyes, a small electronic machine was busily engaged in sawing through the outer skin of Pandora!

“Cybernaut!” Flash said aloud. “A crazy-looking little cybernaut!”

It was no more than two feet long, with a body of rocket exhaust pipes bundled together, a jointed head on top of the metal body, and mounted on top of that a buzz-saw. Separate mechnical devices resembling arms and hands extended from the side of the cybernaut’s body, and these were gripping the outside layer of the spaceship for support as the buzz-saw in the cybernaut’s head continued to grind through the metallic skin, sending slivers of aluminum and steel flying into space.

As Flash stared, the mechanical thing stopped cutting through the outside of the ship and suddenly seemed to detect Flash. It then moved upward through space toward Flash, its tiny bundle of exhaust pipes popping like a toy motorboat.

As it zoomed at Flash, the buzz-saw continued to whirl, its tiny but efficient teeth whirling closer and closer to Flash Gordon’s space suit. Another six inches and—

CHAPTER 4

Flash’s foot had already left the metal covering of Pandora in a fast vicious kick, which struck the little saw-headed robot square in the rocket exhaust tubes. The robot sailed through space away from Flash before the buzz-saw could touch his astrosuit.

He watched the little mechanical unit fly through space, slowly emitting exhaust from its burners and righting itself some twenty feet away. Then it turned and seemed to stare at Flash through some kind of eyeless antenna probes.

Now it occurred to Flash that the small drawings he had studied from the readouts in the Space Lab might indeed have been drawn by robot hands—depicting the presence of a race of cybernauts on the gypsy planet. If the planet was inhabited entirely by cybernauts, then the enormous eyes which were casting light on the skin of Pandora might well be a form of sensor probes that would not only light up the area and object to be scrutinized, but would transmit back to a control center on the planet a picture of such an object.

Flash imagined an enormous computer sitting somewhere in a control lab, in turn scrutinizing the pictures from the plastic eyes and digesting the visual images on a vidscreen. Then what would happen? Flash wondered. Was the entire planet one gigantic cybernaut?

He shivered at the thought of it. Life on earth had become a great deal less human because of machinery and electronic devices, but at least the machine was the work unit of man. Without man to control machinery, where did the mechanics and the electronics end?

“Doc,” snapped Flash. “I just found a cybernaut trying to saw into the bulkhead of the rocket.”

“What!” cried Zarkov, instantly alert. “A cybernaut? You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Not at all,” said Flash easily. “It’s a classic work tool, self-propelled, with gripping aids and sensors of some kind that can cause it to react. It’s floating out there in space right now, thinking about what to do to me.”

“What did you do to it?” Zarkov asked in a very practical way.

“I kicked it in the—in the rocket pack,” said Flash with a smile.

“What about those damned floating eyes?”

“They’re obviously plastic and metal and glass sensors of another type, Doc. Also, they cast light rays on the outside of the ship. I’d say they’re observation cybernaut systems that send an image back to some control.”

“On the gypsy planet?”

“Right on, Doc. It can’t be anything else.”

“Well, what’s the next move?”

Flash had been thinking about that. “You wait right there, Doc. I’m going to try a little experiment.”

“Be careful, Flash!” cried Zarkov. “You’re too damned eager—”

The nearest of the spherical sensors had floated a little closer to Flash during the brief dialogue with Zarkov. When it was within range, Flash moved in on it in exactly the same fashion he had moved in on the little sawing machine. He kicked straight at the enormous sphere and gave it a hard boot in what appeared to be the lens aperture of the big eye.

The plastic eye moved back in space. Flash could not make out how it propelled itself at all. He stared at it, and allowed himself a smile of triumph. Both the mechanical saw and the probe now knew that he would not stand for their interference in the flight of Pandora.

“Okay, Doc,” said Flash. “I’m coming back in.”

“Hurry up,” said Zarkov. “I see more of those damned eyes.”

Flash glanced around. It was true. The area around the spacecraft was crowding up with the big spheroid eyes. He moved quickly, gripping the rungs of the ladder and started down toward the craft’s space lock.

It was then that he saw something which made his heart leap into his throat. There were actually dozens of them, clinging to the sides of the space ship. Cybernauts! Dozens and dozens! He blinked as if he might be going mad.

No. His eyes were not betraying him. They came in varying sizes and shapes: metallic units quite like the buzz-saw cybernaut he had kicked off the skin of the ship. It was as if the outside of the ship had magnetically attracted a madman’s chest of power tools. There were long screwdrivers attached to rocket packs, wrenches attached to robot bodies, hammer heads and saws of varying kinds, steel brushes, buffers, and all different kinds of power tools—each independent and each able to move through space and cling to the metal hull of the craft by some elaborate system of programming.

“Doc! There’s something out here you won’t believe!”

“I see them,” Zarkov cried. “Dozens of robots. Get in here, quick!”

Flash needed no prodding. He sped down the rungs and stepped in through the hatchway of the space lock. The little robots were apparently watching him with electronic probes rather than with eyes, and they did not move while he jumped down to the floor of the lock.

Now as he stood there punching the outer panel control button, he could see them moving around to the edge of the hatchway, the tiny metal “hands” clasping the edges of the metal, and the quivering wire probes moving inquisitively about in space.

The panel started to close.

“They’re all over the forward porthole,” Zarkov yelled in Flash’s ears. “Get in here quick, and let’s blast through them!”

“I’m on my way,” Flash answered, frantically pushing at the button to speed up the closing of the outer hatch panel.

The panel began moving again, sliding past the edge of the hatch opening. Then, abruptly, the panel stopped.

Flash stared in horror.

A dozen of the metal robots were holding the edge of the panel and preventing it from closing. The little robot machines were forcing the panel open again by burning their rocket tubes against the force of the panel.

Flash kicked at them, dislodging one, and then another. As one was removed, another took its place, and the panel slowly vanished within the recess of the outer skin of the ship, leaving the hatchway wide open.

“Hurry up,” snapped Zarkov’s agitated voice. “We’ve got to get out of here. Those damned metallic eye probes are coming closer.”

“Doc, I can’t get the space lock shut! They’ve jammed the outer hatch panel!”

“My God,” gasped Zarkov.

“Try a retro burn,” Flash ordered through the helmet’s headset. “If we back up, these monsters may leave us alone.”

“I can’t risk it with you out there in the space lock,” said Zarkov. “There’s a chance you’ll be blown out by the force of the thrust.”

“Forget that,” snapped Flash, his face covered with perspiration. “It can’t be helped. You’ve got to get away from these little monsters.”

“Can’t you kick them off?”

“I’m trying!”

Flash had half the panel free, but as soon as he began on the lower part, more tiny metal hands would grip the panel above, and force it back into the hull. Kicking wouldn’t do it. Reluctantly, Flash reached in his space suit for the disintegrator ray gun packed there. When he had it, he backed against the inner hatch panel and aimed at one of the creatures.

There was a brilliant blue flash, and a clot of burned-out metal plummeted into space.

Flash aimed again.

Another brilliant explosion. A second robot went into space, burned to a crisp.

Now suddenly, the nearest enormous eyeball moved just outside the hatchway of Pandora’s space lock and focused its rays inside on Flash.

He lifted the weapon and aimed at the aperture and stalled to pull the trigger.

Suddenly the panel behind him slid quickly open and he fell backwards into the cabin of the space ship.

The hatch slid closed immediately.

Flash stood, frowning in bewilderment. Zarkov came around and grinned at him.

“I got into my own life-support system and blew the air out of the cabin. Come on. We’ve got to figure some way out of this before those little monsters and those eyes destroy the rocket thrust packs.”

“Right!”

Zarkov turned to the forward porthole and gestured with his gloved hand. “Would you look at that?”

Flash stared. Big eyes were peering in, and the varied mechanical-tool robots were crawling over the glass.

“They’ve got saws and drills and cutters of all kinds,” Flash said hurriedly. “If we let them stay on the spacecraft any amount of time at all, they’ll tear it apart.”

Zarkov flipped the switch and filled the cabin with air once again. “Let’s blast through them—full speed—total burn. That should shake them off.”

Flash nodded. “In view of the problem, it’s the only thing we can do.”

Zarkov switched on Space-Probe Ground Control. “SpapGroc,” he called. “This is Zarkov in Pandora. We’ve got a problem.”

Ground Control came on immediately. “We’ve got a tape of your last dialogue, Pandora. We agree fully with your plan. Try to blast your way through the robots and we’ll keep you in the scanners and give you burn instructions when you’ve shaken them.”

“Right on,” said Zarkov.

Flash was settling himself at the control module. “Give me those burn readings, Control,” he said.

The monotonous but slightly tensed voice of Space-Probe Ground Control read out the readings for full blast and Flash and Zarkov manipulated the switches for a full minute.

“Ready to go,” said SpapGroc.

“Roger,” said Flash. He flipped the switches one by one and told Zarkov, “Hang onto your helmet, Doc.”

The space ship stirred, trembled, and suddenly shot ahead through space with rapidly accelerating speed.

Zarkov yelled out in triumph. “That’s doing it!”

Flash turned. He could see the tiny monsters at the forward porthole suddenly flying out into space in all directions. When he peered through the port aperture he could see the great luminous probe-spheres pulling away from the craft.

“That’s done it for the electronic eyeballs,” said Flash.

Zarkov leaned back in satisfaction. “Great day!”

Flash nodded and flicked the switch to Ground Control.

“A-Okay,” he said. “We’ve shed our passengers.”

“Good! Now cool the burn and—

There was static.

“I didn’t quite get that, Control,” said Flash.

They shot through the atmosphere at maximum, but there was nothing on the communications panel or in their headphones.

“Hey!” said Flash. “Come in, Control. SpapGroc!”

Nothing.

Zarkov got up and stared over Flash’s shoulder at the communications panel. “You lost them?”

“I lost them,” said Flash, staring in consternation at the panel.

Zarkov twisted his beard in his fingers. “That’s a real bad can of worms, pal.”

“Indeed so.”

Zarkov banged on the switch. “Come in, Control! Space-Probe Ground Control!”

Nothing.

Flash turned to stare at Zarkov. “We’ve lost them for good. What do you think of that?”

Zarkov shook his head. He glanced up at the porthole and made a sudden exclamation. “Hey! Look at that! Did you cut off that burn?”

“Nope,” said Flash. He stared, himself. “You’re seeing the same thing I’m seeing—we’re not moving!”

Zarkov turned and hunched over the power panel. “There’s no power at all, Flash. We’ve lost everything now. We’re not even able to control our direction.”

Flash sank back and shook his head. “No contact. No power. No control.”

Zarkov passed his finger around through the inside of his helmet. “Hey, it’s getting hot in here. You feel that?”

Flash rose and took a turn around the cabin. “Very hot,” he murmured. He glanced out through the forward porthole. “And that’s what’s making it, Doc.”

“What?”

Flash pointed at the gypsy planet. It was much nearer now. The luminous satel-lights around it were enormous, the size of miniature suns. And the heat was obviously coming from them.

“We’re moving again,” said Zarkov. “How can that be? Have we got power back?”

Flash frowned. He glanced at the instrument panel and blinked. “The gyroscopes show movement. But no, we haven’t any power and—”

“Maybe we’re drifting,” said Zarkov shakily.

“Drifting? No way, Doc. We’re—we’re—falling!—falling toward that gypsy planet! It’s got us in its magnetic field and it’s drawing us right toward it.”

Zarkov ripped off his helmet and closed his eyes. His face was bathed in perspiration. “It’s too hot in here to this astrosuit.”

Flash laughed grimly. “Well, Doc, we’re going to do one of two things.”

“Such as?” Zarkov was flushed and sweating.

“We’re either going to crash on the gypsy planet—”

“—which won’t be a bed of roses any way you look at it,” growled Zarkov.

“Or we’re going to burn up on the way down. Which way do you want to go, Doc?”

Zarkov didn’t answer.

CHAPTER 5

A stunned silence settled over the Space-Probe Control Center. Dr. Horace Martin moved quickly over to the Ground Control communications console, now manned by Dr. Paul Henning. Henning was a short, round man with a red fringe of hair on his almost bald, round head. He had blue eyes and a spade goatee of bright red.

Henning glanced over his shoulder at Martin. “It’s no use, Horace. We’ve lost them.”

Martin stared helplessly. “Lost audio communications?”

Henning shrugged. “Completely. And I think we’ve lost touch with all aircraft functions too.”

Martin sucked in his breath. He wheeled and moved quickly over to the Communications Computer Bank. To the young man seated at the console, he said:

“I want to hear that tape over again, please.”

The operator nodded, typed the request into the computer bank, and sat back. The voices of Zarkov and Flash Gordon as they had spoken to one another replayed slowly.

Martin listened with his eyes closed. When he was through, he turned and saw that several of his assistants were standing around him. Henning had gotten up from the Ground Control seat, now filled by a US Space Force captain who was calling Pandora, and was listening with Martin.

“Well, that’s it,” said Henning, flicking his finger over his sharp little red goatee. “Robots.”

Martin nodded. “Strange. You know, those symbol pictures—they did look mechanical. You know?”

“True. Have you got those here?”

Martin led him over to a big table along the side of the room. An air of business-as-usual prevailed over the Space-Probe Control Center, with the Space Force operator continuing to try to raise Zarkov and Flash Gordon. Other technicians were checking their instrumentation carefully to see that no local shorts had fouled out the equipment.

Henning picked up the first of the three photographs. “Well, we studied it before, and we figured it was the representation of a human being of some kind.”

“Possibly a cybernaut,” said Martin.

“Right. And as such it simply says, ‘I am,’ ”

Martin nodded. “The second one looks like lightning bolts, the old Zeus-power-god-thing.”

Henning frowned. “Or simply the delineation of an explosion of some kind.”

“Or war,” said Martin, as his mind roamed at will. “Or catastrophe.”

“There’s no question about the third. It’s a dead man.”

Martin cleared his throat. “Or a man sleeping.”

“Well, possibly. So what do you make of it?”

Martin shook his head. “In view of what we’ve just heard on the tapes, and the fact that we’ve lost all communication with the Pandora, I could say that the so-called ‘message’ has changed in value.”

Henning nodded. “I originally thought it meant, ‘I’m a person,’ ‘I have power, or god-like control,’ and ‘I am human and live and die.’ ”

Martin picked up the first picture again. “Right. An attempt of one living race to establish contact with another living people.”

“Exactly.”

“Now,” Martin said thoughtfully, “maybe the message means something else. Like this: ‘I am the man who lives on the gypsy planet.’ ‘I have power, I make war on my enemies, I control this planet.’ And the third picture: ‘I kill enemies, I kill those who try to hurt me.’ ”

Henning sighed, “I’m afraid that’s the kind of thing I’m coming up with now.”

“Robots,” said Martin patiently. “I got the impression they weren’t humanoids exactly, but some kind of mechanical units. Cybernauts, actually, controlled by programmed memory banks.”

“That’s it. If Colonel Gordon was able to physically kick them off him, and melt them with his disintegrator ray—”

“—they don’t seem to be very ‘human’ at all,” Martin finished.

“Then what are they?” Henning asked with a frown.

“We can’t even begin to guess,” said Martin. “We have so little data to go on. But I’m beginning to think about those three satel-lights floating around the gypsy planet.”

“You think they’re some kind of robot devices, too?”

“Possibly they are robot controls that provide light and heat for the gypsy planet. And the eyelike probes must be mechanical electronic devices sent into space just like we sent out our original Four-Ess probes to investigate the UMO.”

“I concur, Horace.”

“Look, Paul, we’ve forgotten one thing, you know?”

“What’s that?”

“The anatomical resemblance between that almost human eyeball and the weird probes thrown up by the gypsy planet.”

Henning flicked at his sharp little goatee. “That implies the control of some human agency whose appearance is closely akin to earthman.”

“Unless it’s an entirely unearthmanlike organism that has eyes resembling a human being’s.”

“Not really likely, given the manner in which creative evolution operates,” Henning muttered carefully.

“On the other hand, we have the shapes of the stick figures in the computer message via our Four-Ess probe.”

“Yeah. And they look plenty human.”

“Possibly the machines are humanoid in appearance.”

“Not according to Colonel Gordon’s words.”

“But I mean the machines in the control of the cybernauts.”

“Humanoid cybernauts in the control of these small mechanical power units?” Henning speculated.

“Possibly.”

“Have you any more acceptable idea?”

“None whatever,” Martin said with discouragement. “Well.” He straightened. “We’ve certainly got to do something about this.”

Henning looked around the room where the operators and technicians were all going about their duties in a kind of programmed routine. He and Martin walked over to the communications console and stared at the dials and buttons. There was no sign of activity.

“Come in, Pandora,” the operator was saying over and over again. “Come in, Pandora. This is Space-Probe Ground Control Earth. Space-Probe Ground Control Earth calling Pandora. Come in, Pandora.”

Nothing.

Martin growled in his throat. “I’m going to send up a satellite probe.”

“Another Four-Ess?” Henning asked in surprise as the two scientists wandered over to the wide window and stared out at the Space-Probe blast pads and the desert beyond.

“It’s the only answer, isn’t it?”

Henning shrugged. “I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, Horace.”

Martin smiled grimly. “Well,” he said. “Here goes nothing.”

“Washington?”

“Certainly. I’ve got to get permission from the Secretary.”

“Lots of luck,” muttered Henning, his blue eyes twinkling.

Martin nodded philosophically and moved quickly over to his office, a glassed-in section at the corner of the big Space Probe Control room.

“Mr. Secretary,” Martin began after the preliminaries were finished and he was finally in direct contact with the Secretary of Space Development. “We’ve got a problem . . .”

Five minutes later, his ears still burning from the sounds that had emanated from the telephone in his hand, Martin came out of the glass-enclosed office and beckoned to Henning.

“It’s A-Okay. Let’s send up Number Nineteen.”

“How did he take it?” Henning whispered.

“Not well,” said Martin with easy understatement.

Henning smiled faintly.

“When I suggested we send up another Pandora with two astronauts aboard, he allowed that it would be an excellent idea.”

Henning was surprised.

“Sure. If you and I went.”

Henning tried to laugh.

“Come on,” Martin rallied. “It was only his feeble attempt at a joke. Let’s get on with Number Nineteen.”

CHAPTER 6

Zarkov was peering out the porthole at the blazing sky.

“Fascinating,” he said. “You see what they’ve done, Flash. They’ve actually constructed artificial suns and sent them into orbit around the planet. Ingenious!”

Flash was peering at the control console. “What kind of controls do we have on this cabin ejection unit, Doc?”

“What do you mean? Oh, self-contained, I think. Why?”

“What’s the point of crashing onto the planet? Why not blast ourselves out and settle in gracefully?”

“Well, yeah, we could do that,” Zarkov tugged at his beard. “At least, I think those cabin ejection controls are self-contained. We should ask Space-Probe Ground Control.”

“Come on, Doc! We’re cut off.”

“I know we’re cut off,” boomed Zarkov with annoyance. “I was just thinking it out.”

“There’s no time for thinking,” snapped Flash. “We’re just about to smash into the planet.”

“All right,” Zarkov growled. “Let’s get cracking, then.” He peered out the porthole. “You know, it’s a blinding kind of light, actually. I wonder how they make it? You see, the planet itself becomes a self-contained unit. It has its own solar system, carrying the light system right with it. Most interesting. Shows a readiness to adapt.”

“Doc, if you don’t get onto that cabin ejection panel and start punching those buttons while I hold this ship in stability with manual control, I’ll—”

“Sure, Flash. Sorry. It’s just that the scientific demonstrations here are absolutely fascinating.”

“Doc—”

Zarkov reluctantly sat down at the console and studied the buttons. “Okay. Seven. Two. Nine.” He turned around and stared at Flash. “Are you hanging on, buddy?”

“It’s as stable as I can get it in a free fall.”

“Right. When I count down, I’ll flip the toggles.”

“Three, two, one.”

The cabin of the space ship suddenly shot out the side of the rocket, in much the same way as a test pilot jettisoned his seat in an old-fashioned jetplane that was traveling at supersonic speed and could not be brought out of a free fall.

Immediately the two of them and the cabin were catapulted head over heels into space outside the gypsy planet.

Flash peered through the porthole, but could see only the spinning and wildly gyrating heavens. Then suddenly he made out the gypsy planet’s small sun, smaller now, in the distance, and then the huge mass of the planet, and then a brilliant explosion nearby and—

“Doc!”

Zarkov was trying to regain his balance, gripping the panel in front of him.

“Would you look at that? An explosion!” Zarkov cried out.

Suddenly the free-falling cabin jerked to a stop in the atmosphere of the gypsy planet and the rapid fall decelerated.

“The drogue parachute has opened,” said Flash with a sigh.

“We’re home free!” cried Zarkov in elation.

“Home?” growled Flash.

“Just a figure of speech,” muttered Zarkov.

“At least the planet has atmosphere of sorts.”

“Right. Or the parachute wouldn’t slow us at all.”

Flash stared out the porthole and could see the dark hulking shape of the planet coming closer and closer as they settled down in the sky from the space in which they had been traveling. There was a kind of reddish tinge to the atmosphere about them.

“Hey!” Flash shouted involuntarily. There was a tremendous explosion in the air outside the cabin. Flash’s eyes were blinded for a split second, and then he could see again.

“That’s a bomb,” snapped Zarkov. “Or some kind of explosive device.”

Flash nodded. “And would you look at that?” He pointed through the porthole.

Zarkov crouched over his shoulder. “I’ll be damned.”

A triangular-shaped wing-like aircraft zoomed up suddenly from below, sweeping by them and heeling over on its back, to vanish out of sight beyond.

“That’s a tactical maneuver,” snapped Flash. “Somebody’s flying that ship. You can’t fool me! It’s a military craft—”

There was another blinding flash, and an explosion that rocked the cabin as it sank through the air.

Flash could see another flying craft of the same type as the first, diving on them from above. A stream of bright orange flashes emanated from the nose of the ship, apparently trying to cut down another craft somewhere out of sight.

Then, before Flash could recover from that, an enormous missile zoomed up from the gypsy planet, past them, and struck one of the triangular fighting ships. The target blew up in an air-shaking explosion. Pieces of burned metal hurtled past them.

Zarkov gripped the porthole and stared down toward the gypsy planet. He could barely croak the words, he was so agitated. “They’re blowing up the Earth down there!”

“It’s not Earth,” laughed Flash.

“I mean, the planet.”

Flash was beside Zarkov, staring down. There were brilliant flashes from the surface of the planet, which was now very much closer than it had been. The two of them watched a flash, followed by great gouts of rock sent up into the heavens. Small and large ships flashed through the air below them, zooming at one another.

“Are they out to get us?” Zarkov asked thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “We’re small potatoes, aren’t we?”

“Who knows?” Flash said. “It looks more like that old earthly pastime of the last century—global warfare.”

Zarkov’s eyes widened. “You think—you think we’ve gone and parachuted down into somebody else’s war?”

“Why not?”

Suddenly the space cabin was bobbled about in the air like a toy airplane. Neither Zarkov nor Flash could see a thing for a moment. Then, when the cabin righted itself again, they realized they were shooting through the air at an incredible rate of speed.

“What’s taken over control?” Flash wondered.

Zarkov crawled to the porthole and stared out. “My God. We’re apparently fouled up with a huge aircraft that’s carrying us right into battle with a group of other ships!”

Flash peered out. He could see only part of the ship which had tangled up the shroud lines of the chute, but he could tell it was a very large one, and he could see that it was designed with many ports for launching warheads and missiles.

But that was not the most frightening thing. Ahead of him he could see a large squadron of flying saucers, from which flashes of light and heat seemed to emanate. The bank of saucers was heading directly for the enormous craft that had snagged them.

Now missiles seemed to zoom past them everywhere in the air. Metal whirled by at white heat, continuing on out of sight. The craft carrying them slammed toward the waiting cordon of saucers with blazing speed.

Flash watched as one of the ports opened in the ship and a missile shot forward toward the saucers. Then another, and another.

Then, with a tremendous shaking of the air about them, the saucers opened up. Missiles peppered the atmosphere. Flash could see one metallic shape strike the nose of the ship that carried them. It bounced harmlessly off.

But another struck nearby, and then a third and fourth. In the midst of a hush in the activity, another missile slammed directly into one of the airship’s ports. There was an instant of uneasy humming, and then with a fantastic roar the entire ship blew up above them, sending metal and flames everywhere.

The cabin of Pandora lurched away from the explosion, tumbled over and over, and separated itself completely from the destroyed ship.

Down and down they fell, slamming toward the surface of the dark planet.

Then, suddenly, the parachute took hold again.

“Doc!” cried Flash. “Our chute wasn’t burned at all.”

“Of course not,” snapped Zarkov. “Those chutes are made of anti-phloxon, an invention of mine. Flames can’t burn it, vibration can’t hurt it, force can’t tear it.”

“You’ve saved our lives again,” Flash said.

“I rarely get credit for the things I do in the name of science,” boomed Zarkov. “Now that the crisis is here—”

Flash sprang to the porthole. “Hey, we’re not out of trouble yet. We’re getting closer and closer to the surface of the planet.”

Zarkov grabbed his shoulder and peered out with him.

The darkened ground was very close now, and Flash could see that it was not a ground covered with trees or vegetation of any kind, nor was it ground covered with water. No habitation was in sight. It was, in effect, a large rocky plain from end to end, without any kind of break.

But as they stared, suddenly at one end of the plain, a huge metal tank appeared, surrounded by a group of smaller units resembling wheeled cannons. These forces were moving very fast toward the center of the plain.

Flash jumped to the other porthole. At that end of the plain, an opposing group of metal tanks and cannon appeared, rolling quickly over the rocks. In the air, small jetcraft were zooming about, aiming missiles at one another and occasionally dumping blockbuster bombs on the land below.

It was a nightmare of activity.

“We’re going to make a safe landing,” said Zarkov calmly.

“That’s great,” snapped Flash. “Then what? Two men in no-man’s-land?”

Zarkov shrugged. “At least we didn’t crash-land again.”

Flash stared at him.

With a heavy jarring thump, the cabin landed, and the parachute sank gently down over it.

Flash cracked the escape hatch and crawled out. Zarkov was right behind him. They fought the entangling cover of the parachute of anti-phloxon and eventually succeeded in crawling out from under it.

Zarkov looked up.

But Flash was already grabbing his shoulder and raising him to his feet. “Run!” he shouted.

The two of them ran away from an enormous green-striped tank which was rambling over the rocks toward them.

An instant later, they could hear the crashing and crunching of the cabin in which they had drifted to the surface of the gypsy planet. Turning, Flash saw the tank rumble over the metallic remains and come right after them.

“This way!” he cried to Zarkov.

The two of them headed for a rock outcrop that seemed strong enough to slow down the tank.

They crouched there and saw the tank turn slightly, slow down, and then move toward them again.

Flash climbed to the top of the rock outcrop, urging Zarkov on behind him.

Planes zoomed over the battlefield; bombs erupted near them.

Flash poised with Zarkov on the point of the rock, and as the tank neared them, they both jumped on top of it. There was a hatch at the center of the dorsal vents. The tank continued to rumble over the rocks, firing spasmodically into the distance. Now Flash could see that other tanks painted orange were firing back.

Flash and Zarkov cracked the hatch and found themselves looking down into a vast and spacious control room. Flash climbed down, helping Zarkov. They secured the hatch above them.

Flash stared at the wide console of controls.

“It’s more complicated than Pandora,” he said.

Zarkov looked around. “Yeah, but who runs it?”

Flash sat down at one of the empty seats. “It’s spooky,” he said, glancing around. “The tank has nothing inside it but a big control room. The machinery is confined to the under-half. And here we are, in a beautiful military tank without anybody running it.”

The tank shook as it took a bomb from one of the planes.

Zarkov leaned over and picked up a black box from the floor of the tank. It was about eight inches by twelve inches, and six inches thick. There were wire connections extending from jacks all over it.

“It’s a robot control,” he told Flash. “Quite like an automatic pilot on an Earth plane.”

Flash nodded. “So the thing is controlled remotely.”

“Right. This black box is a transmitter and receiver, receiving messages from central control and relaying them on to the panel controls. In turn, the tank receives impulse messages and pictures from its outside probes, and relays that information back by transmitter to the main control.”

“Probably a television set-up there in the port shows where the tank is going,” Flash mused.

“The damned thing is a cybernaut in itself,” muttered Zarkov. “Fascinating! Great way to fight a war, you know.”

“But not to be in it, old buddy,” said Flash.

“That’s a problem, all right,” Zarkov admitted. He put down the black box and stood up. “It’s kind of scary—a race of men fighting a race of robots.”

Flash nodded. “Well, we’ve gotten to know the robot side. Maybe we should take a look at the human side.”

Zarkov pointed through the immense window at the front of the tank beyond the control panel. “There’s the enemy. You see? It’s orange. The orange bunker this green tank is approaching is its objective.”

Flash could see the bunker plainly now. It had been obscured from above by the brow of rocks over it. The bunker had an enormous cannon mounted on top. There were several bunkers strung together along the brow of the hill.

“Let’s take a look at the fortress,” Flash said.

They climbed up out of the tank and stood on top a moment, watching the tank approach the bunker. On the other side of the plain, they could see an orange tank charging across a piece of ground to tangle with a green tank. Shots were fired and the green one blew up, smoke pouring out of its insides.

Flash and Zarkov jumped down from the tank to the rocky ground and ran toward the bunker. At that instant, a plane strafed the green tank they had just left, and a bomb dropped on it, going down through the empty hatch that Zarkov had left open.

The tank blew up.

Flash pulled Zarkov with him onto the top of the bunker. There was a narrow entryway in the middle of its reinforced concrete top.

They climbed down a ladder and found themselves in a well-lighted control room not unlike that in the tank. It, too, was deserted, with a large console of instrumentation moving the enormous gun above.

Zarkov spotted the black box. “The robot box again!” he cried. “It’s a damned war of robot against robot! The war of the cybernauts! What kind of crazy business is that?”

Flash stared at the control panel and shook his head.

Beyond the gun console there was a glass panel revealing a small room in which a dim light glowed. There were more dials and instruments.

“There’s got to be some human brain running this operation,” Flash said.

“I agree with you. But where?”

Flash and Zarkov walked down a corridor that opened off the gun-control room. Doors opened into other bunkers. At the end of the corridor there was a square room, and along one wall of the room there were three metal doors.

“They’ve got the same metals and minerals we have on Earth, I’d guess,” said Zarkov, glancing about him at the structure of the building. “Metal in the ships. Glass on the windows. And cement floors. No wood, though. I don’t know that wood grows on this rocky planet, but maybe it does.”

“No way,” said Flash. “Artificial light? It takes a sun to grow plants. There’s probably no vegetation on this planet.”

“Not much life either,” said Zarkov with a grin.

“Well,” said Flash. “Which door do you think we open to find the human brain running this crazy operation?”

Zarkov shrugged. “I’ll try the center one.”

He tugged at it and it opened.

Two creatures, each five feet tall, stood in the darkness. Their eyes were red lights. Their heads were chain mail globes. Their bodies were metal tubes. Their arms and legs were flexible BX-type cable. Sharp electric charges zipped through them like static.

The globe of one split open in the middle, and a metallic voice issued forth:

“Kill! Kill! Kill!”

CHAPTER 7

Flash Gordon kicked the metal door shut before the words of the strange cybernauts had ceased.

“There’s got to be a human being around here somewhere,” Zarkov said. “Somebody had to build those metal monsters.”

The door trembled under heavy blows and started to bulge at the corners. One of the flexible cables armed with metal claws on the end came probing through the small crack, clacking out for Flash.

“They’re strong little things,” snapped Flash. “Come on, Doc, let’s put some distance between us.”

Zarkov glanced around hurriedly. “Where do you think it’s safest to go?”

“Who knows? Let’s try the right-hand corridor. We know there’s nobody behind us.”

They ran off down the dimly lighted passageway, passing several doors. One stood open.

“Here,” Flash directed, and they went inside. They found themselves in a spartanly furnished, windowless room. There were two chairs in the office-like cubicle. “At least we can sit down.”

Zarkov closed the door behind him and slipped the bolt in place. There was the hum of air conditioning and the faint buzz of indirect lighting in the ceiling. Flash looked around. The room was constructed of a metallic type of super-plastic. It showed no joints nor fittings.

It was very quiet.

The door began shaking. Flash moved over to it and checked the bolt. He could hear the clacking of a robot’s metallic claws outside.

“They’re out there, all right,” Flash told Zarkov. “It’s the cybernauts we saw before.”

“Scary little creatures,” muttered Zarkov. “I’m pooped, Flash. At least we can sit down and rest a bit.”

He sank into one of the chairs. Flash was about to follow suit when suddenly the chair changed shape in front of Flash’s eyes and enveloped Zarkov. Then, amazingly enough, it began to swell up like a balloon, completely covering Zarkov’s body in a billowing plastic material.

“Flash!” yelled Zarkov. “I can’t move!”

Instantly Flash jumped away from the second chair that was waiting there so innocently for him.

“It’s a booby-trap, Doc. Can you still breathe?”

“I’m all right, but I’m completely enmeshed.” He seemed to be calling from inside a barrel.

The chair, now ballooned out into a sphere, stopped inflating and settled in the corner of the room. Zarkov was nowhere in sight.

Flash approached it warily, studying it for some sign of a control. There, at the joint of the strange metallic-plastic material, he found a button. It was labeled “RELEASE.”

“Doc, I’ve found a button here. It says RELEASE.”

“Well, punch it, man! Do you think I want to live the rest of my life in this damned bag?”

“If you’re sure it’s not some kind of back-up booby-trap.”

“Oh, push the button, will you? I can’t see a thing in here. It’s like being asleep in a cocoon! Shake it up.”

Flash glanced around. He could see the door trembling beneath the heavy blows of the two metal creatures outside. He took a deep breath and pressed the button.

Instantly the wall behind him changed shape and two large flexible steel arms shot out of it, holding a silken scarf between them. The scarf went over Flash’s eyes and pulled him backwards toward the wall.

“Doc!” yelled Flash. “It’s another trap. I can’t see. They’ve got me, now!”

Zarkov’s voice was muffled and far-off. “Aren’t you going to get me out of this thing?”

“Doc, I loused it up! They’ve got both of us!”

Zarkov’s voice was so muffled he could not hear it.

Flash tried to tear away the silken scarf—some kind of plastic imitation of Earth’s silk—but he could not drag it free. The flexible cables of the robot arms were too strong. When he tried to pry apart the metal claws holding the scarf they vibrated and made it impossible for his fingers to grip them.

He tried to kick at the wall to gain leverage, but the wall changed shape under his feet. And then he was on his back, bound to the floor by means of the scarf. Another scarf gripped his ankles and he was unable to move.

As he lay there in frustration, trying to tear the claws away from the scarves, his arms were seized by a tremendous strength, and then he was totally immobile. He could no longer hear Zarkov’s muffled voice.

“Doc!” he screamed. “Where are you?”

And he could smell a sweet smell in the air and then there was absolutely nothing.

“Gas,” he said aloud. “Some kind of gas. They pumped it into the room and . . .”

He could hear his voice, then, and he could feel the scarf loosen around his eyes. He lifted his hands—which were now miraculously free—and took the scarf off his face.

He was seated in a large cube-shaped room made of metal walls riveted at the joints of floor, ceiling, and walls. There were no windows. There was no door. But he was free.

And there was Zarkov, opposite him, free of the confining shape of the obscene chair that had swallowed him.

“Whew,” Zarkov sighed. “I’m never going to sit down again.”

Flash sighed. “And I’m never going to try to free you from a booby-trapped chair again.”

Zarkov stared around him. “What is this cell made out of?”

“It looks like metal to me,” Flash said, standing and putting his hand on the surface. “But maybe not. If this is that stuff that changes shape—”

“No,” said Zarkov. “It’s different. But there aren’t any seams in the material, except at the right-angle joints.”

“Well, then?”

Zarkov sighed. “I don’t know. It’s too technologically advanced for me. Probably steel or some carbon combination.”

“How did we get here?” Zarkov wondered. “We were in another kind of room. But this one—”

There was the sound of mild static in the air. Then a very artificial voice sounded from some hidden speaker in the wall.

“Spies!” the wall voice said. “Admit you are spies of the Greens and tell us all you know!”

Flash stared at Zarkov and Zarkov shrugged.

“We know you are there,” the wall continued. “We put you there. Now. Admit you are agents of the Greens.”

“Agents of whom?” Flash asked in exasperation. “We are earthmen. From planet Earth.”

“Doubletalk,” snapped the wall. “Admit you are working as agents of Zenohaven. Admit you blundered into our fortress to try to ferret out our secrets. Admit you are Green agents.”

“We’re not agents,” snapped Zarkov in his booming no-nonsense voice. “We’re astronauts.”

“Astronauts? This word is not in our language. You are purposely talking doubletalk to confuse us. You are agents, and you will die.”

“We don’t want to die,” growled Zarkov. “You’re being damned silly about this. Show your faces. Since we’ve landed on this planet, all we’ve seen is military aircraft, military tanks, military weapons, and military robots. Show us your faces, will you?”

There was a momentary silence.

“We’re not agents,” said Flash finally. “We know nothing of your war here. We were sent up from Earth on a space probe. Your robots attacked our craft and brought it down. We parachuted to safety, and landed right in a war.”

“Very well,” sighed the wall. “You won’t tell us the truth.”

“That’s the truth,” snapped Flash, angry now. “I’ve told the truth!”

“We show no mercy to liars and dissemblers,” said the wall. “You are agents, in the disguise of foreigners to our planet. A trick of the Greens to destroy us. Guns at the ready!”

Flash stared. Tiny ports opened in the walls and at least a dozen gun muzzles of conventional shape and size poked through the ports, aimed at the two earthmen.

“Hold it!” shouted Zarkov in his loud voice of a madman. “We can see you aren’t kidding. Give us a chance! If we could only sit down with you and talk!”

“Talk is for fools,” said the wall. “You die now, enemies of ours!”

“We’re not enemies,” cried Flash. “We came here on a friendly mission to find out how you live. You’re in our solar system and the Secretary of Space Development commissioned us to explore—”

“We do not like talk-talk. You are spies. Now. All guns. Ready, aim, fire!”

Flash and Zarkov stood firmly and philosophically in the middle of the room, waiting to die.

Instantly there was a hissing and they could feel powerful forces smashing at them. They went down on the floor, slipping and sliding in a concentration of furiously propelled water.

Flash opened his eyes as he slid into the corner of the cubed room, the force of the water pinning him there.

“It’s water, Doc!” cried Flash. “It’s like a half-dozen fire hoses turned on us.”

“Right you are, Flash,” cackled Zarkov. “I thought for a minute I was a goner. But it’s just like taking a damned tough shower.”

Suddenly the jets of water cut off, the guns disappeared into the ports in the wall, and there was silence.

“I thought we were being executed as spies,” said Flash, wiping off his head.

“Brainwash techniques,” said Zarkov seriously.

“Wash is right,” grinned Flash.

“No time for your puerile levity,” boomed Zarkov. “It’s really brain-conditioning, a technique to get our military secrets.”

“Good. We don’t have any to get.”

“When they find that out,” Zarkov said, “they’ll let us go.”

The wall resumed its dialogue. “We shall never let you go until you prove you are not agents of the Greens.”

“Haven’t we proved it?” asked Flash. “We have no secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets,” the wall proclaimed. “We shall find yours out and then we shall execute you.”

“You do too much talking for action,” said Zarkov. “If this is some kind of psychological test, we can take it. I’m very good at these things, you know,” Zarkov boomed optimistically. “Go ahead. Let’s have your next ploy.”

“Ploy? This word is not in our vocabulary,” said the wall. “We do not understand ploy. Is it play?”

Zarkov laughed. “Forget it.”

“You are mocking us with your laughter,” snapped the wall. “Now you shall pay for your mockery. Nobody laughs when he is being subjected to our will.”

“You can’t break us if we don’t have any secrets,” said Flash.

“We will take the secrets from your mind. We do not have to depend on you to tell us. We can enter your minds.”

“Be my guest,” said Flash. “I dare you to find any secrets.”

“Ahah! Now the challenge to the duel!” said the wall, quite excited now.

Flash laughed. “Nothing’s going to happen, Doc.”

Zarkov laughed uneasily. “Right on.”

Now part of the wall opened and a large electronic piece of equipment poked into the room. It was shaped like the nose of a metal probe, with insulators glistening on the outside and metal coils and spark jumps showing behind a nose that was covered with a plate-glass guard. Protruding from the end of the nose was a long needle-pointed antenna on which a blue spark glowed.

“Hey!” said Flash, stepping back as the electronic nose descended toward him. “Get that thing away from me!”

Zarkov backed off with his hands up.

The needlenose glowed blue and sparks could be seen leaping behind the plate-glass guard across the points of the gaps in the nose. Flash could feel the force of the emission in the air around him. His hair seemed to stand erect. He could see Zarkov’s beard bristle as if the hairs might be electrically charged.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. At each charge, Flash could fee! the electrical impulse surround him and then vanish. He could not avoid the charge, but it did not seem to hurt terribly. If anything, it simply sapped strength from him.

“Doc,” he gasped. “The charges. You think they’re X-rays? Won’t we be blinded? Burned?”

“If they’re radium emissions, we sure will be,” he said. “If so, they’re trying to kill us. Unless this is just another ploy.”

“Ploy again, is it!” cried the wall. “We will ploy you, war spies!”

The machine vibrated and sent out blue sheets of energy and Flash and Zarkov tried to duck out of range of the impulses.

Then, suddenly, the machine was quiet.

Zarkov lifted his head. “Is it over?”

Flash looked up. “I think so, Doc.”

Without a sound, the electronic probe vanished into a recess in the wall, and the wall became flat again.

Both were staring at the wall when they heard movement behind them. Flash wheeled.

The opposite wall had vanished. The cube-shaped room had now been extended into a much larger chamber, one in which inset ceiling lamps glowed down on a well-furnished area that resembled a board of director’s room in an Earth installation.

“Doc!” gasped Flash. “Do you see what I see?”

Zarkov nodded. “People.”

Indeed there were people in the portion of the room beyond the vanished wall. There were four of them. Three were, by Earth standards, rather strange-looking.

They had egg-shaped heads without a single hair on their skulls, with eyes that slanted upward at the corners, but lacked the fold of the Oriental eyelid. They were dressed in orange uniforms. At least, the garments seemed to be uniforms of a sort. The material covered the neck, covered the arms to the wrists, was belted at the waist, and covered the legs, the ankles, stopping where soft leather boots began.

Each man held an odd-shaped weapon resembling a small hand-gun, but ribbed in the barrel, and square in the grip.

The fourth human being was a woman.

And what a woman!

She had red hair piled on top of her head, over an oval and very beautiful face, with slanted eyes that were light gray, a smooth youthful complexion, and a slender neck. Her orange dress fitted her body tightly, with a ruff up behind her head, a tightly belted blouse with a deep V neck, and stretch pants down to her boots.

Flash nodded cheerfully. “People. You’re right, Doc. There are people on this planet. Just as you said.”

The woman raised her hand, her finger pointed accusingly at Flash Gordon.

“People?” she repeated, copying Zarkov’s accent. “We are not people. We are warriors—and you are spies.”

Zarkov pushed past Flash.

“We aren’t spies. We know nothing of war. We come in peace.”

“Silence!” shouted the woman. “You shall have a fair trial as Green spies.”

She was watching Flash as she spoke.

A murmur of approval swept through the orange-clad bald-headed group surrounding her.

“And then,” she smirked, “you’ll have a fair execution.”

CHAPTER 8

General Ild was lonely. But then, command of any country in time of war is a most lonely business. The fact that General Ild was only twenty-six years old, and that she was certainly the most beautiful woman in Ildhaven, the sector of the planet Errans inhabited by the People of the Orange, did not in any way tend to minimize her loneliness.

If anything, it increased it.

Two hours before the arrival of Flash Gordon and Dr. Zarkov in the palace, she lay on the comfortable chaise longue and stared at the wide vidscreen focused on the terrain outside the underground palace, watching the tanks and halftracks pummel each other in another fruitless battle. She was bored with it all, and yet, of course, there was nothing she could do about it.

It was her inheritance.

General Ildo, her mother, had been one of the most famous generals in the history of Ildhaven. It had been hoped, when her mother died and passed on the orange mantle of war to her, that she would surpass in deeds her mother, but so far, she had not.

“General, Madame, if you please,” a voice spoke up at a distance from her.

She turned her head languidly. It was Alp, her Number One Programmer. He had his head bowed so that all she saw was his naked skull.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, straighten up. What is it, anyway?”

Alp straightened. In the orange uniform he looked ridiculous, but to the eyes of the traditional Ildhaven resident, he was quite natty.

“We have sighted an Unidentified Moving Object in our heavens, General Ild.”

She lifted her head. She could see her reflection in the glass past which the tanks in the vidscreen thudded and burped and thumped.

“I see,” she said. “Does it resemble the other UMO’s confiscated by the cybbies?”

Alp shook his head. “It is larger, General Ild. Perhaps you’d better come and view it in the vidscreen.”

General Ild yawned briefly, putting the back of her slender hand to her open mouth, and watching her head prog through lidded eyes.

He was no worse than any of the other proggies, she thought wryly. She wondered why she expected more. There was something lacking in the men of Ildhaven. In the ancient books she had read exciting stories of duels, and jousting tourneys, and fights—man-to-man combats—that stirred her blood.

That was before the development of the cybernauts. Now the men were hairless and endowed with large brains and small muscles, the more to plan out circuitry in the computers, rather than fight. They had all become programmers, or progs for short.

It was no wonder the women had revolted over a hundred years ago and taken over the reins of the war machines. The proggies had become computer-and-gadget-happy, manufacturing machines and self-propelled vehicles and boats and airplanes and guns and mechanical men to do their work.

It was said that in ancient times the men had been the warriors, and the women the householders. But with the invention of the cybbies, the mechanical servants, that had all changed. The men, whose earlier physiques had been rugged for fighting, hunting, and building, had deteriorated when they became masters and programmers of powered servants. The women, then, freed of all household chores, had slowly moved into the vacuum left by the men as they pursued mathematics and engineering and technology, and had become the warriors.

The cybernauts, or cybs.

And then the cybbies had begun to usurp the functions of the human beings—the ruling of the people, the waging of war, the signing of treaties, the exploration of the planet of Errans and the probe into space around it.

Proggies, thought General Ild in despair. Was this all they were worth? Eyes that looked into vidscreens and feet that pattered along the floors and mouths that opened and told her there was something in the sky she should look at?

Obviously, yes.

She remembered her father, Prog Number One, a look-alike for Alp. He had sashayed about through the palace in his orange robe and tinkered at the benches with the electronics and circuits and programmed computers with all manner of strange functions.

She thought of the fairy tales in the books she had read as a child and she mourned for the days that were dead and gone.

“All right, Alp, I’ll come and look.”

Languidly, she rose from the comfortable chaise longue made out of the new protean plasticene invented by the wizard Lok twenty years ago before he had undergone a sex transplant to become Commanding General Lok. She sighed. Perhaps she had a talent for gadgetry. If this war business palled her, she might have a sex change and become one of the programmers.

She seemed to be waiting around for something to happen to her. It was unsettling. What was she waiting for?

She followed Alp into the Observatory Room in the ground floor of the palace. It was here that she came across a half dozen of the orange-uniformed progs standing about and staring at the scanners.

Alp pointed. “It’s up there, General Ild.”

She nodded. “I can see it.”

“The cybbies are attacking the craft. And it’s very strange. There are women aboard.”

“Aha,” said General Ild. “The Greens?”

“No. We have never seen anything like them. They wear their hair different.”

Alp leaned forward and moved dials on the vidscreen. The camera eyes of the floating technoids up there probed into the inside of the strange craft. General Ild could see two women inside in what were obviously space suits. One of the women had a marvelous black beard.

“Why, she’s exquisite!” said Alp. “Look at that beautiful face hair!”

General Ild squinted. She didn’t think much of that one. Then she caught sight of the other woman on the outside of the craft. She had very blond hair and blue eyes. She looked strong as an ox. Quite handsome. A warrior type. A superior woman. And yet . . .

“Are you sure they’re women?” General Ild asked.

Alp turned to her with a withering look. “But General Ild—of course they’re women. They have hair, haven’t they?”

General Ild could not deny that. Still, she seemed somewhat puzzled.

“Hey!” cried one of the progs. “That fool on the outside of the ship just burned up one of the technoids.”

Technoids were second-generation cybernauts. They had been invented and built by the cybernauts as powered servants to the cybbies—in effect, servants to the cybernauts in the discharge of their duties. Technoids came in all manner of shapes: power tools, sighting probes, sensor mechanisms, and so on.

In a moment there was a great deal of excited babble.

“There’s another!” shouted Alp. “The woman crisped him!”

The progs peered forward at the vidscreen in excitement. “They must be Greens, those women.”

General Ild yawned. “Look, proggies, when you’ve finished with your scan, will you call me? I’ve got a war to run.”

“Oh,” said Alp. “I forgot to ask. How’s it going?”

“Well,” said General Ild. “Cybby Number One reported not an hour ago from the War Council. It seems we’ve broken the backs of the Green Tank Army in the Aspic Mountains.”

“Good,” said Alp tonelessly.

“That’s what I told him,” General Ild said laconically.

“General Ild, General Ild!” She came awake suddenly, snatched from the middle of a dream about a man on a tank, riding victoriously over the battlefield toward her, holding out his arms, and leaping down to grab her up in a sweeping motion.

“What is it?”

“The strange women. They’ve crash-landed in the battlefield.”

General Ild raised an eyebrow. “That’s odd. Why didn’t they go back to Zenohaven?”

Alp shrugged.

General Ild sighed and followed Alp to the scanners again. This time she watched the two strange women run across the battlefield, climb onto one of the Green tanks, and disappear inside it.

“What odd behavior,” said Prog Jut. “Don’t they know they’re in Cybby Territory?”

“Apparently not,” said General Ild. She leaned closer. Now she could see the two women emerge from the hatch of the tank, jump off, and run toward the end of the underground palace.

“They’re headed for our bunkers,” said Alp.

General Ild nodded. These two did not act like Greens to her. They did not act like anything she had ever seen before. If that blond was a woman, she was one of the most muscular and powerful women she had ever seen.

“Isn’t that blond woman beautiful!” cried one of the progs.

“Shut up!” snapped General Ild.

Alp stared at her. “What is it, General, Madame?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Leave me alone, you pompous fool! I want to see those two maniacs. Don’t let the cybbies destroy them before I get a chance to interrogate them.”

“Aye, aye, Madame,” said Alp and gave quick orders to three of the progs.

“No, no,” said General Ild in disgust. “You’ve got it all wrong. You men just don’t understand strategy. Alp, let them come in through the bunker. Lead them into the corridors, but don’t let the cybbies get at them. Once you have them in the Reprogramming Cubicle, then we’ll grab them and interrogate them.”

Alp nodded. “Aye, aye, General, Madame.”

“Treat them like any spy,” said General Ild in sudden inspiration.

“Green spies,” said Alp, his eyes lighting up.

“Now that’s getting there, Alp. I congratulate you,” said General Ild sardonically.

Alp and the three other progs bustled off chattering among themselves like birds in the predawn light.

Observing the two newcomers, General Ild recalled that she had read that the men at one time had possessed hair as beautiful as any woman’s, not only on the tops of their skulls, but also on their chins and jaws. Perhaps these two strangers who had wandered into Sector H of Battleground 3 were throwbacks to those earlier days—Greens who had betrayed atavistic secondary sex characteristics and who had been exiled from society because of their difference.

If so, perhaps they were spies.

Yes. She would have to treat them as enemies. Then, if they proved to be be agents of the Greens, they would be turned over to the cybbies. The cybbies ran the war. Except for the overall strategy.

She watched as the two intruders were finally taken to the Reprogramming Cubicle by Alp and his three prog assistants. The scanners were on them every moment. The blond one awoke first, then the one with the black hair and beard.

“Turn on the parlatech,” she snapped.

Alp flicked a switch.

They were watching the aliens on scanners located in the next room, but unseen by the occupants of the cubicle. The parlatech was an invention of one of the most brilliant technicians in Ildhaven history—a man as smart as the Wizard Lok—although he had not opted for a sex change to take charge of a war machine. He had simply invented a technological cybernetic talking organism, controlled completely by computer-fed information.

“Turn the parlatech to Harassment, subsection Agents, subsubsection Brainscan,” snapped General Ild.

Alp nodded.

“Now let’s watch and see what happens.” General Ild stood there coolly observing the proceedings as the progs buzzed around her.

Cold and aloof, she stared at the vidscreen and could almost feel the fear of the two occupants in the Reprogramming Cubicle.

Her eyes never left the face of the blond giant. She could empathize with the alien’s puzzlement and concern. Still there was no sign of panic, no sign of deterioration, no sign of psychological disintegration.

She could see by his face that he was a strong, self-sufficient man. Yes. He simply had to be a man. In spite of what these twittering progs around her thought, this blond giant was a man. And the strange secondary sexual characteristic exhibited by his head of hair was undoubtedly due to some odd throwback or mutation. He was a fighter, she knew that.

Who but a fighter would have run across that battlefield out there, and jumped into the turret hatch of a firing tank? Who but a fighter would have dared attack the bunker and enter it in spite of the cannonading in progress?

And who but a fighter would lock and bolt a door against the repulsive and all-powerful cybbies in their domain?

Her heart was beating madly against her chest as she watched the scanner. Yes. He was fighting the parlatech, word for word! And so was his companion, the man with the weird chin hair.

Anyone who had the courage to do verbal battle with the parlatech, which had been programmed for every kind of psychological brainwashing imaginable, was someone to be watched.

Alp was jumping up and down in dismay. “They’re outwitting the parlatech! They’re making it a mockery!” he cried.

General Ild laughed shortly. “Well? What are you going to do?”

Alp frowned. He turned to his companion progs. They chattered together for a few minutes.

Then he turned to General Ild. “We’re going to have to release the two of them from the cubicle. I think we must conclude that the parlatech has not been able to convert them.”

“Good. And what about the brainscan?”

“The brainscan plates are in the cybbies’ hands. I’m sure they will prove nothing.”

“Then let’s take them and interrogate them ourselves,” said General Ild, “on the cerebroscan.”

Alp stared. “But no one has been known to survive the cerebroscan.”

“No one who is guilty,” said General Ild. “But who knows what it will do to the innocent?”

General Ild turned and looked at the scanner where the two—she knew now—men were wiping off the unexpected water.

“I don’t know what to think,” said General Ild. She was telling the truth. But she did know what she felt. She felt about the blond giant the way she had never felt about any man. She felt what the ancients in the books called “love.” It would be an amusing experiment to see how this very old-fashioned emotion affected her.

She gave the signal for the breaking of the cubicle and the wall parted.

Slowly the blond giant looked around and his eyes met hers.

She could feel that look all through her body and she almost fainted.

This “love” might not be so bad after all, she thought.

But, meanwhile, there was work to be done, a war to fight, the enemy to be overcome.

And she spoke.

CHAPTER 9

“A fair trial,” Flash Gordon remarked. “If we get a fair trial, we will be acquitted as enemy agents.”

“Perhaps,” said the girl, staring into Flash’s eyes.

“Who will conduct this trial?” Flash asked, uncomfortable under General Ild’s penetrating scrutiny.

“The cerebroscan machine,” said the girl with a faint smile.

“Another machine!” Zarkov burst out.

General Ild turned to the scientist. “Yes.”

“But we’ve already been subjected to the cerebroscan,” said Zarkov lightly. “Weren’t we, Flash?”

“Right, Doc,” said Flash.

“Pah!” snorted General Ild. “That was nothing more than a simple brainscan. A device dreamed up by the cybbies. It could no more tell the real truth deep inside you than I could.”

“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.

Nevertheless, because she liked that blond-haired giant from another world, she hesitated before turning the switch. When she did, she immediately banished all remorse, and settled down in a protean pouf to watch the action.

What she saw immediately was the interior of the quarters she had assigned to Colonel Flash Gordon and Colonel Doctor Hans Zarkov. She had bestowed the title “Colonel” on Zarkov to make him equal in rank with his companion. It was the privilege only of women in Ildhaven to have military titles, but she had bowed to the Aliens because Flash did have the title in his own right on the planet Orth. Or was it Urth?

Zarkov and Flash were preparing for bed. She saw Flash standing over the metal wash basin, laving his head and hands. Zarkov was unlacing his boots. The quarters were not sumptuous, but quite utilitarian, with two bunks, closets, and bureaus spaced about the steel-lined cubicle. All the rooms in the palace were steel-lined to prevent destruction by an errant bomb that in spite of every safety precaution might penetrate the vanadium shields above.

Finally Flash turned to Zarkov with a lopsided grin.

“Boy, did you get a load of that food we had tonight?”

“Food!” Zarkov echoed. “You mean those cubes of vitamins?”

“What do you expect from a planet that doesn’t even grow anything to eat?” grunted Flash.

“I was ready for steak and potatoes, and from the way the Queen described the food, I thought it was going to be a treat!”

“General, my dear Colonel Doctor Zarkov,” Flash corrected him. “Not Queen.”

“Sorry,” chuckled Zarkov. “I keep thinking of her as a woman.”

“So do I,” Flash admitted, wiping his face with a towel.

General Ild leaned back with a satisfied smile. That was what she liked to hear. Compliments! And, coming from the very attractive Flash Gordon, it was most welcome.

“Well, I ate my pill and pretended to be happy with it,” Zarkov said.

General Ild frowned. The Aliens did not like the food she had given them. It was the very best available on Errans. They should see what the progs ate! Reconstituted seawater! Of course the cybbies did not need sustenance—only fuel.

“Me, too,” said Flash.

Zarkov stripped to the waist and crawled into one of the beds, lying there with his hands laced behind his head.

“I never thought I’d see a people like these, Flash. I mean, they love war so much they spend their lives at it. Well, I suppose Hitler and his mob could be said to have loved war, too, but look what happened to them.”

“She doesn’t remind me of Hitler,” Flash observed.

General Ild leaned forward. Who was this Hitler person? Obviously someone on Orth who had pursued a war that was not entirely successful. She wondered what this woman looked like. Was she as beautiful as General Ild?

“You’ve got a good thing going there, Flash, and I wouldn’t scrape it under the rug if I were you,” Zarkov murmured.

“Oh, come on, now, Doc! What about Dale? I can’t just move in and—”

“Old man,” grinned Zarkov, “who will ever know? That is one beautiful kid, Flash.”

“I wouldn’t betray Dale,” said Flash slowly, taking his shirt off.

General Ild frowned. Then she understood. “Dale” must be Colonel Gordon’s fiancée on Orth.

“Besides, I love Dale, and I’ve only just met General Ild.”

Zarkov grinned. “Well, she’s coming on pretty strong, so don’t make any rash decisions, my boy.”

Flash shook his head. “Forget it, Doc. That’s out.”

General Ild clenched her fists. So she was out, was she? She’d see about that! There were ways to persuade Colonel Flash Gordon to comply with her wishes. Many ways!

Flash lay in his bed.

Zarkov yawned. “My theory is that these Oranges are just an aggressive race that loves war and won’t give it up. Imagine a people that builds robots to do all its work, and then puts the robots to work building other robots to fight their wars.”

“It’s a wonder the machines don’t turn on them and stop the war.”

“They can’t. You forget they’re programmed by the human beings who built them. I mean, of course, the cybernauts. The technoids, the tool robots, are a second generation and also can be controlled.”

“What are you thinking about, Doc?”

Zarkov shook his head. “I’m just talking off the top of my head. Boy, these Oranges have to be the most aggressive people I’ve ever seen, fighting for centuries without even remembering why.”

“Like those old backwoods feuds in the Kentucky hills. The Hatfields and the McCoys.”

“Yeah. I’d guess these people were the aggressors,” Zarkov observed. “It’s surprising they haven’t prevailed. The other side must be pretty tough to outlast them. But then, Churchill outlasted Germany.”

“Right. And he didn’t get into it until it had gone on for quite a while.”

General Ild frowned. What were these two Aliens talking about? Aggressors? What did the bearded one think the Greens were? And what was the difference? War was a constant thing. Who cared when it had started? Who was the first human being? Man or woman?

“I’ll bet their enemies, the Greens, are a lot more civil,” Flash mused.

“They certainly couldn’t be more uncivil.”

“If we’re going to get off this planet, we’ve got to find some way to get over to the other side.”

Zarkov nodded. “Right. But it isn’t going to be easy.”

“No. It’s going to be one of the most difficult things we’ve ever done. We don’t even have a missile to get off this rockpile!”

Zarkov sighed. “I get nightmares just thinking about it. We’d better get some sleep, Flash. It’s going to be another long hard day—and at the end of it, a plate of vitamin pills!”

General Ild stood and glowered in fury at the vidscreen.

“So!” she said to herself. “You don’t like it here in the palace. You don’t like our hospitality. You wish you were with the Greens.”

She turned and stared into space. Both Zarkov and Flash had closed their eyes and were dropping off to sleep.

General Ild folded her arms across her breast and tapped her foot irritably. “I should have known better than ever to trust a man.”

She paced back and forth.

“Very well, if they want to go over to the Greens, I can send them there. And use them for my own purposes!”

General Ild paused a moment, switched off the vidscreen, and moved into another room. There were computer banks along one wall, and a series of control panels. Bright vidscreens lined the wall above the console. Two cybernauts were seated in chairs in front of the screens. Their heads swiveled and their lights blinked.

“Good evening General Ild,” the metallic voice of the first cyb said in its monotonous singsong.

This was Cyb Number Two, head of Military Intelligence. General Ild could see the name plate on the cyb’s chest—or, rather, where a human chest would be.

Beside Number Two sat an assistant, Cyb Number Twelve—high in the hierarchy, but not of the top six.

“Good evening Cybs Two and Twelve,” said General Ild with a smile. “How are we coming tonight?”

“The latest readout states that we have managed to land three agents in amongst the Green outposts. However, one was immediately caught by a new superscan device the Greens have developed. But the other two are now moving into the interior of the region.”

General Ild nodded. “And our Counter-Intelligence Units?”

“Nothing, General Ild.”

“Thank you, Cyb Two.” The General did not move out of the Intelligence Room.

“May I be of further assistance, General Ild?” the cyb asked.

She was unnerved at the fact that the cybernaut’s head was turned around at 180 degrees so that it was actually looking out of the back of the body at her. But then, the cybbies could do tricks the average person couldn’t.

“I would like to speak with you in private, Cyb Two.”

Cybernaut Two blinked and responded. “I will come with you. Number Twelve, you will take over the total scan.”

“Yes, Number Two,” said the metallic voice of the other cyb.

Cyb Two followed General Ild into a small chamber oft the Intelligence Room.

The girl reclined on a nearby chair. The cybby stood at attention.

“I await your commands, General Ild,” the cybernaut said again.

“I have an idea to propose to you,” General Ild began slowly.

“I am programmed to hear it, General Ild.”

“The Aliens from space may be useful to us in gathering intelligence data, Cyb Two.”

“Yes, General Ild.”

“I am not trying to interfere with your conduct of the war, you understand, but it had occurred to me that the two Aliens might be dispatched to the enemy to destroy their nerve centers.”

“Affirmative, General Ild. Such an act is a possibility.”

“How could we get the two Aliens on the other side? Is there a way? That is why I have come to you.”

“I will consult my reasoning centers. Yes, General Ild. There is a way.”

“And when will they go?” asked General Ild. “I’d like to make it as soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow, General Ild.”

“Thank you, Cyb Two. Have you any questions?” General Ild asked negligently.

“Are the Aliens expendable, General Ild?” the cyb asked in its singsong voice.

“Yes,” said General Ild grimly.

“The mission will be programmed completely by morning,” said the cyb. “Have the Aliens ready.”

“I shall,” said General Ild with a faint, vindictive smile.

Cybernaut Number Two stalked out of the chamber and the steel door banged behind it.

General Ild stared into the distance and pouted.

“I am disappointed in you, Colonel Gordon,” she said aloud. “We could have had such a good life together. War. And love. And all the comforts of home.”

She waved her hand in the air.

“Pah! Men!”

CHAPTER 11

A raucous klaxon that shook the walls aroused Flash and Zarkov in the morning—or what would pass for morning on Errans—and they rolled out in true military fashion, dressing quickly and flipping the bedclothes back into place.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

“Come in,” Zarkov called.

The door opened and General Ild stared in at them. “Good morning, Colonels. I trust you slept well?”

Flash nodded. “Very well, indeed.”

General Ild smiled crookedly. “You will have breakfast shortly, and then you will come with me for a tour of the palace.”

“Thank you,” said Zarkov.

General Ild turned to go, and then stopped. “Actually, I have an assignment for you, about which I shall tell you later.”

“Assignment?” Flash repeated.

“Yes. After all, you are officers in the Orange Army.”

Flash nodded.

“Eat well,” said Genedal Ild.

“Thanks,” said Zarkov dryly.

General Ild closed the door and was gone.

They dawdled over their breakfast of vitamin cubes as long as they could, and finally chewed them up without comment. Then they sat there and looked at each other.

“That food’ll never make me a champion,” said Zarkov, pointing at the empty plate.

“Nor me,” said Flash.

“I wonder what General Ild has in mind for us today?” Zarkov pondered.

“Colonels Gordon and Zarkov, report immediately to the palace muster room,” the wall speaker bellowed. “Colonels Zarkov and Gordon!”

“That’s us,” said Flash, rising from the bleak dining table.

They hurried down the hall, following the signs printed on the walls.

The Mustering Room was deserted when they got there. It was a large, well-lighted, and well-ventilated room, with a large vidscreen forming one wall. On the vidscreen a battle was going on, obviously piped in from the battle zone where it was being fought.

They watched the action for several minutes, and then tired of it.

“I’d almost settle for a documentary on Ancient Mongolia,” said Flash with a sigh.

“Right on,” said Zarkov. “Wonder when the other officers will be joining us?”

Flash shrugged.

Then General Ild was there, bustling in, waving a riding crop which she slapped against her thigh occasionally. Flash thought of pictures he had seen of General Patton, and wondered if General Ild had seen them too. Obviously not. The military mind simply knew no boundaries—or planets.

“We go to see the Giant War Computer, Colonels,” said General Ild with a slap at her thigh. “Come!”

Flash and Zarkov followed. As they moved quickly along behind her. Flash whispered:

“All business today. None of this hanky-panky like yesterday.”

“She seems to have lost the romantic bloom she had yesterday,” Zarkov responded.

They wound down several levels of stairs and continued along another deserted corridor until they came to a door labeled:

WAR COMPUTER

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

General Ild flipped an orange I.D. disk from her blouse, fitted it into a slot in the wall next to the steel door, and pushed a button. There was a short pause, and then the door slowly opened.

The three of them entered and the door slammed shut behind them.

They were in an enormous underground cavern almost three stories deep from ceiling to floor. At the entrance, there was a kind of balcony overlooking the large area, with steps leading down from it into the middle of the room.

Most of the space was taken up by a large computer bank that must have had at least six dozen computers linked together into one huge brain. There was absolutely no human being in sight.

“This, Colonels, is our War Computer. It is the mechanical brain that fights the war for us.”

Zarkov nodded. “Where are the operators?”

General Ild turned to Zarkov with an eyebrow quirked. “The computers are operated by remote control, from Cybby Headquarters.”

“The cybernauts run the machine?”

“Certainly. But, of course, they were programmed to do so by my ancestors,” said General Ild.

“You have no control over them?” Flash asked.

“Oh, yes. The cybernauts fight better than we can now. They’ve been at it for many years.”

“Then if this computer fights the war, General Ild, what is the need for officers in the army like Dr. Zarkov and myself?” Flash asked.

General Ild smiled. “My dear Colonels, that is what we are here today to talk about. This brain here is the heart and soul of Ildhaven’s War Machine. It is our defense and our offense all rolled into one.”

“I understand,” said Zarkov.

“Pitted against this brain is another brain almost exactly like it. That is the War Computer of the Greens. Their War Computer is our immediate target.”

“Figures,” said Zarkov judiciously. “Just get in there and destroy that, and you’ve won the war.”

“Exactly,” General Ild said with a happy look at Zarkov. “Now you’re beginning to think like an officer.”

“Why hasn’t infiltration been tried before?” Flash asked.

“It has been buried, by the cybbies. But the cybbies on the other side caught on immediately. Even technoids were tried. A hundred of them were crisped before the Cybby War Council gave it up.”

“How about one of the progs?”

“We’ve never had any human being who would volunteer for the mission,” said General Ild softly.

Zarkov looked at Flash.

“I see,” said Zarkov, trying to contain his elation. “You’re going to—”

“—send you to destroy the Green War Computer.”

Flash broke into a smile. “It’s a dangerous mission, General Ild,” he said slowly. “But, since you put it that way—”

“Oh, you’ll go,” General Ild interrupted shortly. “I’ve already told Cybernaut Number One.”

“Exactly how do we do this dangerous assignment?” Flash asked.

“That will be explained to you in due time, Colonel Gordon,” said General Ild with a regal gesture of her hand.

“Anything we can do to help,” said Flash. He glanced secretly at Zarkov and met Zarkov’s mischievous grin.

“You will go in as agents of the Oranges, and you will blow up the War Computer, and be heroes!”

Flash nodded.

“Come, Colonels,” snapped General Ild, turning and stalking out of the War Computer Room. “We have one more visit to make.”

As they continued along the corridor behind her, Flash turned to Zarkov and whispered, “This is too good to be true, Doc,” Flash said.

“Right,” Zarkov rejoined. “We’re planning an escape, and she invites us to go over to the enemy.”

“What did you say?” General Ild asked, turning quickly and staring at Flash.

“Nothing important, General Ild,” said Flash with an ingratiating smile. “Just commenting on the beautiful architecture of the palace and the perfection of this morning’s breakfast.”

“Yes, it was good, wasn’t it?” said General Ild. “One of our best morning menus.”

Zarkov choked and turned his head.

They entered a large, flat circular chamber in which a number of tables and chairs had been placed about. It might have been a recreation hall. There was no one in sight.

“Well, Colonels, it is time to forget about words and act.”

Flash nodded.

“A bomb has been constructed and awaits delivery. You will not be alone on your mission. We have arranged to have you accompanied by an experienced saboteur who has been trained for life for this mission.”

Zarkov glanced around the deserted room. “Where is he?”

“He?” General Ild smiled. “You are thinking in old-fashioned terms, Colonel Doctor Zarkov, deeply ingrained in you in your years on the planet Orth.”

“Earth,” said Flash.

“Urth,” said General Ild. “No matter.” She swung her arm and pointed to a travel suitcase that had been placed in the center of the circular room. “That is your assistant, who will carry your bomb and who will show you the way.”

Flash stared. He saw the suitcase and the chairs, but he could not see either a man or a cybernaut in the chamber with them.

“Okay. I give up. What is he, an invisible man or an invisible cybby?”

“Not invisible at all, Colonel Gordon. Cyb Agent Em-One ready to serve you,” snapped a metallic voice. “Death to the enemy!”

Flash and Zarkov stared at the suitcase.

“The damned thing talks,” said Zarkov. “How did you do that?” he asked General Ild.

“That is your assistant. Colonels. It will help you carry the bomb to the enemy’s War Computer.”

“That—that—bag?” growled Flash, staring in consternation at the suitcase.

“I am a highly sophisticated accurately-programmed cybernetic mechanism, delicately constructed and precisely functioning, quite able to lead you to the epicenter of the enemy’s nerve system. I am not a bag.” There was a pause. “Well, I resemble a bag, true. But I am a totally independent technoid agent of the Orange government, commissioned by General Ild to do my country’s duty. I do not accept the fact that you Colonels do not approve of me.”

Zarkov blinked. “Nothing personal, bag. Uh, Agent Em-One. It’s just that perhaps we had been expecting someone more—oh—like us.”

“But you are Aliens,” the suitcase clattered. “I am much more technically suited to important intelligence-gathering missions than you, and I am also qualified to the nth degree in sabotage. You are looking at a trained machine of destruction, Colonels. These memory banks and control resistors are the product of the latest in military and civilian methods of infiltration, recognition, and destruction. I would not be able to function if I resembled you.”

“I apologize,” Zarkov said, perspiration glinting on his forehead. He turned to General Ild. “Please tell—uh—Em-One that I didn’t mean it.”

“The cybernaut has no sensitivities, Colonel Doctor Zarkov,” General Ild said contemptuously. “Therefore, no apologies are necessary. Em-One is merely stating the facts.”

“On Earth we would simply say that Em-One has an inflated ego and an intolerable arrogance,” smiled Flash.

“I am not programmed for such emotional displays, Colonels. I am a dispassionate machine of destruction.”

“Now, Colonels,” snapped General Ild. “As to your mission. First you must get into your Alien clothing.”

“Our astrosuits?” Zarkov asked. “Won’t they know we’re from Earth?”

“They will think you have descended from the spacecraft in which you came, Aliens. And they will let you into their military complex. With the suitcase you will look like travelers, no?”

“Yes,” said Flash with a grimace. “I travel light myself, but this is ridiculous.”

“Cyb Agent Em-One will direct you to the enemy’s brain center so you can place the bomb for maximum destruction. Em-One is totally programmed to get you and the bomb there. You need have no worries on that score.”

“But what if we are captured? Or what if there are any untoward obstacles?” Zarkov wondered.

“Em-One is sufficiently programmed in ingenuity to work his way out of the most dangerous complications.”

“I am programmed to a capacity one half again as high as the most intelligent man on the planet,” said the suitcase. “I can work my way out of any obstacle planned by mortal man. Your trust will not be misplaced, Colonels.”

“Good, good,” said Zarkov.

“All right,” said Flash. “We’ll get into our astrosuits. Then what? How do we get across that no-man’s-land out there?” He gestured toward the vidscreen scanner on the wall which was playing the war outside.

“It is all arranged,” General Ild said. “I have taken care of everything.”

Clad in their astrosuits, Flash and Zarkov were ordered to follow General Ild once again, and they did so, winding through corridors and then down an elevator into the bowels of the planet. They came out into another subterranean excavation that dwarfed the others they had seen. This one was at least five stories deep.

In the middle of it stood an enormous missile on a firing pad, apparently in an attitude of readiness. Technoids were crawling all over the metal skin of the craft, and lights were blinking furiously at a console set up near the pad.

A group of cybbies were walking about with yellow-lined pads of polyvinylpap, scribbling down notes.

General Ild gestured proudly toward the enormous missile.

“You’re to be sent over to Zenohaven by means of that guided missile, Colonels. The accuracy of the missile is guaranteed. It is radar-controlled and wire-guided. You cannot fail to land within a hundred meters of the computer.”

“A guided missile!” Zarkov repeated, his face pale.

“It has no warhead,” said General Ild with a smile. “Instead, you two and Em-One will be in the head. Once the missile is targeted in for its hit, you will be ejected from the craft.”

“But how do we survive that kind of a landing?” Zarkov asked. “I’ve had a few crash-landings in my time, and they can get pretty hairy!”

“Your agent will guide you,” General Ild declared coolly.

“And I hope Em-One has been instructed to keep us from being shot down on the way?” Flash blurted out.

“Never mind such eventualities,” the suitcase said. “I have been adequately programmed to take care of every emergency.”

“Egotistical little fellow,” muttered Flash.

General Ild moved toward Flash, and gazed at him steadily. “I am sorry we could not plan our future together, Colonel Gordon. It would have been rather lovely.”

“Possibly when Doc and I come back,” Flash said vaguely.

General Ild smiled faintly. “Yes, of course, Colonel Gordon. But there’s always that little fiancée on Orth, is there not? What’s her name, Dale?”

“How’d you know that?” Flash asked in astonishment.

“You told me, did you not, Colonel Gordon?” General Ild said calmly.

“Maybe so.” Flash was doubtful.

“Goodbye, Colonel Gordon,” said General Ild and bowed slightly. “Goodbye, Colonel Doctor Zarkov.”

And she was gone.

Flash turned to Zarkov. “She sounded like she didn’t intend to see us ever again. How do you like that, Doc?”

Zarkov frowned uneasily. “Well, I don’t like it.”

“Into the guided missile, Colonels,” clattered the suitcase. “From now on you take orders from me. Straight ahead, down those stairs, and then across the empty space.”

“Who’s going to act as Ground Control?” Zarkov asked irritably.

“It’s automatic, you Aliens,” snapped the suitcase. “Forward, march, Colonels! Down those stairs, and across the blast pad, and into—”

Flash and Zarkov started off at a trot.

“Hey!” screamed the suitcase. “Pick me up! Do you think I am a stupid human being?”

Flash turned and went back for the suitcase. “Just keep a civil tongue in your head or I’ll chuck you in the baggage room and leave you.”

“Enough talk, Colonel Gordon. That’s it. Nice and easy. Hut, two, three, four! Straight ahead, down the steps, across the pad, and up the stairs to the missile cabin. Hut, two, three, four . . .”

CHAPTER 12

In minutes the missile was airborne, with Colonel Flash Gordon and Colonel Doctor Hans Zarkov seated side by side in the renovated cockpit staring at a console of absolutely incomprehensible instrumentation.

“I have the weird idea, Doc, that the girl is trying to get rid of us,” Flash observed plaintively. “What do you say?”

“You lost your chance there, my boy,” Zarkov said with a drawl. “I thought we were going to get the red-carpet treatment for the rest of our stay here. Instead it looks more like we’re getting the red-blanket treatment.”

“Whew!” sighed Flash. “This missile really puts on speed at lift-off. I wonder when the nose cone tilts down and we start to drop again?”

“In exactly five seconds, Colonels,” said the suitcase, which rested at Flash Gordon’s feet next to the seat to which he was strapped.

“Thank you, Em-One, over and out,” said Flash.

“I still don’t know how we’re going to land this baby,” Zarkov complained. “I certainly don’t look forward to mushing out on the rocks down there in the middle of a battle zone. This is a real suicide mission,”

“Suicide is a value judgment,” said the suitcase. “This mission is not programmed in any way for defeat. It is programmed for victory. There is no possibility that the missile or its personnel will be destroyed.”

“Hear that?” asked Zarkov with a grin.

“That’s very comforting, Agent Em-One. Tell me this—when are we expected to reach our target?”

“Exactly three minutes and forty-seven seconds,” said the technoid suitcase.

“Not very much time,” said Zarkov.

The missile suddenly shook with tremendous force and seemed to veer from course. Then it righted itself and continued on.

“Anti-missile missile fire,” shouted Flash. “We’ve been spotted, Doc!”

“You are so right,” snapped Zarkov. “What do we do about that, Em-One?”

“Nothing, Colonels, unless we are hit.”

“Oh, great!” groaned Zarkov.

“I still don’t know how to land this thing,” Flash complained. “Can you give me a hint, Em-One?”

“I am programmed for complete landing steps which need not be revealed until exactly three minutes and thirty seconds from now.”

Flash glanced at Zarkov and shrugged. “I hope the little fellow knows what he is doing.”

“Attention!” shouted the suitcase. “Attention, pilots! Enemy anti-missile missile approaching on target.”

“How do we steer away?” Flash shouted.

“The missile is not programmed for evasive action.”

“Doc, we’re dead!” Flash said.

“Incorrect assumption,” snapped the suitcase. “There is a release mechanism on the nose cone. Pull the two right-hand grips near the altimeter dials and press button CR on your left. Do you observe them?”

“Got them, Em-One.”

“Release and press immediately.”

“Right on,” said Flash, and pulled the two clasps and pressed the button.

“Oh, great,” said Zarkov. “We delay the moment of truth by seconds instead of being blown to bits this instant.”

There was a loud blast around them, and they were suddenly catapulted through the air, end-over-end. Flash tried to open his eyes, but could not. The speed of their ejection was almost sonic. Then they began falling free, and at that instant, Flash opened his eyes.

“Doc!” he screamed. “Would you look at that?”

The centrifugal force of their spinning flight through the air had pressed them against the instrument panel. Now, as Flash looked back, he saw that the nose cone was not a sealed component at all, like the cabin aboard Pandora, but an open-ended nose cone. As he shouted, he and Zarkov began falling out of the cone into the air.

There were explosive blasts all around them as missiles shot by and rockets blew up.

“Grab my handgrip firmly,” said the suitcase. “Have no fear. I am programmed for your safety. We will win.”

Flash saw the suitcase falling near him, and he reached out and took hold of it. Zarkov heard the voice and reacted instantly.

“I am equipped with an anti-gravitational device which will prevent us from crashing to the ground,” said the technoid.

The suitcase decelerated their speed of descent and brought them into a very slow approach to the ground below. Bombs were bursting everywhere.

“We’ve missed the target, Em-One,” snapped Flash. “How are we going to get anywhere near the War Computer of the enemy?”

“Leave the mechanics to me, Colonels,” said the technoid suitcase. “Hold tightly to my handgrip. I am programmed to guide us between missile paths and bomb trajectories.”

“Oh, boy,” said Zarkov. “I’ve got to see this!”

The suitcase zigzagged through the shrapnel and pieces of flying metal while Flash and Zarkov closed their eyes and hoped.

When Flash opened his eyes he could see the ground below, coming up toward him through clouds of blue and black smoke. Flashes ripped up from cannon barrels and from mortar pots. Jet planes zoomed about them, riddling the air with tracer bullets.

“How did you manage to get us into this inferno?” grumbled Zarkov. “You’ve made a botch of it, Em-One.”

“Your statement is uncorroborated by facts, Colonel Doctor Zarkov. I am prepared for any eventuality, comrades-at-arms. Have no fear. I have built-in guarantees for your safety. Do not despair. We will win.”

“Propaganda at a time like this,” muttered Zarkov darkly, watching a missile zoom not four inches from his dangling foot.

“We will find shelter behind this hill,” announced the technoid suitcase. “Then we will continue on to our destination.”

Flash gripped the suitcase more tightly. “All right, but let’s settle down there fast. This is getting too hot for me!”

There were flashes in the air all around them, and the explosions were deafening to the two earthmen.

The suitcase veered in the air and took off for a nearby rock outcrop that could have been a gentle hill in the smoke and ruin.

They were close to the ground now. Flash saw the half-buried hulks of rusting iron, the snouts of broken cannons buried to the muzzle, the twisted ruins of tank tracks and tank plate protruding from the burned-over ground. It was a graveyard of civilization, the epitaph of man’s inhumanity to man.

They zoomed quickly through a cloud of gunsmoke and turned slightly to approach a clearing at the top of the hill and beyond the outcrop of rock.

“Oh, oh,” said the suitcase. “It’s a machine-gun emplacement.”

Flash stared downward. The cybernaut had identified the position correctly. The machine gun was straddling a rock upthrust and firing through a vee in the rock shelter ahead. The gun was painted green.

“An enemy gun,” said the suitcase. “But have no fear, Colonels.”

Suddenly the side of the suitcase opened and what appeared to be a pair of hand grenades popped out, heading directly for the machine gun.

“How did you do that?” Zarkov gasped.

“I have been programmed for all potentialities,” said the suitcase. “Do not fear, Colonels.”

The grenades had been lobbed exactly in the right direction. One struck the machine-gun barrel and blew up. The other hit the traversing mechanism and exploded in a yellow flash.

The remains of the machine gun lay smoking in the rubble around it.

“Beautiful,” Flash said.

“There is no time for compliments, Aliens. We must settle to ground here.”

“Okay,” said Flash.

The suitcase lowered gently to the ground, and Flash and Zarkov stepped out onto the rocky landscape of the war-torn planet.

The technoid spoke up.

“Release me, Colonel Gordon.”

Flash let go of the handgrip, realizing that Zarkov had been standing beside him and staring at the ruins of the machine gun for several seconds now.

“I shall return immediately. First I must make reconnaissance observations. I have a complex mechanism for direction-finding that will zero in on the enemy War Computer Center.”

“Very well,” said Flash.

“I hope we can count on the little fellow,” said Zarkov. “I’m becoming kind of attached to him. Or it.”

“There is no category in my programming for emotional responses, Aliens. Please do not expect any answer or comment on my part. My programming is devoid of sentiment. Goodbye for now.”

The suitcase zoomed into the air and vanished in seconds in a cloud of haze that steamed up from the mined rocks near them.

Zarkov sank down behind a flat rock and leaned against it. Flash joined him.

“Well,” said Zarkov with a wry laugh, “we wanted to get over to the enemy side.”

“And here we are.”

“I don’t know. Was General Ild so awful that you couldn’t stand her? I think she would have been very nice.”

“I still don’t know what turned her off,” said Flash ruefully. “One minute she was gung-ho for me—and the next she wanted to send me into exile.”

“Now you begin to analyze the romance,” Zarkov snorted. “You think that bunkroom of ours was bugged?”

Flash stared. “I’ll bet it was, come to think of it. She knew Dale’s name, and I never told her what it was. She must have been tuned in to us. I never would have been so candid if I’d known we were wired.”

“Too late now,” sighed Zarkov. “Don’t feel too bad about it, pal. I never could quite go for that elegant cuisine they had rigged for us. Yuck.”

“Reconstituted seawater,” sighed Flash. “What I wouldn’t do for a good plate of ham and eggs, southern style!”

“You’re making me faint,” Zarkov closed his eyes.

The ground trembled.

Flash turned just as an enormous explosion blew scraps of metal and flames high into the air not a hundred yards from them.

“What was that?” Zarkov wondered.

“I hope it wasn’t Em-One, or we’re never going to get out of this no-man’s-land alive.”

“I wonder where he went, anyway?”

“Maybe he’s gone back to General Ild. Maybe we were supposed to be dumped here in the middle of Dante’s Inferno.”

Zarkov shook his head. “This could be my worst nightmare yet. Why don’t I wake up and remember I ate veal scallopini last night?”

“No chance. I’m in this with you. I don’t even like veal scallopini.”

“You don’t visit the right restaurants. You’re a hamburger-and-french-fries man.”

“I’m a steak-and-home-fries man,” Flash protested.

There was a rustling in the haze that had drifted around them. Flash tried to see through the murk.

“Is there something over there?” he asked Zarkov.

Zarkov peered and squinted. “I don’t see anything—at least, I don’t think I do.”

There was a moment’s silence.

From behind them came a sudden sound.

“Spies,” a metallic voice said. “Despicable spies.”

“Huh?” Zarkov grunted.

“What was that?” Flash asked.

Both had turned around and were staring into the smoky air.

“Prepare to die,” said the metallic voice again. “Dirty, rotten, unprincipled spies.”

“What the hell?” cried Zarkov.

The earth shook as another bomb exploded nearby. The rush of air from the explosion instantly blew all the smoke pall away and Flash and Zarkov found themselves staring into the enormous muzzle end of a giant cannon.

“My God!” Zarkov choked.

The cannon was mounted on four mechanical legs, jointed like copper plumbing pipes. At the bottom of the jointed legs were steel grippers like feet that clung to rocks and punched holes in the dirt to stabilize the movable cannon.

Above the muzzle of the cannon were bulging mounts resembling human eyeballs, inside which Flash could see tiny bright lights blinking on and off, as if the bulbs shielded computer controls relaying the image outside the “eyes” back to a remote console.

And then, at the working end of the cannon barrel, where in a normal earth operation the gunner would be seated in an adjustable chair, Flash saw an oval, egg-shaped formation of steel that had one light at the top and a wide irising orifice at the bottom.

It had flexible cable legs, too, and arms of the same material.

“You are Orange spies. Prepare to die, corrupt, deceitful, and perfidious agents of our enemies.”

Zarkov gazed into the sky. “Where are you Em-One, when we need you?”

“We are not spies,” snapped Flash. “We are earthmen who have come to this planet on a mission of friendship.”

“Lies,” snapped the egg-shaped cybernaut. “All lies. You are Orange agents sent to infiltrate our defenses and destroy us. You will not.”

The tiny right arm of the ovoid cybernaut reached out and gripped the firing mechanism of the gun with its metal claws and pulled back.

“Fire,” the metallic voice said in its deadly monotone.

CHAPTER 13

The explosion that came was an anticlimax. Both Flash and Zarkov had stared in stunned horror at the enormous mouth of the cannon—a cannon barrel into which both men could fit easily—unable to move away from it.

Poof!

A lot of smoke and dust puffed out of the cannon barrel, rolling over the two earthmen. A smell of cordite contaminated the air.

“What the hell?” cried Zarkov. “The shell was a dud.”

“Incorrect conclusion from the evidence at hand,” said a familiar voice from the rear of the cannon. “I have fulfilled my program of destruction on the operator of this weapon of the enemy.”

Flash peered around the edge of the cannon and saw the suitcase sitting at the rear of the gun near the breech block.

“Em-One!” Flash said. “I thought you’d gone to locate the target.”

“Exactly. So I have done so, as I was programmed. In returning to you, I came upon the cannon with its operator preparing to blast you to bits. I simply overcame the enemy cybernaut with my magnetic stunray and shorted out the electronic gun controls. When the cybby operator pulled the lanyard, nothing happened except an explosion of the primer.”

“Not bad,” Flash admitted.

“I repeat, you have nothing to fear. I am programmed for your survival and safety. We will win.”

Zarkov muttered, “He’s getting to be an obnoxious little rascal, you know?”

“A little bit of him goes a long way,” Flash agreed.

“Value judgments are received and shunted into the neutralizer cells of my memory banks, Colonels. They have no effect on my performance.”

“Translation,” Zarkov said. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

“Let’s get on to the target, Em-One,” said Flash, studying the enormous cannon that had been ready to kill them.

“First I must be sure I have neutralized the cybby I hit with my stunray.”

“Well, get on with it,” Flash ordered impatiently.

Em-One said, “Affirmitive, Colonel Gordon. I have examined the cybby with my stroboscopic perforay eye. His inner controls are temporarily out of commission. We can continue on our mission.”

“Which direction, Em-One?” Zarkov asked.

The smoke was still swirling about them, screening them off from attack by air or ground.

“You will conceal yourself in the barrel of the cannon, Aliens,” said the suitcase.

“What?” Flash stared at the cannon’s barrel. “You mean climb into the inside of the barrel?”

“That is correct.”

“What if someone fires the damned thing?” Zarkov asked.

“I am not programmed for infantile humor,” snapped the technoid. “It is a one-in-a-million chance that such a thing could happen, and a zero chance in the particular sector in which we now find ourselves. It will not happen. Repeat. Negative.”

“Well,” said Zarkov.

“Hurry up. Quickly, lest enemy sensors pick us up. There is plenty of room for both of you in the barrel. I would not have ordered you to do so if I had not calculated your exact girth and weight.”

Zarkov raised an eyebrow at Flash. “Climb in, Flash,” he said. “You heard the orders.”

“Immediately,” said the suitcase. “I detect the approach of a large Green tank not too far from us. If we do not move, my calculations are that we will be on a collision course with the tank and will be discovered.”

“But this is a Green cannon.”

“All tanks are programmed to destroy unidentified objects in haze and smoke. There is sufficient haze and smoke present to make our presence here a potential danger. Hasten, please.”

“Then what do we do?” Zarkov asked, climbing in after Flash and lying beside him in the barrel.

“We simply ride the cannon to Green headquarters.”

“How far is it?” Flash asked.

“A long distance. But it will be a safe ride. I am programmed for your security. Have no fear. We will win.”

Zarkov shook his head. “Miserable little toy!”

“I am not a toy. I am a sophisticated cybernaut with mental capacities almost twice that of the average human being. You are safe with me.”

The cannon began moving over the rocks and debris of the battlefield. There was so much haze that Flash and Zarkov could not make out the activity on the ground. There was, however, a great deal of rumbling and thumping, and an occasional explosion that signified that another blockbuster had strewn rock detritus about.

“Incredible,” muttered Flash as he peered out the muzzle of the cannon and watched the gun move along the ground on its four joined pipe legs.

“Well, it looks like Em-One is right. We’re going to walk the rest of the way over the battlefield!”

“Correction,” said the metallic voice from the operator’s seat. “My optic scanners have observed an entrance in a rock pile. I sense that this is the port to a cybernaut repair station.”

“Don’t go in there,” cried Flash. “We’ll be discovered!”

“Not necessarily a correct assumption, Colonel Gordon. My reasoning center concludes that there is a possibility we can seek transport there at a much faster rate than on the battlefield. Besides, there will be less chance of being struck by a bomb or missile. The danger of discovery is clearly evident, but outweighed by the threat of accidental death on the battlefield.”

“Forget it,” growled Zarkov. “You’re in charge.”

“Affirmitive,” said the metallic voice of the technoid.

“How are you going to open the door?” asked Flash.

“Magnetically,” said the voice, and Flash and Zarkov watched the steel door slowly open in the slope of rocks in front of them.

Soon they were moving down a rock-walled corridor that had been blasted hastily out of the earth. After a suitable interval, they were winding their way into the bowels of the planet along a steeply descending passageway also hewn from raw ground.

Then, suddenly, they emerged into an enormous underground chamber where vehicles of all kinds—all painted green—were assembled for repair by dozens of enemy technoids.

The technoids were crawling over the vehicles, intent upon their work. Flash saw some in the shape of screwdrivers, in the shape of hammer heads, in the shape of saws, chisels, clippers, swarming over tanks, cannons, vehicles, and smaller weapons that he did not even recognize.

“Wow!” cried Zarkov. “Would you look at those military vehicles! What I wouldn’t give to spend a day or two looking this war museum over!”

“I’d just as soon get back to Earth, myself,” Flash retorted.

“Well, yeah,” said Zarkov. “I suppose that would be a better option. But if we have to stay here—”

“Attention, Aliens. I will move you close to the underground speedway. Do not let yourself be seen as we pass by the technoids.”

“Right,” said Flash in a low voice.

“Where’s the underground speedway?” Zarkov wondered. Then, as he spoke, both he and Flash could see the chute at the end of the big repair room. And in view in the chute was a fairly small vehicle that resembled an old-fashioned stock car, except that it was designed like a rocket and had the wheels covered.

The cannon moved over the floor of the repair shop and proceeded toward the chute. Flash punched Zarkov in the side and pointed ahead.

“A couple of technoid security guards.”

Zarkov nodded.

“I see them,” said the metallic voice in a low tone. “Never fear. I am programmed to protect you. We will pass them by.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Zarkov.

“I am not programmed for falsehood or fallacious information,” said the voice. “Now please observe silence.”

They moved past the security guards, whose bright lights blinked and blinked at the cannon, and then turned to blink at something else. The two technoids did not approach the cannon at all.

The gun moved past the entrance and down an incline toward a long cylindrical tube that ran horizontally through the rock underground. There were several of the small vehicles waiting at the way stop.

On the forward side of one of them, the letters HQ were written.

The cannon moved over to that one.

“I am moving you close to the correct underground car,” the technoid whispered. “Use the cannon for cover, and climb down into the vehicle marked HQ. We will then pilot it through the subterranean route to the Green Headquarters.”

“Right on,” said Zarkov, and waited for the cannon to stabilize. He jumped down, helped Flash, and the two of them grabbed the suitcase from the operator’s seat and took it into the vehicle.

As they climbed in, they glanced around to see if they had been observed.

They had not.

Zarkov slammed the metal doors shut. They found themselves in a small cabin not unlike a rocket’s, with two seats, equipped with safety belts, and a console in front of them displaying a myriad of controls.

The suitcase immediately opened at one end, and coils of flexible cable emerged, gripping the controls with the claws at the end.

“As you see you do not have to drive this vehicle,” the technoid observed. “I am programmed sufficiently to maneuver it where it must go. Sit back, Aliens, and leave the driving to me.”

“I’m glad I don’t have to drive it,” said Flash. “How does it work, anyway?”

“It is an aircar propelled by an air current expelled from the aft tubes. That air moves the vehicle forward. Air expelled from ventral tubes keeps the vehicle from touching the ground. The air is forced out through the exhaust vents by the force of steam behind it, caused by the instantaneous heating of trapped moisture to the boiling point. The heat which produces this rise in temperature is afforded by a miniature nuclear reactor encapsuled in the inner block of the vehicle’s engine.”

“Sorry I asked,” said Flash.

“Fascinating,” said Zarkov. “Wish I had a pencil and paper to take notes.”

“I am directing this vehicle to the storeroom near the enemy War Computer, Aliens.”

“Very good,” said Flash. “You go right ahead!” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “These seats are pretty comfortable for a subway system, Doc. You know?”

“Beats anything I’ve been in on Earth,” Zarkov admitted.

They zoomed through the subterranean tube at an incredible speed. Flash could see way stops flashing past. On one of them there were three technoid security agents with weapons standing there looking at them.

“Attention, Aliens,” snapped the suitcase. “We have been identified as enemy passengers in the subterranean system of the Greens.”

“How do you know?” Zarkov asked.

“My micro-perforay-eye sees a reception committee awaiting us at the next station. We were detected as we passed the last way stop.”

“How did they do it?” Flash asked.

“You naturally emanate human wave characteristics,” the metallic voice explained patiently. “Human beings are forbidden in the recesses of Cybernaut Levels One and Two—those are the places where cybernauts manage the war and technoids fight the war. Hidden in the cannon barrel, your emanations were confused with the emanations of the steel in the cannon. But in this vehicle, you were observed on the vidscreens of the security technoids in the speed transit system.”

“If you say so,” sighed Zarkov.

“Idiom not understandable,” said the metallic voice.

“Forget it,” said Flash. “What are we going to do?”

“I am programmed for any eventuality. We are simply going to escape.”

“Escape?” Zarkov echoed. “How? We’re trapped in the ground!”

“But even in the ground there are ways,” said the voice.

The vehicle slammed to a stop as the aft air suddenly stopped rushing out of it. Only the ventral exhaust kept the craft from touching the bottom of the tube.

“Release the catches on the top hatch,” ordered the voice.

Flash reached up and he and Zarkov opened a hatch at the top of the vehicle.

“Now climb out, and take me with you.”

Zarkov grabbed the suitcase and followed Flash up on the top of the vehicle. Once there, Flash could see that the vehicle had stopped right next to a metal ladder that led up the side of the tube to a round escape hatch. A sign mounted in the tube said: EMERGENCY UNIT.

“Climb up,” said the metallic voice.

“What about the vehicle?” asked Flash, looking down the ladder past Zarkov at the immobile aircar.

“I have programmed the controls to take over for me. In a moment it will continue down the passageway. While the enemy pursues the car, we will make our escape up the emergency tunnel.”

“Neat,” said Zarkov.

The aircar suddenly trembled and swooshed away along the tube in the same direction it had been traveling before it stopped.

“Now where to?” Flash asked.

“Keep climbing,” snapped the suitcase. “Up, up, up. It is not too far.”

Flash climbed and kept looking back to be sure Zarkov and the suitcase were with him. Finally he came out into a small steel room resembling a decompression chamber in a submarine. He climbed aside and pulled Zarkov up the last few feet of the ladder.

“Our mission is coming to a close,” chortled the suitcase.

“Here?” Flash asked.

“Success is ours,” the suitcase clattered. “We are very near the War Computer we must destroy.”

“How the hell do you know?” Zarkov asked, glancing around at the very small steel chamber where only one tiny red light glowed for illumination.

“I have been programmed to lead you to the target, Aliens, and I tell you we are very near to it. There is a hatchway here that must be opened.”

“I don’t see it,” said Flash, peering at the steel walls that enclosed them.

“It is cleverly concealed,” the metallic voice replied. “However, it will not resist electromagnetic force. Stand aside, Aliens. Let a competently programmed and equipped cybernaut show you how it is done.”

“Insufferable little monster,” growled Zarkov.

“Tut, tut,” said Flash, gripping Zarkov’s shoulder. “Maybe he can do it.”

“Of course I can,” clattered the voice.

There was a surge of electromagnetic power in the steel caisson inside which they had found themselves, and then one of the sides of the room slowly bulged outward.

“Aliens, my data banks reason that our mission is almost over.”

The hatchway swung out and Flash, Zarkov, and the suitcase stepped out into another room.

The room was crowded with green-uniformed people.

“Correction,” said a harsh voice. “Your mission is over!”

CHAPTER 14

It was a woman who spoke. Flash and Zarkov stood stock-still in the opening of the steel wall as the group of green-uniformed progs stared at them and covered them with rifles and handguns.

The woman was obviously the leader of the group. She was very young, with jet-black hair, green eyes, and a haughty, defiant cast to her head. Her body, which was most shapely, was dressed in bright green material, wrist-length sleeves, a deep V-neck, a wide ornamental belt of gold, and stretch trousers that tapered into soft-leather boots.

She had a jet black band around her throat in which glistened a green stone like an emerald. On her wrists she wore black bands in which were set similar green stones. Her hair was brushed down over her forehead, with the sides sweeping backward over her ears. It was parted on the right side.

She had her hands on her hips as she stared with animosity and contempt at Flash and Zarkov.

Behind her were a half-dozen men, also dressed in green uniforms—long-sleeved shirts, belts, and ankle-length green slacks which fitted into black boots. They were clean-shaven, but wore their black hair in monk’s tonsures, shaved around the ears and on top.

Flash thought immediately that it was the grimmest-looking bunch of human beings he had ever seen in his life. Compared to them, General Ild and the Orange progs were swingers of the happiest sort.

“Congratulations,” the girl said in a soft but firm voice. “You have penetrated Green Headquarters.” Her red mouth flicked into a tiny smile. “Such capable and clever spies deserve a quick, merciful death!”

Flash turned to Zarkov.

“And we will be delighted to give it to you,” the girl continued, moving back a pace while two of the green-uniformed progs stepped forward with the barrels of their weapons only inches from the chests of the earthmen.

“Wait,” Flash said. “This is a mistake.”

“Your only mistake was the assumption you could penetrate the headquarters of Zenohaven with impunity,” snapped the girl.

“No, no,” Flash cried. “We are not spies. We came here to—”

“Bah!” snorted the girl. “We heard you admit your guilt through that steel door.” The girl looked around. “Where is that third party?”

Flash realized she had not recognized the voice of Em-One as that of a technoid. He glanced at Zarkov, who gripped the suitcase in his hand and kept his face blank.

“Third party?” Flash repeated. “There was no third party. Just Dr. Zarkov and I. Actually, we’re not Errans citizens at all. We’re from another planet. Earth. It’s in the solar system which you have just entered.”

The girl’s brows lowered over her beautiful green eyes. “Let’s not waste any time on these,” she called to the progs on either side of her. “Shoot them, boys! They’re miserable, sniveling, whining cowards.”

“No, no!” Flash remonstrated. “It is true that we came here from the territory of Ildhaven.”

The girl’s eyes rested on Flash’s face. “You tell the truth, spy—an odd thing for an Orange agent to do. We have had you in the scanner since you landed in our battlefield.”

“Yes. We admit we came from General Ild. But we came not to do you harm, but to escape from the Oranges. They are far too aggressive for us. Always war, war, war—”

“A hateful enemy,” scowled the girl. “But you do not fool me, spy. Kill them!”

“Immediately, General Zena,” said one of the green-uniformed men, raising his rifle.

“General Zena!” snapped Flash commandingly, moving toward her.

She waved off her progs. “Well?”

“We have come on a mission of peace,” said Flash, glancing aside at Zarkov warningly.

“Peace?” sneered the girl. “You?”

“Since we have been on this strange planet, all we have seen is destruction and ruin. Although our own home planet, Earth, has been torn by such spectacles for many years of its existence, we know you are on the verge of ruin here on this planet. Without war you could grow crops, raise cattle, build cities, live a life of happiness and joy, and retire in contentment.”

General Zena frowned. “It was once that way on our own planet,” she mused. “Before they destroyed the books, it was written that peace and quiet and prosperity were the ways of life among us.”

One of the green-uniformed progs pushed forward. “Don’t believe him, General Zena! He’s lying—it’s enemy propaganda! Geared to make us put down our arms and stop fighting. It is simply a tactic to give the hated Oranges a chance to destroy us.”

The girl glowered at Flash. “You are a very convincing speaker, spy, but I do not believe you.”

“Without all this war,” Flash continued doggedly, “you could put this metal into machines of commerce, you could live on the surface of the planet, you could enjoy life. Instead of pills you could eat real food—meat, fish, vegetables. You could grow crops, as I said before. My friend and I who come from another planet could teach you how to live the life of the gods!”

“Pah!” snorted the girl. “It sounds pretty sissified to me. Where would the cybernauts fit it?”

“They could do your chores.”

“As in history,” the girl mused. “Well, maybe there is a possibility,” she said, turning indecisively to her advisors. “What do you think, Zed?”

The tallest of the green-uniformed progs shook his head. “It is propaganda, General Zena. Do not believe the silver-tongued rogue. He is implanting passivity in you, under the guise of peace. Then, when you are lulled to tractability, he takes over, and surrenders us all to General Ild!”

“Lies!” shouted Flash. “I am speaking the truth. My companion and I are earthmen. We do not come from Errans. Can’t you tell by my hair—my companion’s beard? We are different from you. We are from another world.”

“You are different,” said General Zena, watching him out of her green eyes. “And there is a different kind of energy emanating from you.” She frowned. “Actually, Zed, I feel rather strange about this man. Hmm. I wonder if it could be true that there is a possibility we could end this war and live in peace?”

“Not while the Oranges live!” snapped Zed. “We’ve got to wipe them out—and then we will live in peace.”

“It is highly unlikely that we will wipe them out, Zed,” said General Zena haughtily. “You know the cybbies will not allow the war to stop, even if we do conquer the Oranges. The only way to gain peace is to take over the war from the cybbies and then sue for peace with the Oranges.”

“Impossible,” growled Zed. “In no way can that be done. It is mandatory that we continue fighting.”

“If you keep fighting,” said Flash, “you’ll destroy yourselves in the end. Don’t you understand?”

General Zena turned to her progs. “Leave us, will you please? I want to talk to these visitors.”

Zed shook his head. “We won’t leave you unarmed, General Zena. Even though you’re a General, we don’t trust you that much. You might be persuaded by this skilled orator to surrender to him. And then he would kill us all for General Ild.”

General Zena stood up to Flash and stared up into his face. “I need proof of your intentions.”

“Proof?” Flash smiled and reached out to take General Zena’s shoulders in his hands.

Programmer Zed shifted the rifle and began to squeeze on the trigger.

“Is this proof enough?”

He drew the girl toward him to kiss her.

At the last instant her eyes widened and her mouth opened. Flash pulled her to him and kissed her firmly. She beat against his chest for a moment with her fists, but then slowly relaxed and drew her arms around his shoulders.

“Yeow!” yelled Zarkov.

Flash broke from General Zena and held her at arm’s length. What was wrong with Doc?

Zarkov was staring at the suitcase which was on the floor. “The damned thing turned red-hot in my hands,” he told Flash. “I had to drop it.”

“Traitor!” screamed the suitcase. “Traitor! I will report this treason of Colonel Gordon’s to General Ild.”

Zarkov backed away. “The damned thing went crazy!”

Flash reached out and grabbed the handle, but it was ablaze with electrical current. He drew his hand away sharply.

Instantly the bottom of the suitcase opened and flexible cable legs extended, lifting the cybernaut from the ground.

“Death to the enemy,” the suitcase shouted in its metallic voice.

“It’s a cybernaut!” yelled Zed.

“An undercover technoid,” another prog cried.

The suitcase raced away, turned, and swept the entire group of green-uniformed progs with a blast of electronic stunray. There was a crackle of lightning and an echoing thunder. Flash and Zarkov went to the floor. Since Flash was so near General Zena, he knocked her down with him.

“Viva the Oranges! Down with the Greens! I go to destroy the War Computer Brain!” shouted the suitcase. There was a whirring sound, a buzzing, and the suitcase started down the corridor.

Flash rose quickly.

Already General Zena was on her feet. “Stop that cybernaut!” she screamed. She had drawn a handgun from her waist belt and leveled it at the moving suitcase.

Flash grabbed my arm. “Give me that! You’ll muff the shot! It’s carrying a powerful bomb!”

General Zena struggled with him a moment, and then relinquished her hold on the handgun.

Zarkov was on his feet. The green-uniformed entourage lay on the floor, paralyzed by the technoid’s blast of stunner electrons.

“Stop that robot!” screamed General Zena. “It’s headed for the computer room!”

Flash steadied himself on his knees, leveled the handgun onto the elbow of his left arm, and peered through the sights at the suitcase in the corridor. The sights of the weapon was strange to him, but he took a chance and fired.

The first shot missed.

The suitcase leaped into the air, steadied, and sent a ray directly back toward Flash.

“Death to the traitors, Aliens! Death to human beings! Death to you, Aliens!”

“The damned little monster,” growled Zarkov, getting to his feet. “He was programmed to bring us in here and destroy us. That’s what happened—General Ild double-crossed us.”

“Right,” snapped Flash. “Relax. I’ll get him.”

The suitcase vanished from sight.

General Zena shivered as she stood next to Flash. “He went down the corridor. Hurry!”

She led Flash along the passage and when they got to the corner, she pointed. Already Flash could see the suitcase almost at the last door.

“That’s the entrance to the War Computer Room,” screamed General Zena. “Somebody stop that thing!”

Flash leaned against the wall and steadied the weapon on the technoid.

He could hear an ominous ticking coming from the suitcase. The suitcase was in front of the steel door into the Computer Room, struggling with the door. The door would not budge.

The suitcase shivered and one side opened. Flash was blinded by a sudden ray of yellow light that shot out of the suitcase.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes.

The steel door began to slide open. Flash could see the suitcase pushing it open and making for the stairs that led down into the War Computer Room.

“Stop!” he shouted.

He squeezed the trigger.

The wall near the door disintegrated.

“The sights are not zeroed in,” snapped Flash. He squeezed the trigger and fired again.

He could see the brilliant flash the moment he had finished. There was repercussion that laid him flat against the floor, sprawling ten feet from where he had been when he fired. A scream erupted from General Zena. Zarkov was thrown back against the wall in the whoosh of smoke that billowed down the corridor.

The steel door was wrenched from its frame and sailed through the air into the War Computer Room to crash onto the floor. Smoke and fire swept through the corridors. Pieces of concrete aggregate and reinforcing rods erupted into the ceiling, tearing out parts of the lighting system.

Fire burst out in the War Computer Room, igniting several of the black-box controls of the War Computer.

Flash, his hair singed and his face covered with ash and soot, crawled backwards to General Zena where she lay on the floor, sobbing and choking.

Zarkov was on his knees, shaking his head and pounding his ear, trying to hear again.

“What did you do?” General Zena asked in a faint voice.

“I saved your lousy War Computer,” said Flash.

“But the technoid—” she gasped.

“He was getting to be a damned nuisance anyway,” Zarkov growled, looking through the smoke and flames at what remained of the doorway to the War Computer Room.

CHAPTER 15

After the initial shock, General Zena was all action. She ran back to the programmers, who were just coming out of stunned paralysis, rising on their knees, shaking their heads, and groping about for their weapons.

“Follow me,” she shouted. “Round up the cybbies. The War Computer was bombed. We’ve got to do an in-depth survey of the damage.”

Programmer Zed began helping his companions to their feet, and finally they were all trotting after General Zena. When she came to the still-smoking entrance, she saw that the blond-haired stranger was staring down into the large chamber where the War Computer was positioned.

General Zena recalled that she had been stunned when this rather outlandish proggy agent had tried to kiss her. Or, for that matter, had he kissed her? So shaken was she by the ensuing excitement and the attempted bombing of the big computer that she had completely forgotten what had really happened there in the corridor.

He had kissed her. Now she remembered. And it was the most upsetting kiss of her life—she, who had been no stranger to kisses and caresses.

Deliberately she banished all memory of it from her mind and waved her hand in the direction of the big computer chamber.

“Come on, Zed. You and the rest of the proggies, get down there immediately. Zed, send Zaj to the barracks to round up all the cybbies there. I want a complete turn-out of every cybby now on the machines. I want this mess cleaned up. Where’s Cybby One?”

A tall, coiled cybernaut, almost as tall as she was, ambled out of the smoke toward her. “Here, General Zena.”

“It’s all your responsibility now, Cybby One. The corridor must be cleaned up, and any damage to the computer banks repaired instantly.”

Cybby One was an insolent, over-programmed, over-sophisticated beast, General Zena knew. But he was the best of the lot, the best cybernaut ever produced by the Green prog staff. But he could be very trying at times.

“I receive the orders, General Zena. I am acting on them.”

General Zena turned away.

“However,” the metallic voice of Cybby One clattered, “you realize the security breach will be investigated by a full board of the Cybernaut War Council. It was through your breach of discipline and lack of resourcefulness that the technoid bomber infiltrated the War Nerve Center.”

General Zena flared up. “Save all that for later, will you Cybby One? I’m tired of your eternal bickering and blame-placing.”

“I act upon your orders, General Zena,” said the android and stalked away.

General Zena climbed down the stairs into the big chamber where the giant computer was installed. She walked along its massive front and studied it carefully. She was followed by several of the proggies who were taking notes on pads of yellow-lined polyvinylpap.

On the steel ladders and catwalks surrounding the installation, cybbies were clambering up and down, probing into the inner workings of the cells with their optic perforay-scanners. Scores of technoids were whipping about, delving into parts of the machinery where the explosion might have sent something awry.

General Zena turned to the proggies. “Okay. I think it’s under control. We’d better leave it to the cybbies or there’ll be an investigation.”

“Right, General Zena.”

They trooped out.

In the corridor General Zena found the blond-haired stranger standing there waiting.

“Your little maneuver didn’t work,” said General Zena.

“Didn’t work?” the stranger repeated in surprise. “I saved your computer, didn’t I?”

General Zena felt uncomfortable. Those blue eyes were boring into hers. She looked over the big man’s shoulder and saw the other bearded man approaching.

She turned to the blond. “Let’s get out of here. I have to talk to you before we execute you.”

“Execute?”

“For espionage and intent to sabotage.”

“But I saved your whole war machine!” cried the blond giant. “What kind of gratitude is that?”

There was a commotion behind her. Programmer Zed moved forward, holding a disintegrator rifle in his hands.

“Is this enemy Alien bothering you, General Zena?”

General Zena turned and stared at Zed. He was a fawning little pipsqueak, she thought suddenly, no match at all for the blond man or the bearded one. “Oh, beat it, Zed. Get back to your cybbies and see if you can pick up the pieces where we left them.”

Zed grimaced. He bowed, his little tonsure gleaming in the overhead lights. General Zena felt like kicking him.

Then he left.

She turned to the blond man. “You and the bearded one. We will go to my chambers.”

The man shrugged. “Call me Flash,” he said. “It’s my name. Flash Gordon. This is Doctor Zarkov.”

“Call me General Zena,” said the girl. She stared at the blond prog again and felt weak in the knees. Then she remembered the kiss and turned abruptly away.

“Come, Aliens,” she said, and walked away from them.

General Zena had been married for two years to one of the top proggies in the country of Zenohaven. He had been a good husband for a general—the mantle she had inherited from her aunt. He had been head programmer for the entire cybby unit that was running the third army. The first and second were in the charge of a master computer.

He had been killed in a freak accident. One of the new cybernaut models had short-circuited accidentally during an exercise and had fused into the console panel at which it was working. General Zena’s husband had unfortunately been at work on the cybernaut at the time with a screwdriver, and had been vanished in a puff of purple smoke.

And that was that.

General Zena had had no time after that for romance. She had been busy ever since running the war. The Oranges had retaliated after a disastrous rout seven months ago, and they had been pushing the Greens very hard. It was a rough business, and it was going to get rougher.

She strode along, glancing now and then into the doors of the corridors where the proggies were at work on new cybernauts and new war machines. The proggy in charge of the technoid section had come up with a real secret weapon that it was hoped would wipe out the Oranges forever. The details were top secret, even from General Zena. It was best she not know until the technoid was complete, anyway. There was too much looseness in security.

“Here we are,” she said finally, and led the two tall strangers into her own chambers.

She watched them as they came in and stared about at the furnishings. She was proud of the room. Along one wall there was an enormous vidscreen now at rest. The other walls were blued steel polished to perfection.

The chairs were saddle-shaped metal perches, far more suited to the human body than the seats in a subterranean vehicle, and the couches were metal saddle-seats mounted on coiled springs. Everything was made of shining metal.

“Do you like it?”

“Fine,” said the blond.

“Flash? Yes, this must be Flash Gordon,” reflected General Zena.

“Great,” said the bearded man.

“And this one is Dr. Zarkov,” General Zena confirmed silently.

“Now,” said General Zena, turning to Flash, “we were in the midst of a discussion when that bomb went off, were we not?”

Flash turned red. “We were in the middle of a kiss, General Zena,” he said boldly.

She moved toward him, draping her arms around his shoulders, and pulling herself closer to him. “We were. It was an unfortunate interruption.”

Flash smiled, glancing aside at Zarkov. Zarkov turned away discreetly.

“Now,” said General Zena. “We continue the discussion.”

She planted her lips on his and pulled him tightly to her. She could feel the strength of his muscles, and then he was kissing her fully, and she seemed to be carried away into space somewhere.

After a moment he let her go.

“Oh,” she said, staring up at him. His blue eyes were twinkling at her—twinkling! He liked it, too!

“Now if that isn’t proof that we’re friends, I don’t know how else I can show it,” he said with a grin. “First I save your War Computer and then I show you I have only friendship to offer.”

“The friendship,” said General Zena, slightly out of breath, “is obviously genuine. At least, it is a cut above the average offered by my own personnel. Yes, the General is pleased.”

“Now, then,” said Flash. “Let’s forget about that execution you threatened us with.”

General Zena slid her arms around Flash’s shoulders again and lifted herself to him, kissing him on the mouth again. This time her eyes closed and she was thinking about flying through space and floating into weightlessness.

Then she was looking up into his face. “Perhaps we could postpone the execution—as I am convinced at this point that you are not an enemy of the state. Or of me, either.”

Flash smiled.

“And I permit you to join us in our death struggle against the hated Oranges!”

“I have another plan,” Flash said. “Instead of war, why not peace?”

General Zena frowned. “But the cybbies would be up in arms. It is their war. Not ours. And our entire economy is based on what the cybbies and the technoids do. We have often wondered . . .”

“Perhaps I can convince you, General Zena.”

“You have gone a great deal of the way toward convincing me already, Flash, my love,” said General Zena with a smile. “And I look forward to seeing how much more of that road we can travel.”

Flash smiled.

“But right now—”

The bearded man suddenly held up his right hand in a salute. “We will join you in your struggle with the Oranges,” he said in a strong voice. “It was never in our minds to shrink from our duty.”

General Zena smiled. “Ah. That is more like it. That is the kind of loyalty I like.” She turned to Flash and made a face at him. “You see, my love, how it is to be a good warrior.”

The blond giant had turned to his companion in utter disbelief. “What is this, Doc? Are you crazy? Have you lost your marbles?”

General Zena frowned. “What is this ‘marbles’?”

“His memory banks are foiled,” snapped Flash.

“I do not think so. He seems quite sane to me.”

The bearded man was talking out of the side of his mouth to his friend. “Ixnay on the alktay, Flash. I’ve got an emeschay!”

“Huh?”

General Zena touched Flash’s shoulder and turned to Zarkov. “I’m afraid I don’t understand your idiom, Doctor.”

Flash blinked and then smiled warmly at General Zena. “Perhaps he will make sense if he remembers that it takes two to make a war—and it takes two to make a peace.”

“Uttonbay uppay, mate,” said the bearded one, glancing at Flash.

Flash shook his head. “All right. You’ve got the floor. Doc.”

“Yes, Doc,” said General Zena with a smirk. “Talk.”

“I have a fantastic scheme, General Zena. A plan that will bring about total destruction for the hated Oranges.”

“Interesting, if true,” said General Zena. “You will tell me.”

“All right. Here it is. I have in my head a plan for a secret weapon that will completely wipe out the enemy.”

“How can I believe this?” General Zena wondered.

“You must take my word for it now. But don’t forget. I bring you technology and know-how from another world. A world that in some ways is in advance of your own world.”

General Zena pouted a moment, thinking. “Well, I like to hear you talk, Doc.” She giggled. “And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to let you prove it. The execution is off. You will not die tomorrow. I will let you build your weapon and try it out. If it works, you have earned your life. If it fails, you die. The same is true of your companion.”

“Me?” Flash asked.

“You.” General Zena smiled. “However, you are in a slightly different category from your friend. Perhaps if all things work out between you and me, my romantic friend, you will not die quite so soon.”

Flash turned to Zarkov ruefully. “We’re not off the hook yet, Doc.”

“It appears not,” said Zarkov thoughtfully.

“I think you’re nuts, if you ask me. These two countries are both so war-crazy nothing can stop either side.”

“I am a scientist, Flash Gordon, and I have one of the best brains on Earth.”

General Zena put her arm around Flash and pointed to the door. “Out you go, Doc.” She giggled again at the sound of the word. “I will inform Prog Zed to give you the fullest cooperation not only from the proggies but from the cybbies and the technoids as well. We will call it Project Illkay!”

Zarkov looked stunned.

Flash raised an eyebrow.

“Fools,” snapped General Zena. “You think we do not have language breakers on Errans? How do you think we can converse this way so easily with an alien race?”

General Zena hugged Flash.

Zarkov turned red.

“Now get with your emeschay, Dr. Zarkov, and I wish you much luck.”

Zarkov, head hanging, left the chambers. General Zena turned to Flash and smiled brightly.

“Now we go to work on our project, my love.”

CHAPTER 16

The underground laboratory was deserted now except for the two men inside it. Dr. Hans Zarkov glanced at the ceiling where the indirect light filtered down, at the walls where vidscreens were mounted but which were inoperative now, and at the benches and tables full of transistors, resistors, condensers, wires, and electronic equipment of all kinds.

He was pacing furiously, glancing at this and that, and storming about at his companion. The companion was Programmer Zed, dressed as always in his green uniform. The prog was watching Zarkov with an amused air, silently taking notes on a pad in his hand as Zarkov caustically waved his arms about and growled orders in his resonant voice.

“Okay, and I want all that old-fashioned gear out of here, you understand that, Zed? Out! I don’t know how you guys ever managed to build a cybernaut, much less make the damned thing work. You’re using equipment that’s been outmoded on Earth for eons.”

The prog looked up mildly. “As I told you, Alien Zarkov, this lab has been out of operation for at least twenty years. You said you wanted a work area which would be out of the general line of activity. With the war on and the cybbies wandering about—”

“Right, right!” boomed Zarkov, spinning on his heels and glowering at the prog. “We can’t afford to have those damned machines spying on us.”

Programmer Zed nodded. “This laboratory is ideal, then. Internal-surveillance scanners were not introduced until after this lab was put out of operation. According to the plans, there are no internal scanners here by which the cybbies can oversee what we’re doing.”

“Security is essential,” boomed Zarkov, slapping one fist in the other palm.

“Yes, sir,” said the prog.

“Now, where’s that storeroom you told me was attached to this lab?”

“Here, Alien Zarkov,” said the prog, pointing to a door at the end of the large work area.

Zarkov opened it. The space inside was filled with old metal containers and piles of burned-out condensers and broken wire and heaps of metal.

“I want all this mess shipped out, Zed,” snapped Zarkov. “Got that?”

The prog wrote it down. “Right. No problem.”

“I want this storeroom spotless. Hear me?”

“Right,” said Zed.

Zarkov entered and pushed aside a pile of junk. He stared about at the walls and ceiling.

“Okay. And when it’s empty, I want it locked up and I want the only key. Do you read me, Zed?”

“Yes, sir,” said the prog.

“Okay.” Zarkov gave his fierce black beard a tug as he glanced around for the last time. “Have you got all that equipment down?”

“I’ve made a list, Alien Zarkov. I’ll have the material delivered within the hour.”

“Good,” said Zarkov. He was staring at the blank vidscreens along the walls. “Zed?”

“Yes, Alien Zarkov?”

“Call me Doc, will you? That ‘Alien’ stuff gives me the creeps.”

“All right, Doc.”

Zarkov grinned. “Now, let’s assume you’re a cybby. Right?”

Zed shrugged. “So?”

“You want to bug this lab. Right?”

“But you said—”

“Never mind what I said. Just put yourself in a cyb’s shoes. You want to find out what we’re doing here. Right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. Where would you put your optic bug?”

Zed frowned. He glanced around at the ceiling and the walls. “Well,” he drawled slowly. “I suppose the best place to work from would be that far corner.” He pointed. “The other corners are ruled out because you’ve got the ventilation port at one end, the air-conditioning vent at the other, and the heating unit in the third. They all cause a lot of vibration and interference.”

Zarkov grinned. “Good, Zed. That’s what I wanted to know.”

“I’d put it there, then. So?”

“Add one unit to that list of yours. One optic bug. We’ll put it in ourselves. And then let them discover it.”

Zed shook his head. “I don’t understand at all, Doc.”

“I realize that. That’s why you’re working for me, Zed.”

Zed quirked an eyebrow at Zarkov.

“Okay, now get packing,” ordered Zarkov. “We’ve got a lot of work to do and time’s awasting.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Earth idiom,” said Zarkov. “It means there is no time to lose.”

“Doc, on Errans we call that a cliché.”

Zarkov glared at him.

The material Zarkov ordered was delivered into the old laboratory within two hours, including the optic bug. With Zed’s help, Zarkov installed the bug and then tied the bug into one of the main lines of the surveillance scanner console.

“Feed out some info to the progs, Zed,” said Zarkov. “I want the cybbies to know about this within the hour. Got me?”

“Feed out some info?” Zed frowned. “You mean you want me to tell another programmer about the bug?”

“Yes. Somebody who can leak it to the cybbies.”

“But who?”

“Now there’s got to be someone among the progs who’s working for the cybbies,” growled Zarkov, scowling at Zed’s denseness.

“I suppose there is,” mused Zed. “We’ve always suspected Programmer Zyug. But—”

“Get the rumors going, Zed. About the secret weapon we’re building in Lab Resurrect. Right? The cybbies will be dying to find out what we’re doing. And they’ll eventually discover that optic bug.”

“I see. You want them to keep us under surveillance.”

“You bet your life,” said Zarkov.

“But—?”

“I want them to keep the lab under surveillance. Because”—he lowered his voice discreetly—“we aren’t going to be working in it at all. We’re working in that supply room next door.”

Zed’s eyes lighted up. “Aha!”

“And if anyone finds that out, Zed, I’m going to feed you to the cybbies!”

“Don’t worry, Doc,” Zed beamed. “I like it.”

“We’ll set up a dummy table in there and fiddle-faddle around with some idiotic rig. You know?”

Zed laughed. “A cover weapon.”

“You’ve got it, Zed-baby.”

Programmer Zed’s estimate of Proggy Zyug was accurate. Within hours the optic bug was in operation. Without letting the cybbies on the eye know they were aware of the surveillance, Zarkov and Zed tested the electronic capacitance of the bug and discovered it was definitely on.

With great industry, Zarkov and Zed set up a wild-looking piece of machinery on the table in full view of the optic bug. And the two men kept babbling to each other in terms that were not too far out but which were quite baffling to the observers.

“Now we’re going to produce an electrostatic shield here,” Zarkov explained. “I want a shunt-off system introduced just before the final phase of the operative system. For backup, I’d like an inductive coil that feeds on the instigator control.”

Zed kept nodding intelligently. “Yes, sir. I’ll get that right now, sir.”

And so it went.

Occasionally Zarkov would vanish into the storeroom at the far end of the lab. Inside the storeroom he would bustle about and bang things around. Then he would come out and join Zed at the phony machine.

And then Zed would go into the storeroom, and stay a while. Only for short times were both of them in the storeroom, so as not to excite comment from the surveillance team on the optic scan.

Zarkov made it as brief as he could.

“Okay, here’s what we’re doing, Zed. I’m building a transmitting device to send radio signals to the War Computer of the People of the Orange.”

“But the War Computer is too far from here for us to beam a message. Doc,” said Zed thoughtfully.

“I know. I’ll take care of that. Now. You’ve had your intelligence technoids go over that machine, I’m sure.”

“Yes, Doc,” said Zed. “We know how it’s made. In fact, we borrowed some of their ideas for ours. And they borrowed some of ours for theirs. To all intents and purposes, the machines are practically identical.”

“I figured as much,” said Zarkov, “when General Ild told us to come in and destroy yours. Okay. We’re going to work on a signal that will be transmitted into the input of the War Computer. Got that?”

“Certainly. The cybby in charge of the War Council here punches in orders right after Council meetings. I’m sure the Oranges do the same thing.”

“Exactly. Now, the problem is to beam the signal into the computer at the point directly after the input gear is tied in on the power line. You understand?”

“Right. We use a teletypewriter. So do the Oranges. The letters each have different voltage drops. We can easily duplicate that by monitoring one of our own signals and breaking it down.”

“Good. We simply send the message in, beam it toward the computer, and sit back and wait for the computer to respond by transmitting the message on to the cybbies and technoids fighting the war.”

“And what’s the message?” Zed asked.

“The signal will read: ‘Beware. The cybernaut next to you is a spy. Turn and destroy.’ ”

There was a silence, “Fascinating,” sighed Zed. “Most ingenious.”

“And of course,” Zarkov continued, “that’s why we have to keep this thing a secret from the cybbies. The idea is so explosive that if they found out what we were doing to the Orange cybernauts, they’d begin to fear for their own lives and destroy the project. You understand?”

“I do,” said Zed. “We must never let this leak out.”

“Right on!”

Zed cleared his throat. “But how do we get that message into the Ildhaven sector of Errans?”

“What about the artificial suns?” Zarkov wondered.

“Bounce the signal off the surfaces?” Zed thought about that. “Not a bad idea. But we can’t be sure it’s going to work. And besides, the electronic heat impulses in the sunettes—that’s what we call them—may interfere with the message.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” Zarkov sighed. “Well, that gives us a problem, doesn’t it?”

Zed nodded.

“Okay. We’ll have to depend on air transport for transmittal,” Zarkov said.

“A missile?”

“Sure. The booster transmitter in the missile for retransmittal of the message we send here. Why not? A guided, wire-controlled, straight-on missile. We shoot the missile up over Ildhaven. We equip the missile with anti-antimissile devices, blow up all the antimissile missiles sent to crisp it, and keep the missile overhead while the message is beamed down. We control the beaming of the signal from here. Right?”

“It’s worth a try,” said Zed.

“Okay. If it’s worth a try, we try it.”

“I’ve got it all down, Doc.”

“Well, that’s all there is to it. Now let’s get out into that lab before they begin breaking down the walls to find out what we’re doing in here.”

They wandered out into the laboratory.

“And then, Zed. I want you to be sure the antimagnetic coupling is grounded on the frame and doesn’t build up electrostatic energy on the rheostat controls. If that happens, the whole forward system will short through and burn out the dynamo.”

“Yes, sir. I have that all down, sir.”

The optic bug continued to surveil.

Exactly seventy-two hours later, Zarkov pushed the button on the vidscreen hookup with General Zena’s quarters.

“Zarkov reporting,” he snapped as the screen cleared and General Zena’s pretty face appeared in focus.

“Yes, Alien Zarkov,” said the General. She appeared a bit lanquid. Zarkov saw Flash in the background, lying on a couch.

“The project is finished, General,” Zarkov said.

“Project Illkay?”

“Yes.”

“Aha!” The General turned to Flash. “You hear that, my love? The project is finished.”

She turned back to the screen and faced Zarkov grimly. “It had better work, you double-crossing Alien, or both of you die!”

“No chance of failure,” said Zarkov, stroking his beard. “When will you give the orders for it to commence?”

“Immediately,” snapped General Zena. “As soon as you get off the vidscreen. Is Zed there?”

“Yes, General,” said Zed, stepping before the screen.

“I want you to take full charge,” she ordered. “Bring that Alien to me. I want both the Aliens here when we view the secret weapon and its effects on the enemy’s troops.”

“Yes, General,” said the prog.

Zarkov smiled.

In the General’s headquarters, a large vidscreen spanned one wall. Here the progs of highest rank surrounded the General and Flash and Zarkov.

“You’re made. Doc,” Flash whispered to Zarkov. “You actually think your bluff is going to work?”

“It’ll work,” said Zarkov confidently.

The General turned and frowned at the two of them. “Well, I’ve given the signal for the start of the mission.”

Zarkov pointed to the vidscreen. “There. That’s the fighter escort breaking through the missiles and anti-aircraft gunfire.”

They watched as the missiles shot through the heavens above the battlefield. Then, following the missile escort, came the missile which Zarkov had programmed for over-target signal output.

The missile continued, sending out anti-antimissiles to combat the antimissiles sent up to destroy it.

“It’s getting over enemy epicenter, now,” Zarkov said, glancing at his watch. “Now. It’s beginning to retransmit messages sent out from here.”

“Messages?” the General asked.

“The message for each cybernaut,” chuckled Zarkov.

“Which says?”

“ ‘Destroy the cybernaut next to you.’ ”

“Ingenious,” muttered the General. “Now we’ll see if it works.”

There was no appreciable change in the vidscreen. Then, quite suddenly, there was a tremendous surge of activity on the battlefield. The vidscreen scanner began monitoring ground action.

To the astonishment of the assembled group in the General’s headquarters, cybernaut after cybernaut began turning on its companion and burning it with its weapon. The technoids joined in, one sawing through its immediate neighbor, another hammering one to ruins, yet another snipping a companion in two. Friendly tanks smashed other Orange tanks, crumbling into ruins, friendly jet-fighters struck down other jet-fighters.

The sky was full of flame and smoke and the ground was littered with burned-out orange machinery and smoking metal.

“The damned thing worked!” Zarkov cried exultantly. “I can turn the machine off now.”

The voice over on the vidscreen spoke:

“It is confirmed. The war cybernauts of the Orange army have wiped each other out. The army of the People of the Orange has destroyed itself. It is annihilated.”

A prog next to Zarkov leaped to his feet. “It’s over! We’ve won! After fifteen centuries!”

“Victory!” screamed the proggies.

“Without their cybernauts, the People of the Orange are helpless,” cried General Zena, realizing the enormity of the event. “We will wipe them out to the man!”

Flash turned to Zarkov. “I told you, Doc. You didn’t expect to bring this war to a merciful end, did you?”

Zarkov smiled faintly. “Come, General Zena. I want you to see the laboratory where we have installed the message machine.”

“Yes,” General Zena said. “I would like to see it. Come, Flash.”

Dutifully, Flash and Zarkov accompanied her to the laboratory.

Proudly Zarkov displayed the tables, the optic bug he had planted, and the storeroom.

“We actually outguessed the cybbies,” he laughed. “Don’t you see, General? My machine destroyed the enemy cybernauts. I’m about to turn it off. Now we can discuss a suitable reward to my companion and me for my labors.”

Zarkov went into the storeroom.

“What’s in there?” Flash asked.

“The main controls,” said Zarkov. He smiled at General Zena. “Here.” He indicated a cabinet in the corner.

General Zena flipped open her waist belt and drew out a small disintegrator ray gun.

“Hold it, Alien Zarkov!” She drew back, moving so she could cover both Flash and Zarkov. Flash stared at her in consternation. “Don’t touch that machine, Alien Zarkov! Stay away from it!”

“But—” Zarkov gulped, leaning down to touch the machine in the cabinet.

“I’ll blow you to bits,” warned General Zena. “Traitor!”

“Traitor?” Zarkov echoed faintly.

“I know you can switch that dial and beam the same message to our own War Computer and destroy our cybernauts, too. Get away from that machine, traitor. I’m in charge here.”

Zarkov looked at Flash helplessly. “Well,” he said. “It was a good idea.”

CHAPTER 17

Incredibly enough, Zarkov’s plan had worked. And now Flash could see that the second phase of the scheme would have worked, if it had been allowed to. Zarkov had, of course, simply underestimated the guile of General Zena. And Flash knew that he should have been helping Zarkov rather than playing along with the General in the hopes of finding her in a defenseless moment. She had no defenseless moments. Her shrewdness in dealing with Zarkov’s little scheme proved that.

The three of them were crowded into the small storeroom where Zarkov had built the console for the signal-output transmitter. Flash could see the controls and he knew exactly how Zarkov had fashioned them.

General Zena held her weapon on Zarkov as the scientist glanced from it to Flash. His eyes flickered, moving from Flash’s face to the controls of the machine. Flash got the message.

Then Zarkov moved, a diversionary tactic.

“I won’t let you do this to me, General Zena. Peace is for the good of the whole planet. I’ve proved the ingenuity of my machine. You can get rid of all your cybernauts by the same method. I should think you’d want to be free of them.” He moved toward her pleadingly.

She turned her weapon on his chest. “Stop, Alien Zarkov!”

Flash chopped down with his stiffened hand on General Zena’s wrist. The weapon fired and then clattered to the floor. Part of the wall disintegrated. The girl screamed. There was a sudden yell from the laboratory in back of them. Flash kicked the door shut with his booted heel as the progs charged forward to help the girl.

Then he was on the floor, scooping up the weapon, and spinning around to hold her at bay. He reached behind him for the controls and pulled the switch Zarkov had been reaching for.

“Traitor!” cried the girl, tears of frustration and rage oozing out of her pretty green eyes as she saw the controls moved and held. “Traitor!”

“That’s probably enough,” Zarkov said in a relaxed tone.

Fists were beating on the door to the storeroom. “Let us in!” yelled the frantic progs. “General Zena!”

Finally Flash stepped back and smiled, lowering the ray gun. “Well, General Zena, there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?”

“I can always have you killed,” she snapped, glaring at Flash.

“But you wouldn’t do that,” Flash said mockingly. “Not when we’ve meant so much to each other.”

She pouted. “It’s the Alien Doctor I really want to destroy,” she admitted finally.

“Why?” Zarkov asked, spreading his hands. “I’ve freed your whole planet from the power of the cybernauts. Every robot on Errans is now completely destroyed. Your world belongs to human beings again.”

“Poof!” She folded her arms over her breast sourly. “We’ve still got those miserable People of the Orange to contend with. They started this by being contemptible, obnoxious, and just plain awful.”

Zarkov shook his head. “I think you’re going to have to get together with them to work this thing out,” he said. “With the cybernauts gone, you can make peace with each other, and transform Errans into a beautiful planet once again. Grow crops. Raise cattle. Live the pleasant life.”

“Humph!”

Flash opened the door to the supply room and the screeches of the excited progs deafened him. “Save General Zena!” they cried. “Save General Zena!”

The girl stalked out, glowering and ruffled. “Back, you fools! I’m all right.” She glanced around. “Where is the nearest functioning vidscreen?”

“In the next room,” one of the progs said.

General Zena ran toward it.

Programmer Zed appeared and spoke to Zarkov. “The cybbies and technoids are all dead, Doc. Oranges and Greens.”

“Beautiful!” cried Zarkov. “You hear that, Flash?”

Flash nodded. “I hear it. Now where has she gone to?”

“General Zena?” Zed asked.

“Right.”

“She’s gone to survey the battlefield on the master vidscreen,” said the prog.

Flash turned to Zarkov. “I’d better keep an eye on her,” he said. “She doesn’t seem quite rational.”

Zarkov laughed. “We’d all better keep an eye on her.”

They moved quickly down the corridor to the Viewing Room next door. There they found General Zena surrounded by a score of progs staring up at the wall as the screen flashed pictures of different areas of the battlefield.

Everywhere were smoking ruins of metal machines and metal cybernauts, both Oranges and Greens. Smoke drifted into the sky. Even the three sunettes could barely be seen through the clearing haze.

“You’ve overcome pollution,” said Flash to the General, “We’ve been trying to do that for years on Earth, and can’t seem to.”

General Zena was scowling darkly. “Damn you, Alien Gordon. Since you’ve come here, all I’ve gotten is trouble. Now we have nothing to live for.”

Zarkov shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, girl. You can make this planet a beautiful place to live.”

“Life is strife,” muttered General Zena. “And don’t call me ‘girl’! The connotations are undesirable.”

“All right, General,” growled Zarkov.

Flash turned to Zed. “Zed, I think you’d better contact the Oranges and arrange for a peace meeting between General Zena and General Ild.”

The head prog smiled. “I certainly will.” He turned to General Zena. “I mean, General, if you order me to, I shall hasten to obey.”

General Zena whirled on Flash. “You see the kind of thing that happens when you come aboard this planet, Alien Gordon? My progs begin to think for themselves.”

Zarkov spread his hands in defeat.

“Oh, well,” General Zena sighed, almost sobbing, “tell that rotten witch I’ll meet with her. I should be dancing on her grave, not signing a peace treaty. Bah!”

The prog hurried out, with a wink at Flash and Zarkov.

The sunettes were bright in the clear sky above, and for once there was quiet over the face of the planet. In a large weapons carrier which had been taken out of the supply depot for the occasion, Flash, Zarkov, Zed, and General Zena bounced along over the torn-up rocky landscape, with a caravan of progs coming along behind them.

The girl was driving.

“Me!” she screamed when Flash had ordered her into the driver’s seat. “Me driving? It’s a job for a cybernaut. What kind of a General drives her own truck?”

“A victorious general, Zena,” grinned Flash.

“I’m not a victor. I’m part of a stupid scheme to surrender us to the enemy.”

“Well, you should have let Zed drive.”

“A prog drive?” sneered General Zena. “He couldn’t do half the job I could with the truck.”

The prog shrugged and sat in the back quietly.

They bounced along, and finally in the afternoon spotted the group of Oranges in the distance assembled on a hilly slope.

“There they are,” Zarkov said.

“Huh!” snapped General Zena. “I never did like Orange.”

They growled to a stop near the hillside. Flash recognized General Ild and her head prog, Alp, standing in a group of other progs, their heads gleaming like billiard balls in the brightness of the sunettes of Errans.

“All out,” ordered Flash, and they climbed out of the car. General Zena marched over the broken terrain and stared at the assembly of Oranges.

Flash and Zarkov pushed forward.

General Ild’s gray eyes narrowed as she recognized the earthmen.

“Aha!” she snorted grimly. “The two traitors who double-crossed us and brought about total destruction of our cybernaut forces.”

“Right,” said Flash. “And because of us, the war’s over. Now neither side has any cybernauts left. There’s no need for war!”

“Arrrgh!” snarled General Zena, behind Flash. “Who’ll do our work for us?”

Flash and Zarkov marched to the center of the group. Flash glanced at Zed, but the Green prog stood back with no expression on his face.

“Okay,” said Flash, as he stood there. “This is a great moment in the history of the planet Errans. This will be the signing of the first peace treaty in at least fifteen hundred years!” He turned to Zarkov. “Doc? Do you have the treaty we drew up last night?”

Zarkov nodded, drawing the papers from his jacket. Flash took out a ballpoint pen from his pocket and held it out toward General Zena.

“Who will sign first?”

General Zena spat out a curse. “What’s to sign? A treaty like that is only a piece of paper!”

“Seems to me I’ve heard that one before,” said Flash to Zarkov with a grimace. “Fellow by the name of Hitler.”

“A piece of lying paper if it comes from her,” snarled General Ild, pushing past Flash and grabbing for General Zena’s hair.

“Hey!” cried Zarkov. “Now, stop that!”

“Get your hands off me, witch!” screamed General Zena, slapping General Ild’s hands away.

“Don’t touch me, you hellcat!” yelled General Ild, beginning to use her booted feet on General Zena’s shapely legs.

“You brute!” growled General Zena, reaching out and pulling the ruff of General Ild’s orange garment up over her head. The garment tore, and General Ild’s torso was exposed.

General Ild grabbed a handful of General Zena’s blouse and pulled hard. Now the two women were panting and glowering at each other as Zena grabbed Ild’s hair and began tugging at her head. Then Ild had Zena’s hair, too, and the two of them were hissing at each other.

Zarkov lurched toward the brawl. “Stop it! This is a peace treaty, not a catfight! Stop it, you two!” He reached out and grabbed General Zena’s wrists and pulled her off. Flash grabbed General Ild and yanked her back.

“Hands off our General!” yelled one of the Orange progs, moving menacingly toward Flash and clouting him on the side of the head.

Flash went down. General Ild backed away, and leaped at General Zena again.

“If it’s a fight you want,” snarled the Orange prog, baring his teeth and clenching his fists, “you’ll get it!”

“Why not?” yelled a Green prog, launching himself toward the Orange prog like a missile. He grabbed him by the waist and hurled him to the rocky ground. The two progs went hard at it, biting and ripping at each other’s bodies.

A second Green prog slammed at another Orange prog, and, within seconds, the two groups were enmeshed in a free-for-all.

“General Zena,” Zarkov called. “General Zena, would you sign this paper?”

“Paper?” snapped Zed. “Paper!” He reached out and took the paper from Zarkov’s hands and ripped it into shreds. “That’s what we think of peace, Doc!”

“Hey, hold it!” cried Flash Gordon, waving his arms about. “Stop!”

There was no stopping the melee. It had spread all over the hill. The Greens and Oranges were hopelessly entangled, smashing at one another with fists, and then with pieces of metal picked up from the battlefield.

From the security of a rock outcrop, Flash and Zarkov surveyed the scene of destruction with glum faces.

“They’ve been fighting now for an hour,” said Zarkov, “When are they going to stop and go home?”

“Who knows?” Flash mused. “It seems that every time they get another score of progs down and out, a new group comes in from the background somewhere. I’d guess everybody on the planet—every human being anyway—is mixed in this by now, one way or another.”

“I don’t really know what’ll happen now,” Zarkov said. “But don’t forget, a good fistfight always clears the air.”

“You’re a very optimistic man,” chuckled Flash. “You mean you think they’re going home after it’s all over and decide fighting isn’t worth it?”

“Why not?” Zarkov said. “They’ve always had cybernauts to do their fighting for them. It’s a lot different participating in a fistfight than it is watching one.”

“Maybe so,” Flash admitted. “I’m willing to wait it out.”

It was a half hour later that Zarkov, surveying the scene in front of them with binoculars, gave a groan.

“Oh, no!”

“What is it, Doc?” Flash asked. The fighting, he thought, had been dying down a bit. He had hopes that Zarkov’s theory might prove right—that both sides would leave and forget the battle.

“Look!”

Zarkov handed the glasses to Flash. He put them to his eyes, adjusted the lenses, and saw what had made Zarkov groan.

Two Orange progs were gathering up parts of cybernauts on the battlefield, and carrying them to one side. As Flash watched, he could see another prog assembling several sections together.

“They’re cannibalizing a new robot,” growled Zarkov. “Can you beat that?”

Flash shrugged. “It figured all the time, Doc. You just can’t get these people to sit still for peace when they love war.”

Before the sunettes set that night, the first cybernaut had been assembled and programmed. The Oranges beat the Greens by three minutes, actually. A group of Green progs, working under the supervision of General Zena, had assembled the second cybby, a Green warrior.

The cybernauts dashed back to their respective headquarters and immediately sat at the big War Computer Machines, flicked the dials and controls, to begin rebuilding materials and hardware and technoids.

And the progs got moving on more cybernauts which would be working not at the central brain, but at the outlying weapons systems.

“I don’t believe it,” groaned Zarkov a little later.

“What?”

He pointed to the sky. The first of the jetcraft resurrected from the ruins on the battlefield was airborne, zooming out toward the Green position.

After a moment or two there was a loud explosion, the first mechanical sound since the wipe-out of the cybernauts by Zarkov’s signal-output machine.

After that, it was all downhill.

Bombs dropped. Tanks crumpled other tanks. Aircraft shot down aircraft. Missiles slammed into targets and bunkers collapsed.

The war was on.

Flash and Zarkov huddled behind the rock where they had found momentary security and stared out at the chaos. Night closed in with the sinking of the sunettes from sight.

Haze settled over them, and smoke rolled into their lair.

“Well,” Zarkov sighed. “I was going to end war on the planet and then ask the two Generals to help me build a rocket to get us back to Earth, but now that theory’s all knocked into a cocked hat.”

“Right,” said Flash. “What do we do?”

Zarkov shook his head. “If we go to either of the Generals, we’ll be crisped for traitors.”

“So?”

Zarkov shook his head. For once he had nothing to say in that booming, self-confident voice of his.

The earth shook about them and a mortar landed perilously close. They crawled deeper into the crevice between two big rocks, where they covered their heads with their hands.

CHAPTER 18

The war continued with unabated fury through the night and through the next day. Flash and Zarkov remained hidden in the crude rock shelter they had found. There they were safe from the concussion of bombs and the strafing of jet-fighters.

When the first full day of war had passed into night again, the two earthmen emerged to search the ruins of the battlefield.

“Lucky thing I had my pocket full of these miserable vitamin cubes,” Zarkov said. “Otherwise we’d be forced to forage for food and risk capture.”

Flash rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Doc, I don’t even think they’re going to send out search parties for us.”

“I suppose we’re safe. It’s a cinch we wouldn’t be welcome at either camp. General Ild would grind us up in a meat grinder, and General Zena would let the cybbies slowly dismantle us organ by organ.”

They stood on the hillside and surveyed the bleak desolation below them, faint but visible in the starlight from the heavens.

“What are we going to do?” Flash mused. “Live like outcasts on the battlefield for the rest of our lives?”

Zarkov shrugged. “It’s better than risking the wrath of either of our fairy godmothers.”

Flash winced. “You are so right.”

“We’ve got vitamins enough for a week or so,” Zarkov said, counting the cubes in his pocket. “Should we explore the planet?”

“Waste of time,” said Flash. “They’ve been fighting for so long I’m convinced the whole surface is as pockmarked as our own moon. Just like this plain in front of us.”

Zarkov sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

“If only we had a rocket of some kind,” said Flash. “Even a missile like the one General Ild sent us up in.”

Zarkov was stroking his beard with suppressed excitement. “Yeah. That’s the ticket, Flash.”

Flash turned to Zarkov with concern. “You’re not working up another big scheme, are you, Doc?”

“Huh?” Zarkov said innocently. “Is that any way to treat an old friend, Flash?”

“You’ve got that look,” Flash said wryly. “The last time you had a great scheme, you know what it did for us.”

“Stopped a fifteen-hundred-year war and started a longer one,” Zarkov grunted. “I know.”

“All right,” said Flash, as they headed back for the rock shelter. “What is it?”

Zarkov looked up at the stars. “Nothing, Flash.”

“Uh-huh,” said Flash.

When Flash awoke next morning, he found that Zarkov was gone. He stirred from the small den they had formed under the rocks and yawned, stretched, and ate a vitamin cube. Grimacing at the taste of it, he climbed out of the hole and stared around.

The war had apparently passed by the plain. In the distance, he could hear the sound of bomb explosions and the muttering of battle wagons. But the plain below him was at peace in its utter desolation.

A movement in the distance caught his eye. Shading his eyes from the three sunettes, he squinted and made out Zarkov’s form in amongst a pile of rubble.

“I knew he was up to something,” said Flash to himself. “The thing to do is to sneak up on him and find out what he’s doing before he can bluff his way out of it.”

Flash made his way quietly through the sea of destroyed tanks and fighter jets to a broken mound of fragmentary geologic detritus and peered around the corner at his friend.

There was Zarkov, wrench and screwdriver in hand, wrestling with what looked like a half-wrecked cybernaut. Flash almost laughed. Zarkov looked like a man dancing with half a woman.

“I’m cutting in,” said Flash, stumbling over the broken rocks and metal toward the scientist. “That’s the craziest dance step I ever saw.”

Zarkov turned, startled. “Uh? Oh, it’s you. Flash. For a minute I thought General Zena had found me.”

“No. Only me. What in the name of sense are you doing?”

Zarkov flushed. He sat down on a bent ammunition cannister, wiping his forehead of perspiration. “I’m making myself an assistant, Flash,” he grinned.

“So he can take over and return us to General Ild or General Zena?” Flash asked sarcastically.

“In no way.” Zarkov was becoming enthusiastic now. He jumped up and began pacing back and forth in the tin and stone. “Look,” he boomed. “It’s as simple as the war itself.”

“War is simple?” Flash repeated in astonishment.

“This one was. What happened?” Zarkov was waving his arms about. “A prog put together a cybby, right?”

“Right.”

“And the next thing you know, another prog put together another cybby. Right?”

“Come on, Doc! That’s enough of the catechism. Speak your piece.”

“Then the cybbies put together technoids and they built themselves a war.”

Flash frowned. “You’re building a third army to go mix in the war between the Greens and the Oranges?”

Zarkov shook his head. “You have no creative imagination, Flash,” snorted the scientist. “I’m building a cybernaut to help me build some construction technoids. I’ll build another cybby to help him, and they’ll in turn create technoids for the project.”

“What project?” Flash was frowning, but he thought he could anticipate Zarkov’s answer.

“Project Rocketship-to-Earth, Flash!” cried Zarkov happily.

Flash rubbed his chin. “Well, it may work.”

“May? It’s got to.”

“A spacecraft is a big thing to build, Doc. Where are you going to get the parts?”

Zarkov swept his hand around the former battlefield. “Look. Temporarily the war has moved out of this sector. We’ve got tons and tons of material here. The cybbies and technoids can use anything they want.”

“And you’ll program the cybbies to get the technoids to do the right thing?”

“Why not? The progs do it all the time. I saw how they worked.”

Flash sighed. “It’s a hare-brained scheme, but maybe it’ll succeed,” he allowed.

“You’re eternally the pessimist, Flash,” said Zarkov with a euphoric grin. “Come on. Lend a hand. I want to get Cyb Number One in the works as soon as possible.”

On the fourth day it looked as if the entire project would be doomed to failure. In the early morning a reconnaissance jet from Orange Headquarters zoomed across the battlefield and then circled back again. Hours passed, however, while Flash and Zarkov hid in the rocks, and it did not return.

Meanwhile, work was continuing at a rapidly advancing rate on the space ship. With each succeeding generation of technoids, more and more workers and pieces of material were put into play. The rocket was beginning to rise from the pad on which it had been started.

Zarkov supervised the operation with considerable zeal, wandering about with Flash, and checking the components and parts as they were put into the growing rocket.

“How are we going to get the thing off the ground?” Flash asked Zarkov.

“I’m having my cybby build a computer that will fire the damned thing automatically.”

Flash nodded.

Zarkov squinted sideways at his friend. “Flash, why do you doubt this will work? Don’t forget I built the first rocket you ever rode in.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m doubtful,” Flash snorted. “That was a pretty primitive affair, Doc. You know that.”

“Yeah, but it worked.”

“Sure. And we crash-landed on Mongo.”

“Wouldn’t you settle now for a crash-land on Earth?”

Flash smiled. “All right. You’ve convinced me. How many more days do you think we’ve got?”

Zarkov made some rapid calculations and punched the information into the computer which controlled the construction of the rocket. The computer rattled and punched out an answer.

“Three days,” said Zarkov, reading the tape.

That evening, another reconnaissance plane roared overhead and circled back. It was a Green air probe.

“You think the cybby at the controls spotted us?” Flash asked Zarkov in troubled tones.

“I don’t know,” Zarkov said. “But I don’t like all this recon activity overhead. Do you?”

“I had begun to think the Generals had forgotten us,” Flash admitted. “Apparently not. Frankly, I don’t like it one bit.”

“It’s not us, particularly. It’s the rocket that’s obvious.”

“Right,” said Flash. He shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it. Hope, I guess.”

“Yeah,” muttered Zarkov.

Zarkov was running one last check on the rocket with the ground control computer installed next to it when another recon plane circled the sky.

Flash looked up. “There’s that pesky spy ship again.”

“Look. We’re almost home free. I’ve got every component in that spacecraft. It’s right up to test time. If we can hold off any kind of attack—if that’s what’s in the works—we can always get out of here fast.”

“Are you ready to start the test?”

“All ready,” said Zarkov. “We’ll do the phantom run-through in half an hour. I’ve got the cybbies all lined up at their stations.”

“Right.”

Flash climbed down from the computer scaffolding and walked over to the blast-off pad. He stood there looking up at the missile that was supposed to take them back to Earth.

“Here’s luck,” he said, and patted the side hopefully.

He turned and saw Zarkov jumping down from the computer. The scientist was very excited. He was waving his arms.

“What is it?” Flash asked, running out to met him.

Zarkov pointed to the top of the hillside.

Past the ruins of the rocks and the war hardware, Flash could see a wide line of cybbies just marching over the rim of the rocks, spread out in a line of skirmishes.

“Cybs!” cried Flash. “Whose are they?”

“They aren’t ours,” Zarkov retorted.

“What do they want?” Flash asked.

“Let’s not wait to find out,” yelled Zarkov. “Get into the spacecraft, man.”

“But you haven’t run that final test.”

“We don’t have time. Come on.”

They could hear the metallic shouts of the cybbies advancing over the hill.

“There you are, traitors from another world. Aliens. Peacemongers. We come to deliver you to General Zena.”

Flash stared at them. “Hey, Doc. Direct our own cybbies to engage them in battle.”

“Good idea,” said Zarkov. “I’ll keep half the force here to ignite the rocket-fuel engine, and let the other half tear into the forces of General Zena.”

Flash watched as Zarkov’s cybbies began turning out to advance on the Green cybernauts. Zarkov made some last-minute adjustments on the console of the ground control, gave orders to the cybs attending the computer, and came running over to the launchpad.

Meanwhile the skirmish force of the Green cybernauts had advanced halfway down the hill. The force of Zarkov’s cybbies was moving out to meet the line.

“Unidentified cybernauts,” clacked the metallic voice of one of General Zena’s cyb Lieutenants.

“This is restricted property,” Zarkov’s cyb clacked back.

Zarkov grinned. “How about that?”

Flash pulled at Zarkov’s arm. “Come on, Doc. Let’s get in this thing. Do you want to go back to General Zena?”

“No way!”

“Restricted property not authenticated,” snapped the Green cyb.

“Entrance forbidden on pain of crisping,” said Zarkov’s cyb.

“Not programmed for threats,” said the Green cyb. “Advance, cybbies.”

The Green cybbies kept on moving.

Zarkov’s cyb leader moved forward. “We are programmed to engage in combat with enemy cybernauts,” he clattered.

“Engage!” said General Zena’s cyb leader.

The cybernauts were battling one another. There were more Green cybs than those of Zarkov. Those not engaged cyb-to-cyb overran the line of battle and came on down the hill.

Flash and Zarkov were climbing the long metal ladder as fast as they could.

One of the attacking cybs reached the bottom just as Flash opened the hatch to the cabin and pulled himself in.

“Hurry up, slowpoke!” he yelled at Zarkov, hauling him in by the shoulders.

“Hey, my cybs did pretty good, though, didn’t they?”

“Oh, stop the chatter, and let’s get this thing going!”

Zarkov secured the hatch and glanced around. “Boy, it’s a jerrybuilt mess, but it should fly.”

Flash stared at the controls grimly. “I hope so. It’s a long way back, but I have a feeling the Wright brothers are looking right over our shoulders.”

Zarkov frowned. “You sure can hurt a guy, Flash.”

Flash glanced out the porthole. “The cybs are halfway up the ladder. Dozens of them!”

Zarkov nodded. “But we’re programmed to blast off right about now.” He stared at his watch. “Four, three, two—”

“Ignition!” cried Flash happily.

“Down in the seats,” snapped Zarkov.

They buckled themselves in.

“What happened to those Green cybs on the ladder?” Flash wondered.

“Guess they turned into instant fuel for the blast-off.”

Flash shrugged. “They were only metal ideations anyway.”

The rocket began moving upward with a surge of power. It shuddered and vibrated and shuffled about in the air as it made the first few yards of altitude.

Zarkov closed his eyes and crossed his fingers.

Then the rocket gained momentum and steadied itself.

“Correction for burn,” the metallic voice of the cyb at the computer said in Flash’s headphones.

“Right,” said Flash, and made the correction as the cyb read it off.

“It’s time for oxygen,” said Zarkov. He pressed the button for the oxygen tank to fill the cabin with pressurized air. The button blinked red.

“Malfunction,” said Flash. “What happened?”

Zarkov shook his head. “That’s what we get for not running through the test. It looks like we’ve got everything going for us but that little thing called oxygen.”

“Oh-oh,” said Flash.

“Well,” Zarkov said philosophically. “At least we don’t have to end it all on that war-hungry planet. We’ll go out like astronauts should—high up in good clean old space.”

“Right,” said Flash, smiling faintly.

“Well, Flash. It’s been a good life, at that, hasn’t it?”

“No regrets, Doc,” said Flash.

They shook hands.

It was getting difficult to breathe in the heat of the cabin.

The air about them burst into brilliant blue streaks.

“Hey!” called Flash. “What’s that?”

“Green interceptors lobbying missiles at us,” Zarkov said, staring out the porthole. “They’ve got us in the sights, all right.”

“This is it, Doc.”

CHAPTER 19

Flash and Zarkov watched the interceptors zoom up to attack.

“Well, I’m glad General Zena is still on the ball,” Flash said. “I suppose it bothers her that we got away.”

“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