Flash Gordon 4 - The Time Trap of Ming XIII by Alex Raymond Read Free Book Online Page B

removed the blaster pistol without looking down at his hand, and then glanced at it.
    His hand was empty.
    He had felt the weapon. But now it was not in his hand.
    “You should see the expression on your face!” Dale said, chuckling.
    Flash stared at her. “What?”
    “I mean, you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”
    Flash looked down at his empty hand. “It’s gone, Dale.”
    “What’s gone?”
    “My blaster pistol.”
    “But you said you had it in your holster.”
    “Dale, I took it out of the holster, and was just looking down at it to check the pin. It disappeared, but I felt it.” Flash closed his eyes. “Maybe it was autosuggestion.”
    Dale stared. “You’re just imagining it, Flash. It’s all this talk about witchcraft and magic.”
    “No,” said Flash. “I had it in my hand. And it’s gone.”
    Dale looked around at the ground near the wreck. “You dropped it. That’s all.” Her voice rose.
    “I had it and it vanished,” snapped Flash. He looked around once more at the forest that surrounded them, with its paleozoic plants frozen in time, the weird lavenders and purples and oranges from Mongo’s soil content. “I can feel someone out there, watching us.”
    “The first blaster pistol stolen from the car. The second stolen from your hand.” Dale shivered again.
    “Come on,” demanded Flash. “The sooner we get out of here, the better I’ll like it!”
    “But where—?”
    “To Arboria. Shank’s mare.”
    Dale looked around once more at the suddenly unfriendly forest and hurriedly caught up with Flash. They walked rapidly over the weed-covered terrain to the lip of the superway. In a moment they were striding along the smooth surface of the pavement. In Mongo’s lower gravitational pull, their steps were a bit longer than an average Earth step.
    A sound in the forest off to the left brought Dale up short.
    “What’s that?”
    Flash halted beside her on the superway, frowning. “I don’t know.”
    The sound in the forest came again, exactly as it had come the first time. Now Flash recognized it as a high-pitched, screeching resonance, entirely inhuman.
    “It’s not a person, but it almost sounds like someone having hysterics,” said Dale in hushed tones. “I mean, hysterics from laughter.”
    Flash glanced uneasily up and down the superway. “I don’t like this being without any weapon.” He sighed. He stared into the forest along the way. The superway wound through a stand of enormous lycopods, over two hundred feet in height. A lycopod was an evergreen mosslike herb. It had creeping stems, small, scaly leaves, and club-shaped candles. This particular variety resembled a ground pine, in Earth nomenclature.
    Now an air-shaking crash reverberated inside the foliage, as if some enormous, massive, bounding creature were smashing trees and brush in its flight through the woods.
    “There’s something coming at us!” cried Dale.
    Flash glanced around. There was a large round boulder behind a giant fern on the right side of the superway. “Take cover,” he told her, pointing.
    Dale ran across the superway and crouched down behind the rock.
    “Come on!” she called to Flash.
    Reluctantly Flash followed, glancing back over his shoulder at the stand of ground pines. He saw the needles and branches of the trees shaking as the weight of the unseen thing crashed through the foliage.
    Flash crouched beside Dale. “Maybe that’s what wrecked the jetcar,” she said softly.
    “No,” said Flash. “The sound of that ray was different.”
    Dale shrugged.
    “This is one of the forest kingdom’s arrested species, I’ll bet,” Flash muttered. “It’s too heavy for a salamander—we’ve had trouble with them before—and it doesn’t sound like one of the rogue rodents. We’ll have to wait for it to pass.”
    “If it doesn’t smell us out, that is.”
    “I thought Zarkov had promised Prince Barin to clean out the timber around Arboria! It’s still not safe to walk a mile