Flash Gordon 3 - The Space Circus Read Online Free Page B

that sort of thing.”
    Nord was intent on watching Flash. He knew what was coming next. “Don’t lose your head. Keep calm—that’s the secret.”
    An electric shock was sent into the ball Flash was holding on to. The shock was sufficient to force him to let go.
    Flash fell again. Now three more ropes were swung out at him from the complex mechanism that loomed above the area where he was being forced to perform.
    Flash caught one, swung himself halfway across the arena, and let go. He dropped another fifty feet before catching hold of another rope. This put him not more than fifteen feet above the glittering turf.
    “Ah, very good,” thought the admiring Nord.
    Flash let go of this rope, turned a full somersault in midair, and landed on his feet on the ground.
    The audience had been concentrating on him, too, and they applauded thunderously now.
    “I don’t know if I like that final touch of his,” thought Barko. “It’s almost as though he were thumbing his nose at us.”
    “Perhaps,” thought Nord, smiling with half of his face. “But he’s very good, Barko. You can see how they like him.”
    The two blue men with the silver shocksticks came running for Flash. They prodded him back toward his waiting cage.
    “We’ll see,” thought Barko. “I admit he’ll be a good attraction, but he may turn out to be a disruptive force among the other performers. I won’t tolerate that.”
    “I wish there were a way to communicate with him.”
    “You’re incurably sentimental, Nord. You know there can be no communication with the lower orders.”
    “Even so . . .” thought the bent man as he went shuffling away.

CHAPTER 9
    T he meal chair reverberated when Dr. Zarkov dropped down heavily into it. “Anything new?”
    Agent Cox was sitting on the edge of his rubberoid desk. “You look as though you’ve been up all night, Doctor.”
    “I have been up all night,” Zarkov boomed. He slapped a handful of thermopaper sheets down on top of the Interstellar Intelligence agent’s desk. “Why are you perched there like that?”
    Dropping to the floor, Cox replied, “You lead a much more active life than I do, Doctor. I spend a good deal of my life in this office. To give some variety to things I try to sit in different places. Behind the desk, beside it, over in the—”
    “If you’d get yourself behind it now,” suggested Zarkov in his booming voice, “you could read what I dug up at the spot where they snatched Flash Gordon.”
    Cox obliged. “We haven’t, by the way, had any further reports of mysterious spacecraft in nearly twelve hours.”
    “They’ve all gone home.”
    The blond young man looked over the bundle of notes Zarkov had brought him. “Your robot typer needs overhauling, Doctor.”
    “I typed those out myself,” said Zarkov. “The fewer useless gadgets in our life the better. The trouble with most of the inhabitants of the solar system is they don’t know the difference between a useless gadget and a useful one.”
    The EII agent had the top sheet of paper held up close to his slightly tilted face. “You’re sure of this, Doctor? Flash Gordon was picked up by an alien spacecraft?”
    “Flash and the landcar he was driving.”
    “How’d they do it?”
    “Swooped low, dropped some kind of large metal claw down, and scooped up the car,” explained Zarkov as he twisted an end of his beard around his forefinger. “I found minute traces of the metal around the spot where they snatched the car. Plus flecks of paint which fell off on each side of the car when the claw teeth took hold.”
    “You’re very thorough, Doctor. A lot more so than the Highway Authority.”
    “Of course,” agreed Zarkov. He bounced out of his chair. “I want to talk to your computers here. They may not be good enough for my purposes, but I’d like to give them a try and maybe save myself a trip to the Planetary Data Center in Houston.”
    “EII can tell you as much as the PDC.” Cox was spreading out