Part Seventeen: The further adventures of Captain Victor J. Hero and Dr. Maximus Scientificus on the hidden planet Sram...
That night, as he lay on his cot in the cold, dark prison cell, Victor thought about his encounter that day with the vicious Glzbrrrgk aliens. How many intelligent species were there on this planet? They had already encountered four, including this one. If this were to go on any longer, they’d be dead within the week. What then? How could they ever return to Earth? How would anybody ever know about the hidden planet Sram at the opposite end of Mars’s orbit?
At the other end of the room, Dr. Max mumbled something.
“What did you say, Max?” said Victor.
Max said, “Ah... I think I understand...”
“Understand what?”
“This planet. I know why it doesn’t appear in our sky back on Earth. Why it doesn’t exert any gravitational force on any of the other bodies in the solar system.”
Leave it to Dr. Maximus Scientificus to come up with the answer to every problem.
“Really, now?” Victor said. “Why?”
“That ‘other half’ of the planet they were talking about, the Glzbrrrgk, they weren’t talking about the other hemisphere. They were talking about a whole other planet altogether. An “Anti-Sram” so to speak. The two planets Sram and Anti-Sram cancel each other out! That’s why we can’t detect them.”
“Huh!” said Victor. He’d never be able to figure something like that out on his own, but Dr. Max had been with him from the start of the mission, and he could always figure out everything that came up.
“Yes, and the two planets are held together by a transference of Type Sigma energy. This energy keeps them from colliding together and annihilating each other, and it also surrounds them with a force field that makes them appear to the outside universe as if they were canceling each other out. And if my calculations are correct, we could channel this Type Sigma energy to power up our rocket ship again.”
Victor grinned, a surge of hope rising through him. “And we’d be able to get out of here!”
The next morning, Lord Voldemars of the Glzbrrrgk ordered the two Earthmen out of their cell. He and the other members of the High Council wanted to talk about Earth. Victor knew he wasn’t going to tell the Glzbrrrgk anything. They’d invade and kill everyone on Earth if he gave away even the slightest hint. No, he’d never tell. Even if they were going to torture him.
Victor and Dr. Max sat across the room from the High Council’s table. A bright spotlight shone on the two Earthmen, making it impossible for them to see any of the Glzbrrrgk.
“So...” the raspy voice of Lord Voldemars called out. “Describe for us... the planet you come from... tell us everything...”
“I am Captain Victor J. Hero, and as a citizen of Planet Earth, I refuse to tell you anything! Not a single thing! Not even what the ‘J.’ in my name stands for!”
“What does it stand for?” Dr. Max whispered.
“Uh...” Victor thought about it. He wasn’t exactly sure. He hadn’t used his full middle name in such a long time. So he whispered back, “I’ll tell you some other time.”
He turned back to the High Council. “That’s right. You will never find out what the ‘J.’ in my name stands for, not even if you torture me for forty days and forty nights!”
“So you are not going to tell us anything?” said Voldemars.
“Indeed. I will not tell you anything.”
“But you’ve revealed that you are from Planet Earth.”
“Yes, I have.”
“You just said that you weren’t going to tell us anything.”
“That’s correct.”
“But if you tell us that you are from Planet Earth, you are telling us something.”
Victor thought about this. It must be some kind of trick question. No, he wasn’t going to give in to it. Let them try to interrogate the truth out of him. He wasn’t going to tell them anything.
“Your mind tricks don’t work on me, Voldemars.”
He could hear soft chuckles from the direction of the High Council’s table as well as someone almost inaudibly muttering, “Earthlings.”
“Unwittingly, you have provided us with some very useful information indeed. You have verified our suspicions that you are from Planet Earth. We know of this very planet indeed. We have studied it for many years, and now we are planning an invasion. Thank you for the information, Captain.”
This was surely another mind trick. No, he wasn’t going to believe them. Ignore them, he told himself.
“We believe we have something to show you,” Voldemars said. He gestured at someone at the back of the room. Victor couldn’t see anything because of the spotlight shining in his eyes.
The spotlight swiveled and illuminated an inconspicuous opening at the back of the room. As Victor’s eyes adjusted, he could see the dimly lit passageway beyond and within it, three vaguely outlined figures. The figures approached the doorway, and Victor could make them out. Once he saw who they were, he gasped, and he could hear Dr. Max react with surprise beside him.
Two Glzbrrrgk guards stepped out of the doorway, escorting a gagged and bound figure between them... a tall, attractive, blonde-haired woman.
Victor ran his eyes over every square inch of the woman’s voluptuously proportioned, thinly-clothed body. Maybe being imprisoned by the Glzbrrrgk wasn’t so bad after all.
“What is the meaning of this?!” exclaimed Dr. Max. “Who is this? What have you done to her? Why is she here?”
Chuckles from all around the High Council table.
“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, Earthling?” Voldemars said. “Well, we will tell you. Her name is Yolanda Sensuosa. We captured her on a recent trip to Earth. Your planet’s ridiculously inadequate defense systems could not detect us at all. We simply flew our spacecraft in and collected data on your planet. This woman happened to come upon us, so we captured her and took her back to Sram with us.”
“Preposterous! How could anyone infiltrate Earth’s defense systems?!” Dr. Max exclaimed.
Voldemars did not respond.
The woman squirmed against the two guards’ grasp and futilely tried to escape from them.
“I won’t have any of this!” said Victor, paying close attention to the way the woman’s curvaceous body moved as she struggled. “Let her go immediately! As a loyal citizen of Earth, I order you to let her go!”
“You think you can order us around, Earthling?” Voldemars said. He chuckled, then turned to face the two guards. “Take her away.”
The woman struggled some more as the two guards dragged her out of the room.
Voldemars turned to look at Victor and Dr. Max. “And you two... you two will go back to your cell. Enjoy the rest of your stay... your infinitely long stay...”
“We must escape now!” said Victor. Get out of this cell, find Yolanda, and get her and ourselves off this planet!”
“You know, Victor,” said Dr. Max, “for once, I agree with you.”
“All right, then! How do we get out of here?”
“Hmm... I’m not sure...”
“Come on, you’re Dr. Maximus Scientificus! You know the solution to everything!”
“Right.” Max gazed at the iron bars between them and the passageway and at the walls of rock around them. “Hmm...”
He stood up and examined the third bar from the left. Then he reached out and poked at something on the bar that Victor couldn’t see. Suddenly, with a low rumble, the bar rose into the ceiling.
“Whoa! How’d you do that?”
“There was a button,” Dr. Max said.
The space the bar left behind was wide enough for both of them to squeeze through. They did so and found themselves in a corridor lined on both sides by empty cells. Victor could hear a soft sobbing in the direction of one of the distant cells.
“That way!” he said, pointing.
They ran down the corridor and found Yolanda sitting on the floor in the middle of one of the empty cells. When she saw them, Yolanda smiled and ran toward them, wrapping her hands around two of the bars separating her and her rescuers.
“Hmm... one of these bars should have a small depression on the side of it,” Dr. Max muttered, searching quickly. He found it on the fourth bar to the right and pressed the button in the depression on the side of it. The bar rumbled and then rose into the ceiling. Yolanda squeezed through eagerly and wrapped her voluptuous arms around Max and then Victor.
“Now let’s get out of here,” said Dr. Max, heading toward the open door at the end of the corridor. Then he stopped and turned around. “Victor! Stop standing there gaping like a fool! We’ve got to get out of here!”
So the three of them rushed through the doorway and into the passageway beyond. It led them to the surface.
A short distance away from the opening of the tunnel, clearly lit by the stars above, was their rocket ship, Flower of Earth. They ran across the red sand toward it. As they approached the ship, Victor heard a soft creak somewhere behind him, but he ignored it. They were almost to the ship, almost free.
Victor leaped toward the ship and lowered his foot to the bottom rung of the ladder going up to the door. But his foot sank through, as if the rung wasn’ t there. He tripped and reached out his hands to shield him from crashing into the side of the ship. But the ship wasn’t there either. He fell on the ground.
When he looked up, he couldn’t see any trace of the ship. Slowly, he tried to stand up. A clawed hand grasped his shoulder and turned him around. It was Lord Voldemars.
“Trying to escape, are you?” Voldemars said. “It surprises me not that you were foolish enough to even try.” He gestured at some of the Glzbrrrgk behind him. They were holding onto Dr. Max, who was gagged. The Glzbrrrgk were tying his hands together behind his back.
Yolanda, on the other hand, stood free beside Voldemars. She gazed with blank eyes at Victor.
“Run!” Victor shouted at her, but she didn’t seem to hear. “Get out of here! Run!”
But it was useless. The truth dawned on him. Yolanda wasn’t an Earthwoman the Glzbrrrgk had captured. She was just a robot.
And now, Victor and Dr. Max were once again prisoners of the Glzbrrrgk of Sram.
To be continued...
Copyright © 2003 by The Invincible Spud