The Mongo Machine - Chapter 9

John Carter. Buck Rogers. Crash Corrigan. Three Warriors. Out of Time.

PDSH Newsletter

Jun 28, 2026

This short story officially launched my House of Entropy and put sci-fi pulp front and center in the Public Domain Super Heroes universe. From this story, the novels The Metropolis of Mongo, The Marine Moon of Mongo and the forthcoming The Martian Monsters of Mongo were born.

This is the final chapter and epilogue of the story.

There is also an index page here if you lose track.

I hope you enjoy it!

CHAPTER 09

The other side of the door was like nothing any of them, save John Carter, had ever seen. A team of men in white lab coats along with a couple of black-uniformed Nazis were watching gauges and dials or staring at the machine itself. Standing on a spidery metal framework, a massive, bulbous device dominated the room; images flashed across what appeared to be an empty space at the centre of the sphere. Waves of light pulsed in a counterpoise to the images, flashing with impossible colours as the images shifted.

Just looking at the strange, indescribable light made them queasy, yet it took real effort to tear their eyes away. When a vista of red sand under a strangely bright orange sky slid into view within the machine, John Carter breathed, “Barsoom,” so quietly that none of the team was certain they had heard it.

They hadn’t been seen yet. Every eye in the room was focused on the readings or the mesmerizing spectacle unfolding in the heart of the machine. The four split into two, half to either side of the door. They spread along the walls, trying to get into a position close enough to the machine and the instruments that their short-ranged gas guns would be effective.

One of the black-clad soldiers tore his eyes from the bulbous machine and the strange, flickering images within, spotting Buck Rogers closing on him. He looked puzzled for a moment and then opened his mouth to raise an alarm. The concentrated acid within the glass bulb that shattered in his open mouth stopped his cry, but his flailing, choking form was more than enough to alert the rest of the room to their presence. Closest to the device on his side of the room, Rogers emptied his magazine into the body of the humming, flickering device, the acid-bearing spheres shattering and instantly sending a hissing, choking cloud of vapour up and around the device. The acid chewed and bubbled its way through the metal housing, but seemed to have little effect on the machine otherwise. The images, the hum and the hypnotic light flashes continued unabated.

The rest of the team was already leaping to the attack. Firing her pistol at the machine, Wilma leapt over a table and landed a flying kick to the shoulder of one of the soldiers as he wrestled his pistol from his holster. The weapon flew up and into the machine, vanishing as it passed through the empty space within, as the image again flashed and changed.

The tone of the hum changed. Corrigan, still moving after knocking a white-coated scientist to the floor, broke the edge of the field that shimmered around the machine. For an instant he hung in the air, caught in its light, and then he was simply...gone.

“Corrigan!” shouted John Carter and Buck Rogers at the same instant from opposite sides of the room.

From the doorway, Deering spied the young soldier they had left alive, his glasses still askew. He was drawing a bead on John Carter with his rifle. As she watched in horror, he pulled the trigger. Only a dry click, and then he was holding the rifle closer to his face in puzzlement.

Before he could figure out what she’d done, a huge explosion sounded outside. The fist of air shoved the bespectacled soldier bodily through the door. Part of her brain registered that the kid was no threat and she whipped her head around, her pistol barrel leading, in search of targets. Chaos had engulfed the room, the scientists frantically calling out readings to one another in German, the enemy soldiers finally starting to return fire, and the explosion and strange hum of the machine adding to the confusion. She emptied her magazine at the machine’s spindly leg structure, reasoning that perhaps the main housing might be too thick for the acid to be an effective weapon there, but perhaps if she dropped the thing on its head by kicking its legs out, that might accomplish something.

Diving for cover behind a toppled table, she slammed home a magazine of the more conventional metal ammunition. The gas guns weren’t as powerful as a regular weapon but in these close quarters, that hardly mattered. She still had another full magazine of the acid pellets, but right now bullets were a better option. If they survived, she’d deal with the machine. If not...

Rogers popped up and fired a quick shot in the direction of the soldiers who had gathered at the far end of the room. The enemy ducked into cover and Carter and Deering waited until they lifted their heads before snapping off shots of their own. The gas guns had a poor rate of fire and limited range, so they’d practiced this kind of timed, alternating fire to compensate. It worked well, so long as their ammunition held out.

Suddenly the hum from the machine again changed its pitch, a second, whining note joining the deep thrum. The images within the machine seemed to swell and bulge as if trying to break free of the housing that surrounded them. The light pulsed between images, somehow both brighter and darker, flooding the room with colours the eye couldn’t name. One of the scientists doubled over and heaved violently, overcome by the effect.

A tall, lean soldier in the menacing black of the Nazi SS, stood and took aim at the table behind which Wilma was crouching. A bullet tore through the wood just above her head, then another just beyond the tip of her nose, splinters of wood carving lines in the sensitive skin of her cheeks. The next shot would find her, and the wooden table would not protect her. The shot never came.

Instead a strangled cry sounded from across the room. Deering risked a quick peek and was stunned to see the black-clad soldier lifted and dragged into the belly of the machine by some unseen force. The instant he made contact with the pulsing light, like Corrigan before him, he simply vanished.

“Wilma!” shouted Buck. “That thing is gonna blow!”

Shots rang out across the room, forcing him closer to her as he tried to stay ahead of them.

“That’s the point, Rogers!” she shouted back.

“If it goes, how do we get Corrigan back?” he demanded, anger and concern warring for dominance in his voice.

“We don’t, Buck,” said John Carter, popping up to send another bullet into the knot of enemy soldiers. The clipped cry from the group told them he had scored a hit. “We fry the damned thing and they send Corrigan’s folks a medal and a flag.”

An ominous creak joined the cacophony that filled the room. Through the smoke and clamour, Wilma could see that her idea had borne fruit. The spider-like leg structure was buckling beneath the weight of the huge machine it held. The acid’s reaction had run its course, but the effect was like an avalanche, unstoppable once it had begun.

As if snatched from the ground by an invisible hand, two more soldiers and a scientist suddenly shot toward the opening in the metal housing, blinking from existence the moment they made contact with the pulsing light within. A moment later, John Carter too was lifted from his crouch behind an upturned table and sucked across the room and into the roiling, flickering light belching from the dying device.

“Carter!” wailed Wilma Deering. There was absolutely nothing she could do and no way she could imagine to get her men back. She and Rogers were now alone. Sliding in beside her, Buck grabbed her shoulder and gave it a shake. Her eyes filled with fury and grief in equal measure.

“We’ve gotta go, Wilma!” he shouted. She could hear booted feet pounding down the hall toward them and there was no other exit from this room.

“Go?” she demanded. “Go where?”

Buck held up a German grenade in one hand and the last remaining rocket in the other. “Wherever they went,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Only we close the door behind us.” He waggled his grenade and rocket for emphasis.

“Are you insane?” she asked, horrified.

“It’s been suggested,” he grinned. He hooked a finger through the grenade pin, cocked his arm in invitation, and smiled wider. “Shall we?”

By the sounds of it, the soldiers were at the door. A grin split her features and she took the proffered arm. A hail of gunfire followed them as they charged across the room and dove for the opening in the machine as it toppled towards them. Buck dropped his grenade and the rocket as he launched them with all his strength.

The machine toppled over onto the floor, falling in such a way that the opening and its flashing images dropped neatly over the grenade and rocket as they exploded. The alien metal of the housing absorbed most of the blast, but even that strange material couldn’t contain the combined fury of high explosive and chemical rocket fuel completely. A deep, resounding ‘whumphf’ sent a ring of compressed air through the room, ripping the housing apart and crumpling the lab’s sensitive instrumentation in its violence.

Thaddeus Sivana, conscripted a month ago, the day after his eighteenth birthday, had watched the whole strange battle through his cracked and cockeyed spectacles. Between the blow from the woman’s strange gun and the impact of the compression wave from the explosion earlier, he had barely been able to stay conscious, let alone reload his weapon and bring it to bear.

Entering the laboratory, he had arrived just in time to see the first enemy saboteur vanish into the machine. Before being conscripted, Sivana had been on a track to attend a prestigious university to further his studies in theoretical physics, but in its wisdom, the state had decided he was of more use behind a gun than in front of a chalkboard. What he had just seen defied everything he knew about the laws that governed the universe.

How wonderful!

Fighting to remain awake, he had watched more of the room’s occupants being dragged into whatever field was powering the impossible device. He devoured every detail the way a gourmand would consume a feast of rare delicacies. He was horrified when he realized that the goal of these saboteurs was to destroy this elegant, uncanny machine but his arms and legs refused to work and he was forced to impotently watch as events unfolded. He tried to focus on the images flashing within the machine, to focus and understand what he was seeing. The hum from the apparatus sent fingers of delicious agony into the tissues of his brain and he thought he heard a voice that was not a voice whisper, “Mongo,” behind his eyes.

When the man and the woman leapt into the device, everything in him demanded he follow, but the effort to move was beyond him. His body had always been frail; his mind was his true strength. In that moment, he would have traded his exquisite brain for a stronger frame.

The machine crashed mightily to the floor, and an instant later, Thaddeus Sivana was slammed against the wall by another compression wave. Hot metal rained down around him, but somehow, he managed to maintain consciousness. Though peppered by a dozen or more globules of hot metal, he was not struck by anything fatal. A shard of twisted metal as long as his middle finger and as thick as his slim wrist clattered to the ground a few inches from his left hand. Though he didn’t know why, he slid his thick wool sleeve over his hand and picked up the hot fragment and dropped it into one of the pouches on his belt.

As he released it, his bare skin touched it for the briefest moment.

Though his ears rang painfully, Sivana still heard the voice behind his eyes whisper, ‘Mongo.’ It was the most beautiful sound he had ever known.

EPILOGUE

“Where…?” John Carter’s voice vanished into a vast red desert beneath an unnaturally bright orange sky. The air hummed with alien life, but he received no answer.

“...the hell…?” muttered Crash Corrigan. He was lying on his back, gaping up at the dome above and the living sea beyond. Thousands of darting fish as bright as gemstones swam in a blue that burned his eyes.

“...are we?” Buck Rogers breathed, lowering Wilma Deering gently to the gleaming street from where she had lain atop him. The impossible city loomed above, towers tilting around them at mad angles, blotting out the sky.

The adventures of John Carter, Buck Rogers and Crash Carter continue!