Flash Gordon

by Arthur Byron Cover

Flash felt a tightening in his gut only partially due to the takeoff. Through the thick glass of the porthole he saw the landscape roll past him; it sank below him. Slowly, even the highest mountains in the distance disappeared, and there was only the infinite, comforting blue outside. He wished he could escape there, that he could let his spirit soar; but random factors had come into play. He no longer controlled his destiny, not even a fraction of it.

  Through the corner of his eye, he saw Dale’s knuckles turning white as she gripped both the armrests. He sighed. To say they had gotten off on the wrong foot would be like saying Nero Wolfe the detective was a tad overweight.

  Clouds like wisps in a dream grazed the plane. Flash discovered the intellectual delight of unpredictable abstract shapes. He searched for figures and faces in the folds of the pillowy clouds farther away; these clouds were immobile, calm. Then, without warning, the fluffy folds of a gray cloud sucked inward as if they had been struck by a gust of wind originating straight above. But there was no indication of winds elsewhere in the sky.

  Before Flash had the opportunity to frame a definition of what had happened, the plane bumped like a jeep traveling too fast over a rocky road. The bumping lasted for fifteen seconds; then the plane flew smoothly again.

  Dale tightened her fist and bit white knuckles. Her face was as pale as a mannequin’s. Flash wished he could comfort her.

  Again, the plane jolted, this time much harder and for much longer.

  Leaning against one wall with his palm along the way, Flash moved into the cockpit. “Any problem, fellas?”

  The pilot said, “Bit of clear air-turbulence. Nothing serious.”

  The copilot added, “But nothing you’d want to toss a third-down pass through either.” Keeping one hand firm upon the wheel, he reached into a briefcase and pulled out a copy of People with a picture of Flash on the cover. “When I heard you were going to be a passenger, I borrowed this from my son’s memorabilia collection. I’d like for you to autograph it for him, if you would, Mr. Gordon.”

  Flash took the magazine and a pen from the copilot. “Glad to. What’s his name?”

  “Buzz.”

  As Flash hastily scribbled his name on the cover, the plane was jolted by the hardest burst yet. For a moment it seemed like the plane had flown through a wall.

  “Wow! Call Boston approach and see what they’ve got,” said the pilot to the copilot. And to Flash: “Seat belt time sir.”

  The plane lurched as Flash quickly moved toward his seat. On the way he turned to the pilots and shouted, “Maybe it’d be smoother higher up!”

  “Would you do us a favor?” asked Dale.

  Flash hesitated before sitting. He raised his eyebrows. Anything! he thought.

  “Leave them alone. They’re busy driving the plane!”

  For once he could not argue with her. He held onto the shelf above her seat. “Just some turbulence. We’ll be through it in a minute. Nothing to worry about, really.” He paused. “By the way, my name’s Flash. Flash Gordon.”

  “I deduced that.” Suddenly the glassy hardness disappeared from her eyes and she looked at Flash with some of the humanity she had exhibited last night. “Will you forgive me? I’m always rude when I’m scared. I didn’t mean to call your T-shirt stupid.”

  “It’s just an amusing affectation.” I think she’ll buy that. “It’s kind of nice. I mean a travel agent who’s scared in airplanes.” He felt very embarrassed as he read the surprise in her expression. “I saw you at the hotel last night. I asked the host who you were.”

  She laughed. “Oh, he’s such a busybody. I bet he gets the inside scoop on everyone who stays there.”

  The plane lurched so violently that Flash would have fallen if he had not been holding tightly onto the shelf. He sat beside her and fastened his seat belt. The plane jolted again, as if a hand from the sky had whacked it. Dale became white, bit her lower lip, swallowed hard, and grabbed Flash’s hand. “Talk to me; get my mind off this!”

  “I couldn’t believe a girl like you was alone.”

  “You’re just saying that to get my mind off this.”

  Flash smiled and shrugged. “I mean it. What were you doing there alone?” His concentration was completely arrested by her; he saw or heard nothing else. He perceived—vaguely—the plane jolting, but he thought nothing of it. After all, the pilots were driving; they should do the worrying.

  Though Dale was looking at Flash, for a moment it seemed she saw another. “My boyfriend ditched me a few months back. Or rather, I ditched him, but he made it impossible for us to continue being an item.”

  “He must have been an insensitive lout.”

  She smiled wryly. “Actually, he was very considerate, but . . .” She looked to her hands in her lap. “The reason we broke up is very embarrassing.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “Well, I should start talking about it sometime if I want to face it and deal with it, and now’s just as good a time as any.”

  “Go on,” said Flash, unable to conceal his eagerness, desperate to know what circumstances and coincidences had enabled him to meet this wonderful woman.

  “My boyfriend, you see, has these needs, needs I tried to satisfy but which I couldn’t deal with indefinitely.” Waving at the air with one hand, she covered her eyes with the other. “It was just that after a while I couldn’t function sexually in all those exotic bars, around all those people, doing all those strange and wonderful things with all sorts of people who were perfect strangers.” She sighed. “I guess I was just too old-fashioned for him.” Then, to Flash’s utter shock, she blushed and grinned. “Some of it was nice though. I might have been able to handle it on a part-time basis. Anyway, after we broke up, I felt I should clean up my act. So I stayed at the Dark Harbor Inn for a few weeks, reading mysteries and watching reruns. And I found a few nice country boys to help me pass the time.”

  I guess the All-American Girl is a little more sophisticated than she used to be, thought Flash.

  “You understand, don’t you?” asked Dale.

  “Uh, sure I do,” replied Flash. “What’s the farthest away place you know?”

  “As in far away?”

  “From everything. I’ll let you sell me a ticket there.”

  Suddenly, the plane jolted so hard it seemed as if it had been momentarily stopped cold by powerful forces. Biting her lower lip, Dale dug her fingernails into Flash’s palm. She cut his skin, but Flash’s only response was to hold her hand more tightly.

  “Honestly, it’s nothing,” he said.

  “Famous last words.”

  “I’m taking flying lessons. Sometimes the air rises under clouds and you get a little . . .” Flash stared out the porthole.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” Dale, too, looked through the porthole. She brought her hands to her mouth and uttered a whimpering cry.

  Billowing waves of pitch blackness rolled across the sky. The sun was an orb of red fire impotently blazing in the darkness.

  Flash did not know what to think of this. He was a civilized, rational man suddenly viewing the unknown. Sweat poured from his face and armpits and chest; he breathed with difficulty. Though the blackness was covering the sky in a matter of seconds, the process seemed to take hours, and Flash felt somewhat like a primitive faced with the ineffable.

  A black disk slowly, remorselessly, crept over the sun.

  Interlude

  THE populace of the northeastern United States could not help but notice that the eclipse and the accompanying special effects contradicted all the known scientific laws of the universe, as well as a few mystical ones, but the more astute among them realized instantly that tremendous inconsistencies were woven into the fabric of life, and there was no reason to assume the fabric of the universe was any different.

  Each individual reacted to the visuals in an individual way. However, it is unnecessary to delineate the reaction of each person who happened to be in New Engla
nd at the time; a few representative examples will suffice.

  Fernando Martinez, for instance, a dishwasher in Boston, was leaning against the brick wall outside the restaurant where he was currently employed, smoking a Winston, drinking beer, and chatting with friends about the busty charms of the new waitress, when he became aware of the shadows smothering the sky. Deeply religious impulses, which he had successfully repressed for years, surged to the fore of his consciousness, and he became certain Judgment Day had arrived. A quick check of his memory revealed many disgusting and perverted sins, and the check only accounted for his deeds of the past week. Convinced he would be sentenced to Hell, his body was unable to withstand the emotional strain and Fernando died of a heart attack on the spot.

  Most reactions were not so extreme.

  Ruth and Biff, two romantically involved teens, were enjoying themselves magnificently in the woods when they were interrupted by the eclipse. An awestruck Biff became distracted, thus setting the stage for an argument wherein each party, with some justification, accused the other of being unromantic.

  Tommy Two-Hawks, an American-Indian high-rise construction worker, paused twenty-nine stories above the streets of a Connecticut city and discovered glorious heights within himself that only his ancestors had known. Micky Martin, who averaged fifteen comic book stories a month, flicked on the electric lights and jotted down four brief plots. Rita Belmont put aside her housework for the rest of the day, celebrating the eclipse because she felt like it. Jory Phillips, who did not allow an opportunity to pass him by when it concerned the game of marbles on the playground, selected a few choice cat’s-eyes while his playmates watched the skies.

  Many a talk-show host and weather forecaster made tentative, reasonable explanations for the phenomena, but none came, as close as Griswold F. Grubb, retired fisherman, who sat outside the general store of Pitched Forks, Maine, and said, “Ask dat Zarkov fella what’s goin’ on. Bet he knows. ’Fact, wouldn’ be ’prized if he wasn’ ’sponsible.”

  3

  Blast Off!

  THE personal history of Dr. Hans Zarkov was not so different from that of many of his ethnic origin and generation, save that he had survived. His mother had managed to have Hans smuggled into England before the Holocaust had begun in earnest. His father was gassed after being held prisoner for several years; his mother survived—after a fashion. While in the camps, she forgot the person she had been, forgot that once she had had a husband and a child. Zarkov searched five years for her after the war. When he found her, he realized she would never again be the laughing, considerate, iron-willed woman of his early childhood. She was silent, sulking, toothless, her hair prematurely gray and her face creased and haggard; she was a seamstress in a huge dry-cleaning establishment, doing the same work she had been forced to do in the camps. Her remembrances of her son were vague. Zarkov was truly alone. After he emigrated to America, he occasionally sent her money, though he knew she would not understand why (or who had sent it, for that matter). She never acknowledged it, she never wrote him a note, and Zarkov did not learn of her death until six months after she had been buried in a nameless grave.

  Perhaps as a reaction to her passing, Zarkov plunged himself into the world of the intellect. He had intended to be a patent lawyer, but he soon realized that the work, though profitable, would be too boring for a man of his mental stature. He studied the sciences. While his fellow graduate students were doing the twist and other frivolous dances, Zarkov was sitting in his dorm room formulating the groundwork for theories and experiments which would ultimately lead to mankind’s understanding of the neutrino. Almost as an afterthought, he proved via mathematics that it was theoretically possible for an entire universe to be enclosed in an electron. His paper on subatomic worlds became a sensation, and he was immediately compared to da Vinci and Einstein. “Pish and tosh,” replied Zarkov when informed of the comparison. “They are mere theorists, dreamers with their heads constantly in the clouds. I make my thoughts reality. If I cannot make it real, then it does not exist and it might as well be consigned to the work of a science-fiction writer.”

  To prove his point, Zarkov began work on an interdimensional field ray which would permit man to peer directly into the fourth dimension. The project was a controversial one, to say the least, especially since Zarkov demanded a million dollars in funding at the onset.

  Now, the first thing people noticed about this remarkable young scientist was that he lacked the personal touch; he could infuriate a man at fifty yards and a woman at twenty-five. His effect upon his peers was much more powerful; he infuriated them with his mere ideas. So when the experimental model of Zarkov’s invention exploded, sending chunks of the building housing it all over campus, miraculously injuring only three people, it came as a surprise to no one that Zarkov failed to rally enough support behind him to continue. In fact, since one chunk had landed squarely in the university dean’s begonia garden, it surprised no one that Zarkov was soon searching for gainful employment.

  The Pentagon was interested in hiring him, naturally enough. But though Zarkov was developing the singlemindedness and indefatigable spirit which would eventually cause three wives to leave him due to his neglect of them in favor of science, he did not totally perceive the world in terms of equations and fundings. He remembered war and what war did to people. If pressed, he admitted in an unsentimental fashion that his goal was to make life better for mankind. He was a man of ideals. Consequently, and in no uncertain terms, he refused the Pentagon’s offer to invent weapons. In fact, his terms were so blunt that the Department of Immigration threatened to deport him. The Department was very insistent until Zarkov informed it (via The New York Times) that he had been a United States Citizen since his twenty-seventh birthday.

  However, Zarkov had no objections to being a civilian employed by NASA. The lure of the infinite void of space was so great that he, like many other noted scientists, pretended the only possible results of the space program would be peaceful and, hence, beneficial for all mankind. He used the race with the Russians as a lever to secure funding for pet projects. In reality, he did not care if the first man to set foot on the moon was an American, a Russian, or an Armenian midget. Ideologies and nationalities did not separate mankind into different species.

  The brilliant, dynamic, irascible scientist soon became a legendary figure, famous at Cape Kennedy, the stuff of fairy tales in civil and military offices throughout the remainder of the nation. He did not deign to waste his considerable wit when he wished to put a bureaucrat or a paranoid general in his proper place. Zarkov merely stared at the offender and rubbed his thick black beard and scowled like a Victorian teacher opening a closet door to discover a pervert having his way with her prepubescent charge. Few men resisted this stare. No man dared to transfer Zarkov to another department or to challenge his ideals. Zarkov spared neither the high nor the low effects of his fiery temper; many a beaker had been hurled in his laboratory. Fortunately his aim was most frequently likened to that of Wrong Way Corrigan.

  Once, legend had it, President Johnson, while touring the Cape, disregarded the cautious words of his sycophants and dropped into Zarkov’s office unannounced. Evidently the President had expected Zarkov to be pleasant and subservient. He exited in five minutes, stunned and shocked, his hound-dog ears blistering from the obscenities and vilifications heaped upon him for perpetuating the war in Vietnam. A general who attempted to defend the President by calling Zarkov a Communist was in turn denounced as “a thick-skulled baboon utterly lacking in decency and respect for the higher ideals of mankind, little better than a charter member of the KKK and certainly no smarter than one.”

  No wonder then that when the space program lost its impetus Zarkov was one of the first scientists to be laid off. Due to a computer error, he did not receive his first unemployment check for over a year, but he was only interested in collecting it as a matter of principle. He was not particularly enamored with an economic system which, in the future,
would result in greater hardships for politicians to remedy. Politicians were humanitarians only during election years anyway. Zarkov was far more concerned about the inklings of greater insights into the working of the universe, inklings which he had only begun to perceive in the vaguest sense of the word during his tenure at NASA. These inklings in addition to his temper and his impatience with the meanderings of small minds, were enough to damage his scientific reputation.

  Zarkov did not know when he first arrived at these insights. Perhaps the inherent philosophical implications were inexorably woven with the tumultuous events of his painful youth. Perhaps he had merely perceived them in a dream. Whatever the cause, whatever the origin, Zarkov became fond of proclaiming that the greatest religions of the world were unprepared to fathom the true nature of the universe. However mankind visualized the ultimate creator, it was doomed to be incorrect; for could a grain of dust visualize a painting by Titian? (“How about a drawing by Frank Paul?” asked an assistant, who was immediately fired.) Zarkov became convinced that mankind was too puny and frail to conquer the universe, indeed, that perhaps mankind should conceal itself on Earth in the hopes the universe would not notice it was there. For Zarkov had sensed malign forces in the infinite scope that were completely indifferent to mankind’s fate. Many a night he wandered about on the estate he had inherited from a distant relative, staring at the beautiful stars in the clear black sky, and he felt the vastness of the universe bear down on him like a tremendous weight. Even as his spirit soared, it was sucked into the black hole of despair.

  The melancholia inherent in the gloomy estate fully matched that in Zarkov’s breast, forcing him to escape into the meaningless problem-solving of his inventions. His relative had had a mania for tropical gardening, an expensive hobby for a New Englander. Consequently the living quarters and the labs were bordered on both sides by greenhouses, and above was a third greenhouse in the form of a tower. Zarkov had given no thought to what it would be like to live in such a building when he had helped his relative design it; never had he thought he would inherit it and have no other place to go.