Flash Gordon (2 page)

“Hmmm, I wonder if testing this planet will not be a waste of energy.”

“These people do possess potential.”

The master asked abruptly, “Would they think me good—or evil?”

“Evil, though I confess it is difficult for me to make the distinction between the two. The categories are, after all, arbitrary. If I might be permitted to add an observation . . .” A pause, during which, presumably, the Master indicated his assent. “This planet, called Earth in one of its predominant languages, has produced specimens of a temperament you might find admirable. Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin. One man, Adolf Hitler by name, possessed the will, but his mind was not strong enough to cope and he became the victim of the very delusions he fostered upon others. Our seers have peered through the veils of time, into alternate dimensions, and they have informed me of the specimens this planet might spawn in the future. Yes, this world is currently insignificant, but there is potential here, potential we must be aware of.”

“It matters not. We can destroy the world if We choose.”

“Yes, Sire.”

“Begin the test.”

The sheathed hand manipulated more controls. Momentarily, red and green waves stabbed at the barren moon.

“Do you remain weary, O Master?” asked the unconcerned voice.

“Indeed. But now I ponder upon the indisputable fact that unsuspecting millions depend upon my whim for their very existence, and the knowledge that I might crush them raises my spirits.”

“They are but insects, Sire, pawns of cosmic forces they cannot comprehend.”

“For one who feigns ignorance, Klytus, you seem to know much about this Earth in Sector 468G29.”

“Cosmic pawns are my hobby, Sire.”

“Good. It is a useful hobby, and you are useful to Us. We cannot help but notice that this life-or-death situation the unsuspecting Earth faces has excited Us. We shall retire and visit Our harem. Continue the testing while We exorcise some of Our majestic passions.”

“As you command.”

F
LASH
G
ORDON
would have gladly divided the thoughts and deeds of the world into two distinct and arbitrary categories, but like many young people of his age, he realized that throughout the course of history the distinction had never been an easy one. When he had seen the newspaper photographs of a South Vietnamese officer ruthlessly executing a prisoner by shooting him in the head, Flash noted that no honorable man would commit such an act without the formalities of due process. Nor did he believe the National Guardsmen who had slaughtered the student demonstrators at Kent State to be honorable, courageous men; instead, he believed that protesting the senseless brutality of war was an act every bit as “American,” if not every bit as brave, as fighting and dying for the ideals of the United States. He did not understand why a former President had not simply admitted he had lied. He did not understand the concept of executive privilege; executives had no more privileges than other men, and to be honest, however belatedly, was certainly no shame, even if one were surrounded by the liars and sycophants of Washington, D.C. He could not understand why the delegates of the United Nations, who professed to be waging a bloodless war for peace, allowed a terrorist, a murderer of innocent children, to brandish a machine gun at the podium, whatever the merits of his cause. The distinction between good and evil seemed irrelevant in a world which routinely permitted such events to occur. Flash Gordon never pondered these matters to the point where they grew tedious, but they affected him all the same.

Flash’s mother had died of internal hemorrhaging three hours after she had given birth to him in a Tuscaloosa hospital. His father was a janitor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and one of his duties was sweeping a section of the stadium after a football game. Flash watched all the games for free, with the inevitable result that he dreamed of one day playing quarterback for the college team. He dreamed of nothing but football. During the week, he spent all his free hours playing it with other children. (Baseball bored him practically to tears, though as he grew older he acquired an intellectual appreciation of it.) He never confided his dreams to his father.

Maxwell Gordon had named his son “Flash” for reasons he could never quite recall. The name was a joke he had made while in a drunken stupor the night of his wife’s death. If Maxwell was both father and mother to his child, it was only because he felt it was his duty, never because he truly loved the boy. When Flash was five and capable of taking care of himself without getting into too many fights and making too much of a mess, Maxwell left him alone to play sandlot football or to listen to the football games on the radio. After a time he acknowledged the boy, only to condemn him as the killer of his wife. Maxwell often threatened to kill Flash. He raged at the youth between drinks from his bottle of Southern Comfort, but Flash endured the cruel words with an infuriating compassion. Flash never hated his father; he understood that Maxwell carried within him a tortuous grief time could never heal, and that Maxwell dealt with it in the only fashion he knew.

Sometimes Flash heard his father making love to waitresses in the bedroom or in the kitchen, but he was not upset or confused. His father’s escapades inspired him only to turn up the radio a little and to lean forward on the couch, to be closer to the speaker. He imitated the announcers of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, sometimes pretending to be them rather than the quarterbacks. He whispered their words, he strove to talk like them in all respects. They became more real than the friends he made during the sandlot games, and, as a consequence, his southern accent became subdued. As he grew older, he lost it completely. The environment had not molded him; he had molded himself.

Maxwell Gordon died when Flash was twelve. Maxwell had gotten in a fight with a young lady in a bar. It turned out the lady was fifteen and her father had taken exception to her plans for the night. The perpetrator, a county clerk as well as a lifelong Democrat, pleaded self-defense. Since all the customers in the bar had been so involved in their own affairs and so uninterested in the fight that they had not seen who had pulled out the knife, Maxwell’s murderer was put on probation for six months. Flash bore the county clerk no malice; he believed the man would still have to face the justice of his conscience.

It was only at the funeral that Flash realized just how alone his father had been. The pallbearers were employed by the funeral parlor, and the services were attended by Flash, Maxwell’s superintendent, another janitor, and Flash’s maiden aunt, the twin sister of his mother. They listened to a slightly inebriated Baptist preacher speak of the great spirit and noble heart of Maxwell Gordon. Flash could not help but notice that the preacher offered no specifics.

His aunt Candace took him to a small farm she owned in the northern part of the state. When Flash wasn’t at school or helping the hired hands, he threw a football through a limp tire hanging from a gnarled tree in the backyard. For his birthday, Candace gave him a brand new football, and now Flash was able to throw two before retrieving them. When he became bored throwing with his right arm and needed a challenge to sustain his interest, he learned to throw with his left arm. At night he studied and read the paperback mysteries Candace was addicted to. Although the young Flash never fully comprehended the passions that drove a person to commit murder, he could not deny his fascination with the individual who guildessly defied the most important law of society, and he could not deny his relief when the detective finally exposed the culprit.

During the summer, when the work was done or could be easily done without him, when the heat was unendurable and each breath made the lungs seem fragile and weak, when his aunt was sitting in the living room and sweating so much that her bra showed plainly through her dress, when everybody else was dead to the world or wished they were, Flash walked through the high brown grass of the fields and climbed the lonely wire fences with rotting posts the dry wind had beaten down over the years. He squinted in the harsh sunlight radiating from a blue sky so deep and pure that he felt it wash over him and cool his skin. His shirt slung over his shoulder, his back and chest and underarms dripping as if someone had poured a bucket of water over him, he stared at the distant shanties of the blacks and the tenant farmers. He heard the children’s dim laughter as they sprayed each other with water from a hose. He heard the whine of a harmonica, the beating of hands and the stomping of feet. He climbed fences until he no longer saw the shanties, until he no longer heard the laughter or the harmonica.

He walked into the forest, into a peaceful world of shady trees. Part of his soul—he supposed that was what it was, he possessed no vocabulary through which he could analyze his spirit—embraced the essence of the silent trees. They became mysterious creatures somehow gifted with peace and long life and wisdom. The dark shadows eased the maniacal quality of his personality which forced him to throw footballs through a tire for hours. He was temporarily freed from the desire to excel and to justify the existence that had caused his mother’s death and had ruined his father’s life. In the forest, life and death mingled with the logic of the inevitable, and he pursued his communion with nature with his usual single-mindedness.

And the Forest in turn embraced him. Birds alighted on his shoulders. The coon and the possum did not fear him. Bucks ate leaves from his hand. Rabbits hopped behind him and the porcupine did not bristle as he walked by.

As he studied the silent, eternal battle of the plants, slowly strangling one another in the quest for growth and life, Flash realized death was not to be feared; nor was the death of those close to him to be mourned for years. During these trips to the woods, Flash exorcised himself of demons of which he had been unaware. And as he grew older, he always carried something of the tranquillity of the woods with him, a tranquillity never more potent than during those situations demanding the utmost of his physical skill, intelligence, and composure. This ability served him well during the months he played high-school football. He won a scholarship to the University of Alabama and eventually a position as starting quarterback for the New York Jets.

This inner peace served him when his aunt Candace died in an automobile accident, leaving him truly alone for the first time. It served him during the tumultuous political events of the sixties and during the gloomy aftermath of the seventies. It helped him to grow into a tall, strong man who carried his bulky muscles with the grace of a gymnast. His hair and eyebrows were blond. His dark eyes possessed a sensitivity and capacity for compassion one did not normally expect of a high-salaried football player; they marked a man who analyzed emotional and spiritual matters as well as the corporal. His handsome face, unscarred by the rough-and-tumble years of football, radiated something of the romantic poet, who perceived eons of evolution in the shape of a rose and who bowed to eternity beneath the canopy of stars. If it had not been for his childhood dreams, Flash never would have been a football player. He liked the game and his skill was unparalleled, but he disapproved of brutality for its own sake; he would have broken his contract and quit the team of a coach who said, “Winning’s the only thing!”

Sportswriters were not the first to notice these unusual qualities in Flash Gordon. Women from every walk of life noticed them at once, and they responded deeply, while men could but react with confusion. However, the unattached women who appealed strictly to Flash’s sexual instincts were invariably disappointed. Although Flash enjoyed the physical sensations of sex, its main attraction for him was the spiritual bond enjoyed by the participants. He had the reputation of being a playboy, a reputation fostered mainly by
People Magazine
and its ilk; he did little to perpetuate it.

However, the complex components of his personality and his convictions conspired to foster his reputation of having a temper which occasionally exploded.

“Damn it, Guiraldes!” exclaimed Flash. “You didn’t have to do that!”

There were two minutes and ten seconds remaining in the Super Bowl. The New Orleans air was warm, and a large bead of sweat singed with dirt rolled down Guiraldes’s nose. The guard reached below his face mask and tenderly wiped the bruised skin and cartilage; his nose had been broken twice in the last playoff game, and fists and elbows were constantly slipping into his helmet. “Do what?” Guiraldes replied, sounding like a barroom bully.

Flash merely stared at him; he reined in the anger which caused his hands to shake uncontrollably, blurring his vision with a red glare. For the first time he realized how exhausted he was, how the fans’ constant cheering and catcalling disgusted him, how his legs and arms hurt; there was also a constant throbbing in his bowels, the dull ache of gas. He tasted the salty sweat above his upper lip. The muscles around his rib cage hurt whenever he expanded his lungs, but his exhaustion would not permit him to inhale more slowly. He calmed himself with an effort. Unaware of his teammates gathering in a huddle, he returned the guard’s glare. Gradually his jaw relaxed, and he nodded to himself, knowing what he had to do.

The gun signaling the two-minute warning fired.

Without looking at his comrades or at the assistants carrying towels and buckets of water onto the field, Flash removed his helmet, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his breakaway jersey, and strode toward the sidelines.

Pretending not to notice the coach’s wild-eyed expression, Flash said simply, “Replace Guiraldes. Put in Hank.”

Coach Hodges bit down so hard on his unlit cigar that he tore it. He threw it to the ground and stomped on it, once, planting his foot as if he were a soldier jerking to attention. Spitting flecks of tobacco from his mouth, he said, “What the hell do you mean?” The remainder of his inquiry was phrased in language much more colorful.

“Guiraldes deliberately spiked Bulgarella’s leg,” said Flash, indicating a giant on the defensive team, who sat with a bored expression while an assistant quickly wrapped a bandage around his bare calf.