Flash Gordon (5 page)

The couple sat in awkward silence; Flash felt the animosity flowing from the young woman. Resting her chin on her fist, she stared out the square window, at the hills beyond the airport. Once she leaned forward, raising her shoulders, looking in all directions as much as the porthole permitted; but her unvoiced questions were unanswerable, or else her eyes had played tricks on her, for she slumped back and reassumed her lifeless pose.

The engines were switched on.

“Ahh, listen to those eggbeaters whirl,” said Flash, trying to make conversation.

Dale contorted her face in such a way that he could not tell if she was confused or horrified. “What?”

“The propellers. Propellers are sometimes called egg-beaters.”

“By whom?”

“It’s a slang term that originated during World War Two.”

“Wonderful,” said Dale, nodding blankly, as if she could not understand why anyone believed this information was important enough to impart to her.

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.

T
HE
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 England 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.”

T
HE
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.