Flash Gordon (6 page)

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.

Despite the pleasant greenery (Zarkov grew most of his vegetables beneath the glass whose properties were enhanced by solar batteries), there was a certain sterility to the estate which was not conducive to relaxation. Zarkov never felt he was at home; he felt, instead, that he had been marooned in a temporary resting spot which had suddenly, inexplicably become permanent, like the characters in those surreal speculative fiction stories who found themselves stranded in airplanes that would never land, or in buses that would never reach their destinations. He and his assistant, Munson (an undependable sort but the best help he could get), slept on cots. For breakfast they fixed cold cuts and lettuce and tomato and mayo on white bread; and for supper they served vegetables and frozen foods in arbitrary combinations. One particularly melancholy evening, perhaps the lowest point of Zarkov’s life since the war, they ate fresh cauliflower with Kraft’s Pasteurized Cheese Spread and a special brand of frozen lasagne laced with preservatives. Munson loved it. They washed their laundry in a machine which, for all the good it did them, was little better than beating their clothing on rocks. They hung the laundry to dry on lines in a section of the greenhouse where Zarkov, with his black thumb, could never get anything to grow. Huge brown wads of dust defaced every corner and hid beneath every chair. The trash from Munson’s occasional forays to fast food restaurants overflowed from the big tan plastic container next to the washing machine. There was no space for pictures on the walls, for Zarkov’s equipment and inventions precluded any reasonable attempt at interior decorating. The ruins of a television set rusted in the backyard. (Zarkov had thrown it outside after his profile on “Sixty Minutes.”) The only entertainment was provided by the cassettes of rock-and-roll music sent by a friendly corporation executive whose firm manufactured the few inventions Zarkov had patented.

Often Zarkov roamed the grounds near the greenhouse that was his home, listening to the strains of The Beatles or The Who through the speakers, pondering the eons of evolution which had led to his being, or merely making another of his innumerable observations on the plight of twentieth-century man. Though he had passed his forties, the spiritual barrenness of the universe made him feel as if he had been cast adrift in a teenage wasteland.

Fortunately for Zarkov’s sanity, he managed to preoccupy himself sufficiently with scientific problems, otherwise he might have been ensnarled in the psychic spiral that frequently sends social outsiders into the bottomless depths of hopelessness. The belief that life is futile often leads to days of neutrality where nothing is gained and everything is lost. Zarkov clung to the notion that only actions and deeds provide life with meaning. And every morning as he stumbled out of his cot, divested himself of his white gown and sleeping cap, and peered into the bathroom mirror, studying those bloodshot eyes and inspecting the pillow traces above the black beard, he wondered how such a magnificent brain could be housed in such a puny skull, how such an exhausted spirit could overcome an existence that fairly radiated despair to toil without hope of reward for mankind’s ultimate salvation. For Zarkov’s common sense had convinced him time and time again that sooner or later the universe would notice mankind, and that somebody had better be prepared. Nearly every night Zarkov sensed the ineffable cosmic forces girding for a frontal assault, and so he devoted his days to measuring the might of the forces which conceivably would one day attack. In his idealistic heart he prayed to whatever benign forces there were that peaceful resistance, at most, would be called for.

The revenues from his patents permitted him to devise mechanical concoctions that modern industrial executives would have broken many antitrust laws to secure. Zarkov invented a sine curve frequency modulator which transmitted waves to measure the expended energy of novas. From the materials of common gravel he created an alloy which did not contract when cooled. Using devices of inordinate sensitivity, augmented by a computer of almost independent intelligence (the size of a writing desk), he discovered a closed section of the galaxy where the heat would not spontaneously flow to the coldest regions; however, he was unable to extrapolate a theory to explain this, and he had no choice but to conclude that energies beyond his ken, perhaps artificial energies created by an alien intelligence, were responsible for the perplexing enigma. After months of arduous (and seemingly futile) effort, he created a vibratory force field which negated, somewhat, the effects of gravity waves. The force field, incidently, radiated four hitherto unknown primary colors; even the cynical and dense Munson was overcome by the simple beauty of this discovery. Zarkov estimated the density of the ether to a nanofraction, detected electric currents transmitted through the said ether that originated in other galaxies, discovered a star formed entirely of molten zinc, a quasar whose energy was mysteriously diminishing, a gigantic comet hurling itself between the galaxies, and innumerable indications of intelligent life—such as a planet exploding for no discernible reason. Yes, Zarkov’s astronomical instruments were of such sensitivity that he had actually pinpointed the location of over fifty planets; he possessed fragments of information about some. But not even his high idealism could convince him that mankind was emotionally and intellectually prepared for the fruits of his genius, even his relatively benign fruits. That is why he designed many weapons to protect mankind from the dangers of the unfeeling and uncaring universe, but why he never brought himself to build them. Thanks to “Sixty Minutes” and his own iconoclasm, he was left alone, but if those dodo-heads at the Pentagon ever learned of the blueprints in his safe . . .

However, when the peculiar energies began manifesting themselves between Jupiter and Mars, Dr. Hans Zarkov wished many a time that he had confided in those same dodo-heads.

The cinder fell in an arc above the gloomy estate; it crashed through the greenhouse glass as if that had been its intention, and it landed between the legs of the sleeping man sprawled beneath the brown blankets on the cot. A column of thick, odorous smoke arose from the blankets.

Munson awoke. He sniffed something in the air.
Smells like a decaying skunk,
he thought, recalling an incident from his childhood when he had tried to bury one in the backyard. Then Munson’s short red hair stood on end; his eyes bulged until they protruded nearly as much as his fat red cheeks. Throwing the blanket from the cot, he slipped into his shoes (he was otherwise fully clothed) and stamped the cinder into harmless ashes. Only when the immediate danger was taken care of did he notice the blackness above. There was not a star in the sky, emphasizing the unholy nature of the darkness. He steadied himself by leaning against a console. “Dr. Zarkov! The sun!”

The doctor was caught in the throes of a nightmare. He dreamed he was in the upper bedroom of the white two-story house of his childhood; he walked through the hall and down the stairs and through another hall as if he were a wraith, gliding past the antique furniture and portraits of his great-grandparents, until he reached the window through which he saw what in his childlike eyes was the great expanse of the backyard; over fifty yards away stood the stoic tall evergreens he loved so much to climb. Much nearer was the alien who had come for him. It was a gigantic orange creature with yellow spots, long skinny legs, longer skinnier arms, a single round eye in the center of its massive stomach, and a tubular sucking organ instead of a neck and head. It ran toward the child Zarkov. Relentlessly. Ruthlessly. The sucking organ broke through the glass with a numbing crash and struck! It completely covered the child Zarkov’s head, smothering him in blackness. Then . . .

“Dr. Zarkov! It’s eight twenty-four and there’s no sun!”

Zarkov thought,
My God, I’m thrust from one nightmare directly into another.
Then the guilt feelings flooded back to him, threatening to drown him in a despair much greater than that he had experienced in his dream, when the sucking organ had covered his head. He staggered at the realization that he had not adequately protected mankind. He was wide awake. Like Munson, he had collapsed fully clothed onto his cot early in the morning. So he leaped from the cot wearing a wrinkled white shirt and tan corduroys. His mouth felt as though a midget with muddy feet had tramped through it, but he couldn’t worry about brushing his teeth now. He had to save the Earth! Reaching the consoles, he pushed buttons and turned knobs and flicked switches. “Check the angular vector of the moon!”

The first thing Munson checked was his heartbeat; numbed by an adrenaline rush, he did not know what to do first. Zarkov, as usual, had given him such vague instructions that several valid courses of actions were possible, not to mention the invalid ones. Running his stubby fingers through his red hair, wondering if he would ever get the chance to shampoo it, Munson dashed to another console and pushed buttons and turned knobs and flicked switches. “I know it’s against orders,” he said, “but I’m going to intercept some television frequencies so I can find out what’s on the news.”