Flash Gordon (7 page)

Zarkov nodded. “Any source of information is acceptable under the circumstances.”

La di da,
thought Munson as he turned a knob and stared at a screen above him. First he intercepted a quiz show, then a Lucille Ball rerun, then an episode of “Tarzan” starring Ron Ely. When he intercepted a picture of Brad Cassidy, TV newsman, speaking into a microphone, Munson breathed a sigh of relief.

“According to scientists at NASA,” said Cassidy over the airwaves, “this unpredicted solar eclipse is no cause for alarm. They have been in conference with the President, however, since seven o’clock this morning, briefing him on . . .”

Snarling, grunting his displeasure, Zarkov killed the sound.

“What did you do that for?” whined Munson, fiddling with the knobs to restore the sound.

“The President is a peanut brain,” said Zarkov. “I swear, ever since Ford allowed reporters to take pictures of him buttering his breakfast muffins on the wrong side . . . Well, it’s been very bad for the country, I can tell you that.”

Right,
thought Munson.
Perfectly clear as usual.
His dissatisfaction with his employer was overwhelmed by his concern when a ticker tape clicked from the console next to that controlling the screen. Holding his breath, Munson gingerly tore it from the slot. He read it several times. He stuttered something incomprehensible after each reading. He swayed, stricken with an attack of gas. He felt the blood draining from his face.

“What did you find? The moon out of orbit?”

“You could say that,” replied Munson when he could manage it. “By more than twelve degrees! This must be a mistake! I told you we should rig new transistors and overhaul this thing.” He whacked the console briskly.

“It’s not a mistake,” said Zarkov grimly. “It’s an attack. I’ve been right, all these years. Fire up those transducers, will you?”

I’ll fire up those transducers,
thought Munson.
I’ll fire them right up your . . .
However, his desire to restore the sound caused him to leave the thought incomplete. Nearly hyperventilating, he attempted to calm himself as he worked the controls on the console, hoping to override Zarkov’s override. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the familiar jowls of the President crystallize with only a slight interference. “The President’s coming on. I think he’s making a statement.”

“What the hell do I care?” asked Zarkov. “I tried to warn him. He wouldn’t listen. A poor man’s Hindenburg, looking for his Hitler.”

The blackness outside was briefly illuminated by red waves exposing a torrent of small meteors. The cinders crashed into trees, knocking over three and setting four afire.

Though his body meant it as a gasp, Munson wheezed horribly, like a coronary victim suddenly stricken with asthma.

“Merely fragments of moon rock,” said Zarkov in tones as comforting as he could make them. “Our moon is being subjected to some enormous force from outer space—a kind of energy beam.”

Now red lightning bolts stabbed across the sky. Their jagged fingers touched points throughout the landscape. Glass, shattered noisily, pieces dropping about the harried scientists. Munson hastily covered his face with his hands, but Zarkov calmly continued his tasks at the console. The lights flickered, the screen faded; Zarkov did not notice as he read a printout. He sighed, but there was a glimmer of suppressed excitement in his voice as he said, “Time for us to go, Munson.”

“Go where?”

Zarkov clenched the hand holding the printout into a fist. The veins of his neck protruded and his jaw was set so tightly that Munson expected to see bits of enamel fall from his mouth. “I’ve got the coordinates now—the direction of the energy beam’s source. This is what we’ve been waiting for. We’ll go up and counterattack them!”

Munson gulped loudly. He slowly turned to stare at the ornate golden space capsule looming above the foliage in the greenhouse behind him. “Surely you jest!”

“No.”

“You’re crazy! I’m not going up in that!”

Nodding as if he had expected this reaction all along, Zarkov opened a drawer and pulled out a revolver.

“Doctor! I thought you were a man of peace!” exclaimed Munson.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures. I can’t handle the capsule alone. Get your toothbrush, Munson; you’re going on a trip to the stars!”

The small plane carrying Flash Gordon and Dale Arden flew blindly in the impenetrable darkness. The pilot wondered if they had somehow flown into a spacious cave, and he unconsciously tensed for an impact into unyielding rock that would arrive without warning, at any second. The copilot, though just as nervous as his companion, wondered if they had somehow flown into a tremendous womb; if only it wasn’t so cold . . . However, they spoke to one another with professional aplomb, as if nothing unusual was happening, as if they navigated absolute darkness every day.

“What’s the word from Boston, Bill?” asked the pilot.

The copilot frowned and shook his head. “Zip. Zilch. Zero. All channels dead.” For the first time he permitted traces of amazement to creep into his voice. “Say, get a load of those VORs . . .”

The needles on virtually every instrument of the controls spun crazily, registering impossible and contradictory information that altered just as crazily and just as impossibly with each passing second.

Suddenly, the pilot exclaimed, “On the left, about nine o’clock high!”

The darkness parted, wounded by a warm glow of red, as if some mad and powerful painter had cast his watercolors into the sky. Terrible, terrific bolts of red lightning stabbed from the warm glow, reaching toward the ground below like a murderer’s knife. The atmosphere itself seemed to react against this alien lightning with an electricity of its own, hoping to reject it or consume it like a gaseous antibody. A streak of lightning barely missed the nose of the plane; it disintegrated an instant before the nose would have struck it.

Now the pilot permitted himself to express a hint of panic and fear. “Hold on tight, Bill, let’s put this baby down right here.”

The moment the copilot touched the flap control, painful electricity coursed through him, and his vision was blinded by a crimson wave. The copilot was vaguely aware of the pilot grabbing his arm, of the pilot experiencing a similiar pain, but those were the last impressions of his life.

The unconscious bodies of the pilot and copilot were sucked through the broken glass as if their seat belts were nonexistent, sucked into the cold, foreboding blackness.

In the passenger section, Flash and Dale had spent the time sitting quietly, pondering the limbo into which they had been thrust. Frustrated that he could do nothing constructive in this predicament, Flash concentrated upon having a steadying, calming influence on Dale, who was finding the situation much more difficult to cope with. The peace Flash summoned in times of need could not relieve him of his anxieties. He had the premonition that the lessons of the past would be of no help in the coming hours, that each risky deed would be performed without full knowledge of the consequences.

The cockpit curtains flapped. Without thinking, Flash unsnapped his seat belt and rushed toward the cockpit, only to find himself fighting a gale. His stomach tightened as if he had swallowed a concrete slab.

When Flash saw that the pilots were gone, he was thankful that at the least he could spend his final moments battling the inevitable. Sliding into a seat, he grabbed the bucking wheel yoke, pulling it back with all his strength. He kicked at the rubber pedals. He could not allow himself to be distracted long enough to see Dale’s face as she entered the cockpit, undoubtedly struggling against the gale, and said, “My God! Where did the pilots go?”

Setting his jaw, his heart fearful over Dale’s fate, Flash said between his teeth, “Hydraulic’s gone. Grab that other wheel, help me pull her up!”

Staggering into the other seat, Dale tugged at the wheel. She was paralyzed by despair when she realized that her efforts had been in vain. Tensing every muscle, she pulled at it again, draining her mind of every irrelevant thought. When it seemed her efforts had been met with some small success, she said, “Are we coming up? I can’t see a thing!”

“Me neither. Look for the landing lights!”

Dale glanced about what remained of the cockpit. The controls and instrument panels were totally incomprehensible. “This isn’t my scene! Look where?”

Though it was risky, Flash released one hand from the wheel and pointed at the controls above Dale. “Switches up there; start hitting them!”

Dale instantly complied. She remembered a comic short she had seen as a child; the three comedians, stranded in a crashing rocket ship, did the only thing they could: they pushed buttons and hoped for the best. When the landing lights finally flooded on, Dale was relieved only because she could once again grab the wheel with both hands.

Flash realized they could not keep the plane in the air much longer; it was foolish to try. He began scanning the ground below, searching for an adequate landing site. He glimpsed a strange tower—a greenhouse?—in the center of a gloomy estate.

“Did your flying lessons get as far as landing?” screamed Dale over the roar of the gale.

“I was afraid you’d ask that,” replied Flash, smiling despite himself.

Red bolts of jagged electricity shimmered and danced on the nose and wings. The atmosphere howled as if its very atoms were disintegrating into nothingness.

Zarkov’s hand trembled as he aimed the revolver at the cowering Munson. His mind full of questions dancing like skeletons in a graveyard, preying upon his sanity, his face remained impassive, his blazing eyes providing the only indications of the irrationality lurking beneath the surface of his personality. “Munson, you’ll go down in history as a
putz.”

Munson folded his arms across his flabby chest and shook his head, his fat cheeks shaking in the dim light. “I don’t care. At least I’ll be a living
putz.”

“I swear, Munson, I’ll shoot!”

Munson shrugged, his moving hands exhibiting his exasperation. “Get shot or go up in that thing—what’s the difference?”

“This way you’ll be giving your life to save the Earth! Haven’t you any spirit at all?”

As if to answer Zarkov’s question, Munson calmly walked away, through the greenhouse, toward the nearest exit.

I knew I should have hired that coed instead,
thought Zarkov.
You just can’t get good help these days.
“I tell you I can’t get off alone.
I need someone!”

But Munson ignored him. Zarkov swallowed something large and slimy that somehow had been manufactured in his mouth. Munson—the
putz
—had been right about one thing: Zarkov was indeed a man of peace. He nervously drew a bead above Munson’s head. Perhaps if he gave his assistant a little haircut, then he would begin to see things in a more reasonable light; he would be glad to sacrifice himself for the good of the billions on Earth. However, Zarkov was reluctant to pull the trigger because he could not keep his arm steady. Just as he began to increase the pressure on the trigger, a horrendous crashing—the impact of metal upon dirt—distracted him. He heard the whirring of propellers, the roar of coughing engines drowning out the crackling lightning and the eternally hissing wind. He glanced about, and was vaguely aware that Munson was walking toward the door as if nothing unusual was transpiring, perceiving bright lights tearing away the darkness, growing larger, approaching with the inevitability of a divine presence.

That plane is coming in for a crash landing.

Indeed. One wheel struck the dirt, ripping out great portions of sod. The pilot, whoever he was, was having severe difficulty keeping the plane straight. Then a sense of doom gathered about Zarkov, and he realized where the plane’s path would take it. “Munson!” His assistant was nowhere to be seen.

The door slammed open. Followed by the remorseless white light, a panic-stricken Munson dashed into the greenhouse. The plane crashed through the door and glass, creating a noise the sky could not have equaled if it had been rent asunder by Zeus himself. Bowling over pots and plants as if they were splinters, it crushed Munson beneath its terrific weight.

When the plane finally halted, Zarkov stared at the pool of blood seeping out from underneath the metal. Dazzled by the vision of what Munson must have looked like under there, he pictured his assistant totally flat, his bones broken and his organs crushed and his face mangled beyond recognition. Though this vision stunned and horrified Zarkov for a moment, he managed to keep his irrational wits about him. He realized the pilot of the plane was strictly inept, but very, very brave. He crept backward into the darkness.

Inside the cockpit, Flash wiped a trickle of blood from his forehead. “You all right?” he asked Dale.

She smiled. “I’m terrific.”

You sure are.
“Come on, let’s get out of here before she blows.”

Though the gesture was perhaps unnecessary, Flash kicked open the cockpit emergency exit. But he was so full of joy, so glad to be alive, that he did not care. Each second stretched onward for an infinity of happiness. He jumped to the ground, turned, and held out his arms. Only the greatest restraint prevented him from spoiling the innocent pleasure of the moment and crushing Dale’s lithe body to his breast when she leaped into his embrace.