Flash Gordon by Arthur Byron Cover Read Free Book Online

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,