Flash Gordon by Arthur Byron Cover Read Free Book Online Page B

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