The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker Page 11

  Goliath’s mighty form came crashing through the side wall, out of range of the time-ray. Picking up a huge chunk of cement, Goliath hurled it at the time-ray projector, smashing it to bits.

  The frozen figures came alive and continued where they had left off. Cap’s driving legs propelled him forward, and his rock-like fist clobbered Karzz on the chin, flinging him limply against the wall. Seeing Cap had things under control, Hawkeye and Iron Man relaxed.

  “It looks as if one powerhouse punch by Cap knocked him colder’n a mackerel,” crowed Hawkeye-too soon.

  For the sagging figure opened its eyes and spoke to them. “You forget my human form is only a disguise for….” His finger jabbed a belt-stud and they watched in revulsion as they saw the transformation that only Iron Man had witnessed before on Mount Everest.

  “…for my true alien form.”

  The hideous monster with purple-blotched skin, green lips, blue hair, and fiery red eyes stood before them on his hooved feet, looking like a nightmare that had somehow become reality.

  “I can stand breathing your poisonous oxygenated air for a few minutes,” the ghastly creature mouthed. “And in this form we have one elusive attribute, that of turning into intangible amorphous material.”

  With that, the monster turned milky in color and formed a cloud of smoke that streamed out the door. Goliath futilely tried to seize it, but he grasped nothing solid.

  Running out, they saw the smoke-alien pouring down through the dome without need of steps, thence into the water-hatchway and into its own deep-sea vehicle parked next to that of the Avengers. Evidently changing inside to solid form, and back to human-like Karzz, his amplified voice came to them as they all raced down the stairway.

  “You have won a minor skirmish,” he snarled, “driving me away from my dome. But you will never capture me when I vanish somewhere in your vast outside world, lost when I mingle among three billion people.”

  The Avengers dashed up just as the inner door closed. On the other side, they knew, the sea hatch was filling with water as the outer hatch opened to let in the sea. Then Karzz could speed away in his deep-sea boat, with a long head-start on them before the hatchway could be put through its cycle again.

  Panting, Cap called a hurried conference.

  “Let’s size up the situation. Even though we didn’t nab Karzz, what advantages did we gain? For one thing, we got control of this undersea hideout of his. Will he have to come back for any reason?”

  “I think so,” said Iron Man. “Up in his control room, I noticed another ray device that I think may be his time teleportation machine-his only way of returning to the future. If I’m right, he’ll have to come back for that sooner or later-or die when the world ends.”

  “Good!” cried Cap. “Then we’ll leave one guard here. Let’s see…how about Goliath? He’s equal to ten other men.”

  “Okay,” agreed the giant man. “Just let that weasel try to sneak back in and get past me.”

  “The rest of us back in the deep-sea boat,” waved Cap, as the inner door opened again, drained of water. Soon, after going through the egress process, they sped out through the outer hatch.

  Iron Man tuned his long-range sonar, reading off measurements from its ping signals. “Just as I thought,” he muttered. “Karzz has a super-speed boat and is already surfacing.”

  Cap looked around slowly, haggardly. “That means to find him we’ll have to search the world.”

  “Every country?” gasped the Wasp. “Every city, town, and hamlet? Among millions and millions of people?”

  “Talk about a needle lost in a haystack,” said Hawkeye bleakly—“this is like trying to find one grain of sand lost on a beach. It’s hopeless.”

  “Not the way we’re going to do it,” spoke up Iron Man. “We’re going to hunt him electronically. I’ll show you what I mean back at headquarters.”

  chapter 16

  The Alien Hunt

  “Keep turning the dial one notch at a time,” instructed Iron Man.

  It was the next day and they were back at headquarters, using equipment that came from one of Anthony Stark’s labs. There were four monitor screens attended by the four Avengers present. The monitors were connected to a huge computer, and also to four radar-dish aerials on the roof that pointed in different directions.

  “The basic principle is simple,” explained Iron Man. “The radar dishes are locked onto four synchronous satellites put up by NASA for radio signals to be relayed around the world. What we are relaying around the world is a ‘spy-ray,’ you might call it. It does not interfere with the normal operations of the communications satellites.” He patted an electronic box that fed signals into the system.

  “An invention I borrowed from Tony Stark’s labs which he’s developing for the military. This is a good test. Each person in the world has his own special brain-wave pattern, as distinctively different as his fingerprints are from. other people’s prints. Now, Karzz’s alien brain waves, which he can’t disguise, would stand out like the wellknown sore thumb from the characteristic patterns of human minds, like these.”

  Iron Man held up a chart of various human brain-wave patterns that were in flowing waves, differing minutely in the height of the curves, their closeness together, and the dips or peaks of the full string.

  “Alien brain waves will be totally different,” said Iron Man. “I don’t know what they’ll look like, but just watch for any freakishly distorted pattern and we’ll have Karzz nailed do n, no matter where he’s hiding. Each of us is attuned to a separate syncom satellite which covers a different broad region of earth. The four of us cover the world with our monitor screens.”

  “Every square inch?” asked the Wasp in wonder.

  “Every square millimeter,” corrected Iron Man. “This spy-ray system could be tuned, if we wished, to finding one blue microbe out of a trillion red ones. Take my word for it that, as you turn the dial, you are scanning a different square mile of earth below the satellites, and every person’s brain wave in that area is registered on your screen. The computer will sort out any number of patterns, even millions at the same time.”

  “I don’t understand a word of it,” confessed Hawkeye. “You mean I could tune in my own mind and see a Hawkeye brain pattern?”

  “No, you’d just get a blank,” said the Wasp slyly. “He said brain pattern.”

  “Then take Goliath,” retaliated Hawkeye. “I understand when he grows to giant size, his brain reduces to ant size.”

  “Oh, you made me think of Handsome Hank standing guard all alone at the sea bottom. I miss him so.”

  “Hah. That’s like missing the measles—’ Hawkeye stopped, seeing that the girl was looking sad. “Sorry, Wasp. Guess I was hitting below the belt.”

  “Everybody on the job!” barked Captain America, turning to his own monitor screen.

  “It will be a hard job,” warned Iron Man, “taking your full concentration, hour after hour. If you look away from your screen for a moment, or even blink too much, you might miss Karzz.”

  Silence fell as each of them turned his dial and watched the changing patterns of brain waves that sprayed onto the screen constantly. Could they comb the world this way, picking one alien brain out of three billion people on earth?

  Twenty-four hours later, stoically skipping sleep entirely, they were eyesore and numb-nerved.

  A radio that Cap tuned in regularly again gave the grim news.

  Key snatches of the newscaster’s words were alarming. “Earth undergoing fantastic change…ocean level up five feet…Holland dikes threatened…volcanoes erupting in Philippines, Japan, Australia…violent highaltitude wind forces all jets to fly lower…giant comet plunging toward earth on possible collision course.”

  “The four earth dooms of Karzz,” muttered Iron Man. “Building up to their cataclysmic finale-—only three days away now. And we still can’t locate Karzz, though we’ve spy-rayed half the world already.”

  Five hours later, they ha
d covered nearly the whole world. Iron Man was frowning worriedly. “One hour to go, with only a few small patches of earth left to scan. Is it possible that….” His voice trailed away as he worked his monitor dial.

  When the hour was up, they all switched off their screens and stared at one another, dumfounded.

  Cap finally said it aloud: “Karzz was nowhereon earth. Or else he devised some way of hiding and eluding the spy-ray.”

  “Impossible,” said Iron Man. “Impossible, I tell you! Stark’s spy-ray works on the telepathic principle, and nothing can stop telepathic waves from coming through.”

  He spun his dial and his monitor showed a single brain-wave pattern ribboning across the screen. “There’s the brain wave of Goliath, seven and a half miles deep under countless tons of sea water. The deepest mine shaft…the heart of a solid stone mountain…the inside of a nuclear reactor—none of those could prevent Karzz’s brain waves from being radiated and picked up by the spy-ray.”

  “Last night I saw upon the stair,” recited the Wasp in a low voice, “a little man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today; oh, how I wish he’d go away.”

  Iron Man winced. “That’s about it,” he said. “Karzz is somewhere on earth—and yet he isn’t. It’s incredible, inexplicable, inconceivable.”

  “Translation—nutty,” said Hawkeye. “Too bad, Shellhead, but your electronic gizmo bombed out.”

  “Don’t blame Iron Man,” defended Cap. “If Karzz is still on earth, he must have picked out some clever hiding place we never suspected…wherever that could be.”

  Iron Man suddenly jumped up. “Wait…think once. Where is the one place on earth we would least expect him to be? The last place we would think of?”>

  “Huh?” said Hawkeye blankly.

  Iron Man turned and ran from the room, banging through door after door in the other section of the building where, as Anthony Stark, he had set up his series of labs and science workshops.

  In some of them, his aides were at work. Other labs were dark and temporarily unoccupied. With all his sensors and detectors on, Iron Man paused outside one closed door labeled: ADVANCED RESEARCH LAB. It was used only by Iron Man himself for top-priority science jobs, containing the finest and most prized tools of research.

  Iron Man’s sensors hummed faintly, picking up the telltale metabolic warmth of a living form beyond the door. The door was locked, but the Golden Avenger rammed through it.

  Within, a man with frosty eyes turned from the workbench.

  “Karzz!” screeched Iron Man. “You were here all the time, in Avenger headquarters, the one place we didn’t think of!”

  “Naturally,” mocked the alien. “It was elementary to outwit you dull-brained earthlings.”

  The other Avengers had followed Iron Man, and they stared open-mouthed.

  “How do you like that?” groaned Hawkeye. “We look for him all over the earth…in places twelve thousand miles away. Yet all the while he was practically sitting in our laps. Well, we’ve got him now.”

  “Au contraire,” said Karzz coolly. “In the past week, while hiding here, I took the liberty of utilizing the lab’s fine equipment. I constructed two seventieth-century devices. Only the first need concern you now….”

  “Grab him, quick,” yelled Iron Man, and all the Avengers rushed forward. “We want him alive.”

  But they all seized empty air, as the leering Karzz turned transparent. They could now see the new kind of belt he wore, which glowed with an eerie blue. luminescence.

  “A fourth-dimensional transporter,” came the fading voice of Karzz. “It allows me to slip through the fourth dimension and whisk anywhere on earth in the wink of an eye. In a moment, I’ll be back in my undersea dome…without the necessity of going past your Goliath guard at the sea-hatch door. I’ll just go through the walls, by osmosis.”

  His form faded to nothingness, with a last derisive laugh.

  “Goliath,” moaned the Wasp. “He’ll be in danger, not knowing that Karzz will materialize out of thin air, behind his back….”

  Dozing, but ready to awaken at the slightest noise outside the sea-hatch door, Goliath awoke uneasily. He had the feeling that something was wrong…that someone was in the dome with him.

  “Impossible,” he told himself. “Now don’t lose your buttons over the dead silence and loneliness. You’ve got too many people to disgrace—Henry Pym, Ant-Man, and Goliath—all three of us. Keep hold of your nerves, big boy….”

  “Garçon!” rang out an insulting voice. “Come up here.” Goliath sat up so violently that he crashed his head against a low crossbeam.

  “Karzz!” he gasped dizzily. “His voice came from the apex room!”

  Shaking off his dizziness, Goliath raced up the nearest stairway, moving faster than any man one-tenth of his weight could. Bursting into the apex chamber, he faced the grinning alien.

  “How did you get in?” roared Goliath, his mind reeling. “I sat before the sea hatch day and night….”

  “What good did that do?” cackled Karzz, “when I oozed in through the wall? Now listen to this story of where I was hiding for a week. It’ll kill you.”

  It very nearly did. Goliath felt as horribly shocked as the other Avengers had been when they realized how the alien had duped them with such diabolic cunning. But Goliath had noticed no force-field aura around Karzz…and he now strode forward heavily, huge hands outstretched. “Well! He who laughs last, laughs last, I always say. I’m going to grab you and hold onto you for the next forty-five hours, if I have to, until the others get here…Uh?”

  Goliath had stopped in mid-stride. Karzz had whipped a headband around his forehead, to which was attached a concave mirror that shone a violet-green glow into Goliath’s eyes. At the same time, Karzz barked: “Stop, Goliath. You are under my mental control.”

  Sweating and straining, Goliath tried to fight the overwhelming hypnotic force that beat at his brain. But then his body relaxed into a slump-shouldered sag, eyes blank, face wooden. Like a zombie, he intoned, “It will be done as you command, master.”

  “Good,” Karzz muttered, a murderous look in his eyes.

  “When the other Avengers arrive, they will find the biggest and strongest Avenger blocking their way, opposing them, fighting them. What will you do to them, Goliath?”

  “I’ll wade into them before they know what is happening,” recited Goliath, following unvoiced telepathic suggestions radiated by Karzz. The giant man’s eyes blazed fiercely. “And then…I’ll kill them!”

  “That is right, Goliath,” voiced Karzz in sinister glee.

  “Now we will wait for the schweinhunde to enter my trap.”

  chapter 17

  Avenger vs. Avenger

  It was not many hours later, after a rocketplane flight and a deep-sea dive, that the other Avengers approached the sea-hatch door of the dome, wary of blast-rays that did not blaze forth.

  “That’s funny,” said Cap uneasily. “If Karzz is back in control of the dome, having somehow taken Goliath prisoner, why wouldn’t he fire his rays at us? He wants us to come in. That spells-and smells like—a trap.”

  “We’ll be ready for anything,” Iron Man said grimly. But they were scarcely prepared for the stunning surprise awaiting them…being confronted by the huge menacing figure of Goliath when they stepped inside the sea hatch into the dome. Behind Goliath stood Karzz.

  “Salaam! Meet my bodyguard,” Karzz announced gloatingly, “under my electro-hypnotic control…the other device I made in your lab. Go after them, Goliath.”

  The giant sprang among them, a human hurricane in action. One mighty blow of his hand flung Hawkeye ten yards. His other balled fist cracked against Captain America’s chin and sent him thudding against the wall. One huge boot swung up and propelled Iron Man away like a football and he tumbled between two crossbeams and wedged fast.

  Only the Wasp had escaped the giant’s fury, by swiftly shrinking to insect size and buzzing away frantically.

 
; She listened in horror at what came next, while the three male Avengers lay out cold, or too dazed to move.

  “Finish them off, Goliath,” ordered Karzz. “Pick up that iron club and see that nothing recognizable remains of them. Go…do as I say!”

  But Goliath was hesitating, a bewildered look on his face, like that of a man coming out of a dream. “But they…my friends,” he said brokenly. “Won’t…can’t harm them.”

  “Hmm, I see you need another dose of my hypno-ray,” snapped Karzz. “Evidently your Avenger minds are so strongly loyal to one another that it takes repeated hypnotic dosages to keep you under control. All right….”

  The Wasp helplessly watched Karzz shine his headband device at Goliath, who again subsided into a mindless slave with slack jaws and transfixed stare. In a trance, at Karzz’s repeated command, the mighty man picked up a huge spiked iron club that lay ready and strode ponderously toward the nearest limp Avenger.

  But the delay, while Goliath was being re-hypnotized, had given the toughest men alive a chance to come to, their senses swimming back. So when Goliath’s murderous club swung down at Captain America, Cap sprang away, gasping in horror at the first sight his eyes had seen after opening.

  “Goliath is berserk!” yelled Cap, seeing the other two stirring. “Run for it. Hide in the dome somewhere till we can figure out what to do.”

  There was no chance to gain the sea hatch and their deep-sea boat. Their only chance was somehow to survive within the dome itself, stalked by a mad giant. Cap gave Hawkeye a hand and yanked him to his feet, slapping him across the face to wake him up faster. Then the two of them rushed to where Iron Man was wedged, too weak to free himself.

  “Jump on my shoulders, Hawkeye,” Cap barked. “Hurry!”

  From this vantage, Hawkeye was able to seize one steel leg of Iron Man’s suit and pull him free. Then all three dashed away, just in time, before the lumbering Goliath could get within club range of them.