The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker Read online

  Hawkeye silently threw up his hands in surrender. Captain America was saying, “In conclusion, we can all cry Well done, Thor! At present, he has returned to his abode in Valhalla.”

  Cap pressed another stud and the searchlight shifted to a statue titled QUICKSILVER, a man in a light green one-piece uniform. His silvery hair stuck out at the sides as winglike tufts.

  “Like his name,” said Captain America, “Quicksilver moved with fantastic speed, which came from his being a mutant variety of human being. Back in his Balkan homeland, Quicksilver’s everyday name was Pietro. He guarded his secret abilities well, but often used them as an Avenger.”

  Cap’s eyes misted a bit as if looking into the past. “Quicksilver was a blur of motion, able to outspeed cars, trains, or planes as if they were stuck in mud. He could run circles around any Olympic track star. He won every grim race of life and death against Father Time himself.”

  “Is Cap for real?” snorted Hawkeye in a low tone. “Methuselah there is giving us cornball jazz that went out with Ben Hur’s chariot. When will he catch up with the jet age? Can’t he dig plain English?”

  “Shush!” spat out the Wasp. “Cap came from an earlier generation than ours. You can’t blame him if his speech is behind the times. But when it comes to a fight, he speaks absolutely modern clobberese with his fists, right? So we can forgive him being a bit of a square.”

  “Square?” choked Hawkeye. “He’s a cube…cubed. Why, I…Ulk!”

  Hawkeye’s whisper choked off, for the simple reason that Goliath’s huge forefinger and thumb around his throat had given a tiny squeeze…enough to make Hawkeye turn purple, unable to catch his breath, let alone talk for the next few moments.

  Cap swung the spotlight to a third statue. Another girl like the Wasp was portrayed, but in a witch-like scarlet costume as befitted her emblazoned name that lighted up—THE SCARLET WITCH.

  “Pietro’s sister, Wanda,” explained Captain America for the benefit of the TV audience, “was also a mutant, but her special ability lay in witch-like supernatural powers. For a while, both Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were pawns in the hands of Magneto, an unscrupulous mastermind. And originally, they were thus the enemies of the law and fought against a famed band called the X-Men, while carrying out Magneto’s sinister schemes. They voluntarily joined the Avengers later, to make up for their former misdeeds under duress.”

  “So?” muttered Hawkeye. “I was also an anti-Avenger at one time, or at least I battled Iron Man time and again. Then, on my own, I reformed and became a good guy. So who pats me on the back? If you ask me….”

  “We aren’t asking you a thing, William Tell-it-all,” came from the Wasp icily. “Besides, we current members of the Avengers all get a run-down later, addressed to the TV viewers. Wait your turn, Bow Twanger.” Hawkeye glared at the Wasp. Goliath glared at Hawkeye. Hawkeye decided to glare elsewhere.

  The lights came on again and Captain America snapped erect. “In conclusion, let us salute the former Avengers for their deeds, always to be remembered as long as Avengers keep assembling.”

  As they started to rise to their feet, a tiny voice buzzed in Goliath’s ear. “Careful, High Pockets…the ceiling, you know.”

  Barely in time, Goliath bent his neck and stood half bowed as they all saluted the three statues and said in chorus, “Hail to Thor, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch!”

  Captain America now smiled for the cameras, relaxing. But inside he was wondering, “When is Iron Man going to show up? What’s keeping him? Did he run into something unusual?”

  chapter 3

  Karzz, the Conqueror

  Captain America could hardly guess how unusual was the “something” that Iron Man had run into and how deadly. He was plummeting like a stone toward the mammoth electromagnet on the peak of Mount Everest, pulled downward by superpowerful forces.

  But he had not given up all hope. Through his swirling mind a desperate plan had formed. Rapidly, his gloved hand grasped a dial on his chest and rheostated the total power of his suit to its highest output. Ten megawatts of energy sizzled through his circuits and fed into his antimagnetic unit.

  Clashing forces flung him back a bit, as his antimagnetic radiation fought the supermagnetic pull below. But inexorably, he was drawn down again, his antimagnetic unit whining uselessly. It was like trying to paddle a canoe up Niagara Falls.

  Still, his antimagnetic “brake” had slowed his fall considerably. Was it enough to save his steel suit from cracking open like an eggshell against the force-field cushion?

  Fifty feet…25…10…5…WHAM!

  A shriek tore from Anthony Stark’s lips, inside, as his outer iron hulk slammed into the force-field like a car smashing into a brick wall at two hundred fifty miles an hour.

  But his steel suit held up without cracking, and his built-in molecular-foam padding protected his fragile human body from absorbing too much of the bruising impact against the armored linings. With no more than his wind knocked out, Iron Man bounced a hundred feet high from the force-field barrier, then fell off to the side toward bare hard rock.

  Shaking off reeling dizziness, Iron Man managed to shoot out a retro-braking burst of jets in time, so that he landed on his feet with no more of a jar than that of a man jumping down ten feet.

  He swayed on his feet a moment, almost collapsing, but then his spirit-level adjustors and gyros automatically straightened him up. His blurred eyes cleared up and focused—on a man in a strange costume.

  Iron Man stared in wonder. The man was dressed in clothing that resembled no style ever seen on earth before. His height and figure were average, but his face had a saturnine cast. Strangest of all was the malevolent expression in his frosty blue eyes, infinitely cold and hostile.

  “An intruder,” came his harsh voice, as if he owned Mount Everest. “But you are different from the other earth-people in my world monitor screen. You are encased in protective armor. Who are you?”

  “My real name is unimportant,” answered Stark. “They call me Iron Man, the Avenger.” He waved at the humming machine, still awed. “And just who are you? Did you build this supermagnet? And why?”

  The stranger drew himself up regally, and spoke in lofty tones. “I am Karzz, the Conqueror!”

  “I imagine I’m supposed to tremble at the name,” said Iron Man sarcastically, “but you might as well have said Joe Smirch, for all the name means to me. Where do you do your so-called conquering?”

  “All over the universe, my mocking friend. World after world among the stars has fallen before my invincible legion of space warcraft. I am not a native of earth. I am from a far-off world of superscience beyond your imagination.”

  Iron Man would have put him down for a harmless crackpot, except for one thing—the supermagnet. You couldn’t laugh that off. And after all, it was a well-accepted theory that the universe was full of other habitable worlds, many of which might be further advanced than earth, to the point of having achieved interstellar spaceflight.

  “All right, you’re a denizen of another distant solar system,” agreed Iron Man. “I see that evolution on your world produced the same human species as earth did.”

  “You are mistaken,” denied Karzz. A faint smile played about his lips. “Prepare for a shock, earthling. We control metabolic transformation of our body tissues at will. Watch…this is how I really look.”

  Before Iron Man’s eyes, the human form began to subtly and steadily alter, like a man melting down and changing into something else. The face and other human attributes faded into an amorphous mass, over which a new face and form began to superimpose themselves.

  Iron Man’s eyes kept widening at what he saw materializing, portion by portion, until there stood before him a shocking monstrosity. He was in general still semi-manlike, and not changed in general size. But all else was utter madness…

  A face with blotched purple skin…ghastly green lips…hair of a poisonous blue…and eyes that were fiery red like hot coals. The arms
had changed into boneless tentacles with ten slender “fingers’ that writhed. The two gnarled legs ended in hooves instead of feet.

  It was a surrealistic creature beyond the imagination of a Dali…a nightmare beyond the wildest phantasmagorias of the human mind. Iron Man recoiled as if from a loathsome monster—yet there was intelligence in the creature’s face. Superintelligence, in fact; and clammy fear clutched at Stark’s ailing heart. Earthmen could expect no mercy or pity from such coldly inhuman intellects.

  “Appalled, earthling?” mocked the alien. “But let me hasten to inform you that nausea strikes me when I gaze upon your horridly repulsive human form.” Letting that sink in, the alien began reversing the process, his monstrous form slowly metamorphosizing back to the human “disguise” he had worn before.

  “It is not to spare your eyes that I adopt human form on earth,” Karzz commented, “but because in my own form I am dangerously unadapted to the earthly environment. On our native planet, we breathe chlorine gas. And only in human guise can I breathe this horrible oxygen in your atmosphere, poisonous to us.”

  Karzz shrugged and went on.

  “To satisfy your curiosity as to why I can speak your language fluently, I have been on your world a week now. During that time I tuned in radio broadcasts and learned all languages.”

  “All of them on earth?” gasped Iron Man.

  “Including all local idiom,” nodded Karzz. “In Americanese, for instance, I dig how the cats talk. Crazy, man.” With a wry face, he turned haughty. “I know everything else about earth from my long-range sensors, scanners, and monitors—the continents and oceans, mountains, rivers; also cities, subways, cars, trains, planes. And people, pets, and politics.”

  “You absorbed all this in one short week!” marveled Iron Man, aware of the superintelligence facing him. Then, bracing himself, he asked the next logical but rhetorical question:

  “You have come, I suppose, to conquer earth now?”

  “No, earthman.”

  Prepared for the affirmative, Iron Man was staggered, his head whirling.

  “But you boasted of how many other planets you had conquered. Then what else could you be here for?”

  “To destroy earth!” hissed the alien, his eyes seething in ferocious hatred.

  In America, the Avengers’ colorful Memorial Meet played on to a rapt TV audience.

  “We have honored past members of the Avengers,” announced Captain America. “We will now review the current Avengers, giving a broad resume of their origin and special abilities. First, a man who sits nine feet tall in the saddle, and I’m not exaggerating. Here he is, the man mountain…the modern Gulliver…the walking skyscraper…Goliath!”

  The spotlight limned the huge ten-foot form and a gasp sounded in every home in America that had television.

  The Wasp had flitted off his shoulder. “This is your show, Big Boy. I’ll go press the button for the elephant to come on stage.”

  Flying to the podium, the Wasp darted down and jammed the button with her descending feet, just before Captain America’s finger got there. She grinned impishly at him.

  Out on the stage of the auditorium, a big door flew open and a moving platform came into view, on which stood a huge bull elephant with one end of a heavy rope wrapped in its trunk. Goliath picked up the other end. The rope tightened as he braced himself and the trained elephant began to pull.

  “A tug of war between Goliath and a five-ton elephant,” sang out Captain America. “Don’t bet too soon on the wrong one!”

  At first, the powerful beast began to back up, dragging Goliath forward. But then the towering Titan planted his feet, rippled his muscles, and began a slow, steady pull that first halted the elephant, then—incredibly—dragged him forward foot by foot, and finally brought him across the dividing line.

  Panting, Goliath took a bow in the spotlight as the other Avengers applauded. “You know it’s not muscle but sheer weight that wins a tug of war,” said Hawkeye maliciously, eyeing the Wasp. “It’s a good thing that cloudscraper has plenty of fat—between his ears.”

  “Fat or not,” said the Wasp sweetly, “it can out-think whatever stuffing they put in your skull…probably rocks.”

  Captain America cleared his throat as Goliath sat down.

  “Now listen to the strange story of Goliath, alias Giant Man, alias Ant-Man. He is a famous biologist in private life and one day, some years ago, he devised an astounding bio-serum which could shrink the human body down to insect size. He then became the Ant-Man for a while, cleverly using his tininess to outwit certain evildoers.”

  The spotlight now swung to the Wasp, again perched on Goliath’s shoulder.

  “Dr. Henry Pym,” said Captain America, giving Goliath’s real name, for his “secret’ identity had been revealed to the world at large, “eventually let his girl friend share the bio-serum, a variation of which shrank her down to small size and gave her some of the characteristics that account for her name—the Wasp.”

  The audience was listening raptly to Cap’s commentary as he continued. “The Wasp has shared in many Avenger adventures, doing her part in confounding our foes. Originally, like Ant-Man, she had to take the reducing serum each time, then an enlarging serum—a sort of antidote—to regain normal human size. But eventually with enough bio-serum in her body to last a long time, she developed a mental way to shoot down to small size, and back to human size. By will power alone.”

  The spotlight under Cap’s control swung back to Goliath.

  “Let’s return to Ant-Man. Dr. Pym one day took an overdose of the enlarging serum, and instead of stopping at human size, he kept growing and growing to the tremendous height of twenty-five feet. He then joined the Avengers as Giant-Man. But in time, he found his Cyclopean stature too much of a handicap.”

  “Probably,” Hawkeye murmured to the Wasp, “because too many people kept asking him, “Hey, how’s the weather up there?” “

  The star-spangled MC went on before the cameras. “Dr. Pym finally revised his formula so the bio-serum kept him below fifteen feet tall…for a while. Even this was an unwieldy bulk to maneuver—especially into buildings made for people not much over a third his size—so he settled on a more modest ten feet, as he is today. Having been on a leave of absence from the Avengers for these experiments, he returned to us in a new uniform and with his new name of Goliath.”

  Cap went on in a deadly serious tone. “Needless to say, this giant Avenger has helped us out of many a tight spot—tighter than if he himself tried to squeeze into a telephone booth.”

  “He got himself into tight spots worse than that,” drawled Hawkeye for the Wasp’s benefit, “like that time he got stuck in a narrow cave and the rest of us had to figure out some way of working him loose…before a load of nuclear bang-bang stuff went off and blew the place to bits. You weren’t there that time, Wasp.”

  “Were you all blown to bits?” she asked innocently.

  “Into a million bits,” growled Hawkeye. “But the same guy who put Humpty Dumpty together again came along and serviced us, see?”’

  “They never did put Mr. H. D. together again,” the Wasp reminded him. “So that explains why you’re scatterbrained at times.”

  Hawkeye was about to make a sarcastic retort when the spotlight fell on him. He bounced to his feet and bowed in the grand manner, with the TV-camera lens aimed at him.

  “Robin Hood, they say, could split arrows,” came Cap’s build-up. “But now you’re going to see a demonstration by Hawkeye, our third Avenger member, that would make envious Robin Hood put away his bow and retire.” Hawkeye strode to the middle of the floor, where an attendant stood with a pistol, facing a target fifty feet away. Hawkeye stood beside him, pulled an arrow from his quiver, and notched it to his bowstring.

  Hawkeye pulled back the bowstring with deceptive ease.

  It would have taken two other strong men to do the same, one holding the bow, one pulling the string. His firing hand poised, Hawkeye snapped: “
Fire!”

  At the same instant that the attendant fired his pistol, Hawkeye’s bowstring twanged. A bullet and a sleek lightweight wooden arrow sped to the target in motion too fast for the TV eye to follow.

  But the TV camera could record what happened in the next millisecond, as described by Captain America. “See, folks? The arrow arrived first and the bullet split it!”

  The thunderous applause all over America could not be heard, as Hawkeye, acting nonchalant, returned to his seat.

  Cap’s voice resumed. “This superarcher’s repertory of arrows includes unique kinds of his own devising to perform ingenious feats. To name but a few—the blast arrow that can blow open a locked door, the stun arrow for putting enemies out of action, the rocket harpoon to spear flying criminal craft, the bolo arrow to twine around a running man’s ankles before he can escape, and the sneeze smog arrow which both throws a smoke screen for an Avenger’s escape and causes pursuers to sneeze violently and ruin their aim with weapons. There are many more.”

  “Especially the bombast arrow,” whispered the Wasp, “which carries a recording of Hawkeye bragging about himself and bores the enemy to death.”

  Hawkeye had to keep smiling. He was on camera.

  “Hawkeye’s history is somewhat like that of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch,” Cap informed the audience. “He had been a bitter and resourceful foe of Iron Man for a while. But not by his own choosing. In reality, he had been wrongly suspected of crime by the police, which led him to join forces with a notorious girl-spy, the Black Widow. This enmeshed him in intrigue that further got him in bad with the authorities. Hunted like a criminal, he was forced to battle for his own life and freedom.”

  “A poor, misunderstood, downtrodden slob,” murmured the Wasp, wiping away a false tear. Then she brightened. “But there’s justice after all, and today you’re a heroic, honored, and respected…slob.”

  Hawkeye kept smiling into the TV camera, but his hand, which was off-camera, moved around to where he could reach toward the tiny tormentor on Goliath’s shoulder.