The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker Read online

  Cap conquered his first surge of disappointment. Swiftly his eyes took in the wide courtyard and the tall rocket standing on end with a gantry tower around it. Turning back to Karzz, Cap’s eyes narrowed. Was the faint purplish aura of his force-shield missing for some reason? Was he vulnerable?

  Suddenly he plunged forward in a crouch, to find out.

  Karzz stood unperturbed. “You are the incomparable man-to-man, face-to-face, toe-to-toe slugger that no other man on earth is a match for…except one,” he said.

  He touched a stud on his belt and a figure dashed out of a barracks doorway nearby.

  Cap’s driving plunge had ground to a halt, in utter shock. The man coming toward him in a crouch, legs churning powerfully, had a round shield in front…a uniform of red, white, and blue design…a winged cap….

  “It’s me!” choked Cap. “Another Captain America!”

  “Your android double. While you were supposedly sneaking in, my electro-scan ray was X-raying you inside and out, feeding the data into a bio-computer, which then built up a carbon copy of you, so to speak. His body and mind are exactly like yours. So, in a sense, my bodyguard is…Captain America!”

  Karzz finished with a devilish laugh. “Now see if you can defeat yourself.”

  Recovering from his first shock, Cap sprang forward to meet his twin’s charge. Like super football-players, two powerful figures came together with bruising impact, their shields clanging together so loudly that the vibrations made a dozen loose bricks fall out of the crumbling wall nearby.

  They both reeled back. It was almost like a parody in pantomime, the two actors doing everything the same, and reacting exactly alike.

  In unison, they swung the world’s mightiest fists at each other, to meet the world’s toughest chins. When Cap suddenly flung his shield to slice at his opponent’s legs, the second Captain America also sailed his shield in a perfect block shot, knocking Cap’s shield aside.

  When Cap ran to retrieve it, his double leaped headlong to tackle him around the legs and they both crashed to the ground. Both without shields, they wrestled and tumbled in the dirt. When Cap pulled a judo trick to hurl the android back, his double promptly rolled on his back and footed Cap away as he charged.

  Karzz had watched the furious battle with an amused grin. “Very entertaining, but I have work to do. While you’re busy fighting with yourself, Captain America, I’ll start the countdown for my Storm Satellite.”

  The alien flipped over switches on a control board near the rocket, then began counting: “Ten…nine…eight…”

  It was now or never for Cap, if he hoped to stop earth doom number four—whatever it was—from being launched.

  He tried a desperate ruse, facing his android double and gripping his shield as if to sling it at him again.

  “Seven…six…five…”

  Cap flung the shield, but not at the android. It went to the side, at one of the stone walls of the courtyard. Puzzled at this move, the android hesitated a moment, watching the flying shield. It was at this instant that Cap hurled himself forward, taking the android unawares and flattening him with a driving shoulder in his solar plexus. He heard synthetic bones crack within the artificial man.

  “Three…two…one…”

  Cap went over the fallen android, straight toward Karzz at his controls, with a flying leap.

  “Ignition!” Cap heard, just before he smashed into the control box and tipped it over with a crash, staggering Karzz back.

  chapter 13

  Avengers’ Darkest Hour

  Cap fell back as a roar burst from the rear of the rocket and a glowing flame drove it upward out of its launch cradle.

  “Too late!” crowed Karzz. “My rocket is on its way to space orbit above earth.”

  Cap clutched at him desperately but once again met the diamond-hard invisible shield of force that had previously protected the alien.

  “I had to convert all my available power into the launching procedure before,” Karzz said. “But now I can keep my shield around me again.” He shrugged. “It hardly matters that you disposed of my android bodyguard. You may as well share my joy now that earth doom number four is launched on schedule, and hear all about it. I want you Avengers to know my achievements in full so that you will more exquisitely enjoy zero-day-when your world ends.”

  “Never mind rubbing it in,” growled Cap. “Let me hear the facts.”

  Karzz chuckled, and went on. “My aides in the seventieth century devised and tele-transported this launch rocket to me in the twentieth century. Its payload is about to go into orbit.”

  Karzz pointed to a monitor screen, in which the powerful rocket could be seen driving upward and starting to slant toward the horizontal. The booster separated and the second stage drummed on, faster and higher. Then the empty second stage separated, and floating in space was a shiny shell whose outer sheath split open to reveal an intricate satellite.

  “The Storm Satellite,” said Karzz. “As is spins around earth every ninety minutes, it will spray down kinetic forces into the top layers of the atmosphere. A violent wind will gradually arise in the thin stratosphere and work its way down into the thicker air near earth.”

  “You mean all the air around earth will turn windy?”

  “Yes, in eight days. The satellite went into polar orbit, which means it will shift westward every revolution, and thus will cover every area of the upper air daily. It will eventually whip up a super-hurricane all over earth, with wind velocities of five hundred miles an hour.”

  Cap gasped. “Most natural hurricanes are under one hundred miles an hour.”

  “You can picture, then,” Karzz gloated, “what my superwind will do, blowing away people, cars, houses, everything. It will have the force to level the sturdiest steel skyscrapers, which will crash in big cities and create a further shambles. After a few hours, earth’s surface will be swept bare.”

  Cap shuddered at the stark picture of wind-swept destruction.

  “Of course,” said Karzz, “there won’t be much left to be swept away after the giant comet crashes, and the Antarctic floods arise, and earth’s volcanoes erupt in unison. Do you think, Captain America, that even one person will be left alive on earth after the four dooms strike?”

  Cap choked, unable to answer.

  “There won’t be,” Karzz predicted savagely. “And that means my goal will be accomplished, eight days from now. With earthly civilization wiped out, there will be no human race to build up a superior technology that would in the seventieth century smash my drive for galactic conquest. In short, the new parallel universe, or if universe, will replace the former real universe. And in the parallel universe, I will win the galaxy.”

  Cap felt hollow inside. Had this heartless monster won all? What were his plans now? “With your four earth dooms launched, are you going to return to the future?”

  “Not yet,” Karzz answered. “I will remain on twentieth-century earth for three more days, to observe and make sure the four dooms are properly building up to their climaxes. If one or more of them seems to be halting, I will make the proper adjustments to insure their final success. Then I will say farewell to earth…forever.”

  The alien’s frosty eyes glared at Captain America triumphantly. “Rest assured that no hitch in my world-wrecking plans will occur. In eight days…sic transit gloria mundi!”

  “And so passes away the glory of the world,” muttered Cap, remembering the translation from the Latin from his college days. Rage boiled up in him now, at the smug, ruthless monster from outer space…and outer time. Leaping up, Cap slammed away at Karzz with all his power—or at the force-shell protecting him. It was futile, senseless, Cap knew. Yet he could not stop himself from hammering away, until his knuckles cracked and bled.

  Karzz was laughing harshly.

  “Keep it up, asinine Avenger. You will never burst through my energy shell.”

  Yet suddenly, there was no invisible obstruction there, and Cap’s fist connected
solidly with the alien’s chin, sending him head-over-heels.

  Cap stood stunned, hardly believing it had happened.

  Then he leaped forward and ripped the studded belt off of Karzz, who was just dazedly picking himself out of the dirt. “Without this belt of weapon rays or your forceshield, you’re my prisoner.”

  “But how can my force-shield be gone?” said the bewildered Karzz.

  “Because,” rang out a new voice, “I penetrated it with my Z-ray, as I did once before in Antarctica.”

  Cap whirled. “Iron Man!”

  “Hi, Cap,” said Iron Man, landing with Hawkeye, whom he was towing. “We came as soon as we could, all four of us.”

  “Four? But where are Goliath and Wasp?”

  “Ant-Man, alias Goliath, and the Wasp rode in style,” answered Iron Man with a grin, opening a pouch in his belt. Two tiny figures crept into his palm and he lowered them to the ground. The next moment, two human figures grew magically before their eyes until they were normal size.

  “That pouch was rather stuffy,” complained Goliath.

  “And full of lint,” added the Wasp, brushing herself off.

  “You’re all a sight for sore eyes,” said Cap happily. But then his face fell. “But you came too late to stop earth doom number four.”

  Briefly, he recounted the story of what the Storm Satellite would do.

  “Maybe we’re too late to stop that,” said Iron Man, seizing the still-dazed Karzz, “but not too late to blackmail this fugitive from the future.”

  “Blackmail?” echoed Cap.

  “First of all,” explained Iron Man, “remember that we met only androids of Karzz in Antarctica and the South Seas. But this is the real Karzz now, handling the Storm Satellite’s launch in person.”

  Iron Man shook Karzz like a rat.

  “And now here’s the pitch, mister. It won’t do you much good to be here for the end of the world, will it? If you die too, in the holocaust you caused, you can hardly return to the seventieth century, and carry out your conquest of space.”

  Karzz paled, and Iron Man went on measuring his words grimly.

  “That’s the blackmail, pal. We’re offering you a trade. Your life for the lives of three billion doomed earth people. I’m assuming that with your future science you can somehow reverse or halt the earth-doom processes…. Well?”

  “But what if I can’t?” choked Karzz, his face distorted with fright.

  “Then you still stick with us, as our prisoner, for eight days. You’ll have a grandstand seat for the big show, as earth cracks up around your ears as well as ours.”

  Karzz’s face had turned to putty. Terror shone from his eyes. “I—I don’t know if the four dooms can be halted,” he stammered. “I never thought of it.”

  “Well, you’d better begin thinking now,” spoke up Hawkeye. “And if you fail….” Whipping an arrow out of his quiver, he shot it at whistling speed past Karzz’s ear. “You’re going to die a thousand deaths in the next few days, before the real thing comes. I’ll use you for target practice every day, see?”

  Goliath was shooting up to his full ten-foot size, and he now seized up the trembling alien in his two mighty paws. “That is, Hawkeye will have you only in between the times I toss you around like this….”

  Goliath flung the screeching alien up in the air, like a mere toy. He sailed up and up to dizzy heights before he plummeted down into Goliath’s waiting arms with a thud that knocked his breath out.

  The Wasp, in her tiny size, next came diving down to jab her sting-beam into Karzz’s shoulder. “When the boys get tired entertaining you, I’ll take over,” she promised grimly.

  “And I,” added Iron Man, “would like to put you in an armored suit, like a knight, and have some daily exercise with battle-axes.”

  “I think,” advised Cap mildly, “you had better listen to them, Karzz. Even though I’m the leader of the Avengers, I don’t think I could hold them back. Besides, I might just happen to have my back turned.”

  He grabbed Karzz by the neck and shook a mighty balled fist in his face. “And in case they sluff off, I’ll use you as a punching bag every hour on the hour. Give, you worm…can you save earth?”

  But Karzz was laughing now, wildly. Cap let him go, surprised.

  “Did he lose his buttons?” asked Hawkeye.

  But Karzz did a more astounding thing, seizing an arrow out of Hawkeye’s quiver and plunging it into his chest clear through his body.

  “He’s bumped himself off,” groaned Goliath, as Karzz fell to the ground.

  “Pretty good play-acting. Si, señors?”

  All the Avengers jerked at this new voice out of thin air—the voice of multi-lingual Karzz.

  Then they saw the image of the alien’s leering face floating toward them.

  “Good grief!” whispered Iron Man, toeing the fallen body pierced by the arrow. “Then this was an android too.”

  “Buenos noches from the real Karzz,” said the mocking image. “What squares you Avengers are! Under my control, my guided android pretended fear and helplessness just to carry out the farce to its end. I have made utter fools of five great champions of earth.”

  They all looked the way they felt…miserable. Victory had been snatched out of their hands.

  “Let me explain,” went on Karzz. “I sent out my three androids from the start, to Antarctica, the South Seas, and the Sahara. I myself have been safely hidden in a secret haven all the time. Where? You’ll never guess. I still must stay three days to make sure the four earth dooms are coming on schedule. Well, Avengers? An American phrase is most apt at this point: Cat got your tongue?”

  None of them had anything to say.

  “Farewell,” said the image, receding and fading away. “You’ll never find me in my hidden haven.” A last mocking laugh…then silence.

  There was an awkward silence among the five Avengers too. At last, Hawkeye spoke up lamely: “If mankind is doomed, simple—we resign from the human race.”

  Nobody laughed or even cracked a smile. Hawkeye dramatically drew out an arrow and pretended to stab himself, as the android had.

  “Three days to search the whole world for Karzz, without a clue,” said Cap, voicing the thoughts of all of them. “We haven’t got a ghost of a chance. Where would we look first?”

  “In the sea,” said Iron Man calmly, looking at an instrument he had slipped out of his belt. “That’s where his image-broadcast came from. You see, after that episode Hawkeye and I had in Antarctica, first meeting that image-gimmick, I returned to my lab and worked on the problem before coming here, figuring Karzz would use the trick again.”

  He tapped the transistorized instrument. “I devised an image-tracer covering every known kind of carrier wave in the spectrum-gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, radar, and radio waves. I also hooked in the range of cosmic radiation and the area where electrons, neutrons, protons, and mesons operate as wave particles. I left nothing to chance.”

  He looked at his wristwatch. “I’m waiting for the built-in thumbnail computer to analyze all the data and pin down the exact spot undersea where Karzz is hiding.”

  “Superscience against superscience,” murmured Cap. “That will be the only way to win out over Karzz. Without you and the scientific genius you bring from Anthony Stark, Iron Man…Well, we Avengers would have nothing to avenge.”

  “Ah, here are the results.” Iron Man peered at a thin tape that came out of the side of the tracer device, imprinted with mathematical data.

  “Hmm…According to latitude and longitude figures, Karzz is in some sunken hideout in the deepest part of earth’s oceans—down in the Pacific Trench between Hawaii and Japan, seven and a half miles deep.”

  “But how do we get there, and what do we do?” Hawkeye asked.

  “That,” said Captain America, drawing himself up, “is something to be worked out at an Avenger conference among all of us, back at headquarters. Let’s go….”

  chapt
er 14

  Destination Deep-Sea

  “Ah, nothing like a good night’s sleep,” said Hawkeye, coming into the conference room at Avenger headquarters to find the Wasp already there. “Not to mention a hot bath, a change of uniform, and a seven-course dinner. I feel great.”

  “Like a novus homo?” said the Wasp. “That’s French for ‘new man,’ old thing.”

  “Look, Fraulein, don’t give me any of that linguistic guff the way Karzz does,” growled Hawkeye. Then he went on musingly. “I wonder if people think we Avengers never bother with life’s trivialities—sleep, showers, meals, trimming our fingernails, and such. I’ll bet they think I wear my Hawkeye uniform day in and day out, without a change.”

  “Don’t you?” queried the Wasp in wide-eyed innocence.

  “Very funny. It so happens I have three full uniforms. Two of them always out at the cleaners.”

  He eyed the Wasp with a devilish glint in his eye. “Your elastic uniform has stretched from small to large so many times that your leotards have baggy knees.”

  “Why, that’s pretty funny,” laughed the Wasp.

  “Yeah?” said Hawkeye, startled and pleased.

  “Yes, but it only proves,” said the girl sweetly, “that you’re a Hawkeye android. The real Hawkeye serves nothing but stale corn with mold on it.”

  Hawkeye smote his forehead dramatically. “Why do I always play stooge for you?” he said plaintively.

  They were bantering as usual, but only to cover up the gnawing dread within. Multiple earth dooms launched by Karzz the Conqueror…to crush this thought they had to play a game of brittle humor.

  “Speaking of stretch uniforms,” put in Goliath, “shed a sympathetic tear for Wasp and me. Our special superelastic costumes have to stretch and shrink from insect proportions up to human size—and to ten-foot tallness in my case—along with our bodies. They wear out in a month and it costs us plenty to replace them constantly.”

  “And what about my arrows?” retorted Hawkeye, not to be outdone at hardships. “Each is made of special parts and tricky gizmos that I have to sweat over through long hours.”