“I would hardly call the Russian Consulate,” spoke the next man, in a Russian accent, “the ‘turf’ of the CIA.”
Morgan cleared his throat and folded his fingers together. “General. Director. Listen. We’re just exploring a lead or two in an operation. The source happened to be at the consulate, so we sent our mar there.”
The CIA man leaned forward. “Report says there’s a visitor there now, but it’s a woman. Is she one of yours?” Morgan looked at the director. “We’re using her in this Abomination business. She’s a professor.”
:t!;'“Does she have any connection with the Hulk?” “I’m sorry?”
“You’re also using the Hulk, does she have any connection with the Hulk?”
“None at all,” Morgan lied. “Betty Gaynor is a religious studies professor at Richards. She has no connection with the Hulk whatsoever.” He paused. Back up. “Except, of course, that both she and the Hulk are now trying to help us find Emil Blonsky before he does anything dangerous. Anything else, that is.”1
The general spoke up. “I trust you have not forgotten that Blonsky is to be delivered to us.”
“Not at all,” Morgan said to the Russian. He turned to the American. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you, Jim?’ ’
“We’re making our own arrangements with General Voyskunsky.”
“Good,” said Morgan. “You two told me I could run my operation and get Blonsky, and I think it should come as no surprise that that means SAFE is going to wander into your yards a little bit. Back off, guys. Cut me a little slack here.”
The CIA man grinned. “Right, right. Just don’t take too many liberties.”
■^'Wouldn’t think of it.”
After a few more words the screen went blank. Morgan rubbed his eyes and felt the headache coining back. Betty had better get her little interview over with. Someone was liable to take a picture.
He drummed his fingertips. Who was he kidding? Sending Betty into the consulate was dangerously close to blowing her cover. But Banner had agreed with the idea. Nadia had looked like a good source of information, and all had agreed that Betty, with her fine possibilities for commiseration, was the prime candidate. Should it matter that chances were that this would ruin Betty Gay-nor, professor? Maybe and maybe not. He had to think.
Morgan looked at the clock on his desk as the printer next to the telephone began to hum. It was a transcript of the meeting with Nadia, which seemed to have concluded. He read it quickly and shook his head, looked at the clock again. He had a lunch date with the Hulk.
Bruce looked the SAFE director up and down and smiled. “Where are we gonna go?”
“Go ahead and circle, Benue,” Morgan shouted over his shoulder to the pilot at the front of the hovercraft. The Hulk saw the pilot nod once and flip a few switches on the display in from of him. Morgan tossed the Hulk a soft cellophane tube as they passed under the raised arm of Lady Liberty.
ou want to set down somewhere,” Morgan asked, “or just circle?”
The Hulk snatched the tube out of the air and unwrapped his sandwich as Morgan d:H the same. He raised a green eyebrow. “Turkey.”
Morgan leaned on the rail, surveying Ellis Island. “Hope you’re not a vegetarian.”
“Betty tells me to stay clear of red meat. She’d approve of this.’ The Hulk chewed and leaned on the rail. “We have to stop meeting like this. What’s happening?” “Your wife just finished with Nadia.”
“Okay,” said the Hulk. “And?”
“I want to use her.’p
“Don’t you have employees of your own, Colonel? I think Betty’s done enough.”
■. ^“No,” said Morgan, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “I mean Nadia. I think she could be of use.” Bruce looked down at the water as they began to follow the edge of the island. He tapped the rail a few times, absently. “No.”
“Blonsky’s got a soft spot for her. He wouldn’t harm her. I think maybe she should be brought in.”
“Look,” the Hulk shook his massive head. “Obviously I’m not in charge of Nadia. But I advise against it. Do you realize she doesn’t even know Emil is s i 11 alive?’’
“I realize that.”
“No, see ... Emil even kidnapped her once, tried to tell her himself. But he backed off. I think he knows that would crush her. She thinks the Abomination j a monster.”
“He is a monster.”
“Morgan, I convinced Emil not to tell. I convinced him to let her go.” He looked out at the clouds. It was cold; even Morgan was shivering a bit beneath his topcoat. “It would be— ’
Morgan came closer, stood next to the giant. “What?” “It would be a betrayal. I can’t help but feel that. Emil has this idea about my sense of honor; it’s a sore spot he keeps hitting. Putting his wife in the line of fire—” “Ex-wife,” Morgan said. “Widow. Have you forgotten who we’re talking about here? I’m not interested in sparing Blonsky’s feelings. He’s put too many people in danger. My God, you were there underground, you were there on the field. What does it take with you?’ ’
“What do you want?” Bruce snapped. “We’ll stop him. ’
L “We haven’t stopped him yet.”" [
■y“Don’t you think Nadia’s been through enough? That woman has been the focus of one of his attacks, you want to turn around and tell her that her husband is alive, and it’s him? How many old wounds do you want to reopen?” The Hulk looked down at the SAFE director, watching his face. Morgan’s eyes were sunken; the man looked like he hadn’t been sleeping. ‘All I see coming from that is failure and misery.”
Morgan’s head trembled a bit and he moved his lips, then closed them. Then, abruptly , he threw down his sandwich. “All / see, Dr. Banner, is a man who refuses to do what it takes to get the job done.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” Morgan snapped. “I’ve gone to bat for you, Banner. I’ve kept the heat off you even though
you’re believed to have blown up a senator on national television. I have the executive office and S.H.I.E.L.D. breathing down my neck, and so far you’ve delivered zilch. And when we think we have an angle on Blonsky you back down. You react, but you refuse to act.” “That’s not true,5' Bruce said.
“Isn’t it?” Morgan was a coupie heads shorter than the Hulk but stood next to him, dressing Bruce down like a cadet. “This guy is a killer. He’s not to be coddled/’ “Morgan,” said the Hulk, “I don’t know if you remember, but this is my operation. You put me in charge, and if I think we don’t use Nadia, then we don’t use her. What on Earth do you want to do, use her as some sort of negotiator? A hostage?”
Morgan shook his head, exasperated. “I have no intention of putting an innocent life in danger.”
“That’s what it would mean, ’ Bruce countered. “Emil sees we’ve got Nadia, he’ll either feel betrayed or angered, and he’ll lash out.”
L~ “People are going to die if we don’t stop him.r: “And this isn’t the way, Morgan.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Morgan said coolly, Ups curled, a husky, extremely uncharacteristic anger rumbling through the colonel’s voice. “You’re used to letting people die.”
Bruce looked down at the man and felt himself recoil as if struck. He bit his lip, breathed slowly, a long, sighing breath. “So that’s it. Morgan, there was nothing—” “Nothing you could do? You’re out with your head hung low hands in your pockets, walking after midnight. Do you ever wonder, could I have looked up, could I have been watching around me, could I ever prevent instead of just reacting, too little, too late? Do you lie awake at night wondering if you heard the brakes squealing, if you could have leapt a bit faster, could you have stopped the accident? Could you have done it, Banner?” Morgan was searching Bruce’s eyes, anger and desperation warbling over one another. “All this power, and for what? Why don’t you ever use it right? Could you have done it differently? Could David still be alive?”
It was the longest number of words Banner had
ever heard Sean Morgan string together in their short acquaintance. He could hardly credit that this was the same man who didn’t flinch when, during their first meeting, the Hulk lifted him up by his neck and almost strangled him. Then, his gray eyes were unblinking, almost uncaring. Now, they pleaded—the eyes of a man long past the end of his rope.
The Hulk closed his eyes. He saw Galactus and the Beyonder and trucks on fire, jelly, glass, and a lake of flame. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah. I want to know.”
“No,” he shook his head. “I moved as fast as I could. I did everything I could. I tried everything i knew. I lie awake at night and I ask myself, was there anything more I could do? And the answer is no.” The Hulk chewed his lip and said, ‘ And that’s the truth.”
Morgan turned around, leaned on the rail again, his collar flapping in the cold wind. “It just— I needed to hear that. I guess the truth is, I was hoping you were wrong. I wish there was something you could have done. It’s easier to believe that his death could have been prevented. Because the truth is I don’t want to own up to my own fault.”
“Your fault? You weren’t anywhere near there.” “That’s right,” said Morgan. “And even if I were, like you said, there was nothing I could do. My fault is that I forgot that that happens. That any of us can go at any time, for any reason, for no reason at all. And the only thing we can do about that is be prepared.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “You want to know what I could have done? I could have seen my son more.”
Bruce nodded slowly. “How much did you see him?” “Not much,’' Morgan said, his voice expertly con-
trolled, yet timorous, choked in the back. “Margaret and I didn’t last long, and David kind of knew better than to forgive me for being as—absent as I was. The truth is I don’t think he hated me. Frankly, I don’t think he gave me much thought. I guess hate would have been an investment. And he knew better than to make an investment when he wasn’t sure he could expect a return.5'
“That’s very clinical, Morgan.”
^It is, isn’t it?” The colonel sighed. “Now is the time to be clinical. The time to involve oneself, the time, to feel, to live, not to analyze—that time is gone. The time has come to analyze, and grieve. Except I don’t know what to grieve about.” He shook his head. “I barely knew him.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? There’s a hole in me the size of my son and I don’t know how to fix it because I don’t have any idea what I’m missing. All there is is ache and loss, like I lost a limb I never used and now that it’s gone I don’t know how to repair myself.”
Bruce shook his head again. He remembered standing in an underground cavern in an alternate future, trying desperately to connect with a son who had grown up without him. He remembered that boy’s twin, lying dead only hours after he was bom. And he found, hizarrely, that he envied Sean Morgan, because at least he had some time with his offspring.
“You say you didn’t know him. At all?”
Morgan thought for a second. “I visited him a few times a year. There was more back when he was a lot younger.”
“What kinds of things did he like to do?” “Apparently he liked driving with his buddy to a monster movie marathon at a community college out near Margaret.” Morgan smiled a bit. “I don’t really know anything about that,” he said. “There are fragments in my brain of him, pieces of him that I can string together to try to fill the hole. But the fragments don’t add up to much.”
‘ ‘What is grief?’ the Hulk whispered.
“Hm?”
“Betty was teaching a class on Genesis and one of the questions she kept asking as she prepared was, ‘What is grief?’ The most common kind of grief is this thing, when we lose someone. But I think that’s not really accurate, not an accurate way to think about it. We think of grief as the pain we feel over something being gone from our lives. But I think grief is something else—it’s the pain we feel about what we didn’t do to make the most of what we had. The pain we feel about not making things happen differently. Sometimes I think grief is how people wish that they had the powers of a god. Our hatred of being human, not being able to stop time from passing, people from dying, from getting angry when you should be making up.”
Morgan scratched his chin, then splayed his fingers out and in, exercising them. He put on a pair of gloves and held the rail in front of him. “What is it like, then to be as close as you are?”
The Hulk looked down to the street far below, the tiny people scurrying in and out of stores and taxis. “You know, it’s funny. There’s a joke, a tellingly unfunny joke that goes around the super hero community. The joke goes, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ ’ ’
“I take it the answer isn’i the usual. ’
Bruce smiled and threw him a sideways glance. “The answer is ‘unstable molecules.’ ”
Morgan said, ‘I don’t get it.”
“That’s the point. It’s not funny. Besides the obvious point that Reed Richards’s discovery of unstable molecules has been the answer to a lot of questions, it’s not funny. Hell, Reed doesn’t get it. I asked him once what he thought it meant and he assured me he’d look into it. His sense of humor is not legend.”
“So I’ve heard,’' said Morgan.
“I mean, you pick a joke apart and you ruin it, but I’ve thought about this, Bruce said, scratching his head. “And maybe my sense of humor isn’t the best, either. But I think it sums a lot of things up in one tiny little piece of nonsense. Here we are, all us ‘paranormals,’ or whatever they’re calling us. We know we scare people There’s religious coalitions that wish all of us would go away; we challenge a lot of long-held beliefs about power and autonomy. They wonder if humanity can actually have any uniqueness if there is a new iace of beings, so many of them, who fly and lift tons. They think we’re Abominations. Years ago, the Avengers set up an office of volunteers who deal strictly with sending pamphlets to people, Why Thor is Not Allied with the Antichrist, or some such nonsense. But the fact is a lot of us, we don’t know what to do with these powers, either: do we work for the government? Do we work alone, as vigilantes? Why do we have to do anything, just because we’re this powerful? But I think that joke spells out a real, terrible fear that moves through this community like a virus.” “What’s that?”
f ‘That we’re powerless, ’ ’ said the Hulk. ‘That it really doesn’t matter. That I can have the strength of a thousand men and Reed Richards can open a window in the living room while he’s standing in the kitchen, and it makes no difference at all. That we still can’t answer the basic questions. We have very different, but stijl very wrong, answers. We still guess. The Avengers can travel to other planets, but we can’t stop war, really. And we sure can’t make time move backwards. And even if some of us can come awful close, we never know quite what to do. We can’t change human nature. We can’t figure out why some people live until they’re ninety and die in their beds and other people die in car accidents.”
“Infinity is meaningless,” said Morgan.
“What?’^-
“Aristotle and the classical philosophers were deeply troubled by the concept of infinity,”' Morgan said. ‘ ‘The reason they were troubled was because, they said, if things just went on forever, if there was no limit to how high you could count, for instance, then really, nothing made any difference.”
“Right,” said the Hulk, “I know the argument. If the end never really comes then progress never amounts to anything. I see what you’re relating this to. We keen doing grander and grander things, but it’s just more of the same. Nothing changes. It all just goes on. And the worst part is, we still feel pain.
“Yes. Every new loss is fresh, even if it’s happened a thousand times. The police handle small-time thugs and you guys get in between the Kree and the Skrulls. And on and on, until the world ends.”
^‘Sometimes it’s like there’s not supposed to be a finish at all,’" said the Hulk. “Like
infinity, dangerous as it is, is a part of our lives. Nothing stays solved. No one stays happy. No one stays dead. The story never ends. Continuous upheaval. Another damsel in distress, another world threat.
“Until you’re dead, for good,” said Morgan. “I have news for you; it’s the same for us.”
“And still I ask, why can’t we change? Why do we still grieve our mistakes? Why can’t I be there a minute earlier, stop the accident, or change the past? Or why do I care? Why does it keep us up at night?”
“Unstable molecules,” said Morgan, chuckling softly. The Hulk muttered. “Yeah, right. Unstable molecules.' ’
Sarah Josef of URSA rolled down the window and leaned out, touching the green button. A striped wooden arm raised itself before her and she drove into the parking lot. A sign overhead said, you’ll find it at zithers. She brought the subcompact three levels down, parking near the elevator on the second lowest level. Sarah took the stairs one level farther down and let the door to the stairwell slam behind her as she moved quickly across the parking garage. She turned a comer and heard a whin ing, mechanical sound, accompanied by a muffled sound like a chainsaw under heavy shielding. The work on the tunnel was progressing.
Up ahead was a gigantic plastic curtain which swayed with the air-conditioning. A few sawhorses ostentatiously warned anyone who might wander by: caution—men at work. Indeed. Sarah nodded at one of the workers who sat on a stool by the black curtain, wearing a Dickeys overall and a hard hat. The man looked ap from his magazine and nodded at Sarah. She returned the nod as he held back the plastic curtain for her and she stepped into the guarded, curtained off section.
The work section was about twelve feet across, taking up a comer of the Zithers parking garage. Naturally, all the right people had been bribed. All the right people at Zithers were looking the other way for just so long as URSA needed.
“Comrade Josef!” An agent poked his head out of a hole in the concrete wall and deftly shimmied out. He removed his hard hat to reveal a head of red hair and a Trotskyesque beard of the type many of the URSA boys were affecting these days.
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