by Greg Cox
Hoping for the best, he lowered the mike and waited expectantly. “You really think you can get through to him?” Iron Man asked skeptically. “I doubt that old Avengers ties cany much weight where the Hulk is concerned.”
Confirming Iron Man’s worst expectations, the Hulk responded by digging his hands into the soil of Goat Island and tearing out a large, gray boulder the size of a washing machine. Raising the colossal rock above his head, he hurled the boulder at the shore, sending it soaring over the entire width of the American Falls, nearly clipping the propellers of one of the buzzing TV choppers.
“Watch out!” Captain America warned Lopez and his soldiers. “Incoming!”
The rock came whistling at them, descending in an arc from the sky above. Snatching his shield off his back, Cap raised it above him and braced himself for the impact. Iron Man had another idea. Bright orange repulsor beams issued from his metal gauntlets, twin streams of accelerated neutrons pulverizing the boulder only instants before it crashed down upon Cap and the others. Bits of stony debris rained down on Cap instead, deflected by his upraised shield.
So much for peaceful negotiations, Iron Man thought. The Hulk was clearly in no mood to talk.
The unprovoked attack was the spark that set off a wildfire of retaliation, and drove the intrusive helicopters away from the Falls. Artillery fired on both sides of the river, all targeted at the berserk, green-skinned monster on the island. The unleashed firepower was deafening; romantic Niagara, the honeymoon capital of the U.S.A., suddenly sounded like Omaha Beach on D-Day. The smell of gunpowder filled the air, along with the rat-ta-tat-tat of machine guns. Neither the Canadian nor the Americans, it was obvious, intended to give the Hulk a chance to launch another projectile assault. Cap couldn’t much blame them.
Unfortunately, their efforts generated more sound and fury than results. Missiles and automatic weapons fire exploded all around the Hulk, raising clouds of dust and smoke, but leaving him entirely unscathed. Rockets detonated against his chest, and the indestructible behemoth merely bared his teeth and shook his fists at the armed forces doing their best to destroy him. He broke off another chunk of island and catapulted it into the air, this time at the Canadian forces assembled on the other side of the Horseshoe Falls. With no Iron Man to defend them, the flying boulder smashed into the armored chassis of a tank, smashing the gun turret to a pulp while nearby soldiers ran for cover.
Hopefully, nobody in the tank got hurt, Cap thought. But it was only a matter of time before someone was seriously injured or worse.
The X-Men were also under siege from both armies. Cyclops’s ocular energy beams swept in a wide swath, shielding his comrades from the deadly fusillade while the Beast helped the stricken Storm limp toward the partial safety of the beckoning woods. Was he trying to defend the Hulk as well? Captain America couldn’t tell. The crimson beams, similar in effect to Iron Man’s repulsor rays, blocked whatever firepower came their way.
Almost. As the Beast pulled away from his visored leader, one hairy blue arm supporting Storm, an errant shell detonated less than a yard away from him. The Beast took the brunt of the blast, sparing Storm, but the shock wave slammed the one-time Avenger into the base of an old maple so hard that the tree crashed down on top of him, pinning the agile mutant to the ground.
Watching from the shore, Cap was distressed to see the Beast lying immobile beneath the downed tree. Was he just unconscious or. . . ?
“Blast it!” Captain America exclaimed, his words lost in the din of the battle. “This is just what I didn’t want!”
The Vision gave Captain America a questioning look. The Captain nodded solemnly, and, without a word, the Vision launched silently off the parkway once more, leaving Captain America and Iron Man to defend the American troops as best they could. The artificial Avenger flew over the Falls, rockets and live ammunition passing harmlessly through his intangible body.
A curious urgency compelled him. The prospect of engaging the Hulk in combat seemed vastly preferable to continued inaction, especially while the Scarlet Witch remained unaccounted for. It was only logical, of course, to desire the safe return of a valued team member, but was that the only source of such uncharacteristic haste? A rigorous self-diagnostic could not ignore the potentially significant factor that the Avenger at risk in this instance was, as a matter of biographical record, his former wife.
Wanda. His emotional responses were not what they once were, having suffered significant degradation over the course of various episodes of major repair and reconstruction, but he could not rule out the possibility that some residual subroutines, left over from an earlier generation of himself, might still linger in his software, lending additional impetus to his current priorities. Wanda is in danger. Wanda.
An intriguing hypothesis, but now was the not the time for further introspection. The Hulk loomed before him, glaring at the Vision’s spectral form with unconcealed antagonism as the synthezoid descended from the sky by minutely increasing his mass. The Vision’s plastic face was as impassive in appearance as the Hulk’s was fierce.
“Do not attempt to resist, Hulk,” he warned. “Willingly or not, you will answer our questions.”
“Questions?” the Hulk echoed. For a moment, he looked more puzzled than aggrieved, as though unable to imagine what manner of questions the Avenger might have for him, then his customary belligerence returned. A contemptuous sneer further marred the aesthetic of his primordial features. “What do I look like, an information booth?”
It was difficult to comprehend the Hulk’s words over the cacophonous tumult of the military armaments deployed against him, so the Vision adjusted the sensitivity of his auditory receptors, filtering out a statistically significant portion of the explosive background noise. His boots touched down lightly upon the soil of Goat Island, directly in front of the Hulk. The green-skinned goliath towered over the slender synthezoid by more than a head, but the Vision was undaunted; as long as he remained intangible, the Hulk’s physical strength, however formidable, could not touch him.
The Vision glanced quickly to the left, ascertaining the current status of the X-Men. Captain America would want to interrogate the mutant adventurers as well, he knew, but they did not appear to be in danger of escaping in the immediate future; Cyclops remained fully occupied by the task of fending off the barrage from the two armies while the Beast and Storm had not yet recovered from previous injuries. I will deal with them shortly, he resolved, giving the Hulk his full attention.
‘ ‘I require data, Hulk, which either you or Dr. Banner may be able to provide. What do you know of the Gamma Sentinels and/or the abduction of Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch?”
“Don’t talk to me about Banner!” the Hulk snarled, saliva spraying from his prognathous jaws. He tried to bat the Vision away with the back of his hand, but the slap passed through the synthezoid as if he wasn’t there. The Hulk glared at his own splayed fingers with open annoyance.
“I am waiting for your answers,” the Vision said with 1 9 1
implacable calm. His arms were crossed below the yellow diamond symbol on his chest. His boots left no impression in the ground below. 1 ‘Will you surrender them voluntarily, or will I be forced to resort to physical coercion?” The amber gem embedded in his crimson forehead started to glow forbiddingly.
“Don’t pull your spooky act on me, robot!” the Hulk growled. He walked straight through the Vision, effectively leaving them back-to-back instead of face-to-face. “Get real enough to fight, or leave me alone.” He strode arrogantly across the tiny spit of land, not giving the Vision so much as a single backwards glance.
But the artificial Avenger declined to be dismissed. Turning his head, he tapped into the solar energy absorbed by the amber jewel and redirected it out through the projective lenses in his eyes. Red-hot thermoscopic beams streaked toward the Hulk, intersecting at the base of his neck. For a nanosecond, the chartreuse flesh turned red and raw, before the Hulk’s legendary in
vulnerability asserted itself, restoring the damaged skin to a healthy green hue. With the sun now shining brightly overhead, however, the Vision kept up the bombardment of concentrated photons, his gaze literally burning into the back of the Hulk’s neck.
It was enough to make the Hulk slap a Brobdingnagian paw over the afflicted area.
“What the—!” he exclaimed, than yanked his huge mitt away in a hurry as the Vision’s thermoscopic vision seared the back of his hand, which healed almost instantly. “Cute,” he said sourly, giving the Vision a dirty look, “but you’re goin’ to have to do better than that.”
Before the Vision could reply, a new voice called out, significantly complicating the situation.
“Hulk!” Cyclops shouted. He rose from the Beast’s side, where he had knelt only seconds before.
From Cyclops’s behavior, the Vision deduced that the X-Men’s leader had not discovered the Beast’s injuries to be life-threatening. This is well, he concluded. The Beast has been a valued comrade in the past, albeit with an unnecessarily active sense of humor. The Vision further noted that a shaky Storm stood once more upon her own feet, although with obvious effort.
“It’s not too late to make a clean getaway,” Cyclops urged, daring the fusillade to approach the Hulk at a run. “Our aircraft is nearby. Come with me. Now.”
Fascinating, the Vision observed, extinguishing his heat beams. His initial analysis of the situation had suggested that the Hulk and the X-Men were pitted against each other as adversaries, but perhaps that assessment needed to be revised. Cyclops now appeared to be siding with the Hulk, despite their earlier confrontation. Regardless, the Vision decided, he could not permit either party to depart before their role in Wanda’s abduction could be determined.
Wanda.
Without warning or conscious volition, a picture-perfect recollection of his wedding to Wanda, conducted years ago in the garden of a Vietnamese temple by none other than Immortus, the enigmatic Master of Time, surfaced in his mind, momentarily disorienting him with its vivid clarity and unexpected emotional resonance. For approximately .791 seconds, he could almost smell the overpowering fragrance of the tropical blossoms, sense once more the joyful camaraderie of their assembled friends and allies.
Happy, he recalled with a twinge of regret, the bitter-1 93
sweet jolt of remembered emotion threatening to disrupt the ordered procession of his computations. We had both been so happy....
Cyclops’s forcebeam swept harmlessly through the Vision, leaving the synthezoid untouched but successfully deflecting another hail of bullets and missiles. Ricocheting rockets detonated at a safe distance from the determined X-Man, who tugged on the Hulk’s mighty bicep. “Hurry,” he exhorted the immovable green goliath. “Let us help you get away from this chaos.”
The Hulk was no more interested in Cyclops’s assistance than he was in the Vision’s questions. “Bah!” he grunted loudly. “This island is getting too crowded.” Shrugging off Cyclops’s grip as easily as he might a flea, the Hulk squatted upon bended legs, then leapt into the air, his tremendous strength propelling him over thirty feet above the Vision and Cyclops, who had to tilt back their respective heads to follow his ascent as he rose like a rocket into the clouds. His departure left gallon-sized footprints in the ravaged soil.
“Wait!” Cyclops yelled after him. His blazing eye-beams chased the Hulk, who quickly outdistanced them. “I need to talk to you!”
No less than I, the Vision thought, resolving that the Hulk would not elude him so easily. It seemed he could still smell the flowers in the garden of a temple many thousands of miles, and a lifetime, away....
From the shore, Captain America took in every detail of the Vision’s confrontation with both the Hulk and Cyclops. If nothing else, the Vision had distracted the Hulk from his attacks on the various military personnel, freeing him and Iron Man from the challenge of defending Col-
onel Lopez’s troops from soaring boulders and the like. He tapped on Iron Man’s crimson shoulderplate, attracting the armored Avenger’s attention. Holding the miniature microphone before his lips, to ensure that Tony could hear him over all the racket produced by the artillery and the Falls, Cap pointed toward the tiny island where the Vision had established a beachhead of sorts.
“Get me over there,” he requested, before handing the mike back to Iron Man, who replaced it in his neck assembly while Cap strapped his shield back onto his back.
The golden Avenger nodded. “You want a ride, you got it,” he said, his voice mechanically amplified once more. He clamped his iron gauntlets around Cap’s wrists and ignited his boot jets.
Cap felt the wind rushing against his face as Iron Man carried him into the air with impressive speed and much more volume than the Vision had produced in his takeoff; it was like hitching a ride on a man-sized 747. Cap’s own red boots dangled above the rushing Niagara River for only a second or two, then he spotted dry land beneath him. Working together like a piece of flawless Stark technology, Iron Man released his grip on Captain America, who somersaulted through the air, landing on his feet just in time to see the Hulk hurling back to Earth, with the Vision flying away in hot pursuit of Bruce Banner’s green-skinned alter ego. Iron Man circled overhead, keeping a careful watch over both his teammates, ready to intervene wherever he was most needed.
Cap looked around him, appalled at the devastation. The northern tip of the island looked like No Man’s Land, with flattened trees and gaping craters, the latter where the Hulk had yanked his boulders from the ground. Shield in hand to defend himself from the whizzing rockets and gunfire, Cap raced across the battlefield, nimbly evading every pitfall, until he came to face-to-face with the X-Men’s youthful leader.
“All right, son,” he informed Cyclops sternly, raising his voice over the hubbub, “I’m giving you a chance to explain what this is all about.”
The scarlet glow behind the X-Man’s visor made it impossible to read the younger man’s eyes. Cap waited tensely for Cyclops’s reply, ready to raise his shield at the first sign of hostile action on the X-Man’s part, but hoping sincerely that further violence could be avoided. Bombs exploded in the background, as, beneath his shining visor, Cyclops’s lips moved urgently.
Cap couldn’t make out a word he said.
The Hulk had become nothing more than a faint green speck in the sky before gravity finally caught up with him. As the Vision tracked his quarry’s progress via artificial eyes, the Hulk accelerated downward almost as steeply as he had climbed, landing feetfirst midway across the crest-line of the Horseshoe Falls. The splash created by his semi-seismic return drenched onlookers all along the Canadian border and soaked the super-powered occupants of the island as well, all except for the Vision who let the inundating spray of droplets pass through his immaterial form.
I cannot allow obsolete and outdated memory files to distract me from my task, he affirmed, letting the unsolicited recollections of his wedding slip back into his memory banks. Instead he carefully considered the Hulk’s latest tactic.
The raging current rushing over the Falls would be more than enough to push anyone else over the brink, but not the Hulk. He stood hip-deep in the cascading foam, adamantly immobile despite the countless gallons of water surging past him.
“You clowns want me?” he hollered at the Vision and the X-Men, as fixed in his footing as the ancient cliff itself. Surging white water was forced to flow around the pillars of his legs. “Come and get me!”
Cyclops’s mouth gaped open, only half of his startled expression concealed by his gleaming metal visor. Wet brown hair lay plastered atop his skull and water dripped from his soaked blue uniform. Obviously, there was no way the X-Man could follow the Hulk out into the river; the torrential current would wash him over the Falls almost instantly, eyebeams or no eyebeams.
The Vision was not so readily thwarted. Leaving the X-Man behind, he reduced his weight as well as his density and floated off the ground and out over that fork of the river wh
ich flowed between Goat Island and Ontario. “Stay where you are, Hulk,” he commanded coldly, the wind blowing through his face. “I do not fear to join you upon the very precipice you have chosen.”
As easily as he could make himself lightweight, he could also increase his density until he became as hard as diamond and as heavy as solid neutronium. Sinking into the frothing white water only a few feet away from the Hulk, he let his swiftly-accumulating mass anchor him to the rocky riverbed no less steadfastly than his emerald opponent, until his boots were deeply embedded in the silt and stone below the rushing current. Epidermal sensors in his legs registered the lower temperature of the icy water as opposed to the open air, but he experienced little discomfort; the solar energy that powered him also helped his more heat-sensitive components resist the sudden chill.
His lengthy yellow cloak, composed of unstable molecules, remained selectively intangible, the better to avoid becoming tangled in the rapids.
“So, just can’t take a hint, huh?” the Hulk rumbled, his words almost lost beneath the clamor of the Falls at their feet. He leered barbarically, savoring the prospect of physical violence. “Okay, let’s do this the hard way ... just the way I like it.”
He reached out for the Vision, presumably with the intent of breaking the synthezoid in two, but the Vision grabbed onto the Hulk’s wrists, holding him back for a few moments. His gloved fingers failed to reach all the way around the Hulk’s thick wrists, making it difficult to keep his grip as the Hulk leaned forward, pushing against the Vision’s defense with all the force of oncoming bullet train. The Vision had to increase his corporeal density to its utmost limit, his feet sinking deep into solid rock, just to keep the Hulk out of arm’s reach.
“You’re tough, robot,” the Hulk grudgingly admitted, “but not tough enough. Get ready for a really big fall.” They grappled like mythic champions above the awesome spectacle of the Falls, the dark green of the Vision’s skintight costume contrasting against the chartreuse hue of the Hulk’s coarse hide, the synthezoid’s spectral cape spreading out from his shoulders like a streaming yellow banner. Despite his considerable mass, the Vision felt his heels sliding backward, digging parallel trenches into the stony riverbed. He fought to regain his footing, only to realize that he could not long resist the unremitting pressure of the Hulk’s advance. But perhaps his opponent’s overpowering momentum could be turned against him?