by Stan Lee
* * *
CHAPTER 1
Peg Faber clung desperately to the other bodies tumbling through the nothingness of the Rift. Even so, Harry Sturdley, John Cameron, and Mike felt far away. Her attention was devoted to the mental probe she had driven into John Cameron’s near-comatose brain, powering the weird mental circuitry that operated this dimensional portal. They’d been forced into a cosmic getaway—an escape for which John was badly hurting and Peg unready.
It wasn’t easy—her fledgling control of the Rift was constantly being buffeted by gusts of emotion and memory blasting through John’s brain.
They spun wildly, torn by a crosscurrent in the Rift. Peg’s attempts to keep them together were complicated by a flash-recall of John’s first experience with such eddies—educational, but distracting to Peg’s frantic efforts to steady their transit.
Besides battling her own fear, she had the ghost of John’s panic threatening their mind-link. Why the hell couldn’t he remember a successful journey? Then maybe she’d get some useful tips on making this passage work.
Perversely, her anger at him seemed to trigger fond memories of her. Images flickered on the link—Peg at her desk at the Fantasy Factory, laughing at a joke John had ventured. Peg with her eyes wide, hurling herself out of an elevator and flinging her arms around him.
She remembered the second episode. It had followed the appearance of a pair of giants on Earth—giants that John had Rifted over in response to a silly wish of Harry Sturdley’s. Harry had given Peg the job of finding John, who had mysteriously disappeared. After devoting days to a fruitless search, she returned to admit her failure—only to have John stop the elevator and try to jump aboard. She’d vacillated between wanting to kiss him and wanting to kill him.
The cluster of humans floating through the Rift void threatened to fly apart—and Peg realized almost too late that her inattention to the transit could doom them all. Grimly, she refocused her mental energies, trying to ignore the barrage of images threatening to swamp her mastery of the cosmic flux. Even the roiling of her outraged gut was pushed to second place. Bringing them through the Rift alive needed all her concentration.
She almost missed Sturdley’s telepathic message informing her that they’d reached their destination. Only when Harry linked into her mental probe did Peg realize the time had come to send a new flux through the telepathic circuit linking them with John.
It had required both of them to power up that strange knot of “Rifting” cells in John’s brain. After being held prisoner in a field that inhibited his mental powers, John was as dissociated as if he’d spent weeks in a sensory-deprivation tank. He hadn’t been able to give directions, forcing Harry and Peg to use their own newfound psionic powers and hurtle their little group blindly into the Rift. The question now was whether or not they’d managed to escape.
The transition back to normal space was even more torturous than their fall through the alien void of the Rift. Peg felt squeezed, squashed, and twisted simultaneously in several directions.
Then they were belched out into reality, landing in a tangle of arms and legs on a huge patch of overgrown lawn. Peg levered herself up on shaky limbs. Her first instinct was to help John, who lay naked and helpless beside her. They’d spirited him out of a Frankensteinian nightmare in the subterranean science center on the giants’ world. Forgotten by the very race it had spawned, the center had been declared a Forbidden Zone. But the ancient computer that ran the complex had remained crazily true to its programming, conducting bizarre genetic engineering experiments—with Harry, Peg, John, and Mike as the lab rats. Their escape attempt had been spurred by the fact that the computer had actually created an in vitro embryo and was tampering with Peg’s hormonal balance, initiating a pseudo-pregnancy in preparation for implantation.
They’d fled into the Rift before that experiment reached culmination. But there were still repercussions. Right now, the nausea swirling in Peg’s tortured stomach felt as much like morning sickness as motion sickness.
“I’ll be damned,” Harry’s voice penetrated Peg’s grogginess. “We’ve reached John’s Planet of the Superheroes!”
Peg knew about the existence of this other world. She’d seen John’s sketches of the skyscraping towers and flying armored figures. At the moment, however, Peg could care less about their location. She was too busy redecorating the lawn with what appeared to be the entire contents of her stomach.
As the last miserable spasm passed, a pair of boots intruded on Peg’s low-to-the-ground field of vision.
Perfect, she thought. Here come the cops. We’ve probably broken some local ordinance about stepping on the grass—she clutched her stomach—or barfing in the park.
Peg forced her eyes upward, and instantly regretted the action. The figure before her was dressed in a suit of high-tech armor that would make Darth Vader jealous, although it appeared to have been painted by a color-blind artist high on LSD. A complicated pattern in searingly fluorescent greens and purples crawled over the shiny armor. Just looking at it set off Peg’s stomach again. “Oh, please,” she muttered in a constricted voice. Summoning up what was left of her strength, she called, “Harry—help!”
Sturdley turned and did an astonished double take. Whatever the folks around here used for propulsion, it was incredibly quiet. He stepped over to the armored figure, noting that there were others behind it assembling various complicated-looking machines.
Harry opted for what he considered a typical stranger-in-a-strange-land response, extending open hands and saying, “Hello! I’m Harry Sturdley. This is Peg Faber—excuse her, she’s sick. And this is John Cameron, and Mike.”
The looming form in the psychedelic armor remained still. Harry considered that a good sign. The last time he’d tried this act on an alien planet, he’d nearly gotten a spear in his gizzard.
“We’re—I guess you can call us dimensional travelers. And we’re having some difficulty. Our friend John isn’t well, and we needed to get away from where we were. This was the nearest destination ...”
A slightly raspy voice suddenly boomed from speakers hidden within the armor. “You ... are ... travelers.”
Sturdley jumped a little to be addressed in his own language. “That’s right. Do you speak English?”
An armored limb pointed to one of the constructions now rising around them. “This ... can ... guess. Difficulty. Need you to speak.”
“Need me to speak?” Harry echoed. Then he understood. “That machinery is some sort of translator. You need to hear more of my language for it to process.”
“Need more English,” the armored figure agreed.
Sturdley complied, giving a brief rundown of their adventures and explaining the mysterious Rift as best he could. It was a relief to have someone to talk to. Peg sat on the grass, looking lousy, while Mike, busy taking care of John, barely glanced at the armored figures.
Once a sufficient vocabulary had been acquired, an exchange of information proceeded. The armored figure introduced himself as Triadon, and seemed considerably more friendly than the computer that had held them captive on the giants’ world.
“I am a ... scientist,” Triadon explained after fishing the word from his translator. “I have been studying this Rift, the changes of ... energy.”
“Energy fluctuations.” The words came from John Cameron, who had roused slightly. As Harry turned in surprise, his mind was brushed by a mental probe from John.
Idiot! Sturdley accused himself. His mental powers would speed the process of communication considerably—if he’d thought to use them. Sending out some unobtrusive probes of his own, Sturdley found that Triadon’s interest in the Rift was far from academic.
“Our world, Argon, is in danger whenever this Rift opens,” the scientist explained. The—“ the term proved untranslatable— ”get out.“
Harry tried to zoom in. “Something—or someone—coming through the Rift? Aliens? Invaders?”
Triadon made a complicated ge
sture. “They come—”
“Where the hell do they come from?”
“Hell?” the scientist asked.
“A place of punishment,” Sturdley quickly explained.
“Ah,” Triadon said. “Hell. A place of sending away.”
“Exile?” Sturdley hazarded. “So these people coming in—they aren’t aliens.”
“No. You are aliens—I can see that,” Triadon said. “These are ... villains.” The scientist picked the word from Harry’s comics-oriented vocabulary.
“Criminals?” Harry said. “You send them into exile somewhere through the Rift?”
John Cameron’s hoarse voice abruptly interrupted the conversation.
“Yes—criminals,” John echoed. “And coming here!”
His eyes were open, staring blindly into the sky. High above them, Sturdley could make out minute, flying dots. They grew larger. Then, as if to make sure they’d be noticed, flaming bolts lashed downward from the descending forms, aimed squarely at Triadon and his assistants.
* * *
CHAPTER 2
The hawk-face of Kenneth Drivelle gazed piercingly from the television screen. Leslie Ann Nasotrudere had never thought of him as much of a talent—the high point of his career had been playing a TV detective thirty years ago. But she grudgingly had to admit that in his trenchcoat, Drivelle had the perfect look for the host of a show like Unresolved Enigmas.
“One can find enigmas anywhere,” Drivelle intoned in a deep, slightly hoarse voice. “But this is one for the books—the comic books.”
“Hey!” Marty Burke leaned forward from his place on the couch beside Leslie Ann. “Here’s our segment.”
“Our segment?” the newscaster said a little sourly. “I seem to remember Network yanking the story out of my hands and giving it to those hacks in the entertainment division ...”
Burke hushed her as Drivelle set the scene outside the San Diego Convention Center, relating the mysterious disappearance of Harry Sturdley, Peg Faber, and John Cameron from the midst of comicdom’s largest annual convention.
“Goddammit!” Leslie Ann burst out as the screen then filled with the videotape of a group of masked attackers disrupting the Fantasy Factory’s huge outdoor promotional event, drawing real weapons previously concealed as prop rayguns. “That’s my tape!” she complained, her voice drowning out Drivelle’s narration of the terror and chaos. This should have been her story, done as real news. Instead...
Burke flapped his arms, admonishing her to silence as he stared raptly at the screen. There was always an eyewitness interview after the clip, and he expected to see himself there.
He was disappointed. There was another talking head on the screen—a middle-aged man running to fat, dressed in black and with an all-too-obvious fresh haircut that left a visible demarcation between the summer’s tan and the shortened length of the hair. In fact, the whole impression from the interviewee was that of a person freshly scrubbed for his fifteen minutes of fame. Only when the guy opened his mouth and a familiar braying voice issued out did Burke finally place him.
“They went with Loony Lonnie Lancaster? When they could have had me?” Marty was infuriated.
“You could actually see me there in the film clip,” Lonnie Lancaster said with relish. “I was the guy in the Jumboy outfit for the costume parade. At the time of the attack, I was actually talking with John Cameron.”
He shook his head sadly. “The kid was a real talent, a top-rate artist. What a shame we’ll only have three books to remember him by.”
“Aaaaah, they’re probably high-priced collector’s items by now,” Burke spoke to the screen in disparaging tones.
“I tried to stop ’em,” Lancaster went on. “Got my head cracked instead.” He pointed with some pride to a crease that angled from the side of his forehead off across his temple. “So I was down and out when that giant—the Terrific Thomas—threw the car to try and cut the gunmen off. I was at least as close as they were. Maybe if I’d been conscious and looking the right way, I’d have seen what happened to Cameron, Sturdley, and the girl.”
“Right,” Burke said mockingly.
“At least he tried to help,” Leslie Ann found herself saying. “You were just as close when the shooting started. But you managed to become the Invisible Man while the Cholesterol King over there became a hero.”
Burke turned, his face flashing shock, anger, and hurt.
What did I ever see in him? Leslie Ann asked herself, looking at her lover as if for the first time. He’d been much more impressive as the rebel firebrand of the Fantasy Factory than as the guy in charge. Of course, he’d been a useful tool against Harry Sturdley. Sturdley had made the mistake of embarrassing her publicly, earning himself a top position on Leslie Ann’s shit list.
But now Sturdley was dead, or kidnapped and his body disposed of, according to the theories being reviewed on the television screen.
She turned to Burke, only to be abruptly silenced by renewed frantic hand-waving. “Ah,” Marty said with much satisfaction, “here I am.”
His televised image sat behind a large desk—Harry Sturdley’s desk, she realized—looking like some, sort of overstuffed toy. Television added pounds to people, Leslie Ann knew. This fact was never more cruelly evident than now, as Burke pontificated on what a great loss to the comics community Harry’s disappearance was. Pudgy and pompous, she thought. A deadly combination.
Burke frowned as his sound bite came to an end, and Ken Drivelle returned to wrap up the segment. “Damn,” Marty complained, “they hardly used any of the stuff they taped. I had a great spiel about what the new Fantasy Factory would be like—you know, life after Sturdley.”
“Those are the breaks,” Leslie Ann said coldly. “Most raw footage winds up on the cutting room floor.” She gave him an exasperated look. “Besides, the angle was Sturdley’s disappearance, not his company.”
“But we did get coverage.” Burke beamed as if he were personally responsible. “I mean, it’s free publicity, right? What’s that saying? ‘Speak of me well, speak of me ill, but speak of me.’ ”
Staring at the fatuous look on his face, Leslie Ann had to clamp her lips to keep from speaking ill of him right then and there.
Burke finally noticed her expression. “Aw, you’re not still mad at me for agreeing to the interview, are you? That was a business decision—publicity, like I just said.” He moved closer toward her on the couch. “Hey, I’d have loved working on the investigation with you, but that was the network’s call. It’s lousy luck that you got beaned with a bottle covering those riots.”
He gestured tentatively toward her face. The swelling had gone down around her right eye and cheek, and the cuts had healed where she’d been hit. But Leslie Ann still sported a gorgeous shiner and major bruises. Her less-than-perfect looks had prompted the network to put her on temporary leave. She’d lose more weeks before she got back on the airwaves. The Sturdley story would be a dead issue by then.
Burke moved closer still, worming an arm around Leslie Ann’s waist. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you,” he said, his breath coming a little faster. “I just want to make you feel good.”
Leslie Ann intercepted Burke’s free hand before it slipped under her robe, twisted free of his embrace, and rose to her feet.
“Not tonight, Marty,” she told him in a flat, decisive voice. Now it was her turn to gesture toward the bruises on her face. “I’ve got a headache.”
Westchester County was famed as an enclave of gracious living and quiet respectability. When Harry Sturdley had installed his giant superheroes up there on the grounds of an unused estate, the atmosphere took on a carnival-like quality. But with the departure of the newspeople and the efficient supervision of the giants, the area around the mansion now called Heroes’ Manor had grown quiet again.
Few people in the neighborhood even knew that the Heroes had expanded their domain, purchasing the estate next door to theirs. Dr. Cedric Thonneger knew, and he w
as scared to death. The doctor was a prisoner of the giants in the ramshackle pseudoTudor monstrosity. The resident titans had ignored the house, choosing instead to restore the old boathouse on the property. They’d turned it into a combination lab and hospital, where Thonneger tended a single, enormous patient.
The doctor couldn’t believe how he’d gotten sucked into this nightmare. He lived and conducted his practice in the neighborhood, so he was aware of the giants. He hadn’t learned of their mind-reading abilities, however, until the leader of the Heroes had come to pay a call. Robert was quite polite, but equally inexorable, picking the doctor’s mind to point out a number of medical misdeeds that Thonneger had committed.
It was sheer blackmail, but Robert had forced the doctor to close down his practice and come to work for the giants. His first look at the enormous, comatose form hidden in the boathouse told Thonneger that his patient—Gideon, he later learned the name—had sustained a vicious beating. The medical man had set to work on the welts, bruises, and the crusted lacerations on Gideon’s wrists—proof he’d been bound while being beaten.
Thonneger hadn’t been able to bring Gideon back to consciousness, a situation that oddly enough hadn’t disturbed Robert. It seemed the head giant had some tests he wanted Thonneger to conduct on the comatose patient. Some of them were straightforward enough—obtaining sperm samples and storing them for possible artificial insemination. Next came requests for other experiments, designed to explore the genetic differences between the giants and the human population. In other circumstances, Thonneger might have relished the opportunity—this was sure-fire Nobel prize material.
But then Robert began pressing for research into the effects of radiation on the giants.
Thonneger was leery, having little experience in nuclear medicine. He’d already encountered the strange force-field that protected each of the giants. How would that react to irradiation?