by Stan Lee
Robert had become insistent, but Thonneger, then still living in his own house, had resisted.
Soon after, his dog was found dead.
Zoltan was no ordinary animal. He was a German shepherd, a big, fierce watchdog—purchased by Thonneger after Robert’s first visit. The dog had been trained to stay in or near the house. Yet Zoltan had been found on a nearby parkway, his body crushed.
The police, of course, attributed the animal’s death to accident—an encounter of the closest kind with an eighteen-wheeler, perhaps.
But the afternoon after this verdict was announced, one of Robert’s lieutenants—a giant named Thomas—had stopped by Thonneger’s backyard. He smilingly announced that he was responsible for Zoltan’s murder. Then, calmly pressing huge, muscular hands together, he indicated that the good doctor had better get to work on the radiation experiments.
Frightened out of his wits, Thonneger had begun, first trying x-rays and tracing isotopes through Gideon’s bloodstream. The force-field did indeed have some strange effects—for instance, x-rays didn’t penetrate too deeply. On a conscious subject, a stunning near-twenty-foot-tall redhead named Ruth, the doctor found that the field could apparently be thinned at various points. Loss of consciousness, however, brought the field up to maximum—a wonderful survival trait.
Robert had accepted the doctor’s initial findings, devouring medical texts to get a deeper understanding. But the leader of the giants wasn’t satisfied. He wanted additional experiments, more intrusive—more life-threatening. Thonneger had been scared before, but now his mood verged on hysteria.
An evening fog was blowing in off the lake, and the air held a clammy chill. The back door of the rundown mansion was out of true, and tendrils of mist curled round the edges. Thonneger pulled the sweater he was wearing more tightly around his plump frame. When winter came, he realized, it would be damned cold in there.
If he were still there by winter. If his patient—and Thonneger himself—were still alive.
Thonneger stepped out of the house and down a well-defined trail that led to the boathouse. The original owners must have kept a yacht berthed there, because the structure was on the large side. A key from the doctor’s pocket unlocked the landward entrance, and Thonneger stepped inside.
A faint odor of antiseptic struck him as he entered the half-lit, high-arched enclosure. Most of the old bay had been floored over. The walls were lined with medical monitors that gave off faint beeps as lights on their boards glittered. Thonneger paid little attention to them. He had a duplicate set of telltales up at the house, connected by wire.
No, the object of his attention was the enormous still form that sprawled across the center of the room. Gideon lay quiet, the worst of his superficial injuries now healed. No hospital bed in the world could have held him, so he rested on a gigantic air mattress—the sort of thing that was advertised at neighborhood fun fairs as a “Moon Walk.”
Thonneger slipped off his shoes and donned a white lab coat, then stepped onto the mattress, making his usual tour of inspection. The monitor probes were all taped in place, and the oxygen connection was fine. He began to make notes. Breathing regular, skin tone acceptable ... Thonneger poked the recumbent form with a finger. Yes ...
A figure noiselessly rose from the water at the lakeward side of the boathouse. Thonneger started as Robert climbed up onto the floor of the sickroom. The giants always entered the secret infirmary underwater, keeping their visits unseen.
Robert sat at the end of the flooring, drying himself and gazing at the patient and his doctor with a faintly sneering air. “Still the same?” he asked Thonneger in a low rumble.
The doctor nodded. “No change.”
“Then if the subject remains stable, I expect you to begin the new course of experiments.” Eyes like fist-sized blue marbles bored steadily into Thonneger’s face.
The doctor gulped, wilting under the glare. “I—I’ll start tomorrow,” he said in a constricted voice.
On the planet Argon, panic reigned. Triadon and his technicians scrambled desperately as bolts of destruction flashed down on them from armored figures diving from the clouds. The greensward was now torn with blackened scars from near-misses. Sturdley saw one of Triadon’s armored men take a blast full in the breastplate and collapse in a shower of sparks.
Harry himself was trying to escape the center of combat when he glanced back toward Peg. The onset of danger had apparently overcome her illness, but she hadn’t run for it. Instead, she crouched over John Cameron’s recumbent form in the stance of a tigress defending its cub. Mike’s eyes were glued to the sky as the fliers surged ever closer, seeming to aim for John. He tugged fearfully at Peg’s arm, only to be shaken off.
Her gaze was also directed skyward, although her eyes seemed unfocused. “Damnation, Harry! Most of ’em seem to be robots!”
Sturdley directed his own mental probes up toward the raiding force, confirming Peg’s discovery. Most of their attackers were machines, while a few airborne humans hung back, directing the foray.
“Triadon!” Sturdley got the attention of the leader of the friendly Argonians and passed along the information. He and Peg helped the defenders by pinpointing the enemy’s leaders. The assault faltered as its commanders had to plunge into evasive maneuvers.
But the robots responded to an override program. The mechanical attackers, about a foot higher than the armored humans, hit the ground and headed for Peg.
She moved to block the nearest robot, lashing out with a potent psionic thrust. It didn’t work. The robot backhanded her away.
Peg went tumbling and the robot headed for John.
The thought crashed in Sturdley’s brain. Sure—John! The one who controls the Rift! Of course they’d want him.
If anything happened to John, it would also mean that he and Peg would be stranded. Sturdley stepped forward, irresolute. Something had to be done, but his mental powers would be as useless as Peg’s.
Peg staggered upright, a nimbus of energy playing among her unruly red curls as she tried another psychic attack on the robot, with minimal effect.
But the robot must have become aware of her as some sort of hindrance. It turned, this time leveling a weapon at the girl.
John abruptly came to life with an inarticulate cry, his eyes blazing as he rose to confront the mechanical mercenary. An incandescent swath of energy swept round his entire body, then leapt to envelop the robot, which proceeded to explode in an impressive pyrotechnic display.
John wasn’t done. Ignoring the other robots closing in, he glared up, seeking one of the humans directing the attack. Sturdley felt a tremendous rush of mental energy.
The robots shot skyward in unison, as if the ground beneath their feet had become molten lava. Triadon and his people went on the offensive, using weaponry built into their armor to fire at the retreating raiders.
John staggered over to Peg, reaching out to her. She sagged under his weight as he suddenly collapsed again. Only Mike’s assistance kept the two of them from falling to the lawn.
Peg glanced up at Sturdley. “Even half out of it, he was stronger than the two of us together,” she whispered.
“But right now, he’s weak as a kitten,” Harry replied. “We’ve got to find some help—”
“I will give as much help as I can,” Triadon announced, appearing soundlessly at Harry’s elbow. “Your friend and the young lady—Peg—seem sick. Besides, you all need a place to stay. The evil ones”—he looked up after the dwindling forms of their attackers—“were after you.”
The newcomers rode on a flying equipment platform provided by Triadon. Passenger accommodations were nonexistent, but Peg managed to find some sort of tarp to cover John. She, Harry, and Mike flew exposed to the high-altitude chill as the open-bodied cargo craft flew on.
The skyscraping towers disappeared behind them as Triadon led his people away from the city. Peg and Sturdley were shivering by the time the platform swooped downward. They found themselves
skimming across a greenish-gray tundra, broken in the distance by a rocky butte.
Shivers of cold turned to shivers of fear as the platform seemed to throw itself at the sheer cliff face. Just as Harry was about to scream a warning to the pilot, the stone cracked to reveal a titanic doorway.
“Wow,” Peg muttered, impressed. “It’s just like the place in that Dynasty comic—the Fortress—”
Harry stopped her with a wave of his hand. “We’ve got enough problems without copyright infringements,” he said. “I’ll name it ... the Citadel of Silence.”
Mike, who’d been staring in dazed wonder since the fight began, finally spoke up. “This is the land of the gods, isn’t it?”
“What?” Peg turned her attention from John to Mike.
“I just—I—I ... I’m sorry.” Mike wouldn’t even meet her eyes.
“Mike, what are you trying to say?”
“When I tried to—to, ah ... when I met you.”
Peg had first encountered Mike on the giants’ grim home-world, where he and two fellow thralls had tried to rape her. She’d survived by seizing control of his mind, using his muscle and her martial arts training to pound the other two into the ground. She’d also made use of her new-found psychic powers to do a little brainwashing, convincing Mike he was in love with her, that he’d do anything to please her.
Before they escaped from the planet of the giants, Peg had released her mental hold on Mike. But his Bronze Age mentality was not at all prepared for what he’d seen in the past hour. “I didn’t know then that you were a goddess. I would never have—” Mike’s words tapered off into humble mumbling.
“Mike,” Peg began with a trace of asperity.
But Harry cut her off with a warning gesture. “Don’t rain on his parade,” he said softly. “We may need Mike’s respect to get him through whatever comes next.”
As the flying platform moored inside a huge underground hangar, two of Triadon’s technicians picked up John and led the visitors through a labyrinth of passages into a laboratory full of incomprehensible devices.
There was a medical exam in a big cocoon-like machine, more high-tech and considerably less intrusive than the computerized physicals they’d endured on the giants’ world. While waiting for their turns in the automed, as it was called, Peg and Harry worked to expand the translation device’s vocabulary. Mike entered the cocoon in silence, but his darting eyes betrayed his nervousness. John remained semiconscious through the procedure.
Triadon joined them when the exam was over. Peg and Harry had learned from the technicians that their defender was also the planet’s leading scientist. As Triadon approached, the Argonian removed his helmet, revealing a craggily handsome face with piercing blue eyes and reddish gold hair that descended to a widow’s peak on his forehead.
“Interesting,” Triadon said, perusing a printout on some sort of translucent plastic material. “Two of you show traces of inoculations against several diseases we consider extinct. One of you seems to have never been inoculated against anything. And one—” he frowned, glancing at John. “One shows no trace of any infections at all.”
His eyes went to Peg, and his face reddened slightly. “According to the body chemistry report, the young lady appears to be one week pregnant, except there doesn’t appear to be a fetus ...”
Peg’s face reddened considerably more. “It’s a long story,” she sighed, “involving genetic experiments and a mad computer.”
Triadon went back to scanning the printout when he suddenly dropped the flimsy plastic and stared at them as if they were radioactive. “And all of you bear the gene of evil!”
* * *
CHAPTER 3
“What the hell is an evil gene?” Harry Sturdley demanded.
“And why do you act as if it’s catching?” Peg wanted to know.
“Please forgive me.” Triadon had the grace to repress his shock. “The condition is so unknown these days that it was among the last tests conducted.” He glanced at the two terrestrial castaways. “Over a thousand years ago, our scientists isolated the genetic cause for discord, personal friction, greed, deviance—and succeeded in artificially removing it from the population. For more than a millennium, our society has suffered no war, crime, social agitation ...”
“Utopia,” Peg mouthed the word in wide-eyed wonder.
“Yeah—if you’re a sheep,” Sturdley responded as he gave Triadon a sharp look. “This ‘deviance’ you talk about. That’s another word for ‘change.’ How many new inventions have been created lately on this wonderful world of yours? Are there any new art forms?”
Triadon hung his head. “No,” he admitted, “there are none. Besides conflict, it seems that the evil gene controlled the source of creative thought.”
“A thousand years of peace—at the price of stagnation,” Peg said quietly. She shivered.
“I’m afraid the last breakthrough our people achieved in our technology was the hemisemidimensional paraperpen-diculatronic warp.”
“That’s quite a mouthful,” Sturdley said. “I don’t think your translator handled it well.”
Triadon shrugged. “More simply, it’s the machine that exiles our criminals into the interdimensional flux you call the Rift.“
“I guess that clears it up,” Harry said.
“You exile your criminals into the Rift?” Peg shuddered at the thought of falling eternally through nothingness. “Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Our ancestors created the Sphere of Exile and remanded there all those who wouldn’t be changed—those who threatened the stability of our civilization.” Triadon’s voice was defensive. “It was a normally unreachable location in the flux. The problem is that, of late, our planet has had visitations through the Rift. Someone has traversed the interdimensional flux—as you did—and in the process, reopened the connection from the Sphere of Exile to our world. Some of the criminals have come back to Argon and ... well, you’ve seen what disasters they’re causing.”
Sturdley nodded. “The wolves have returned to devour the poor sheep, and you have no defense.”
“Poor defenses,” Triadon admitted. “In calmer days, my followers and I were shunned because we were tainted with the evil gene. We were considered throwbacks because of our mildly aggressive or creative tendencies. When Argon was threatened, we volunteered to form a defense group. Otherwise, The Consensus—that’s our government—is virtually helpless. We are the only ones capable of fighting the Deviants.”
“Well, now you’ve got reinforcements,” Sturdley said grandly. “We’ve had lots of experience in dealing with villains—even high-tech ones.”
Seeing that Peg was about to make a comment, Harry rushed to cut her off. “It’s the least we can do, Triadon. After all, it’s our appearance here—ours and John’s—that caused this problem.”
Sturdley rubbed his hands together, his thoughts flying rapidly. “We’ve got ESP, you’ve got armor. When we put it all together, the S-Force should have these guys on the run.”
“S-Force?” Triadon was puzzled.
“Sure,” Harry said with a big smile. “S, as in Sturdley.”
Outfitted in a suit of Argonian armor, Harry found that flight required considerably more technique than he’d ever imagined when he had so light-heartedly given that power to his superheroes. Attitude control, elevation, heading—even the slightest movement brought what he considered a gross overcompensation from the armor’s exoskeletal controls. As for the other systems, weapons and so on, he had no idea at all how they operated.
This was supposed to be a test flight, to acclimate Sturdley to the demands of the armor. But Harry was determined to do more than that, to prove the usefulness of this new alliance. On the pretext of wanting to test himself out in heavy traffic, he’d gotten the technicians accompanying him to lead the way to the nearest city.
It turned out to be the place where they’d tumbled out of the Rift—the capital city of Argon, Kaldoa. Harry admired the
skyline of mile-high towers, so familiar from John’s sketches. The viewpoint was different from hundreds of feet in the air. Harry wondered if Manhattan would look the same. He’d often dreamed of flying over the highrises there, of being a caped superhero.
In fact, flying in New York would probably be easier. Here he had to dodge numerous bodies hurtling around him. Triadon’s people had explained something about the suit’s automatic collision-avoidance system. Sturdley was depending on that circuitry now as he blundered through the airborne traffic, paying little attention to his course as he flung out psychic probes.
The minds he touched were placid, quiet, well-adjusted ... dull as hell. But somewhere down there had to be a mind with criminal intent, a mind that would stand out among these psychic sheep like a bloodied wolf.
Sturdley didn’t find such a mind. Instead, he discovered a body without a mind at all.
Zeroing in on the contact, Sturdley’s probes revealed electronic circuitry and mechanical contraptions beneath human-sized armor and human-seeming skin.
“There’s a robot lurking on the top landing stage of that tower,” Harry snapped to the closest technician, a guy named Melador who’d managed to match his crazy flight pattern.
Melador followed Sturdley’s pointing finger. “That’s the Consensus Computer Spire!”
The three technicians accompanying Sturdley peeled off and swooped toward the landing stage. Harry remained where he was, hanging in midair. He wouldn’t be much help in any rough-and-tumble. But his abilities might be of use in pinpointing any additional robots. He spread a wide mental net, but came up empty.
The robot was apparently acting on its own.
Right now, the creature was attempting to run. It couldn’t take to the air because Melador and company were above it, enjoying the advantage of the high ground. Sturdley caught the loudspeaker echoes of Melador’s voice shouting in Argonian—a warning, apparently, as the few humans on the platform scattered. The robot attempted to join them, but was stopped as a brilliant blue flare scythed from Melador’s right arm to blow off the robot’s left leg.