by Stan Lee
Under cover of desultory conversation, Robert discovered the strings that controlled Ben Seckert’s personality and quietly took them into his own hands. As Demagogua moved off at a mental command from the giant, Seckert thought he was merely trading conservative commonplaces with the new law-and-order symbol. In reality, Robert was quietly redefining Seckert’s attitudes, bending him to respond to the giant’s suggestions ... and orders.
Robert carefully kept his face bland as he continued the process. Back home, Binding was a much simpler operation. A Master simply battered a Lesser’s mental shields out of existence and imposed his own control. This delicate technique of Binding subjects without their conscious knowledge was much more of a drain.
At last, the job was finished. Robert smiled. Seckert would make a useful addition to his nascent Washington network. Even as the giant withdrew his mental tendrils, Seckert was already doing his bidding. “General!” he called to a man whose crew-cut iron gray hair gave the lie to the casual civilian clothing he wore. “General Hardesty is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he explained to Robert.
Seckert had been programmed to introduce other likely candidates for Binding, and he was immediately following through. Robert forced a smile to his face, trying to push back the incipient headache brought on by his mental tinkering. “General.”
His probes already revealed a warrior’s persona, raging at the lack of what Hardesty considered worthy enemies. Yes, much could be done with this mind.
“I understand you’ll be in the White House rose garden tomorrow,” Hardesty said, giving Robert a quizzical’look.
Two Senators who happened to be passing glanced up with smiles. “Tell the President hello for me,” one of them said.
Robert returned their smiles. Senators, generals, high government operatives, all would be of use in promoting a nuclear war. And a global nuclear war, he had at last decided, was the only way to advance his long-range plans.
When he’d first arrived on this world with his fifty followers, Robert had thought they would be sufficient to establish the dominance of his kind. Subsequent experience had shown that they couldn’t even dominate a single human city. There were too many wild Lessers on this world, hundreds of millions of them, wielding a technology that could threaten even a Master’s life. Back home, a Lesser wielding a bronze knife would be a rarity, and certainly no threat to the natural order. Raise a foot, bring it down a few times, clean off the blood, perhaps remove the blade caught in the sole of one’s buskins ...
Here, however, these unnatural Lessers could conceivably pose a danger. Therefore it was necessary to thin their numbers, deprive them of their technology. What better way to do that than use the Lessers’ most potent weapons against them?
Robert’s smile broadened. And tomorrow, he’d be meeting this domain’s top ruler. The one the newspapers referred to as “having his finger on the button.”
* * *
CHAPTER 6
The enormous rocky doors of the Citadel of Silence stood open to admit shafts of brilliant Argonian sunshine. But Harry Sturdley barely noticed as he strode fretfully back and forth over the vast hangar floor.
“We’ve been working our tails off, and the Argonian in the street still barely knows about us.” His tone of voice was the same as he used at Fantasy Factory staff meetings when a comic launch had fizzled. “I don’t get it! We’re the good guys here—the civilians should love us! At least—”
“Yeah, we know,” Peg Faber interrupted, her voice barely hiding her sarcasm, “it works in the comics.”
“It worked in real life, too,” Harry hastened to point out. “Remember how most New Yorkers acted when the Heroes first turned up?”
He regretted that argument almost as soon as the words were said. How was New York doing now? What were the giants up to? His lean face tightened. Robert was surely responsible for the assassination attempt on John at the San Diego comics convention. Did the giants think he, John, and Peg were dead now? How had the Fantasy Factory board reacted? How must Myra feel?
Sturdley pushed away thoughts of wife and home, trying to concentrate on the present campaign. They had to clear things up here before they could take on the ills of Earth. “It’s as if the folks here have no idea of good and evil.”
“They don’t—not in the sense that you mean.” Triadon’s craggy features seemed shamefaced as he stood with his helmet under one arm. The ruddy gold of his hair shone in the sunshine, clashing wildly with the psychedelic green and purple heraldic painting on his armor.
“And what does that mean?” Harry growled.
As happened quite often now, all eyes went to Mike. The mind-expanded escapee from the planet of the giants tried to explain. “You’ve got to remember, Harry, these people have lived in nearly perfect peace for a thousand years. To them, any conflict, any fighting, is a bad thing.”
“Great!” Sturdley burst out. “So just the act of protecting them makes us look bad in everyone’s eyes?”
Mike, Triadon, and the other Argonians nodded unhappily.
“Rationally, we know that we must fight to defend our world,” Melador said slowly. “But in our hearts, well, even I have doubts about the rightness of our actions.”
“We’ve tried to bring back the concept of right and wrong,” Triadon said. “I asked a friend of mine—another throwback who is also a great theater director—to stage a production of Flubadub for Argonian Classics.”
“Flubadub? Very catchy title,” Sturdley muttered.
“It’s a classic play from the Age of Strife,” Mike went on. “The theme deals with choosing between good and evil.”
“Wait a second, I saw this on 3-D,” Peg said. “The guy who played the lead, Flubadub—”
“Our greatest living actor,” Triadon assured her.
She sighed. “It was like watching Dick Van Patten take on King Lear.”
“That successful, huh?” Sturdley turned to Triadon.
The scientist stood with downcast eyes. “According to the ratings, hardly anyone watched.”
“Well, if we can’t get their attention the classy way, I guess we’ll just have to go for crass.” Sturdley gave the group a crooked smile. “It’s just lucky you’ve got a crass comic book type with you. From now on, we’re going to market our heroes.” He stabbed a finger at Triadon, at Melador, at John, Mike, and Peg. “Collectively, you’re the leaders of Argon’s defenders. We’re going to have you out every day, patrolling.”
“What about you, Harry?” Peg asked.
He shook his head. “I’ll help out at first, but I think I’ll work out better as the wise old guy who stays home.” He frowned in thought. “We’ve got to have a credo—a code.”
“Great,” Peg muttered. “He’s going to reinvent the Comics Code.”
“No,” Harry said, turning to her. “A hero’s code. Something to distinguish our tactics from the Deviants. Those blasters in your armor,” he asked Triadon, “can you change them for a weapon that stuns?”
“Stun?” the scientist echoed in bafflement.
“From here on, we go for no killing, no destruction. The bad guys do all that. We need nonlethal weapons, plus some way to shoot those nullifier nets at the villains’ robots.” He grinned. ‘The flashier, the better.“
Three days later, Sturdley had a chance to test his theories. He, Mike, and three of Triadon’s technicians had flown to the northernmost of Argon’s spire-cities, distant Ahkeya.
“There’s got to be some kind of method to what the Deviants are doing,” Harry told Mike for about the fiftieth time. “Some sort of thread to all these crimes.”
“They tried to kidnap us,” Mike pointed out.
“That had to be part of a plan to get more of their people out of dimensional exile,” Sturdley said.
“Just after we arrived, they looted several robot factories.”
“And now they’ve got more of those killer robots.”
“You stopped a spy at the Conse
nsus computer records, there were several attempts to kill large numbers of people, and I intercepted the hijacking of a shipment of doojig— um, ultramicrochips.”
“Which seem to be an integral part of Argonian technology.” Sturdley nodded. “Now back in the bad old days when people still had the evil gene and were inventing stuff, Ahkeya was known as The City of Science.”
“I knew that,” Mike said promptly.
“Yeah, well it took me a couple of hours of digging around in those Argonian computers.” Sturdley gave his hero-in-training a dirty look. “The thing is, Ahkeya still has Argon’s largest science museum, with exhibits dating back to the Days of Strife.”
Mike glanced over as they flew along. “You mean weapons?”
“I don’t know,” Sturdley said. “But I bet the bad guys plan to find out.”
The Science Museum was housed in the lower levels of a small, aged-looking tower at the edge of the city. Traffic was light as Sturdley stood on an upper terrace, staking out the place. For the past hour, he’d mentally scanned everyone entering the museum—not that there was a great crush of humanity. A few academics had come to visit the museum’s library, and a small knot of unhappy school kids had been led in and out.
Bored out of his mind, Harry glanced upward. The tarnished plast-alloy of this spire certainly didn’t scrape the sky. And was it his imagination, or did it lean to one side?
“Here comes another.” Mike’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
Stifling a yawn, Sturdley sent out a subtle mental probe to the gray-haired figure shuffling along in a quietly painted armor suit, helmet under his arm. It would probably turn out to be another professor checking the date of Framadon’s fourteenth gizmoidal experiment—that’s what Argonian scientific scholarship had descended to.
Instead, he encountered no mind at all—only positronic currents swirling in a maze of wire mesh and ultrami-crochips.
Sturdley whirled to the others. “That guy is a robot! We’ve nabbed ourselves another spy!”
He scanned the area. There were no other robots, but several human strollers were crossing the cracked esplanade at the base of the tower.
“There’s nobody on the ground floor of the museum. We’ll get him there.”
The five S-Force members swooped down from the terrace and burst through the museum entrance, Harry quickly feeding entry tokens into the automated gates. Still flying, they crisscrossed the ground floor, finding a number of dusty exhibits but no robot. Sturdley furiously started shooting off probes. “Where the hell did the damned thing go?” he muttered to himself.
The robot didn’t appear to be in any of the public areas. Harry expanded his mental search and hit paydirt. He snapped over the radio, “It’s in the third subbasement, officially listed as an uncatalogued storage area.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Mike said, leading the technicians to the nearest drop-shaft.
If the museum proper had been dimly lit, the lighting budget for the storage basements had been cut to the bone. Some sort of glowing strip had once ringed the shaftway, but time and neglect had left only a feeble radiance with many gaps. With a thrust of his jaw, Sturdley flicked on an infrared guidance system, warning the others to show no lights. “We don’t want to warn him we’re coming.”
The robot had walked to its destination, leaving a trail of footprints in the thick dust on the floors. They followed the tracks down narrow aisles between vertiginous piles of sealed crates and vast, ungainly shapes swathed with tarpaulins and spiderwebs.
Harry had his outside sound receivers tuned to maximum gain and picked up a bubbling hiss from the far side of a rampart of stacked display cases. “Just beyond here,” he whispered.
The technicians checked their newly-implanted stunners— useless against this antagonist—with low-voiced, nervous chatter. Two of them unslung weapons that looked like sawed-off blunderbusses. This was Triadon’s answer to the need for a long-range weapon against robots. Inside the large-caliber barrel was a smart rocket that, once aimed at a robot, pursued the creature and deployed a nullifier net to take it out.
Harry sent the two gunners to the top of the piled cases, hoping they’d get a better shot. “We’ll fly down this aisle and fire off our stunners like gangbusters.”
“What’s a gangbuster?” Mike asked.
“And what do we do if the robot shoots back?” the Argonian technician wanted to know.
“All we need is a couple of seconds’ distraction so we can net the damn thing,” Sturdley said. “We’ll all be taking the same chance.”
They floated in the aisle, Harry taking the highest position, Mike the middle, and the technician flying as low man. “On the count of three,” Harry whispered into his mike. “One, two ... now!”
He flung his hands out, going for top speed, and rocketed into an open space in the stacks. An entire pile had been brought down, the area filled with smashed crates. Harry spotted the robot kneeling on the floor beside one of the broken boxes. It was pouring a liquid over what looked like a huge, fossilized dog turd—a three-foot by one-foot brownish-gray clot.
It had to be some sort of chemical reagent, Harry thought. Wherever the liquid touched, the petrified gray-brown material bubbled away to reveal a gleaming metallic cylinder.
“Fire!” Harry yelled. He thrust his fingers in the tridi-girector gesture, and pale-green stunner flashes erupted from the projectors built into his armored gauntlets. They looked pretty, he thought, but they were about as effective as throwing salad greens at the robot.
It’s just a distraction, Sturdley told himself. We only need to make the robot freeze long enough—
The robot did indeed freeze, for a good tenth of a second. Then it turned back to the cylinder on the floor, tearing at the protective chrysalis.
What have we got to worry about? Sturdley thought. That thing’s been in storage the past thousand years!
The robot whipped around, the gleaming cylinder—it looked like a squat, baby bazooka—balanced in its hands.
There was a glare of garish white light, and the pile of crates behind Sturdley, not to mention a ten-foot section of ceiling above him, abruptly ceased to exist.
Wish I could get batteries like that, Harry thought as he went into desperate evasion maneuvers. Where the hell are those guys with the nets?
The robot got off another shot, vaporizing one of the nul-lifier rockets. Number two, however, was right on target. Its mid-air burst deposited the sparkling, gossamer webwork over the mechanical intruder.
That should have put the robot out of commission. But in the instant before the net settled, the robot self-destructed, exploding in a gout of reddish flame. Harry found himself flung upward and through the newly created hole in the ceiling.
A shaken Harry Sturdley stood on the plaza outside the museum tower as a cluster of Argonian firefighters struggled to extinguish the flames crackling merrily in the space where the Science Museum had stood.
“You’re sure you’re all right, Harry?” Mike asked worriedly.
“Fine, kid,” Sturdley assured him. “I regained control right after getting whooshed through that hole.” He raised a gauntleted hand to his unhelmeted head. “Better than the tech who got smashed into that wall of crates.”
“His armor kept him from getting badly injured,” Mike said. “Um—I think the media has arrived.”
He pointed to several flying platforms coming in for landings. All were loaded with cameras and transmission equipment.
Harry patted Mike on the back. “Go get ‘em, kid. Take what I gave you—and play it the way I said.”
Mike nodded and set off for the organizing news crews.
“Hey, Mike,” Harry called after him.
Mike turned.
“From what you know of these bozos—will it work?”
“I think so,” Mike said, a little surprised.
“Then go in there and kick some ass.”
“Harry taught me a new term today,�
�� Mike said, raising a utensil full of food to his mouth. “Damage control.”
Peg Faber smiled. “That’s a very Harry-like notion,” she agreed. “Especially after blowing up and setting fire to the Science Museum.”
Mike raised an admonitory finger. “That was all the fault of the Deviants—and their robot. We were only there to restrain. The robot attacked.”
“And the Argonians bought that?”
“According to their culture, that’s exactly what had to have happened. Sturdley was worried about that,.too.” Mike looked at her, his handsome face twisting as he tried to put a difficult concept into words. “The Argonian worldview—it’s very different from what I grew up with. And from the way you’re reacting, it’s very different from your culture as well.”
“Well, I didn’t think they were gods.”
Color rose in Mike’s face. “A point to you. Yet, even Sturdley told me that the idea of inhaling an education seemed like magic to him.”
“Me, too,” Peg had to admit.
“But there is also a—logic—to their culture, a framework. For instance, Triadon’s name ...”
“Yeah. Bizarro.”
“Actually, that’s a rather offensive Argonian term. The whole name-structure here ties into a complicated cultural matrix. It denotes his social status, his politics, his basic intelligence, education, class standing, his genetic background...”
“Hey, you could tell me it also included his hat and shoe size and whether he’s left-handed. I’d still have to ask how the hell you can do that in just three syllables.”
“And I’d have to answer—” his face twisted a little more. “You just don’t understand.”
Peg fiddled with the food on her plate. She knew she shouldn’t have accepted this dinner invitation, but she was tired of the mess hall at the Citadel of Silence. And she had to admit that Mike looked pretty impressive in the bathrobe and tights ensemble that the well-dressed Argonian male donned for a night on the town. Argonian civvies made Harry look like Hugh Hefner’s older brother.