by Stan Lee
Which probably meant it had some ridiculous Argonian name like doo-whacker, John thought.
Triadon stepped into the discussion, his tone grave. “The worrisome thing is that this was specifically designed as a weapon.”
Mike, his helmet off, turned to explain to Peg. “The stuff they’ve been using in battles so far has been whipped up from civilian tools. The Deviants’ red-ray weapon—that was developed from a cutting-beam device. Our blue-ray projector was originally a welding implement. The green beam, the stunner, has been used as surgical anesthetic.”
Sturdley spoke up. “The thing is, the weapons in use so far aren’t capable of widespread destruction. The force cannon, however, is.”
He looked at Triadon. “This thing was invented right at the end of the Age of Strife, so only three prototypes were made. One wound up in the Science Museum.”
“The Consensus records give no clue as to what happened to the others,” Triadon finished. “But if they fall into Deviant hands—”
“You keep digging in the computers,” John said. “Those of us with mental powers will probe every Deviant we encounter for information.”
“Peg and I are going to question the guy Mike captured at the Kemot hijacking,” Sturdley said. “If we get any information that can be followed up, we’ll radio you.”
Mike and the others donned their helmets, and the S-Force members who were to go on patrol checked their armor. The huge doors rumbled open, and suited figures began flying skyward.
John caught the mental message Harry sent after them: And be careful out there.
John, Mike, and their three Argonian backups made a leisurely orbit around the central spires of Kemot City, maintaining an altitude about halfway up the towers.
“Well, I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” Mike said.
“We’ve got reports of several cargo platforms being stolen.” John frowned as he watched the city’s air traffic swirl around them. “But there’s too many for us to stop every one to check the ownership.” His frown grew deeper. What would criminal terrorists want with the equivalent of a terrestrial truck? Moving loot? A getaway vehicle? The flying version of a car bomb? .
He spread a mental web across the teeming traffic, trying to isolate any thoughts that had to do with platforms or force cannons.
John found nothing—except for a heavily-laden platform whose crew didn’t think at all.
“Robots!” John warned, giving his team a mental view and location of the Deviant vehicle.
“Grumadon! Moradel! Nullifiers ready!” Mike barked, peeling off with two of the technicians who quickly unslung their antirobot weapons.
John frowned at the casual way Mike had again seized command. But as they had planned, he remained with the last technician, holding back as the mobile reserve.
As soon as the S-Force team headed for them, the robots aboard the platform leapt to action. The driver brought the vehicle broadside to the oncoming team, while others shifted tarpaulins to reveal a squat, cylindrical shape that looked like a personal cement mixer.
“Looks like some kind of cannon!” Mike’s voice blared over the radio. “Disperse! I’m going in!”
John, who’d continued to launch mental probes, zeroed in on another robot-crewed platform coming behind the attack team. Again, the robots were aiming one of the mixer-cannons.
“There’s a second platform! They’re going for a crossfire!” John warned over the radio.
Mike continued to arrow toward the first platform, committed to his attack.
“Get your net,” John cried to the third technician. “We’ll have to take out that other gun.”
They dove down, John clutching the unfamiliar shape of the nullifier-gun in his gauntleted hands. The others all enjoyed marksman’s status with the new weapon, thanks to a vaporware session that taught the niceties of firing the net-dropping rockets. John had only a week’s practice on stationary targets.
His suit’s proximity detectors suddenly distinguished the flight of a small rocket above and behind his right shoulder. That meant his wingman had already fired one nullifier. It swooped down to deposit its net over the driver of the platform. The robot froze at the controls, sending off showers of sparks. The crew serving the cannon-like weapon slewed it around to aim at them.
John fired his rocket, aiming not for any of the gunners but for the electronic innards of the cannon itself.
The impact of the rocket and the reaction between the gleaming net and the gun circuitry looked like the Fourth of July. Luckily, innocent passersby had already been rerouted at the first warning of Deviant activity. When the damaged cannon finally exploded, the only ones in range of the blast waves were the S-Forcers and the other Deviant vehicle.
The remaining gun platform was flung about, its crew unable to aim at the oncoming armored figures.
John and his Argonian wingman flew over to join the attack.
Moradel, a female technician, had already netted one of the gun crew. Another of the robots was aiming a hand when he was nullified by a net shot from John’s wingman.
“Good shot—uh—” Damn! He’d forgotten the guy’s name!
Belatedly, John realized he hadn’t reloaded his own nulli-fier blunderbuss. As he fumbled for a new rocket, he saw two more robots go down, and a third take aim at his wing-man.
“Damn!” John knew his clumsy fingers couldn’t slam the rocket home. Instead, he pegged the thing, with all the force of his exoskeletal armor, at the chest of the robot.
He knew the rocket wouldn’t be primed. But it presented enough of a distraction that the robot didn’t fire. An instant later, Mike landed on the platform, smashing the robot down with the butt of his own launcher. “Let’s get this thing back for study,” he said, making his way between downed robots to the platform’s controls. “We’ll rendezvous beyond the city limits, then head for home.”
The S-Force’s latest Deviant prisoner was not an impressive sight as he lay in a leotard-like garment across a laboratory slab. They were in the same room Triadon had used to expand Mike’s mind, and the prisoner was bound spread-eagled on the same operating table-like piece of furniture.
His position and the tight clothing revealed a scrawny but leanly muscled frame, somewhat shorter than the average Argonian. The Deviant’s face was ratlike. Even with the pale radiance of a soothing field flickering across them, his features retained a pinched and bitter expression. Muddy brown eyes stared up sightlessly at the field projector.
“We can keep him essentially unconscious like this, but he’s been conditioned against any of our interrogation techniques, short of—” Triadon stumbled over the word—“torture.”
“Well, let’s see if we can try an end run around those defenses,” Harry said briskly. “Peg, why don’t you give it a try?”
Unvoiced, he sent her a mental message: You’ve had the most experience mucking around in people’s heads.
Peg grasped a lax wrist and sent tendrils of thought into the prisoner’s psyche. A quick brush with his ego-identification, and she reported, “His name is Emagrun.”
Triadon made a little hissing noise. “Identification parameters we don’t even use anymore.” He hastily coded something into a thumbpad computer. “Still, I believe that was the name that corresponded to his fingerprint and retinal images.”
“Has he got a record?” she asked.
Triadon frowned. “Arrested for thievery with bodily harm. Transposed to the Exile Sphere more than a thousand years ago.”
Peg felt a chill crawl down her back as she looked at the slack-jawed figure on the slab. A man who’d walked this planet a thousand years ago, still alive—
Her head jerked up as she broke her physical contact with Emagrun. “How can he still be alive?”
Triadon gave a helpless shrug.
“Well, there’s one way to see.” Peg sank back into Emagrun’s psyche, searching out his memories. His exile was a traumatic moment, easily traced. She relived the
scene as Emagrun, held helpless in a force-field, faced the authorities furious and unrepentant. He spat on the floor as the hemisemidimensional paraperpendiculartronic warp enveloped his body.
Peg felt the criminal’s terror as he underwent the sensation of transiting the Rift. Then Emagrun found himself in what seemed to be a gigantic soap bubble floating in the Rift’s awful emptiness. The Sphere of Exile was aptly named. Like John Cameron’s Grand Central Station of the mind, it was an artificial construction within the Rift. Unlike John’s spanking-new version of the terrestrial commuter train nexus, however, this station was featureless—and had no way out.
There were also, Peg discovered, some odd effects within the exile zone. The periphery of the sphere—the film of the soap bubble—somehow impinged on normal space. If they were willing to endure the vertiginous sensation of Rift transition, the exiled criminals could see ghostly images of life on Argon—the life they could never regain.
Peg couldn’t explain the phenomenon—she suspected it would require a degree in physics rather than her bachelor’s in English Lit. But apparently the deeper one moved into the pocket universe of the Sphere, the more slowly time progressed.
Through Emagrun’s eyes, Peg saw the most homesick exiles, those closest to the periphery, grow aged and die like mayflies. It was like watching a life in fast forward. For the exiles who floated in the innermost zones, the centuries went past as years. These were the die-hards, the ones with the most burning hatred of the Argonian way of life.
Then, one day after numberless unchanging days, the bubble universe had deformed. Some of the exiles were drawn irresistibly to the periphery—and after an instant of vertigo, miraculously found themselves back on Argon.
That must have been John’s first sketching visit, Peg thought. Unwittingly, he’d opened the door to the exiles’s prison.
She continued to probe Emagrun’s memories. The escaped Deviants had formed themselves into ad hoc gangs. Some were out-and-out piratical types intent on looting helpless enemies, like the pack that Emagrun had attached himself to. They chose their scores carefully, not wanting to kill the golden goose. Other Deviants were soured idealists who had resisted the Argonian citizenry’s choice of stagnation—scientists whose aggressive lines of research had brought them into conflict with their society. They were determined to bring down the whole of what they considered an oppressive, effete civilization.
Other fleeting disruptions assailed the Sphere of Exile, creating more runaways, more crime—and a need for organization. A rough hierarchy had been hacked out among the escaped Deviants. As far as Emagrun knew, ultimate authority had been seized by a superscientist determined to destroy Argon through crimes against property and terror attacks on the citizens.
The main Deviant problem was their lack of numbers. Even with robots serving as the shock troops, there were not enough humans to direct them. Emagrun, for instance, had handled several robots during the attempt to kidnap John when the four castaways first arrived. His crew had been scrambled to intercept the alien arrivals. After his failure, Emagrun had been sent to Kemot to oversee the theft of ul-tramicrochips, only to get captured.
Peg withdrew her probes and passed on the information she’d received.
Triadon was deeply shocked. “There was no reference to time dilation or any interdimensional intersections in any of the scientific literature on the Exile Sphere,” he protested.
“Well, I guess they didn’t get any mail back,” Sturdley said. He turned to Peg. “You’re saying the bad guys knew we were coming?”
“My instruments detected your arrival as well,” Triadon said.
“But now we know they were looking for us—and that they want John.” Harry shook his head. “I think this head Bad Guy has his eye on new worlds to conquer.”
Looking down at Emagrun’s lax features, he told Peg, “Check out his recent memories. Maybe we can get a line on what these guys will be up to next.”
She reinvaded the captive’s memories, moving up toward the present. As she pulled away again, Peg gave Harry a dubious look. “I don’t know if this is a reference to that cannon theft we stopped, but Emagrun overheard his boss talking to some other Deviant leaders about a major coup being planned—a new weapon in the pipeline ...”
* * *
CHAPTER 9
Marty Burke glanced again from the resume in his hand to the young woman sitting on the other side of the desk. On paper, she looked pretty good—secretarial school, junior college, two years’ experience as an editorial and production assistant—she had everything needed to be a publisher’s good right arm.
But in the flesh ... well, that was the problem. There wasn’t enough flesh on this candidate. Her modest “executive style” suit jacket covered a chest that probably measured in at thirty-two inches. Burke decided he wouldn’t even waste time on a stenography test.
“I’ll keep your resume, Ms. Sandoni, but we have a number of other applicants, and our criteria are very stringent.”
Burke’s criteria certainly were. Besides being able to type, file, take dictation, deal with phone inquiries, pick up editorial slack, and, if necessary, give a hand on the production end, his assistant had to have a cute face and big boobs. Essentially what he wanted was someone as efficient and good-looking as (or better-looking than) Peg Faber, only more stacked, and graced with a considerably more ... accommodating ... nature. Just the thought of Peg and her karate tricks made a twinge of pain go through his left arm. So he was probably a little more curt than he meant to be as he sent Ms. Sandoni off.
He picked up the next resume, his eyes sourly roaming the office. Even though he’d been here for more than a month now, the place was still Sturdley’s. Burke felt that the long desk made him look even shorter than usual. He wanted a wide desk to keep people back, and new guest chairs—ones with shorter legs, so he could loom over visitors as he sat. Maybe he could set up some kind of dais structure so he’d have a good six inches on any seated guests.
The problem was, Burke was afraid to go on an office furniture spending spree. The board of directors wasn’t in his hip pocket, after all. And Sturdley hadn’t shelled out so much for the furnishings here. He’d inherited the teak-paneled office, its furniture ... and Peg Faber at the desk outside ... when the Fantasy Factory had taken over this floor from a defunct publishing company. Doubtless that had made Sturdley look like a good administrator.
So Burke was stuck in an out-of-scale office that made him look vaguely ridiculous—and made him feel like an interloper.
Still, there must be something he could do to make this his place, to bring in his own personality. Burke’s eye fell on one of the framed superhero portraits that dotted the wainscotted walls. It was an old Rip Jacoby pen-and-ink rendition of the Rambunctious Rodent, autographed both by Jacoby and Sturdley as cocreators. Next to that was what had to be a twenty-year-old sketch of Mr. Pain, drawn by Fabian Thibault. Why Sturdley would display a picture by a moth-eaten hack like Thibault instead of Burke’s new, modernized rendition of the character ...
That’s when it hit him. He could make this room his by displaying his artwork, his characters. He’d dump the current crop of pictures—well, maybe he’d save the Jacoby, that could be worth money, and the John Cameron sketch of Robert. Collectors would probably pay big bucks for that in a few years.
But the rest of the sketches would go, to be replaced by Burke originals. He knew there was a large-size image of Mr. Pain somewhere in his studio. He could do a companion piece of Echo, the hero’s lost love. There were some works-in-progress on the Glamazon. He had a decent-sized drawing of the Petulant Lump, and there was that group picture of the Latter-Day Breed. It would be nice to let people know what those characters looked like, especially since the book—proudly announced so long ago—still wasn’t completed.
Burke nodded. He might even let a few selected artists contribute a picture or two, as a mark of his favor...
But that could wait. First came th
e job of selecting, matting, and framing the artwork, which would become the first responsibility of his new executive assistant. Satisfied with himself, Burke prepared to read the next candidate’s resume.
Then the phone rang.
Of course, the gofer who was supposed to be manning the desk wasn’t there. Fuming, Burke snatched up the handset. “What?” he barked.
“It’s Gunnar.” The Fantasy Factory’s head editor—and Burke’s main rival—didn’t sound too rosy himself. “I just got a call from that guy Silikis’s people out in Hollywood. They’re arranging tenting grounds as accommodations for the Heroes, and want to know what we’re doing by way of getting the giants out there. This is the first I’ve even heard that we were supposed to be doing something.”
The detail had slipped Burke’s mind since he’d discussed it with Silikis weeks ago. Still, he had an answer handy. “I’m sure I delegated that problem to you, Bob. In any event, I know you’ll come up with the appropriate answer— and soon.”
He hung up, strode over to his door, and called the next applicant. “Wendy Wentworth, please.”
A compact little blonde got up, short but with curves in all the right places—and gazongas Burke could hardly believe.
He smiled. What was that line from the old movie? Oh, yeah: It’s good to be king.
Several offices away, Bob Gunnar sat glaring at his phone. The great Burke is too busy interviewing bimbos to make sure his precious movie deal works out. So the job gets dumped on me. Hop to it, Gunnar.
The editor drummed his fingers on the desk. The only transportation the Fantasy Factory had arranged for the giants was strictly local, tractor-trailers leased from a van line as Hero-mobiles. They had neither the fleet nor the time to drive the soon-to-be movie stars cross-country. How else could they go about this?
Gunnar found himself remembering a conversation he’d had with Elvio Vital, one of the company’s top artists. The prolific Vital drew the Fantasy Factory’s one humor book, a superhero parody called the Electrocutioner. Over drinks at a convention, he’d shared an interesting theory on work. “When you do a job,” he’d said, “there are three things to think about: getting it quick, getting it cheap, getting it good. Usually, though, you only get two out of three. If you get a job cheap, you might get it quick, but you won’t get it good. You might get a good job cheap, but you won’t get it quick. And no good, quick job comes cheap.”