by Stan Lee
Creases of worry appeared on his face. “At least John will be here.”
“It sounds like there’s a lot more to this story,” Myra said with a sharp look at him. “But I’ll wait for all the juicy details. Regarding part one of your plan, we’ll have to talk about that. Obviously, until you figure out how to deal with the giants, you’re going to keep your return a secret. So I can stay and help for a while, at least.”
“Especially with part two,” Sturdley said. “I need a better idea of what’s going on at the Fantasy Factory, stuff I can’t get out of the Wall Street Journal.”
Myra nodded. “Well, let me tell you what I know,” she said. “Then we have to figure out how to get you in there to do your mind-reading act without anybody knowing it’s you.”
Bob Gunnar stood in his office door, watching the shabby figure seated on the guest chair at Peg Faber’s—he corrected himself—Wendy Wentworth’s desk. The busty blonde alternated between ignoring the elderly messenger and being actively nasty to him, as if he were a homeless derelict.
Actually, the man’s ill-fitting suit looked on the new side. His shaggy white hair needed a trim, and he had an odd, sort of patchy, beard. During the past week and a half he’d become a familiar sight in the executive hallways of the Fantasy Factory. Myra Sturdley had hired the guy to carry in files and memorabilia from her husband’s home office. He’d also carted away those personal items that Burke had dismissed as Harry’syM/jfc.
There was a load of stuff by Wendy’s desk now. Gunnar noticed the Thibault drawing of Mr. Pain topping a pile of odds and ends, a victim of Burke’s redecorating program. He wondered where some of the valuable items, like the Rip Jacoby Rodent sketch, had gone.
Wendy hadn’t yet bundled up the latest batch. She’d just put in a call to the mail room, and proceeded to type a letter on a shiny new computer, turning her back on the messenger.
Typical, Gunnar thought. And equally typical, the messenger just sat there, his eyes going unfocused as if he’d spent too much of his life waiting—or maybe he was merely waiting for death?
Gunnar pushed aside the morbid thought. Just because he was fighting for his life here at the Fantasy Factory didn’t mean that death and destruction haunted everybody.
He was surprised to notice that the messenger’s brown eyes had sharpened considerably and were now staring at him. “Excuse me, sir. Could I talk to you for a moment?” the old man said in a raspy, almost put-on kind of voice. Gunnar realized that he’d never heard the guy speak before.
Wendy gave her unwelcome guest a venomous look, opening her mouth to say something spiteful, no doubt. For reasons Gunnar wasn’t quite sure of, he forestalled her. “Sure, old-timer. Step in here.”
He ushered the older man into his office. Maybe it was that morbid feeling again. Or maybe it was just that the old guy had stirred a memory of one of comicdom’s darkest secrets. Before DC Comics had finally paid out a small share of the untold wealth the company had made on Superman, the creators of the character, Siegel and Schuster, had fallen on hard times indeed. Legend had it that Jerry Siegel had been forced to take a job as a messenger, and had found himself delivering packages to the company whose financial future he’d assured.
Gunnar smiled. Not that he expected this poor character to turn out to be a comics genius.
He glanced over at the old man, who reached into a voluminous bag and produced a bottle of liquid with a pungent, alcoholic tinge.
Great, Gunnar thought. I’ve invited a wino in to have a nip with me.
Instead of drinking, however, the messenger poured the liquid on his face—and his beard began to dissolve.
He pulled off the shaggy white wig, removed a pair of trick eyebrows, and Harry Sturdley stood grinning at his dumbfounded chief editor.
* * *
CHAPTER 14
Continued stresses distorted the lower-dimensional substrate around the nexus known as Earth, creating a rift within the Rift. As extrusions of the higher dimensions made themselves felt in the four-dimensional frame, what had previously seemed immutable “laws of nature” proved more and more capable of amendment...
In Flatlands, Oklahoma, Billy-Ray Woolsey flexed the fingers on his right hand. They looked a little swollen as he placed the quarter on his thumb. Constant use had left it so numb he couldn’t even feel the coin anymore.
He flipped, clumsily caught the quarter in midair, clapped it to the back of his hand, then held it out to the lens of the video camera Jesse-Bob Fargis held.
Heads yet again.
“How many does that make?” Billy Ray asked in a slightly hoarse voice.
“Counting that one ...” Jesse-Bob shifted his attention from the camcorder viewfinder to the scratchpad by his elbow as he made another tick-mark. “Well, I’ll be dipped! That’ll make two thousand heads since I got here.”
Not only had Jesse-Bob driven over to preside as official witness, he’d brought his camera to record every moment. For the better part of a videocassette running at super-long play, and excepting only a few bathroom breaks, Billy-Ray had sat by the window, flipping that damned quarter. Behind him, clouds had roiled and rain threatened. Before him sat his buddy Jesse-Bob, immortalizing every move.
“That’s got to be enough,” Billy-Ray said, resting his hand on his lap. “I can’t believe the Guinness people have somebody who’d gotten that many heads in a row.”
“Can’t rightly believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Jesse-Bob assured him. “What are the chances against that kind of run? The whachacallum—the probabilities? You must be the luckiest man who ever lived.”
For a long, pregnant moment, they stared at each other. Then Billy-Ray jumped to his feet, fumbling for the keys to his pickup. “Damn, we must’ve been sniffing too much powdered fertilizer or somethin‘! I can’t believe we spent all this time taking pictures of me flippin’ a coin when we could have been halfway to Vegas!”
Jesse-Bob was slightly delayed stowing away his camcorder. He was behind Billy-Ray, closing the door of the house while his buddy had nearly reached his battered blue pickup truck.
Then Billy-Ray and the whole farmyard disappeared in a flaring blast of lightning. Blue afterimages danced in Jesse-Bob’s retinas; the slam of the door behind him was lost in the most earth-shaking peal of thunder he’d ever experienced.
The bag containing the camcorder slipped from Jesse-Bob’s nerveless fingers. He just sort of leaned against a wall, completely unstrung, as his vision slowly came back. A pelting rain was now thundering across the dusty yard, the drops actually seeming to dig tiny holes in the ground. The pickup was miraculously untouched as the rain drummed on its metal hood.
But Billy-Ray lay unmoving where Jesse-Bob had last seen him.
“Hey, Billy?” Jesse-Bob called tentatively, getting no answer.
He’d just reached the porch steps when a second lightning flash blew him back.
Jesse-Bob shook his head and aimed his blinking gaze to his friend’s recumbent and now steaming figure.
“Hit twice by lightning, and in the same spot,” Jesse-Bob muttered. “Now what would the probabilities be for something like that?”
He glanced back at the camera case still lying by the door. “Coulda sold that to one of them video shows for a good figure if I’d been filming.”
Jesse-Bob sighed. “Some people got all the luck.”
The hangar of the Citadel of Silence rang with chaos and mayhem as swirling bodies flew and fought in three dimensions. There was no battleline, not with the attackers coming from two directions at once. The escapees from the Sphere of Exile attacked the guards circling Harry’s Rifting point, engaging in power-armored hand-to-hand combat. Part of the circle disappeared as defenders were caught from behind by the weapons of the Deviant storming party. Those S-Force members who were armed and armored joined the fight. The others ran, some to find weapons, others simply to escape.
For Peg, there was no battle, merely a successio
n of one-on-one dogfight duels.
She dispatched another foe, killing the inertia of her dive from the ceiling as she glanced round for the next opponent. The area around her was momentarily bare of enemies. She might have won her single combats, but the fight as a whole was going heavily against the S-Force. She caught a glimpse of Mike holding a Deviant over his head and hurling the hapless criminal into three more of the attackers.
Off to one side, a helmetless Triadon had rallied a knot of fighters, setting up the beginning of a defense to keep the raiders from getting farther into the fortress. But for the most part, the S-Force was fighting badly, caught by surprise and in disarray ... lacking the direction of its founder and leader.
How long before Harry is safely on Earth and John can bring his attention back here? Peg wondered desperately as three attackers ahead engaged a lone S-Forcer. She recognized the heraldic pattern on the defender’s armor—it was Moradel, a female technician. Green stun-blasts flared as Moradel nailed one of the Deviants. The other two, however, fired bright red blast-bolts, cutting Moradel down.
Gritting her teeth, Peg extended both arms in the tridi-girector gesture. Her armor still carried blasters, and for once, she had no qualms about using them. The two Deviants standing over Moradel went down—permanently, Peg hoped—as she looked for other targets.
A ripple seemed to pass through the very air of the hangar, and Peg felt the hairs at the back of her neck raise. Gooseflesh crawled along her arm as she aimed the tridi-girector at a new attacker—a Deviant who disappeared in midair even as she fired.
The wavery feeling settled into a pattern Peg could identify—the familiar queasy sensation of the Rift in use. It hit her again, like a brief gastric attack, and then she understood.
John was back in the fight, using his unique powers. He must be popping the escapees back to the Sphere of Exile, she thought, doing it so quickly nobody can get over from the other side. The dizzy, sickening sensation struck again, making her arm waver as she fired at another enemy. The blast-bolt missed, tearing a hole in the side of a parked flying platform.
It was a lot easier dealing with the twinge of Rift transition as a single gut-wrenching swoop, rather than in fits and starts of nausea, Peg thought. She tried to reorient herself, seeking John’s position in the turmoil.
He was pretty much where he’d been when it all started, except that now he wore a helmet. And there were five Deviant escapees crawling over John’s armor, trying to bring him down. Even as Peg leapt forward, bringing up her arms to aim, the attackers faded, Rifted away in an even worse flaring of nausea.
“Jeeze,” Peg muttered, “this is even worse than that imitation morning sickness.”
The next knot of attackers coming at John was armed, members of the Deviant assault team that had blown away the hangar doors. As they brought their weapons to bear, Peg launched herself in flight, bringing both arms up to aim her blasters. The Deviants seemed to freeze, then were cut down in a crossfire of blast-bolts from Peg and Mike.
“Why’d they just stand there?” Peg asked.
Then the answer hit her. They’d frozen because John had used a mental attack instead of a physical one. She and Mike had cut down a group of helpless enemies, blasting them when simple stun-bolts would have served.
“You might warn us when you’re going to do that,” Peg snapped into her radio. She would have said more, except for the figure rising from behind the mound of moribund, spark-emitting attackers they’d just blown away.
His armor seemed considerably more lightweight than the Argonian standard, and in his right hand he carried what looked like a stubby silver bazooka—another prototype force cannon.
Mike moved to cover John, bringing up his arms, trying to get a clear shot, but the Deviant moved with inhuman speed. Peg had only an instant’s time to debate using her guns or her mental powers.
Then came a white glare of light, which briefly diminished, then reached blinding intensity.
Peg felt as if someone had suddenly spray-painted her shoulder with acid. She was flung to the side, and when she tried to extend an arm to stop her fall, nothing happened. As the defunct suit hit the concrete floor, she enjoyed all the sensations of being sealed in an oil drum and crashed into an ironmonger’s shop. The bone-rattling noise finally ended, to be replaced by the faint, staticky sound of sparks crackling. The outside audio pickups must be dead, she thought. The stink of burning insulation was strong in her nose as she attempted to hit her helmet’s emergency release switch with her jaw.
Instead, she sank down into darkness.
John stood in horror, staring at the tumbled forms he’d psychically bound while his friends attacked them. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be at all. They were supposed to stun them—that was Sturdley’s code ...
Of course, a small voice in the back of his head reminded him, the other side had no such compunctions.
Mike and Peg faced him, a brief tableau in the shrieking chaos around them.
“You might warn us when you’re going to do that!” Peg sounded almost on the verge of tears. She’d just helped kill five helpless prisoners.
Then the new attacker popped up from behind the pile of corpses, wielding the force cannon. John found himself staring down the muzzle of the damned thing, into some sort of faceted, jewel-like lens.
It’s going to kill me, he thought.
His armored arms with their built-in blast projectors were down by his sides. His brain seemed oddly numb,, guilt making him unable to focus his mental powers.
The Deviant fired.
At the same instant, Mike jumped.
It was an amazing demonstration of his grasp of things Argonian. Mike used the gizmoidal drive to turn himself into a human missile. He lofted right over the pile of casualties sheltering the gunner, landing right on the force cannon, exoskeletal arms raised to pound on the mechanism.
In that moment, however, the weapon’s beam cut him in two. The glare of white energy flickered for an instant as Mike’s body blocked the muzzle. Then it was back at full intensity, even as the ruins of Mike’s armor followed a dead man’s final command, smashing down with exoskeleton-enhanced power on the gleaming cylindrical weapon.
Mike’s suicidal attack saved John’s life as the weapon wobbled slightly. The beam moving out of line with John’s body—to catch Peg in the side.
“Nooooo!” John yelled as Peg tumbled back past him, her shattered armor sending out a pyrotechnic distress signal of sparks.
Mike’s pounding must have done something to the force cannon, because the beam cut off, seeming to throw the hangar into sudden darkness. Then all the antagonists, Deviants and S-Forcers alike, screamed in distress and clutched at heads that now exploded from a wash of rage.
Lambent blue blast-bolts sent a pile of dead bodies erupting in gouts of blood and machinery. But moving with preternatural quickness, the mysterious cannoneer dodged back.
John strode among the reeling combatants like a god of war, striking down Deviant after Deviant. It was horribly easy, dispatching nerveless foes. But none of them carried the stubby silver tube of the force cannon. None of them was the enemy he really wanted.
The fighters on both sides began to recover their equilibrium, to separate themselves from the roaring tempest of John’s emotions that had overwhelmed their psyches. And as they did so, they realized the tide of the struggle had abruptly turned. Too many Deviants had gone down in the last few seconds. The survivors didn’t press their attack.
They merely retreated, running, flying—in some cases, crawling—for the opening they’d blasted through the hangar doors. And as John’s berserker mood cooled, the other members of the S-Force plunged forward in full hunt.
John let them go. He didn’t expect the enemy to attempt a stand. His brush with their minds told him they were too stunned, too terrified by his attack, to do anything but flee.
Even as he turned to scan the hangar, unarmored figures, some bearing weapons, bega
n to examine the casualties. Harry might scoff at them as sheep, but there was a basic decency to the Argonians, a decency that would compel them to bring all the wounded, S-Force and Deviant alike, to the automeds.
Unlike us, John thought, or the Deviants who can kill at will.
He passed among the still victims of the fray. In some places, S-Forcers and Deviants lay side by side. In others, the dead and wounded had tumbled into stacks like drifted snowflakes or impromptu war memorials.
John took to the air, flying for the center of the huge room. Yes. There was the desecrated pile of dead, the grotesque ruin of Mike’s torso on the top, leaking blood like some sort of obscene syrup atop a mounded dessert.
John’s stomach threatened to rebel, hot bile burning the back of his throat. He flew past, searching for a smaller figure whose armor was decorated with a whimsical flying eye.
Sparks still flickered from the ruined circuitry of Peg’s suit. But that little illusory movement was the only sign of life.
“Peg!” John cried into his radio.
No answer.
But even as he knelt beside her, he could see that the heavy pauldron on her right shoulder—where the radio transceiver was located—had been gouged and melted.
Almost afraid of what he’d find, John extended a probe into Peg’s mind.
A breath he hadn’t known he was holding gushed forth in an echoing rush within his helmet when he found she was merely unconscious.
He gathered her up in his arms and went in search of the nearest automed.
The wounded were all being sent to the infirmary, which was set higher up in the butte that housed the Citadel of Silence. But John remembered the healing machine in Triadon’s biology lab, where they’d gotten their post-arrival checkup.
He burst into the empty room, the door automatically closing behind him. For a second, John just stood, trying to find a place to set Peg down. He rejected the lab tables with a shudder.