by Stan Lee
“Robert,” the blond giant said when he picked up the call. “You have a message from that Burke fellow. He says—”
“I’m aware of the message,” Robert cut off his subordinate. No sense broadcasting any more information than necessary. “We must be glad for the—unexpected return, and can only hope there will be more.”
Would Victor understand his elliptical reference?
“You mean Jo—”
Again, Robert cut him off. Definitely, there should be no names on the air. “Yes, the others. As you know, I’ve always been concerned about them.” He carefully accented the word concerned.
The contingency plans they’d made would now become operational. “Of course,” Victor replied. “We’ll be—ah, waiting for news—very eagerly.”
Victor understood at last. The Masters of Heroes’ Manor would throw a psychic dragnet over as much of New York as their powers could cover.
“Let me know if you hear anything,” Robert pressed.
“Oh, immediately.”
Robert cut the connection. He hoped the aircrew wouldn’t be too upset at the immediate turnaround when they arrived in Los Angeles. He’d have to send a dependable lieutenant to coordinate the search for the Rift manipulator. The best choice for that job was undoubtedly Thomas. It would be necessary to emphasize that the hunt be conducted discreetly.
Thomas was only to find John Cameron.
Robert would deal with him.
* * *
CHAPTER 19
One by one, the general store cowboys sifted through the collection of pictures Leslie Ann Nasotrudere showed them. Each photo showed the portrait of a strong-featured, handsome man. Five were pictures of New York models. The sixth was a shot of Robert.
“That’s him,” Anse Chandler said, tapping Robert’s photograph.
“Which?” Woodie Ledbetter glanced over, only to have Leslie Ann step in the way. “Look at your own pile,” she ordered. “Is the picture of the giant you saw in there?”
One by one, Anse, Woodie, Ken, and Elmo all identified Robert. They stared a little dazzled at the INC. cameras focusing on them. Her back to the lenses, Leslie Ann had a tight smile on her face. When the Idaho local affiliate’s story came into the International News Combine’s offices this morning, the staffers had chuckled and dismissed it.
All but Leslie Ann, when she realized the location of the reported giant sighting—Elk Pass—was on the bill of lading from Harvey’s Survival World. She’d gone up the chain of command with this tidbit, and been rewarded with a camera crew and tickets to Idaho.
As she questioned the quartet gathered around the general store’s potbelly stove, she realized that they had slipped from the first to the second stage of news awareness. The first stage, which might be called voluble hype, was the preferred condition for interviewees. They conveyed excitement about whatever experience they’d had, talked about it a lot and at detail, and were generally emotional. The mother whose child has just been run over, the man who’s just escaped from a train wreck, these were generally excellent news subjects. On the tape from the affiliate, the four men had been fresh from the event, their adrenalin pumping.
In the time it had taken Leslie Ann and her crew to get to Idaho, stage two had set in. The four had gotten a chance to think. The two more intelligent ones, Anse and Ken, had begun to wonder if they were making asses of themselves with this story. Elmo, of course, had an emotional investment. He’d been the one to discover the giant in the first place, and the others were his backup. Woodie, unfortunately, was just a boob.
The essence of the story, as Anse shamefacedly admitted, was that they’d gone trespassing on posted land, been loomed over by a giant, and run like hell. Not exactly nightly news material. The giant didn’t do anything. If he’d eaten one of them, she’d have had a lead story.
The news here, however, was not that these yokels had met a giant, but that the giant had been out here at all.
What did the Heroes want in the Idaho mountains—melting pot for America’s most bizarre extremes, home of sur-vivalists, ultra-Aryans, and unreconstructed hippies? Why had they bought a dilapidated old ranch in the boonies? What were they building out there? And why were they stocking it with enough supplies to weather the end of the world?
No, this story was only a wedge for a larger investigation. She’d get them on tape, although they declined to show her the giant footprint they’d found. She’d take the cameras to the construction site Elmo had mentioned. With luck, there might be prints out there as well—maybe workmen who’d seen the giant.
The hunters’ story would only be a light-hearted opening gun, because the answers Leslie Ann really wanted had to come from the giants—specifically, Robert. Her only chance to get that interview depended on how much public interest—how much pressure—she could generate.
The California sun had just set as the giants watched the evening news. Turning from the final story of the evening, presented so amusingly by that blond newswoman who’d done a series of broadcasts attacking Sturdley, Barbara turned to Robert with a laugh. “Did you really run those Lessers off that land?” she asked. “And the buildings they showed—have you really decided we need houses our own size? And why construct them in—what was the name of that place? Idaho? It seems very far from New York.”
Robert glared at the large-screen TV as if he could expunge the story—or at least change the channel—by mental effort alone.
Gods below! he swore bitterly to himself. And after I thought I’d handled the situation so well! This female Lesser, whom he knew was sharing Marty Burke’s bed, had managed to focus on the giants all the attention Robert had wanted to avoid.
Robert glanced hard-eyed at Barbara’s merry face. Only she, Maurice, and Ruth were seated around the television. Members of the inner circle. It was an acceptable risk to tell them.
“Its distance from New York, or any other major population centers, was the prime reason I settled on Idaho. You all know what I was doing in Washington—Binding the Lessers’ leaders to cause a war of great destruction among them. That land in Idaho is to be the fortress where we will ride out the coming cataclysm in safety.”
The others, not realizing how far along his plans had developed, merely stared in nervous silence.
“Our problem now is how to deal with the attention this will bring to our new domain.” He frowned in thought. “When we finish the movie, Barbara and I will go there in a very public manner. Perhaps Thomas and Ruth, as well.”
Ruth, he noticed, didn’t look exactly overjoyed at this pronouncement.
“We’ll tell the newsgatherers that we need to breathe the country air, that this complex has been built as a retreat for our kind. We’ll do simple, healthy things for the benefit of their cameras. And soon enough, I expect, they’ll get bored.”
Unfortunately, he suspected, Leslie Ann Nasotrudere would not get bored. From a reference she’d made during her narration, he suspected she’d discovered something about the food being stockpiled in Idaho.
He sighed. Back home, it would be so easy. If a Lesser, male or female, discovered anything damaging about a Master, such a vexatious person would simply disappear. He couldn’t do that in this world. Especially since this Nasotrudere woman was sleeping with his main ally at the Fantasy Factory.
Could he use Burke to muzzle his troublesome lover? More likely, that would break them up ... not such a bad idea—it would limit one road of access to his people’s secrets. On the other hand, Burke could be an invaluable source, revealing areas where Nasotrudere was digging.
Robert frowned in thought. His counter move could embody several strategies at once, to be developed as circumstances warranted. He’d ask Burke why his lover was distracting public attention away from the upcoming movie. At the same time, he could implant some instructions, some suspicions, into Burke’s mind ...
On the planet Argon, John and Peg lay entwined between the perfumed sheets of her bed. She held him tightly, his fa
ce in the cleft of her breasts as she kissed the crown of his head.
“Your muscles are all tense,” she whispered, stroking his neck, his shoulders, his back. “And even when we were making love, you seemed distant.” Her gray eyes were troubled as she held him to her.
Maybe she was being greedy. Perhaps that fusion of souls they’d achieved in their first rush of passion wasn’t possible all the time.
Her lips quirked in a self-mocking smile. She’d always laughed at the idea that a single stud’s lovemaking could, as the saying went, “ruin a girl for other men.”
Now, though, she feared that such a thing had happened to her, with the gentle, unstudly—but very male—John Cameron. Their lovemaking had been electric, a passion reinforced by their celibacy as they’d both fought night and day against the Deviants’ campaign of terror, which had slackened significantly after the failed attempt to kidnap her.
Now Peg could feel something dark in John’s mind that he wasn’t sharing. Something that hadn’t been there the first time they’d come together. Something had happened while she’d been unconscious at that blasted farm, and he wouldn’t tell her what it was.
“John,” she murmured, slipping down so they were face to face.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s just—it sounds silly. But I feel everything I do—we do—is being spied on.”
“Ach, ze paranoia,” she said in her best shrink voice.
But he didn’t smile.
She ran a tentative finger along the barely visible scar that now extended down John’s left cheek. The automeds had miraculously healed the torn flesh, but John had refused to devote the time that perfect plastic surgery would have taken.
Frankly, Peg would have preferred his face without the scar. Since he’d gotten it, well, his whole visage had changed. In all the time she’d known John, she’d thought of him as having a cute, but curiously unformed face—as if he still had to grow into it.
Peg didn’t know if it was because of the physical scar or because of some mental one, but John’s face now had a hard, set look. Where he’d always looked too young before, now he seemed older than his years.
They hadn’t told anyone except Triadon that Melador had been a traitor. She’d gone along with John’s rationale about Argon needing heroes. But she’d also participated with John in screening all the remaining S-Forcers for any signs of deep conditioning.
“It’s not just Melador,” John said, shifting back. ‘There’s something else, something I can’t put my finger on.“
“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything around here you couldn’t put a finger on,” Peg joked.
But the moment was past. He pulled away even as she tried to hold him.
“Stay with me?” she asked in a low voice.
“I’m not good company.” He rose from the bed, slipped on a light robe, and went to the door. “See you in the morning,” he whispered. Then he was gone.
Okay, love is not exactly rational, Peg told herself, blinking back tears. Which seems pretty well to sum up my relationship with the mysterious Mr. Cameron.
Jackass, John reproved himself as he moved down the corridor to his own room. You wanted Peg so badly, your whole body ached. And now you’re screwing it up because some tickle in the back of your mind says somebody’s watching over your shoulder—some voyeur.
John opened his door, stepping into a small sitting room. The staff accommodations at the Citadel of Silence rivaled those of a four-star Earth hotel. John dropped into a hugely comfortable overstuffed chair, unwilling to face an empty bed. What was it about this hypothetical voyeur that bothered him?
Was it the psychic blonde he’d tangled with at Peg’s kidnapping? What had Peg called her—Matavi? John shook his head. If she were spying on them, he was sure he could detect it and trace any probes to their source. Besides, why would a gorgeous blonde need to get her jollies watching a couple of kids make it?
No, he’d fine-tuned his shields and probed till his brain hurt, but John had not been able to find his hypothetical watcher anywhere on Argon.
As he closed his eyes, the phrase reverberated in his brain. So where were there watchers who weren’t on Argon? Something was definitely tickling his brain. Finally, he focused on the memory, from a briefing given by Peg after she’d questioned a prisoner. It had something to do with the Sphere of Exile.
Then it came. The homesick Deviants had gone to the outermost edges of the Sphere of Exile to catch ghostly glimpses of Argon ... and die. An inchoate jumble of facts in John’s mind began clicking together. Psychic powers could pierce the interdimensional flux—John had already proven that. The bad guys had at least one psychic—Matavi. When Harry had been returned home, the attack had been two-pronged, coming from the Argonian Deviants and those in the Sphere of Exile. Coordinated. The only way to do that was if there were communication between the two sets of Deviants.
They were being spied on—from the Sphere of Exile! That’s why John hadn’t been able to detect anyone. He’d been looking in the wrong places!
Now, however ...
John relaxed in the chair, eyes closed, reaching out with his mind on a specific wavelength. He felt a slight dizziness, the precursor to the vertigo that announced an impending Rift transit.
And then he was in contact with the Deviant spy.
Although his eyes were closed, John was aware of a figure drifting in midair. The watcher was bored now, although John could still catch twinges of the avidity with which he’d spied on them in Peg’s room.
Well, you won’t be bored for long, John thought. Using his Rift powers and telekinesis together, John hauled the Deviant eavesdropper against the dimensional barrier that made up the Sphere of Exile—not through, but into the soap-bubble of immaterial force. It was extremely painful—the spy twitched like a gaffed fish.
And into that sudden, overwhelming pain John ruthlessly thrust his own tentacles of thought, seizing control of the invisible voyeur’s mind.
The Deviants aren’t the only ones who can condition a subject, John thought.
So divorced from the physical world was he with this mental struggle, he never noticed the door to his room quietly opening. Peg had felt the Rift-twinge as well, and came to see if there was trouble.
What she found instead was John sitting motionless in a chair. And in the air above him, outlined in a ghastly pale light, writhed an immaterial human form.
Every body the S-Force could muster was now in the air, surrounding the semi-ruinous building set into the saw-toothed mountain slope.
“You’re sure of the information you got from this spy?” Triadon asked for about the thousandth time that night. John communicated with him mentally—the storming party was maintaining strict radio silence.
It’s the old laboratory of the ultimate Deviant leader—a guy named Scaladon, John responded. After the spy reported the information I’d implanted, the council of Deviant leaders will definitely be meeting.
But how—Triadon began.
John cut him off. He needed all his psionic powers to fuddle the Deviants’ electronic detectors, as well as the exiled watchers. Throughout this night, while scrambling the assault force and making other, final arrangements, he’d spent his time probing for and neutralizing invisible lookouts. He had a flicker from the ruined complex below them—a fleeting impression of inhabitants, but he hadn’t probed. That might warn Matavi.
The strike force was now deployed, and John and Peg gave the signal for attack by blowing in a newly-restored plast-alloy door with their blasters.
John had gotten the layout of the place from the spy, a servant of Scaladon’s in the Age of Strife. In moments, the raiders crushed through the outer defenses and were storming the main conference chamber. The room was packed— this time the S-Force had moved too fast for the leaders to escape.
Seated round a table was the brain trust of the criminal conspiracy aimed at bringing down Argonian society. John had known they’d be there, after
what he’d planted in the spy’s brain. Scaladon and the others would have considered it a prime threat—or opportunity.
According to the memories John had implanted, the spy had eavesdropped on a top S-Force meeting, in which John had proposed recruiting reinforcements from Earth, fighting men still contaminated with the evil gene.
That would put the Deviants up against professional adversaries. Of course they might also be able to arrange another mass jailbreak and attack, the way they’d crashed Harry’s farewell party.
Whatever the course of action they’d choose, the leaders would have to discuss this development. John had suckered them all into the same place at one time.
The group was surprisingly formal as John, Peg, and a squad of enforcers burst through the chamber door. Many of the Deviant leaders weren’t wearing armor.
Peg gasped as she looked toward the head of the table. Two men sat there, frozen to immobility by the stunning raid. One was short and skinny, dressed in a brocade robe. Spiky red hair burst in wild profusion over a metal face mask. He held an old-fashioned globular Argonian control device.
The man beside him would have been well built if he’d had skin. But he didn’t. His flesh was an amorphous, misty outline, a sort of violet haze against which the whiteness of his bones stood out shockingly.
Peg glanced at John, her face numb. “Don’t these guys look sorta familiar to you?” she hissed.
John looked on Megladon and Scaladon, the masterminds of the Deviant conspiracy, and his brain clicked to another frame of reference.
They did indeed look awfully damned familiar. With a couple of details changed, these guys were perfect twins for a pair of fictional Fantasy Factory villains—Meglomanik and Skeletone.
Peg felt as if the floor had dropped from beneath her feet—almost as if she’d fallen into the Rift. But the void here was the empty feeling of ultimate improbability. Their bitterest enemies on the planet Argon were actually comic book characters? Her willing suspension of disbelief finally crashed and burned.