by Stan Lee
The reason for the crowds was an attraction that hadn’t existed in Harry’s boyhood. Approximately 120 feet of Heroes stood outside the theater. Clad like his five colleagues in an immaculate white Hero uniform, Thomas shepherded his fellow giants while smiling and waving to the crowd.
The big stars of the production, Robert and Barbara, were out on the Coast with the human-sized stars for the Hollywood premiere. The lesser lights—Thomas, Ruth, Maurice, and Victor—were in subsidiary, though no less important, markets.
Of course, Thomas was used to crowds. He had his own comic book, The Terrific Thomas, and had made the rounds of comics conventions. In fact, Thomas’s exhibition of strength at the San Diego Comic Convention had been the setup for the assassination attempt on John Cameron—the start of John, Peg, and Harry’s odyssey through the Rift.
As their car pulled into the line of waiting limos, Sturdley stared up at the sandy-haired giant. The first time he’d seen Thomas, he’d been impressed by a muscular form straight out of a classic comic—“Murphy Anderson abdominal muscles” had been his initial thought. With Thomas’s handsomely rough-hewn features, that had been enough to start Sturdley thinking in terms of an addition to the Heroes titles.
Now Harry wished he’d paid more attention to the cold eyes, that incipient sneer on his lips. Oh, Thomas was smiling and waving, but Harry had a cold feeling that the giant could just as easily be slaughtering the adoring masses who barely came up to his knees.
Matavi repressed a sigh as she stared around the Diamond Exchange. Over the last two weeks, her existence with Emsisdin in New York, as she had finally learned the place was called, had settled into a certain routine.
Matavi would use her mental abilities to scout various locales where wealth was stored. She located the guards and security devices that might bar their path—after the debacle at Tiffany’s, she’d learned to invade minds for security information before entering. Some of the alarm devices she could handle psionically. Others she’d had to describe to Emsisdin, who had proven surprisingly adept at using primitive Earth technology to circumvent guardian systems in unexpected ways.
“Don’t look so surprised,” the cocky Argonian gangster had told her as he assembled circuitry out of crude-looking components. “As the Rationalists gathered power back home, they started many programs to uplift less advantaged sectors of society. I learned a bit about all sorts of useful trades—” his lips twisted in a sneer as he looked down at his busy fingers—“and some I thought not so useful. But even that course in restoring antique technology is coming in handy.”
Antique or not, Emsisdin’s little creations seemed an order of magnitude ahead of New York’s available alarm technology. Matavi suspected they could live better selling antisecurity devices to local criminals than stealing and fencing valuables. But Emsisdin wouldn’t hear of it. He even wired his contraptions to self-destruct after they had served their purpose.
The raid on the Diamond Exchange had been par for the course. Matavi had seized control of a guard’s mind to allow them entrance. She’d used another mind-controlled security officer to incapacitate the security control room. Then it had been a case of psionically pulling the guards toward her one by one to be darted. Six “rentacops,” as they identified themselves, had slumped blank-faced—and blank-minded—at her feet.
Meanwhile, Emsisdin deployed his high-tech arsenal to defeat wires, cameras, motion detectors, even beams of coherent light. He happily ranged the silent halls of the exchange, looting jewelry from anything that had a lock. From a glimpse at his mind, Matavi knew he was trying to show his usefulness in their partnership.
Emsisdin was painfully aware that Matavi had done the lion’s share since their arrival. She had created their identities as Finnish business travelers, seeking a nationality that matched their appearances and also provided an obscure, impenetrable language barrier. She had warped minds to arrange for everything from food and shelter to financial services. They had a bank and a checking account, an office where they kept their armor, and a pleasant sublet. Even the man who fenced their loot had been discovered and brainwashed by Matavi.
They had a command of English thanks to her mental thievery. Emsisdin had been rigid with anxiety when she implanted the necessary knowledge in his cerebral cortex, fearful that she would tamper with his mind. For a brief second Matavi had been tempted. But over the long term, controlled minds proved to be blunt weapons. She reminded herself of what happened with Melador back home on Argon. Besides, what was the purpose?
Purpose ... from the first, her only purpose in life had been to survive as a valuable commodity—the successful survivor of a gene-meddling program. Working telepaths had been relentlessly exploited. But Matavi had learned to exploit back, becoming a premier corporate intelligence operator. Then the Rationalist movement had begun, determined to banish certain genes—and Matavi’s abilities. Even after the fighting was over, she’d managed to survive several years, living underground. But in the end, she’d been caught and sent to the Sphere of Exile. Her millennium of incarceration had been another lesson in survival among snarling, vicious, sometimes insane personalities.
Then ... she’d perceived the shift in the roiling flux-stuff around them, the passage of the traveler John Cameron. Matavi had taken immediate advantage of the possibility of escape. As more escapees utilized the disturbances in the void, she’d become prominent in the Deviant underground, until she alone ran the rebels’ intelligence operation.
Matavi had emerged from this struggle with two imperatives—her personal survival and the perpetuation of the powers she’d developed.
As Emsisdin approached with a jingling bag of choice loot, she had to admit that their recent activities had laid a foundation for the first imperative. But the long-term question remained. What were they going to do on this strange new world?
Mere moments into the ride home, John Cameron knew he had made a mistake taking the subway. He’d wanted to calm down after the confrontation with Peg, wanted—his expression went sour—to get home normally.
Rush hour was long over, and John was the only one in the subway car wearing a suit. And even though he’d removed his tie, his affluent appearance seemed to imprint the word WITHDRAWALS on his forehead.
After dealing with three beggars in as many stations, John became aware of the scrutiny of a nasty piece of work peering at him from the other end of the car. The scrutinizer was big, but a lot of his bulk came from fat. He also had a sharpened screwdriver jammed in his back pocket. After taking stock of John up Broadway and across Fifty-ninth Street, the thug made his move as the train thundered through the tunnel between Manhattan and Queens. He’d already taken a seat beside John. When the train hit a rough spot on the rails and the lights flickered, the hood whipped out his screwdriver, aiming to place the sharpened tip at John’s throat.
But John was aware of the move even in the dark. He grabbed the shaft of the screwdriver, trying to deflect it. The body-warmed metal was greasy and slipped between his fingers.
A new fury exploded in John’s mind. Couldn’t he even handle a garden-variety mugger? Rage blazed in his eyes as he glared through the darkness. It ignited a dull red spark in the metal shaft of the sharpened screwdriver. Changes occurred in the metal as the ferocity of his emotion attacked the crystalline lattice of the tempered steel. The spark briefly brightened, and the tip of the screwdriver twisted away as the metal shaft bent as though it were made of warm taffy.
The lights resumed, and a thoroughly discomfited thug stared at the objet d’art his weapon had just become. He turned suddenly fearful eyes toward John, who abruptly rose and exited at Queensboro Plaza.
John found an empty stairwell, started down, and Rifted home to Astoria. He felt no triumph at scaring the hoodlum. Even the strange new wrinkle in his powers—could it be telekinesis?—barely interested him.
All John wanted to do was get out of the monkey suit he wore and into his armor.
Why? he aske
d himself. Was there that great a need tonight to kick ass and take names? Or was he just running from the mess he’d made of whatever delicate bond he might have shared with Peg?
It’s better this way, he tried to assure himself. Now she’s free to find some stud—I mean, some nice, everyday guy without weird powers.
John wadded up his designer outfit and tossed it in the corner. Although, he wondered, what would that potential new boyfriend make of Peg’s suit of armor in Harry Sturd-ley’s closet?
The traffic on Sixth Avenue had broken down to an almost complete standstill. But even in the back seat, Antony Carron could feel the power of the big V-8 engine throbbing through the floorboards of the car he had reclaimed after escaping the giantess.
Joey Santangelo sat hunched over the steering wheel as they crept through Rockefeller Center at a rate that could only be called agonizing. He barely looked at the searchlights, crowds, and hoopla in front of the huge theater on the right. “Are you sure this is okay?” he asked his boss. “I mean, if these guys can read minds ...”
“They’ve got hundreds—maybe a thousand minds around them,” Carron pointed out. “That’s a lot of reading to do.”
Privately, he wondered how the multitude surrounding the giants must feel to a telepath. Was it a dull roar impinging on the consciousness? Or something more like the chit-tering of insects?
In the final analysis, he didn’t care, as long as it kept the giants’ early-warning systems overloaded.
Even so, Carron didn’t take chances. He kept his mind off what he intended to do, taking refuge in Zen. Zen archery: The archer is the arrow. The arrow is in the target.
He kept his mind on pseudooriental mumbojumbo until the seeming clunker made its way past the knot of giants. The snarled traffic began breaking up. Carron glanced from the huge figures to the opening spaces ahead. “Windows, Joey.”
Santangelo stabbed a finger at the power window controls. The two rear windows smoothly slid out of the way.
Antony Carron brought the olive drab tube resting on his knees up to his shoulders. He squinted through the attached scope, searching for a target.
There—the brunette with the ample top.
The crosshairs centered on her head, then her chest, and finally, her knee.
Carron squeezed the trigger. A yard-long plume of flame gushed from the rear of the tube, and an antitank rocket arced from the front.
When Joey heard the blast of the propellant, his foot came down hard on the gas. With a squeal of tires, the rust-bucket took off like a bat out of hell.
* * *
CHAPTER 25
Penelope’s ample bosom rose and joggled entrancingly as she stood outlined in the glare of the premiere searchlights, waving to the crowd. With a figure outstanding even by Masterly standards, Penelope was used to turning heads. But then, the simultaneous adulation and lust of hundreds of minds was an experience she’d never encountered before. On her homeworld, her appearance usually generated fear among the Lessers who saw her—fear and a bit of strangulated desire. In this strange new world, however, the males were much more open in their appreciation.
Normally, Penelope would have become furious at being ogled at by mere Lessers. But here, the unabashedly hormonal response to her body, amplified by the multitude of minds, felt like basking in warm sunshine.
As Penelope smiled and waved to the crowd, Thomas nudged her, indicating a pair of Lessers exiting from a limousine. “Harry Sturdley,” he whispered, a sneer shading his tone. “And his red-headed slut.”
With her eyes on their enemies, Penelope never noticed the flash from the window of the passing car. Only the surprise and alarm she detected among the Lessers made Penelope turn her head.
By then, the antitank rocket had almost struck the telekinetic shields that supported her body. This was no mere baseball bat or bullet. A 9 mm slug weighs a little more than a quarter of an ounce. The warhead aimed at Penelope’s knee weighed more than five and a half pounds.
Penelope’s shields shredded under the impact. They absorbed some of the kinetic shock, slowing the warhead slightly, then failed. The metal tip of the rocket struck skin, then turned the kneecap and the delicate joint it protected into a red ruin. Penelope’s leg buckled, her eyes going wide with shock, terror, and pain.
The giantess tried to grab onto Thomas’s shoulder, but her hands were clumsy, fumbling, not quite in synch with her brain. Down she went, twisting to make a desperate grab for the lip of one of the searchlights. Overheated metal sizzled against palms no longer protected by psychic shielding. Penelope lost her hold and fell to the ground screaming, the agony of her burns and fractured leg broadcast to all telepaths in the vicinity.
Thomas, his fists clenched, gazed with such concentration at Sturdley and Peg that he didn’t realize anything untoward had happened until the blast of pain assailed his mind.
He turned in shock, able to offer only a stupid stare as Penelope’s hands groped feebly at his shoulders. Then she toppled, shrieking in anguish. Thomas tore his eyes away from the sight, shooting out mental probes, trying to find the perpetrators.
Almost instantly he pinpointed a combination of malice and triumph in a car screaming away. A momentary image came—Antony Carron. Recognizing another member of the enemies list, Thomas charged forward, but had hardly taken a step before he found himself blocked by a throng of curious Lessers.
“Back! Get out of my way!” Thomas roared. But the damnable fools refused to clear out, surging forward to gawk at the bleeding Penelope.
The giant had no patience. He had to get through. And if the Lessers wouldn’t move, he’d make them. When Thomas reached the tightly-packed mob, he lashed out with his right foot.
Cries of confusion abruptly turned to screams of pain and terror as Thomas waded into the crowd, lashing out right and left with his legs. Buskin-covered feet half as large as a normal human body smashed into onlookers with sickening thuds or the muffled crunch of breaking bone.
But a path began to open as people along Thomas’s course clawed at the bodies behind them to escape those relentless, crushing kicks. Still others fell to the ground in the panic-stricken scramble, only to be trampled by members of the crowd.
Thomas could move more quickly now, needing only the occasional kick to clear the way of crouched or dazed figures. He felt the psychic stir as Kevin, one of the better mindcasters among the giants, tried to reach out and dominate the driver of the car.
Kevin apparently tried to force the driver back to the theater. Unfortunately, his control wasn’t complete. The escaping car turned, swerved onto the far sidewalk, then proceeded south causing new mayhem.
Thomas attempted to cross the avenue, now forced to deal with standstill traffic. He was nearly incoherent with rage, screaming for the cars to give way. When they didn’t, he snatched up a slow-moving cab. Brakes shrieked as he raised the vehicle over his head.
From the crowd below came a sudden, sharp sense of deja vu. Thomas looked down at the swirling confusion at his feet to lock glances with Harry Sturdley. Of course. During the attack in San Diego, he’d been entertaining the Lessers by picking up cars.
Effort and rage made the veins pulse in Thomas’s neck. He could feel the pounding of his blood. Here was a chance to do away with one of Robert’s bitterest enemies on this world, ..
Sturdley seemed to recognize his danger at almost the exact same moment. The Lesser’s hand dove to an inside pocket of his suit. A second later it emerged, clutching a stubby metal rod. A pen? What did Sturdley expect to do with that?
But just as Thomas was about to heave the cab down, a beam of light streaked from the rod. It was pallid, barely noticeable in the extravagant blazes of the searchlight. But it sliced unimpeded through Thomas’s shields, his uniform, and into his flesh.
The sting of sudden pain upset Thomas’s grasp on the taxicab. It cartwheeled out of his hands to smash into other cars on the avenue, creating an instant roadblock.
Thomas ca
ught an odd odor, like scorched cloth and overcooked meat. He twisted his arm to see where the beam had hit it, feeling a sudden burning twinge. The immaculate white spandex of his uniform was now marred by a charred brown line across his left bicep. The fabric had split and curled away, revealing angry burned skin around a razor-straight trench seemingly seared through his flesh. There was no blood—the heat of the bolt had apparently cauterized the wound. It was merely a graze—the proverbial flesh wound.
But that beam could just as easily have continued to slice through flesh and bone until it had amputated his arm. The world around Thomas began to dissolve in a red haze. In the space of seconds, Lessers had dared to assault Masters twice. Still worse, they had succeeded in inflicting pain!
Thomas yelled orders, his voice bellowing across the crowd noise. “Kevin, get that car! Camilla, take care of Penelope. Everyone else—punish these vermin!”
His followers, already burning with fury and fear, didn’t need any more persuasion. In seconds, pandemonium quadrupled as four giants rampaged into the crowd.
Harry Sturdley felt his gorge rise as he saw a woman fly over the crowd, propelled by a particularly vicious kick. Her body was as limp as a rag doll’s, but her mouth was open, emitting a keening wail of pain that cut over the confused, frightened roar of close-packed humanity.
Harry gripped the weapon in his hand more tightly. The metal rod had been warmed by contact with his flesh, but it felt slippery in his sweat-dampened palm.
“So much for scaring off Thomas,” he muttered to Peg, who stood pressed against him in the crush of people. The sensation might have been pleasant if they hadn’t been in danger of getting stomped to death.