by Stan Lee
“Great coverage,” he managed to say. “But are you sure this is the way to get it? Out here in the open? Maybe you should go for a bird’s-eye view—up in one of the office buildings—”
He pointed to the glass-and-concrete towers surrounding the scene of carnage. From the corner of his eye, he detected Thomas heading for them.
“We’d have to go off the air to get up there,” Leslie Ann said flatly. “And no way are we going off the air.”
She flicked on her mike, resumed her plastic face, and stepped back into the camera frame with new commentary. Burke wondered how the cameraman felt, watching Thomas grow larger and larger through his viewfinder. Maybe the guy’s job depended on doing what Leslie Ann said. Burke’s job didn’t.
Marty stepped forward, pointing desperately over Leslie Ann’s shoulder. She glanced at Thomas, but continued speaking. As Burke came closer, threatening to come on-frame, Leslie Ann gestured for the cameraman to pull in for a tight shot on her face. Then, still talking, she used her free hand to fend Marty off while keeping most of her attention on the camera.
Burke pulled away, then stepped behind Leslie Ann, heading into Thomas’s path. Maybe she’d see what he was doing and wake up to her personal danger. Maybe Thomas would recognize him, and Burke could talk him out of this attack. That would make Marty Burke a household name.
Thomas loomed over Burke, not a trace of recognition in his face.
Or maybe, Burke thought, I’m about to get squashed like a bug...
John Cameron flew over a cordon of police to find the area around the movie theater pretty much empty of activity. Two giants were down, two more knelt over the stricken titans, tending them. In the distance, another giant seemed to be involved in waving his arms over his head. John ignored him, at least for the moment. The only giant engaged in anything like a hostile act was Thomas. He was advancing on a lone camera crew.
As John came closer, he saw a figure detach itself from the crew and move to intercept the giant, waving its arms. It was either the bravest or most stupid thing John had ever seen. Then he recognized Marty Burke, which seerned to answer that question.
Two more figures came dashing onto the scene—Harry Sturdley and Peg Faber. They began arguing with the news crew. From INC, John noticed. Could that be Leslie Ann Nasotrudere down there?
John focused his attention from the byplay to the main action. Thomas wasn’t going to stop. He was raising his foot, apparently determined to stomp Burke flat, when John revved his drive unit and aimed himself straight for the giant’s jaw. At the last moment, John cut the drive and flipped end for end, arrowing in on momentum alone.
His impact smashed back Thomas’s telekinetic shields until John’s armored boots impacted against the point of the giant’s chin. The effect was as if Thomas had been slugged with a particularly robust punch.
The giant, caught offbalance, staggered back, nearly falling to the pavement. John ricocheted off Thomas’s jaw-line, cutting in his gizmoidal drive to hang in midair at his adversary’s eye level. Down below, Marty Burke darted away, heading back to the INC camera crew.
Thomas shook his head like a prize fighter trying to come back from a good shot. He glared around, trying to spot what had hit him. John waved until Thomas caught the motion. His usually florid face went red with rage, and he lunged forward, aiming a roundhouse swing.
John boosted gizmo and floated above the punch, dodging right and then left to avoid subsequent empty blows. Poor Thomas, John thought. He looks like his friend a couple of blocks away.
Flying beneath the giant’s fist, John looped around to strike with both feet just at the solar plexus.
Thomas folded, stumbling back.
How does it feel, bully? John sent mentally. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of pain instead of dishing it out?
The giant tottered over to the microwave mast rising from one of the network vans. The transmission tower rose nearly as tall as Thomas. His face was no longer red. It was pale and pinched.
Thomas seized hold of the mast at its base and yanked it free. Holding the metal pole in both hands like a quarter-staff, he jabbed at John. With a banking motion, John sent his armor swooping under the thrust.
But Thomas wasn’t through. He twirled the mast in a wide loop, then chopped downward as if he were swinging an ax handle.
Thomas had a good eye. The metal spar connected, jolting John out of the air.
John’s plast-alloy armor withstood the blow, but he had the air knocked out of him as he crashed into the ground with bruising force. Thrusting up with his arms, John twisted on the pavement to look up at Thomas. The giant was raising the microwave mast for another shot. His face was florid again, his lips pulling away from his teeth in a rictus of anticipation.
“Robert will be glad to hear that I disposed of you, Lesser scum.”
John tried to activate his gizmoidal drive, but all he got was sparks and a stench of burning insulation. He had no escape—physically. John brought up his hands to blast at Thomas, but the giant was already swinging.
So it all ends with me being pounded into the ground, John thought, while I fry Thomas.
The mast slashed down, suddenly intersecting with a glaring burst of white radiance. Solid metal flared and disintegrated, leaving Thomas with only a small stub of his weapon. The rest of the metal mast flew off to land with a clatter. Thomas faltered to a stop, staring in disbelief at his amputated staff. That hesitation saved Thomas’s life, as John’s blast-bolts crashed past his ears. The giant took off toward his wounded friends.
John went to fire again, but his aim went astray as the realization crashed through his brain. The beam that destroyed Thomas’s weapon could only have come from an Argonian force cannon. And that only existed on the Planet Argon.
Perhaps surprise made John broadcast his thoughts, because they were answered by a flirtatious mental projection: Don’t complain about it, handsome. We saved your life, didn’t we?
John pinpointed the sender, whirling to find two figures floating overhead. Both wore Argonian armor, both were familiar. The thug with the force cannon had once blown him out of the sky on another world. The blonde in the revealing armor suit had tried to bend his mind. Both had tried to kidnap Peg and use her as a hostage.
As recognition came, John’s hands seemed to rise of their own volition, forming the tridigirector. Blast-bolts flew upward, but the pair of Deviants were already swooping off.
The blond psychic sent him a parting message. Maybe some other time.
John was too busy shooting to pay much attention—not to the blonde, not even to Peg when she began sending frantic mental messages. Finally a psionic roar from Harry Sturdley got his attention.
KID! Sturdley broadcast. You’d better get out of here, unless you want to be the interview-du-jour with that Na-sotrudere broad.
John turned to see Leslie Ann determinedly dragging her cameraman forward to get footage of the new phenomenon on Sixth Avenue. Through his external audio receptors, John could hear the newswoman yelling all the typical questions—who was he, where did he come from, why had he and his armored associates stopped the giants, why had he shot at the other two armored people, could he please open his visor and give an interview.
For a brief, crazy second, John considered acceding to the last request. It would be interesting to see how Leslie Ann would react to a complete surprise.
On the other hand, he feared that Harry’s response might be a coronary.
Instead, John resorted to the best traditions of his chosen genre. He executed an airy salute with his right hand, raised it straight over his head in a fist, cocked his left leg, and engaged his gizmoidal drive to fly out of there.
All he got was the smell of burning wires.
Damnation! He’d forgotten that the drive had been knocked out of commission. The silence around him grew longer. John realized he couldn’t just walk away now.
There was only one way out.
Focusi
ng all his mental energies, John went into psychokinetic mode.
His takeoff was a little wobbly, but he managed to gain speed and height. It wasn’t as though he had to go far. All he needed to do was get something between himself and that damned camera.
John cleared the roof of the building that housed the movie theater. With his last bit of strength, he boosted himself toward Fifth Avenue.
At least he was out of frame by the time he thumped in-gloriously to the rooftop.
Groaning from a new set of bruises, John quickly pushed himself to his feet and Rifted out of there.
* * *
CHAPTER 27
Nature abhors a vacuum. And as time went on, the once nearperfect emptiness of the Rift drew in currents and eddies composed of the stuff of higher dimensions, creating a maelstrom of constructs, pocket universes whose “laws of nature” did not conform to the basic working concepts of the four-dimensional world.
Sometimes a facet of one of these miniature universe-constructs managed to interact with four-dimensional reality, fitting in momentarily—and cataclysmically—with a four-dimensional matrix on the nexus known as Earth...
The streets of New York City were far away—both physically and psychically—from the green campus that housed the Vigilance Foundation. One would have to traverse four counties before coming to the city’s northernmost border. The upstate business center that housed the Foundation was large on open spaces and short on sidewalk. Modernistic buildings arose on a bucolic plot of land larger than Central Park—and its greenery was immaculately manicured.
A conservative think tank, the Vigilance Foundation monitored all threats to the American dream, from urban unrest to foreign terrorism.
Dr. Lowell Carswell, Ph.D., loaded his pipe while reading the coverage on last night’s disturbance in the New York Times—ideologically unsound, but still the newspaper of record. “This may require rethinking several urban parameters, not to mention an entire new threat assessment.”
“We had initially processed the Heroes as containment factors in the urban equation.” Dr. Thayer Birch, Ph.D., took a sip of coffee. “Despite the police injunction restraining their activities, they nonetheless remained a deterrent in esse—a threat to street crime.“
“And, of course, they established an almost immediate alliance with Senator Demagogua,” Benedict Scheer pointed out.
Scheer only had a Master’s degree, and his contribution to the coffee break discussion gained him only superior looks from the two doctorate holders.
“Demagogua is no true conservative,” Carswell sniffed.
Birch nodded. “He’s merely an opportunist riding the conservative groundswell.”
“Well, certainly those giants didn’t turn out to be dependable compatriots for the superpatriot,” Scheer hastily agreed.
“Mmnnnn,” Carswell said in quelling tones. “But I think we should table any discussion of the import of the Heroes’ actions for a more formal venue—like the weekly status meeting. Scheer, you get back to quantifying the megadeath potential of the Brazilian atomic arsenal.”
“The hypothetical Brazilian atomic arsenal,” Birch added.
Scheer bent over the keyboard of the office computer— neither of the Ph.D.s was computer-literate. “A Master’s degree, and they treat me as a blasted errand boy,” he muttered.
Those were his last words. As he tapped into the Foundation’s computer network, a loose vortex of tenth-dimensional space—a pocket universe—made a conjunction with the Foundation’s electronics system. For a brief instant, electrons were turned into positrons, negative matter that reacted explosively with the normal matter around it.
The computer, the scholars, the Foundation buildings, and most of the green-swarded campus disappeared in an incalculable flare of energy.
John Cameron bit his lip as he applied a pungent potion to his bruises. He’d moved so creakily when he came out to breakfast that Mama Putnik had pressed a jar of her homemade remedy on him. The smell was enough to bring tears to the eyes, but as John gingerly spread the stuff, it felt as though he were taking a blowtorch to his bruised ribcage. Apparently the burning surge overwhelmed his pain receptors—the tightness eased.
If only my armor could be restored as quickly, John thought. He picked up the clamshell plates that protected his chest and back. That was where the damage had been done. The stink of burnt insulation mixed with the spicy tang of Mama Putnik’s embrocation.
John extended hair-thin tendrils of mental force, following the circuitry embedded in the plasteel. He frowned as he detected a number of electrical connections that had been sundered—some of them in the irreplaceable Argonian ul-tramicrochips.
No chance of taking this thing to the shop, he thought. Argon and its technicians were on the far side of an increasingly stormier Rift. He’d have to find some way to repair this damage himself.
Then John recalled what he’d done the evening before, deforming the screwdriver that subway thug had used to threaten him. If he could combine his circuit tracing and psychokinesis. ..
He wormed a psionic tendril along electronic pathways until he came to a break in the circuit. Then he focused his psychokinetic talents on the crystalline lattice of the circuit’s metallic elements, literally turning it momentarily molten to seal the gap. It was like manipulating a microscopic arc welder. Again and again he operated, throughout the entire suit, until every system was whole.
John sat back on his cot, a fine sheen of sweat on his face.
Well, he thought, my body is okay, and my suit is excellent. Of course, my head feels like it’s just been kicked by a mule ...
Robert made a graceless, awkward exit from the specially-outfitted 747 after it rolled to a stop on the LaGuardia runway. He had spent the past six hours flying from California, abandoning the West Coast movie premiere when newscasters began asking about the riot in New York in a near feeding frenzy. Robert had forgotten to take his Hero-phone, so he spent the entire flight incommunicado. He hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. His eyes felt as if there were pebbles caught under the lids.
He strode across the tarmac, bypassing the terminal he’d never fit in. Passengers from other flights gathered at the floor-to-ceiling windows. Robert was familiar with that phenomenon. He was even familiar with the fear rising off the Lessers like a stinking fog. What he’d never experienced was the hatred he now detected in the glaring crowd.
Months of painstaking work building the trust and respect of these pissant creatures, destroyed by one of Thomas’s temper tantrums. A delegation of newsgatherers crowded against the cyclone fence at the edge of the runway.
“Robert! Are you aware of what happened on Sixth Avenue last night?” a reporter asked.
Hoping he didn’t look as haggard as he felt, Robert replied, “I returned as soon as 1 heard. This is a terrible situation—a cowardly attack, an angry response ...” He sighed. “And all too many innocent bystanders caught between.”
The newscasters were on him like a pack of baying hounds.
“We have reports of people being kicked to death!”
“Would you have allowed that, Robert?”
“Do you feel your people’s response was appropriate?”
‘Thomas actually attacked news crews. Do you think that was a good idea?“
Robert forced back the response he’d have liked to give, that he wished all Lessers—especially these reporters—dead.
Instead, he exerted his mental powers to the fullest, trying to dissipate the fear and distrust among the news people. “I feel for every victim of this tragedy—those who were caught in my people’s response, and poor Penelope. Does anyone know where she’s being treated? Do we know if she’ll be able to walk again? All I heard was that she’d been shot in the leg by some sort of heavy weapon—”
He continued in that vein, picking up information from the minds and voices of the media crowd. Robert’s next move was to arrange ground transportation. Luckily, he had some Lesser money o
n hand, which allowed him to rent the use of an open-bed tractor-trailer. His first move was to visit the midtown hospital where Penelope and Kevin were resting uncomfortably in improvised quarters—a circus tent roofing over a small atrium. Kevin’s burns didn’t give Robert much concern. With minor wounds, Masters were fast healers.
But the sight of Penelope’s face, pale and drawn with pain, filled Robert with conflicting emotions. Foremost was rage at the Lessers who’d committed the atrocity. Underlying his fury, however, was the uncomfortable admission that without this world’s medical technology, Penelope wouldn’t survive. Back home, despite the support of their telekinetic shields, giants’ legs and hip joints were the first to go. And there was no such thing as a crippled Master. As their limbs began to fail, older giants were pushed to the periphery of Masterly society, off into the woods where they finally fell, took additional damage, and never got up again.
Robert took it as a fact of life that, barring the vagaries of power, most Masters were dead by their early forties, giving him a life expectancy of barely twenty more years on the outside.
Had Penelope suffered this damage on their homeworld, the only decent thing to do would be mercy killing, out of sight of Lesser eyes. The broken bones and injuries from her fall couldn’t even have been addressed by the level of medicine available.
Here, however, Penelope lay if not in comfort, at least in woozy acceptance of her pain, her leg encased in an enormous swathing of plaster.
“It was Carron,” Kevin said, “one of the Lessers you’d told us to look out for. I pinned him and his toady mentally, but before I could finish them I was attacked by more Lessers. These were covered in metal shells and could fly. One burned me—” He looked a little shamefaced—“while the other got into my mind. That’s all I remember.”
Robert frowned. More vermin with mind powers? “The Lesser who attacked you mentally—that wasn’t Sturdley?”