by Stan Lee
Kevin shook his head. “That one was down on the ground when the trouble began. He’d just come out of—what is that name for a fancy car? Lemon?”
“Limo,” Robert said. “I’ll leave you now. Rest, heal quickly. As soon as possible I’ll have you moved to Heroes’ Manor.”
Although, he thought, only the gods below know what I’ll find there.
Robert’s truck was stopped a good mile from his destination. The whole area around the home of the giants had been evacuated and cordoned off. Hundreds of Lessers in the mottled green outfits this domain issued to its warriors bustled about, setting up heavy weapons and metal war machines.
A little mental spying reassured Robert somewhat. These were not professional fighters, but members of something called the National Guard. The local chief, or governor, had called them out to contain a perceived threat.
The commander of the troops was a short, grizzled man whose growing stomach strained his uniform shirt. “I’m glad to see you,” the Lesser said. “We’ve allowed no one out of your compound since your people came back, and no one has come out to talk to us. I’m glad someone with authority has returned. The only leader we know to be inside is Thomas—and he’s the one who started the problems.“
“Yes,” Robert said as he poured soothing thoughts into the colonel’s mind. “I’m sure that between us we can restore order.”
He turned to see another crop of the ubiquitous news crews turning their cameras on him. Reporters asked questions just as inane as those of their urban counterparts.
Robert ignored them, walking up the path to the iron gates of Heroes’ Manor. Well, he thought, things could be worse. At least there’s a sentry out.
The giant stood behind the cover of one of the trees arching over the front drive. It was Quentin, one of the older members of the group. From the look on Quentin’s face, he wasn’t there as a sentry—more as a lookout.
And it seemed that Robert was what Quentin had been looking for. “You’re barely in time.” The faint wrinkles at the edges of Quentin’s eyes and lips seemed deeper. “It’s as bad or worse than when the old Master of Masters died. Everyone has formed cliques and factions. The arguments are just about to break into real violence.”
“And what faction claims you?” Robert asked.
Quentin smiled without mirth. “The older and wiser heads. I expected you’d be along sooner or later. The only problem is resolving the doubt and panic among our people without letting the little ones outside know about it.”
“And my main difficulty?” Robert pressed.
“Thomas,” Quentin said flatly. “We just barely persuaded him to stay inside the walls. He wanted to go out and break the Lessers’ picture-boxes, thinking that would let the pictures out.” The older giant shook his head. “Though his plan certainly didn’t work so well last night. That blond-haired vixen you’re so fond of caught Thomas on something called ‘tape.’ We all saw it on the Tee-vee.”
“And how did Thomas respond?”
Quentin shrugged. “He wanted to break the Tee-vee, too.”
“Always good to have some advance warning,” Robert said, heading onward. “I’ll remember you, Quentin.”
Quentin trailed after him, but well to the rear. He might believe Robert would win the coming confrontation. Nonetheless, he hedged his bets, not following the leader too closely.
The grassy slope of lawn leading from the mansion to the lakefront beach was the giants’ usual meeting ground. As Robert came around the building, he could see his followers bunched in three knots, all glaring among themselves. Factions, indeed.
A bare handful clustered around Thomas—the most heavy-handed and arrogant. Robert ignored them, turning to the largest group.
“I leave you alone for a few days, and you undo all my work,” he said.
“The Lessers attacked us!” Thomas protested. Robert still paid him no heed.
“They crippled Penelope!” Katharine cried from the second largest group. “That could never had happened at home! This is a bad place for us. We’d be better off going back. The fighting in the old domain must be over by now. We could make a deal with the new Master of Masters—at the worst, there’s always the woods.”
“Oh, you’d become a woods runner now?” Thomas taunted. “And what of them out there?” he hooked a derisive thumb in the direction of the National Guardsmen. “You’d allow those Lesser vermin to harm a Master—and live?”
Robert forbore from pointing out the logical flaws in both positions. John Cameron, not Robert, had brought them to this world. Robert had just led them. And Robert had no intention of taking on the Lessers’ artillery to gratify a quick impulse for vengeance. His long-term plans would take care of that...
He continued to look at the largest group of his erstwhile followers, still waiting to hear their position. “And you?”
“We want to leave.” Camilla’s voice was nervous, but emphatic. “Since we arrived here, we’ve acted like clowns for the Lessers. Those picture books for Sturdley. Your film. There’s a whole world out there—we see it on the Tee-vee. But only a chosen few have been allowed more than a day’s travel from here. We think we could make our way out there, as Andrew probably is ...”
“Andrew?” Robert directed mental probes through the compound.
“Gone,” Camilla told him. “We think he swam out through the lake after he, Thomas, Walter, and myself returned here last night.”
“You think it’s so easy to walk away from here?” Robert asked. “Warriors surround us. The Lessers fear us now.”
Camilla gave a cynical grin. “We know what to do to make them like us again. You showed us how.”
“To the pit with making them like us!” Thomas shouted. “They should fear us! They should feel our wrath!”
Robert swept forward and knocked Thomas to the ground with one blow. “These others I can forgive because of their ignorance. But you knew my plans—and nearly sabotaged them with your temper!”
Thomas lay crouched on the grass. One hand cradled the side of his head as he cringed under the mental outpouring of Robert’s wrath.
The giants’ leader turned on his people. “So, some of you fear these Lessers, others want them to pay, still others wish to lose themselves among the Lesser hordes. I have not been merely entertaining the vermin out there—I have been working to lessen their numbers by using their own vaunted technology against them!”
He outlined how he’d been Binding Lesser leaders, preparing a global holocaust.
“You’d kill them all?” Camilla asked.
“Not all,” Robert assured her. ‘There’ll be some Lessers left—breeding stock for the new order.“
“And we’ll survive?” Quentin demanded.
‘The tests I ran on Gideon indicate that we are considerably tougher than the Lessers in resisting the deadly aftermath of the bombs—this radiation.“
The giants took heart at this validation of their superiority, seriously battered after the kneecapping incident.
“We will have a haven—the structures I arranged to be built in Idaho. All we need to do is stay together.”
“If we hang together,” Harry Sturdley desperately raised his voice over the hubbub of the staff meeting, “we can overcome even this disaster.”
“Is it true this Silikis character is trying to pull Heroes from the theaters?” Thad Westmoreland demanded.
“After the incredible success of the New York premiere, it’s hard to imagine why,” Sturdley said tartly.
“Hey, maybe we should look at it as an enormous publicity stunt,” Marty Burke suggested. “Remember when those poor jerks imitated that football movie and got themselves run over? People were falling all over themselves to see the flick.”
“There speaks the man who drew the movie tie-in comic,” Sturdley said.
“Hey, one way or the other, I expect that sucker to become a collector’s item,” Burke insisted.
“Like the Famous Serial Killer
s card set?” Mack Nagel inquired nastily.
Burke ignored the jibe, his allies continuing the attack. “It seems as though Sturdley’s Heroes comics weren’t such a great idea after all,” Westmoreland sneered. “I’ve heard that dealers and distributors are dumping orders like crazy. You got another brilliant idea up your sleeve?”
Nagel shrugged, looking at Harry. “Unless you want to revive the horror comics genre with the giants as villains.”
“For one of them, that might work,” Xan Ximenes, the artist on the book starring Thomas, sighed. “We could change the title from The Terrific Thomas to The Terrorist Thomas.”
“That’s one plan.” Sturdley stared around the table. “But maybe we can come up with some other alternatives.”
At Dynasty Comics, Dirk Colby had a very different idea of what constituted a staff meeting. Artists, writers, and editors need not attend. Colby dealt with his marketing and trafficking people. And there was no brainstorming. These were meetings to pass orders onto the working talent.
“So,” Colby said, “The Death of Zenith cycle seems to be reaching an end of profitability. Just one more publicity angle.”
Jerry Barnum, head of marketing, nodded. “Where he’s reincarnated as a female and we rename the series Zenithe.”
Barnum’s assistant, Chuck Sutton, chimed in, “Maybe it will get the libbers off our backs to see a broad in Zenith’s suit.”
“I want sketches from three artists for a new Zenithe costume—briefer,” Colby abruptly said. “Our market research says the buyers want four things: small heads, big muscles, clenched teeth with lots of blood on them, and busty babes in small costumes.” He fixed the assistant with a piercing glare. “Why do you think we put Zenith through a sex-change? No decent broads in that book. Ram-man has Vulpinette, the villainess in the little fox costume.”
“Well, not lately, since Ram-Man got that stroke after the killer robot Nemesystem beat his brains out,” another assistant pointed out.
“How is that developing?” Colby wanted to know.
“Ram-man has trapped his worst enemy in the ram costume, after jamming the horns full of plastic explosive,” Barnum said. “He needs a stand-in since half his body is paralyzed. But he always holds the detonator in his good hand.”
Wendell Piltdown, one of the traffickers, raised a logic problem. “You mean the Jesticulator has been stuck in that costume for weeks? It must stink.”
Colby turned to Barnum. “Make a note. Maybe they can use it in a plot.” His grin was more like a baring of teeth. “I’ll show ‘em gritty.”
As Barnum scribbled away, Colby roved the rest of the table with his pale eyes. “So, what other ideas do we have to make our Silver Age heroes more attractive in today’s market?”
Carlo Ponzi, a lesser marketing staffer, held up a crude action figure. It was the Aquabat, Dynasty’s underwater hero. But the figure’s legs had been chopped off and shiny metal cylinders glued on.
“How’s this sound for a scenario? The Aquabat has his legs bitten off below the knee by a mutant shark, and replaces his lost feet with jet-skis.”
“I like it,” Colby said. “Blood, pain, and high technology. And it makes him more of a human torpedo than the Fantasy Factory’s hero.”
“Besides,” Barnum chimed in, “the Aquabat doesn’t need to stand—he’s always swimming around.”
“Not to mention the merchandising aspects,” Ponzi went on enthusiastically. “This could make a fine bathtub toy.”
“Other characters?” Colby went on.
“I talked to one of the editors about your idea of making Herowena pregnant,” Walt DeMara of trafficking said. “He said there may be trouble with the Comics Code if we go with Zeus as the father. Zeus is the father of Hercules, and since Hercules is supposed to be Herowena’s father ...”
“Right. The mother thought he was a traveling salesman.”
“Which brought us code problems forty years ago,” Colby said, tapping a forefinger to his lower lip. “Is the publicity value worth the trouble?”
“Actually, the editor had a useful suggestion,” DeMara offered. “Why not make the whole thing a mystery? The story arc will feature Herowena figuring out who did the deed.”
“And will give us more time to decide on a final answer.” Colby nodded. “I like it.”
“I guess that means we hold off on her costume redesign,” Alf Orton of marketing sighed. “I mean, it’s awful small—and if she’s going to be pregnant...”
“She’ll keep her figure the first few months—even get bustier,” Colby said. “Then we can cover her up.” He shot his glance around again. “Any more?”
‘The Red Scepter,“ Vic Lustig, another trafficking guy, spoke up. ”Suppose he loses his mind ...“
“Like Ram-man did last year?” Ponzi asked.
“And Herowena right before her last hiatus?” Barnum added.
“Sort of,” Lustig admitted. “But this would be different. He’ll turn nasty—bloodthirsty—after we kill off everybody he knows by blowing up his hometown.”
“Blow up Lake City?” Colby inquired. “How? An asteroid strike?”
“I was thinking a tactical nuke,” Lustig said.
“Awful lot like the plot of the Fantasy Factory’s Heroes movie,” Barnum objected.
“But meaner,” Colby said. “The terrorists there failed— here they’ll succeed. What else do you have in mind?”
“Changing the crimson scepter to a battle-ax.”
Ike Kruger of marketing roused himself from the end of the table. “Another one turning into a broad?”
Colby skewered him with a look that didn’t bode well for Kruger’s future advancement.
“I mean the scepter itself,” Lustig clarified. “It turns brainwaves into energy. But when he goes nuts, his brainwaves transform the scepter into an ax—more bloodthirsty, you see.”
“Too subtle,” Colby complained. “How about we change it to the Blood-Red Battle-ax of Death?‘
“Is that too close to Doom’s Blood, the Black Death?” Barnum asked.
“Or Death-Hawk’s Bloody Claw?” Ponzi added.
Colby shrugged. “One more won’t hurt. Anything else?”
Silence fell over the table.
“Okay, that’s the end of old business.” Colby picked up a newspaper from the tabletop. “Here’s the new business.” He pointed to a fuzzy picture of a flying armored figure on the front page. “Sturdley and the Fantasy Factory have been beating our brains out for months with his real-life giants. Well, it looks like there are new real-life heroes in town. I want ‘em. You”—he pointed at Barnum—“will find them, and get them under license.”
Colby then turned to Piltdown. “You’ll have the job of setting up a wholly-owned subsidiary company to turn the comics out.”
Piltdown blinked. “A whole new company?”
Colby nodded. “Yes—a small one. It’s bait, you see.” He gave his people another thin smile. “But I’ll bet it will be enough to get the guy I want to run things.”
For a brief moment, John Cameron became aware of a flash of emotion far below. He broke off his search pattern and swooped “downward to find a young kid lying flat on a rooftop, his eyes the biggest thing in his face.
John reversed gizmo and regained altitude. He wasn’t looking for kids, he was looking for the pair of Deviants who’d appeared the night before.
But, as he resumed the painstaking survey, his quarry remained hidden under the mental murmur of eight million minds.
Nonetheless, John kept circling.
* * *
CHAPTER 28
“It’s like something out of a Fifties monster movie,” Peg whispered, staring at the television set installed in Harry Sturdley’s office.
The screen showed a phalanx of nervous-looking National Guardsmen fingering their M-16 rifles—weapons of proven uselessness against giants. A few of the citizen-soldiers appeared more confident. They were holding olive-drab tubes that were no
w familiar to TV viewers. Ever since the giantess had been cut down on Sixth Avenue, pictures of rocket launchers and the rockets they fired had been all over the tube.
Of course, the most cheerful faces in the military cordon were the ones poking from the hatches of the tanks. Not only did they have cannons to shoot at any errant giants, the crews were behind one to four inches of armor.
Sturdley sighed, turning away from the image. “Those poor, dumb bastards. All they lack is Godzilla coming over the hill at them.”
John Cameron, slouched in the corner, soberly shook his head. “Godzilla might scare them, but they’d stand up to him. The giants can invade their brains.”
He glanced at Sturdley. “We knew they were dangerous long before they proved it to the man on the street.” His hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “And we still have no plan for dealing with them.”
Up at Heroes’ Manor, Robert walked the walled perimeter of the compound. Standing behind a tree was Quentin, no longer a watcher and waiter, but a sentry placed by Robert’s command.
“Anything to report?” the giant leader asked.
“Their leaders are all congregated opposite the gate in something called a ‘command post,’” Quentin said. “They’re in a defensive posture, waiting for some response from us.”
Robert sighed in relief. “So they still aren’t coming in to take Thomas?”
“It doesn’t look that way,” Quentin said. “Although I’m sure we could take them if they made the attempt.”
After setting up the defense of the compound, Robert had no doubt of that. The crew of each tank had been targeted by the strongest mind benders of the giants’ colony. At the first sign of attack, mental commands would cause the tanks’ weapons to be turned on each other. The second line of defense would be to eliminate the warriors armed with rocket launchers by mental and physical means. That would leave the mass of Lessers with their ineffective rifles and low morale. If required, the giants might have to kick a few officers to death, but any attack would undoubtedly dissolve.