by Stan Lee
“I’ll see you lots later,” she’d said, heading out the door. For a long second, Marty debated telling her about the batteries. But why ruin the moment?
Burke sorted through his reference files, looking for a decent shot of Thomas’s face. At the same time, his finger tapped the channel select button on the remote. What went best with drawing a fight scene? The Flintstones? A rerun of Bewitched? No, here it was. Tom and Jerry.
Peg Faber glanced at her watch. Where the hell had the time gone? She’d been tracking and coordinating the preparation of legal exhibits for the copyright suit—Harry’s anti-Deviant crusade, as she privately called it. Now it was suddenly well after lunch.
She reached for the phone to order something from the deli downstairs when her eye fell on the open door to Harry’s office. He was out, schmoozing a newspaper editor in the hopes of getting a few column inches printed about Dirk Colby’s treachery. For a brief instant, Peg desired to do something more concrete on the Deviant problem. Harry was still pestering her to don her armor. It was just inside, locked in his closet...
Peg had just risen from her seat when the room seemingly made a sudden, vicious orbit around her, lurching not merely around, but downward. Peg dropped weak-kneed back into her desk chair, her hands gripping the chair’s arms. The whole unpleasant experience had a sickening similarity to her jaunts through the Rift. But this time, John Cameron wasn’t around to initiate the transition.
She huddled over her desk, all thoughts of superheroics driven out of her head. Unless the weird stuff going on in the Rift was beginning to affect her...
No longer was the Rift an interdimensional void. It was now more of a dimensional soup, with fragments of the higher-order cosmos tumbling around in ever-growing profusion. More and more pocket universes began jostling each other. If the realities they contained were sufficiently antithetical, such a collision resulted in complete destruction for the two bubbles—in some cases, vaporizing all the universe-bubbles unlucky enough to be nearby.
In other cases, the impacting fragments might be of sufficiently similar cosmography to join together and form yet a larger bubble-universe. When these superfragments interacted with the Earth-nexus, they affected larger and larger areas in the four-dimensional realm.
On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Terrill Saunders III felt the blood drain from his face as his colleague Sean Chapereau passed on the news. Three airliners had suddenly plummeted from the holding pattern around O’Hare as if they had all simultaneously forgotten how to fly. That was bad enough for the Chicago-bound passengers. But for Terrill Saunders, the news spelled ruin.
In moments, stocks of airlines and plane manufacturers would go into a free-fall as disastrous as the crashes had been. And not only had Saunders steered his brokerage clients into the transportation sector, a good deal of his own money was tied up in the airline stocks that would take a big hit.
He frantically initiated selling procedures, but the hum of incipient bloodbath was already invading the exchange floor.
“Gonna be a hell of a day,” Chapereau said, his eyes gleaming with excitement. Saunders hid the wash of WASPish contempt he suddenly felt. His family had maintained a seat on the exchange since his great-grandfather’s day. They’d weathered panics, depressions, recessions, and black weekdays of every stripe—and they had done so stoically. But this outsider, whose father’s name had been Shapiro, was acting like a spectator at a bullfight.
“You see,” Chapereau leaned forward, wintergreen-laced breath puffing in Saunders’s face, “I found a safe haven.”
Saunders glanced around and leaned closer. “What? Where?”
“Look at the market. Automotive’s gone to hell, with cars and trucks blowing up. Most of the manufacturing sector, especially electronics, are getting slapped with product-liability suits for appliances that killed people. Retailing’s getting sued for selling the damned things.”
Right, Saunders thought. The whole consumer ethic—the economic engine that had made America great—was unraveling.
“So we’ve got to go back to the basics—back to what made America strong. I’m investing in crafts companies, horse and mule farms—hell, I even found a buggy maker.”
Galvanized, Saunders turned away to a computer and frantically began scanning the issues. He might be able to save only pennies on the dollar, but he was going to invest in the immediate future, in the form of America’s past.
Unfortunately, even as he depressed the keys on his keyboard, anomaly engulfed the Exchange—physical anomaly, not financial. Every device carrying electricity—telephones, computers, fax machines, even the building’s wiring and the phone lines—suddenly turned to white-hot plasma. Saunders, Chapereau, and every broker, runner, and tourist at the Exchange abruptly died in flaming agony.
And the building that housed the Exchange swayed, rumbled, and disintegrated from the ground up.
Leslie Ann Nasotrudere was in a van heading downtown seconds after word of the disaster reached her newsroom.
“What is it—terrorists?” her cameraman asked as they battled their way through traffic.
“From what I heard, it sounds like all their electronics blew,” Leslie Ann said grimly. “This is one they can’t shove under the rug and cover up.”
She joined a throng of media people milling around at the police cordon blocking people off from the Exchange building—or rather, the site where the building had been. Concrete dust still hazed the area, but there were beams of sunlight piercing through the space where a cathedral of commerce had risen only hours before.
Leslie Ann spotted a familiar face—a young cop she’d half-flirted with at other crowd scenes. “Hey, O’Brien,” she wheedled, “give us an idea what’s going on behind the lines.”
He only shook his head, looking sick. “This one makes the World Trade Center look like a day in the park.”
“What do you mean?” one of Leslie Ann’s rivals, a print reporter, asked.
“With that, we had a hole under the building and a lot of people to get out.” The cop swallowed hard. “This dropped a building full of people on a street full of people. Every chunk of debris they pick up has somebody squished under it. Hell, they’re evacuating people in other office buildings who got hit by stuff falling through walls and windows.”
He glanced significantly at Leslie Ann’s camera crew. “They’re not gonna let you in there. It’s too damn ugly.”
“Can you tell us where we can get a shot of the people being evacuated?” Leslie Ann asked.
“Even that ain’t too photogenic,” the cop said. “A lot of the people are minus arms or legs.” He lowered his voice. “And with the body bags, the best they can do is load in whatever pieces they can find.”
After a frustrating tour of the area trying to find something to film that wouldn’t make the viewers throw up, Leslie Ann took her crew to the official briefing.
The police commissioner did the talking while the mayor stood by looking appropriately serious beside a representative of the Exchange, who looked frankly dazed. Leslie Ann surmised he’d been out for a late lunch and missed the catastrophe by sheer luck.
The statement was short and sweet, a masterpiece of stonewalling. Bad enough the tourists were afraid of crime. If the big companies began to suspect that Con Ed was blowing them to bits ...
“We are working on the assumption that the explosion was an act of terrorism—and that, in time, some extremist group will take responsibility,” the commissioner intoned.
A virtual invitation, Leslie Ann thought. But there were lots of media types beside herself who weren’t ready to accept that explanation.
“Mr. Commissioner,” one of her network rivals asked, “what about the reports of strange effects from the electrical systems—”
“We have no such reports,” the top cop plowed over the question.
“Really?” the reporter pressed. “I was in the hospital talking to several survivors—people from outside t
he building. They said the lights, including the streetlights, gave off what one called an ‘intolerable glow.’ ”
The commissioner looked as if he’d been on the receiving end of a kidney punch, but he made a game response. “Perhaps if you helped us identify these people, we could question them.”
His words sounded jovial enough, but the gleam in his eye made it clear that such inconvenient witnesses might spend their hospital stays incommunicado.
Leslie Ann had her own question prepared. Prompted by what the cop on the line had told her, she’d made a few phone calls for professional advice. She raised her hand and was acknowledged.
“Mr. Commissioner,” she asked, “could you give us an idea of how much explosive was used to destroy the building? We know the terrorists used a truck full at the Trade Center to blow a hole in the parking garage and cause a fire. How big a bomb would they need to bring a whole building down? How did they manage to position it to achieve the amount of structural damage that was done here?”
The commissioner assured her that such details would be discovered by further investigation, but he sounded more like Porky Pig than a police officer and leader of men.
Leslie Ann came out of City Hall enjoying the taste of a little blood on her teeth. Sooner or later, the blanket would have to come off this burst of electrical mishaps. And she wanted to lay the groundwork ...
Her thoughts were interrupted by a leather-lunged voice coming from City Hall Park. “It is up to us, my friends, to stop this new plague that is upon us. It is judgment, friends, a judgment upon godless, soulless machines!”
Leslie Ann peered into the park to find a rally in full swing. A heavyset bald man stood on a makeshift rostrum haranguing the crowd through a bullhorn. It was the crowd, however, that caught Leslie Ann’s attention. Graying secretaries stood by brawny mailroom clerks. Street people stood by men in executive suits. It was as wide a range of people as one could hope to find in the city. But there was one similarity. Every person in the assemblage had frightened eyes.
“Is he making a Monckey out of you?” a bored, superior voice inquired. It was Garstairs of the Gazette, married but still trying to add Leslie Ann to his collection.
“Monkey?” she asked.
“That’s the Reverend Judah Moncke—with a CKE at the end. He’s quite particular about that antiquated spelling, but that’s the man in a nutshell. Fellow’s a neo-Luddite, wants to bring everyone back to nature or some such. Equates the Industrial Revolution with Original Sin. All technology is sin—using the bullhorn to get out his message must be a venial sin.”
Garstairs was so busy scoring wit off the speaker, he paid no attention to the audience. Leslie Ann cold-shouldered the newspaperman until he finally went away. Then she beckoned her crew over. “Park the van right here on the sidewalk and light up the microwave mast,” she said. “I want to go in and get some footage of this rally.”
“What for?” her tired-looking cameraman asked.
“To show Corporate that people are already frightened about machinery blowing up—and they’ll only get more scared if they don’t get accurate information.”
In moments, she was poking her way through the back of the crowd, clearing a path for the camera. The Reverend Judah Moncke was launching into a new topic. ‘The Lord in His infinite mercy was willing to stay His hand when we went against the natural plan,“ his hoarse voice boomed out. ”But then we embraced alien abominations! I have heard otherwise sensible people refer to the giant freaks thrusting themselves uninvited on our world as ‘guardian angels’! And now we have metal-clad flying demons in our skies. If the good Lord had wanted man to fly, He would have given us the wings of angels, not a diabolic metal suit.“
Leslie Ann had reached the front of the crowd. With a camera and lights, her crew was not exactly inconspicuous. While the reverend worked on his listeners’ emotions, she kept the tape running, interjecting no comments. Moncke was a persuasive speaker. One of the stockroom boys in the crowd tore off his Walkman and threw it on the ground. It was crushed by dozens of eager heels.
Enthusiasts began closing in on the news crew, but Moncke spoke to forestall them. “Let the technology-worshipers be!” he thundered. “They will help us spread the word—I will use Satan’s tools against—awrp!”
Leslie Ann’s cameraman gave a yell as a fat blue spark crackled from the camera to the bullhorn in Moncke’s hand. The hand-held loudspeaker blew up, and Moncke fell backward, his face a red ruin.
Screams and yells rose from the park, echoing off the building fronts. Leslie Ann and her people were hemmed in on one side by Moncke’s makeshift stage, and on the other three by a scared and angry crowd.
“They killed him!” somebody yelled.
A louder voice cried, “Look! Look over there!”
The microwave mast on the INC news van was haloed with a spectral glow, like a multicolored St. Elmo’s fire. A couple of hardy types from the edges of the crowd ran over and began rocking the van, ignoring the protests of the technician inside.
Things were getting out of hand, and Leslie Ann knew the time had come for a quick exit. The problem was, she and her people were still surrounded, although those near her were shying away, since Leslie Ann’s microphone was now giving off the same eerie glow. She tried to use it as one might use a torch against beasts, and cleared a path a little ways into the crowd. They were trapped in the midst of the press of people when the glow abruptly faded.
As she stood holding a useless microphone, Leslie Ann had an instant’s memory of a picture from her childhood, an old lithograph of Custer’s Last Stand, the blond-haired Custer brandishing his six-shooter against a pageful of enemies.
Then came the true cry of a mob. “Get ‘em!”
The crush of bodies increased. Rough hands grabbed Leslie Ann. But their grasp suddenly slackened as heads glanced upward, responding to a low, warbling noise. Gasps rose from the crowd when they saw the armored figure floating above them—one of the enemies Moncke had warned about.
“Goddam freak-monster!” somebody yelled.
“Demon!”
Leslie Ann recognized the figure as Emsisdin.
Rocks and clods of earth flew up from the crowd, as well as a few bottles and somebody’s briefcase. The fusillade proved useless, the impromptu ammunition either missing or rattling off Emsisdin’s armor. Then it fell on other members of the mob, not improving their tempers.
When the briefcase came flying up again, Emsisdin extended an arm and vaporized it. That took the fight out of the crowd. It began dispersing—fast.
Emsisdin flew low over the news crew, covering them from above. Before Leslie Ann got in the van, she beckoned to the Deviant.
“I have to handle some things before tonight’s newscast,” she said. “But I should be free after eight o’clock.”
“And?” Emsisdin said.
Leslie Ann smiled. “A lady in distress is under a debt of honor to ... reward anyone gallant enough to rescue her.” The smile became sultry. “I prefer to honor my debts as soon as possible.”
Peg Faber sat quietly in the den of the Sturdley household, braving doom by listening to a radio through a set of ear plugs. The local news station droned through its hourly schedule. She glanced down at the notepad lying on her right thigh. Four bizarre stories of mechanical mishaps in as many hours, the major one occurring at a rally in City Hall Park that had apparently become a near-riot.
That story got updates. The others had not been repeated. A man in Westchester trying to use an automatic garage opener had been left with a bloody stump when the remote exploded in his hand. A woman in a tanning parlor had been killed when the machine she’d been in seemingly imploded. And a telephone operator had a whole lot of stray voltage leave the lines and enter her head by way of her earphone ...
Peg resisted the desire to pop the plugs from her own ears and roam around the room. Yes, listening to the radio this way might be dangerous. But Peg had heard of people getting elect
rocuted nowadays merely by trying to turn on a light.
Besides, her restlessness stemmed neither from the news nor the rumors she’d heard about murderous appliances. It was more like the way her grandmother had predicted the onset of thunderstorms. Gram could just feel them in the air.
Peg wasn’t expecting thunderstorms. But some primitive, gut-level detection system was warning her that something was on the verge of occurring.
For just a moment, she thought of her armor, still locked away in Harry Sturdley’s office closet. That technology, bizarrely enough, seemed to be working perfectly. Which job would make Harry happier—maintaining the media watch he’d requested, or flying out on patrol as he kept asking her to do?
Peg shook her head. She was an administrative assistant who’d started out in publishing and wound up in comics. That was bad enough without acting like the characters in the comic books.
Resolutely, she readjusted her earplugs and turned the radio dial to the competing news station. What appliance stories were they covering?
Peg tapped her pencil against her notepad. She wished Quentin Farley would get back to her with whatever he’d found on John Cameron’s origins.
John flew out on his evening patrol, feeling vaguely distracted, as if his skin or his brain were prickling at ... something. Luckily, the evening seemed to be fairly routine. John swooped down to thwart a carjacking, three fistfights, and a basketball game where the score was about to be settled with guns.
As he gained altitude to resume his circling of the city, John shook his head inside his helmet. As far as crime busting went, he was racking up a score more like an old-time beat cop than a superhero. The Rodent, Silicon Savage, and the Human Torpedo always managed to stumble on far more significant action.
Of course, if their adventures were running daily instead of monthly, maybe their patrols would get a bit more humdrum, too.
Ah! John detected a large group of men gathering around the back of a Cadillac. Focusing a mental probe, he got images of a score of weapons and spirited bidding. The Caddy’s owner, apparently, had just made the run from out of state, and was auctioning off his latest shipment of smuggled weapons.