by Len Wein
“You’ve devised a fissionable G-bomb,” said Drenkov, tailing him, “or so you claim. Why, then, won’t you—”
“If you’ll shut the hell up, Igor, you’ll see just what sort of bomb I’ve devised,” Banner told him, his voice rising now. “We’re here in this damned bunker to watch it be tested. Remember?” He glanced from a row of dials to his wristwatch.
Before the big Russian could reply, a red light began flashing across the chill room. Then a heavy metal door swung open.
“Now what’s wrong?” the bulky, gray-haired man who came stomping into the room wanted to know. “You better have a damned good reason for all this halfwit delay!” The abundant brass trim on his blue uniform glittered in the blinker’s artificial light.
“You can’t rush this sort of—”
“Rush, my aching fanny!” bellowed General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. “Rushing is one thing, and then there’s stubborn foot-dragging.”
“Money,” murmured one of the slim lieutenants who moved in the blustering general’s wake.
“Right! Every damned second you dawdle, it costs the government big bucks. The halfwit taxpayers are always bellyaching about the military budget, and now—”
“Sometimes,” cut in Banner in a quiet, level voice, “I think I made a mistake leaving the solitude and peace of my own private lab to bring my ideas to the govern—”
“Aw, you talk like a man with a paper bummy, Banner!” stated Thunderbolt Ross. “My men have been stationed here for days on end, wasting time because of your confounded delays. The bomb is supposed to be tested today. Right now! Hell, I have guests here to see the damned test.”
Banner maintained control of himself. “You have to realize, General, that we’re fooling with some very powerful forces here,” he patiently explained to the angry military man. “I’ve got to be sure every precaution is taken.”
“Don’t you think I know we’re monkeying with powerful forces, for cripe’s sake!” Ross’s beefy hands turned into fists. “Why in blue blazes do you think we dumped such a stewpot of money into your lap? We want to unleash these so-called powerful forces, we want a gamma bomb that’ll scare the bejeepers out of every damned enemy of the U.S.A.!”
Banner turned his back, then began moving along the rows of control panels. “The test will take place in a few minutes, General. The more you yell, the more time it’s going to take.”
Waving a fist at the retreating scientist, Thunderbolt Ross said, “I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Banner—you’re chicken. Right, chicken! You come up with one of the great weapon ideas of our generation, and then you’re afraid to follow through.”
Drenkov, who’d been watching the exchange with a thin smile on his face, said, “You may have a point there, General.”
“Oh, stuff it in your armpit, Drenkov!” said the general with a snort. “You’re worse than he is, and I still think you’re a spy for the Russians. If I had my way, I’d be in charge of this Gamma Project and all you halfwits would be locked up in—”
“General Ross,” said Banner, striving to keep his temper under control, “it’s time to commence the final countdown.”
General Ross snorted. “About time!”
Drenkov eased over to Banner’s side. “Are you certain all your calculations are correct? If you’d confide more in—”
“I don’t make mistakes, Igor.”
A black technician turned from his monitor screen. “Countdown has begun, Dr. Banner.”
“Okay, Gabe.” Banner moved to a reinforced observation panel in the bunker’s thick wall. He wanted to witness the explosion as directly as possible. “Now we’ll know for sure what happens when powerful gamma rays are released.”
He lifted a pair of binoculars off a metal shelf and raised them to his eyes. The desert outside was filled with a dry yellow stillness—an expectant stillness, waiting for the explosion.
These were the final few minutes before all his theories would be tested. Everything he’d worked for these past years—all the time and effort was about to pay off. Or fail. Banner felt himself admiring the tranquility of the bright landscape outside, wishing he could find that kind of serenity for himself.
But you’re going to destroy that serenity, he thought to himself. In a very few moments the gamma bomb will explode out there and . . .
Far to the right of his vision, a tiny swirl of dust was showing. Probably only the wind making a dust devil—except that there didn’t seem to be any breeze outside.
Banner glanced at one of the room’s many clocks. Less than three minutes to detonation time.
Jamming the binoculars back to his eyes, he stared out again at the desert. The dust cloud was coming nearer and at its center now he could make out a red dot. The dot grew, expanded, became a car—a car with someone at the wheel.
“Good Christ, there’s somebody out there!” He spun, letting the glasses fall to the floor, and ran for the door.
Drenkov reached for his arm. “What are you doing, Banner?”
“Somebody’s driving into the test area!”
Thunderbolt Ross made a grab at him, too. “It’s too late now to stop the countdown!”
Banner’s slim body eluded both men. He went on toward the door, made it, and wrenched it open. He sprinted down the corridor to the outer door, ignoring the angry and surprised voices behind him.
The heat of the day slammed into him like a blow. It was almost as though he’d dived belly-down into a pool of water. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, he ran for the jeep General Ross and his party had arrived in.
The keys were dangling from the ignition. Banner leaped into the driver’s seat, started the motor, and was roaring away from the bunker in his own cloud of dust before anyone from the bunker had made it outside.
Banner could see the car clearly now as he aimed his borrowed Jeep at it. The vehicle had stopped near the protective trench.
“What kind of idiot would come blundering in here?”
He saw the driver now. Only a boy, a teen-ager. Feet up on the dashboard, a guitar over his knees.
The Jeep nearly banged into the ancient red car. Banner was out of it before the dust had settled. “For the love of God!” he shouted. “Get out of here! You’re in a danger zone!”
The young man peered out at him. “It’s okay, no sweat. See, I bet some of my buddies I could sneak past your guards and—”
“Idiot, a bomb is going to go off here in less than a minute!” Banner yanked the car door open, caught the young intruder by the collar, and pulled him out into the daylight. The guitar came flying out, too, its strings whanging in protest.
“A bomb?” said Rick Jones. “Come on, you’re kidding. There aren’t any more—”
“Just shut the hell up and hope we can make it to that trench over there!” Banner dragged Rick, the guitar tangled between his legs for part of the dash, toward the deep, wide trench.
That slit in the yellow of the desert never seemed to get any closer. They ran, ran without stopping.
And finally they were at its edge. Banner tossed the boy in and went diving in after him.
An absolute silence came rolling across the desert. And then gradually it changed, becoming the loudest noise Banner had ever heard. The world shook as though it were ending; an intense greenness stabbed into his eyes. He opened his mouth, the way a drowning man does, to suck in just one more lungful of life.
Then the silence again. Blackness.
“. . . alive.”
“It’s a blasted miracle! By all rights there shouldn’t be anything left of him.”
Mostly new faces. Four or five of them floating in the haze above Banner. The only familiar one was that of Thunderbolt Ross, and even that one came in hazy and distorted.
Banner finally managed to say, “You . . . got me out of there . . .”
“You absorbed the full impact of that gamma bomb, Dr. Banner,” one of the faces told him, a concerned doctor’s face. “I don’t kno
w exactly why you’re among the living at all.”
“That kid . . . that crazy, idiotic kid . . .”
“He’s alive and well, too. Later on, he wants to talk to you.”
The room was filling in some, the white walls and the watching doctors and nurses. And the impatient-looking General Ross.
“Damned fool thing to do,” muttered Ross. “Risk your fanny to save a civilian. Dumb.”
“Suppose it . . . maybe it was,” said Banner. He focused on the doctor who’d spoken to him before. “What . . . do you think . . . will happen to me now?”
Shaking his head, the doctor said, “We really don’t know. We’re going to have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see,” echoed Banner as he fell asleep again.
Three
They kept him behind thick glass.
They talked to him through overhead speakers, fed him on trays shoved through a slot in the wall of his room.
His cell.
Banner was fairly certain he was still someplace within the hospital, but in a very special kind of isolation. They were somewhat vague when he asked for details.
“Very odd fluctuations in your radiation levels,” one of the doctors had told him. “Frankly, we don’t quite understand what’s happening to you.”
After a while, he didn’t bother to talk to them. This was as close to solitude as he was likely to get for a good long time.
“How long?” he did ask once. “How long do I have to stay here?”
“We’re not certain, Dr. Banner,” replied the voice out of the box. “There has never, as you very well know, been a case exactly like yours.”
Then something unusual happened. Banner lost his temper.
“Damn it!” he shouted, shaking a fist at the thick glass wall. “I’m tired of being treated like some creature off ‘The Late Show’!” He ran, grabbed up his food tray, and sent it flying into the glass wall.
“Easy, now, Dr. Banner.”
He ignored them, regained control of himself, then sat in the corner of the room, huddling in on himself, sulking like an animal in its cage.
A few hours later it happened.
Drenkov had paid a visit. “You’re not looking particularly well, Banner,” came the Russian’s voice through the microphone, “even for you.”
Frowning, Banner watched his colleague standing smugly on the other side of the heavy glass. He made no effort to respond.
“I wanted you to know,” Drenkov continued, “you won’t have to confide in me about the Gamma Project. Since your little accident, I’ve risen in status.” The Russian paused, smiling. “I am quite confident my request for complete access to your confidential files will be honored. Then there’ll be absolutely no need for—”
“You damned—!” Banner charged the glass wall, hit at it with his small fists.
Drenkov’s pleased laughter came through the speaker and he was gone.
“He can’t do that!” Banner cried. “I won’t have him prying into my . . . my . . .”
Suddenly, Banner’s raging anger overwhelmed him. His skin tingled. The world abruptly grew dark before his eyes. He threw his hands to his face, then saw them glowing a faint green—a green which began to darken, and grow deeper, even as the hands themselves began to enlarge.
Banner clenched his fists in agony, and he heard a faint ripping sound as the seams of his shirt split wide open, giving way before a sudden swell of steel-hard muscle running rampant over his entire body.
No longer was Bruce Banner a frail, slender scientist. In his place stood an awesome figure, fully seven feet tall, clad in the tatters of Banner’s clothing. A brutish figure rippling with strength and sinew, but whose narrowed eyes displayed little intelligence from beneath a hooded brow.
Snarling in bestial rage, the behemoth raised an immense fist and dealt the glass of his prison a tremendous blow. The glass exploded, shattering into huge jagged chunks. Alarm bells rang, alarmed voices began shouting, and widened eyes watched as the brutish creature lumbered out through a gaping hole in the building wall, then strode away into the darkness.
“What was that?” asked one of the witnesses.
“I don’t know,” replied another. “Nothing human. More like some kind of . . . a Hulk!”
. . . And that had been how long ago?
Banner wasn’t exactly sure. A short time, a long time, it didn’t really matter anymore.
Banner soon learned that, once his anger passed, he would become himself once more.
His affliction was like some sort of disease, causing uncontrollable fits. And it terrified Banner more than anyone else. He was only human, after all. From time to time, despite his greatest efforts, he was bound to lose his temper. And when he did, he would change, becoming something less than human, yet more than beast. A wild, rampaging creature possessed of unparalleled strength. Seven feet tall, one thousand pounds of unfettered fury. The most powerful manlike creature ever to walk the earth.
The incredible Hulk!
If only, Banner thought, hunkered down in the rattling boxcar, I could find some way to end . . .
Then Banner heard it. Above the clacking of the train, there was a new sound growing.
A whupping, pocking noise in the hot sky above him. He didn’t need to go to the door to know what the whupping sound meant.
Helicopters. Choppers dipping low, following the onrushing train.
Once more his pursuers had found him.
Four
He shouldn’t have felt cold.
The sun was slanting down through the chestnut trees which lined the wide flagstone pathway. And the house itself was pleasant enough, a turn-of-the-century wooden structure with dormered windows and a turret from which a weathervane sprouted. Its several stained-glass windows glowed in the late-afternoon light. Very homey and well kept.
Yet Rick Jones felt a sudden chill as he made his way toward the porch of Linda Connelly’s boardinghouse. Rick didn’t exactly believe in premonitions, but he had a sudden and unsettling feeling that before he left this place some very rough things were going to happen to him.
There was a cat watching him. A frizzy orange thing just on the other side of the screen door. The cat made hungry, anticipating sounds.
“Got nothing to feed you, kitty. If you can get over to the park, though, there may be some pizza left.” He pressed the doorbell.
Nothing happened, not even a ringing inside the quiet house.
Rick switched to knocking. “Anybody home?”
“Yes,” said a pleasant voice behind him. “I was over in the garage.”
Turning, Rick saw a very pretty young woman standing down on the path and smiling inquisitively up at him. She was probably two or three years older than he was. Still within his range. “Miss Connelly?”
“I’m Linda Connelly.” She had green eyes, and long auburn hair that was tied back with a single twist of emerald-colored ribbon. Even in jeans and a faded checked shirt, her slim figure showed to advantage. “Are you looking for a room?”
“Among other things.” Grinning, his guitar case banging into his knapsack, he trotted back down the steps to face the pretty girl. “Your doorbell, by the way, doesn’t work.”
“And the roof over the front parlor leaks,” said Linda. “Old Mr. Marschall is the only handyman in town. Even on the rare occasions when you can find him at home, it’s very difficult to acquire his services, because he’s also nearly deaf.”
“I’m handy,” volunteered Rick, “and I happen to be hunting for a job.”
“In this town?” She looked surprised. “Would you like a glass of lemonade?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“Let’s go in, then,” said the girl. “Don’t step on Toto, because she likes to wind herself around strangers in hopes of bumming an extra meal.”
“Toto isn’t a cat’s name.” He climbed the creaky wooden steps and held the screen door open.
“My aunt wouldn’t let me have a dog.” Smil
ing, she stepped across the threshold.
Sure enough, Toto slithered around Rick’s ankles as he followed Linda along the cool, shadowy hallway. It was difficult to dodge the cat and at the same time admire the way the girl carried herself. “I’m used to not being in the high wage bracket,” he said. “So what about the job?”
She took hold of the refrigerator handle. “You haven’t told me your name.”
“It’s Rick Jones. Am I hired?”
Laughing, she took a frosted pitcher out of the refrigerator. “This thing was my aunt’s—cut glass, and must weigh a good ten pounds. Was always spilling it when I was a kid.” After setting the hefty pitcher on the round, wooden kitchen table, the girl fetched glasses. “You’re bright and able-bodied, Rick. Why are you so anxious to get a job in Crater Falls?”
He took the proffered glass of lemonade. “Cheers,” he said, sipping. “Okay, I’ve got another reason for being in town, Miss Connelly. It’s very important that I see Dr. Stern.”
The girl, very carefully, pulled out a straight-backed chair and seated herself at the table. “You can call me Linda,” she said finally, eyes on the glass her fingers were circling.
“Okay, Linda,” he said, unslinging his guitar and backpack. “I know you’ve been working, part-time, anyway, with the doctor. His housekeeper told me.”
“Oh, her.”
“I really do need a place to stay and a temporary job. The most important thing is talking to Dr. Stern. Do you—”
“He’s not a regular doctor, you know, not an M.D.”
“No, Dr. Stern is one of the leading researchers in the field of gamma rays.” Rick took a chair opposite her. “He used to be with the government; quit to do research on his own. I’m interested in that research because I think Dr. Stern’s come up with something which can maybe . . . well, it’s hard to explain. Let’s just say I hope he can help a friend of mine.”
A frown touched Linda’s face. “How do you mean help?”