by Len Wein
One of what? He had to find out the purpose of these nocturnal marches.
But first I’m going to have to make a try at getting some help. Leaving the window, he crossed the floor of his bedroom and went toward his door. Even though he knew there was no one in the house anymore, Rick moved quietly.
The door wouldn’t open. Someone had locked it from the outside, and he hadn’t even heard it. Score one for their side.
“If I were Spider-Man, I could go out the window and climb down the side of the house. However . . .” Squatting, he fished out his pocket knife.
After about three minutes of fiddling, he succeeded in picking the lock. He opened the door cautiously and stepped out into the hall. He went down the carpeted stairs as silently as a burglar.
He waited in the dark downstairs hallway for a moment, listening. Nodding to himself, Rick went to the small table which held the house’s only phone. He picked up the receiver and was glad to hear a dial tone.
Sometime ago, during an earlier encounter with Bruce Banner and General Thunderbolt Ross, Rick had gained access to a very special unlisted phone number. He was no great lover of authority. Like his friend Banner, he much preferred to go it alone. At the moment, however, there was trouble right here in Crater Falls, the kind of trouble Rick didn’t think he could handle by himself. And it didn’t look as though anybody in town, and that included Linda, could be trusted.
He dialed the number of Gamma Base.
Thirteen
They treated him much better now.
Didn’t keep him locked in his cell; let him wander at will in certain corridors. That was after he’d given his promise this morning to cooperate with Gamma Base in their study of him, and after one of the medics on staff had started dealing out tranquilizers with each meal, the theory being that a tranquil Bruce Banner was not likely to become the Hulk.
If only it were that simple, Banner thought.
From the other side of a pale blue door he was passing, he heard the raised voice of Thunderbolt Ross.
“Who? What in blue blazes . . . who wants to talk to me? Who? Rick Jones? Oh, yeah, that damned hippie . . .”
Banner stopped, glanced up and down the empty corridor, then placed an ear close to the door of the general’s private office.
“. . . might have something to say. Put the kid on. Hello? You’re where? Crater Falls? I knew that already, Jones, so if you phoned just . . . Sure, we keep an eye on you, and on all of . . . What? He’s dead? You’ve got to be . . . I know Dr. Stern was doing his own experimenting there and . . . Glowing green? Are you . . . Yeah, okay. I . . . what do you think did it? What? The sheriff says what? Jones? Jones! Hey, where the heck did he go? No, I don’t know where he was, exactly. Someplace in Crater Falls. Well, use your so-called brains and track the call down. Find out why we were cut off. I—”
“What happened?” Banner had entered Thunderbolt Ross’s office.
“Banner, why the hell are you busting into—”
“Let’s drop the protocol. Did something happen to Rick Jones?”
Ross hung up his blue phone, then narrowed his eyes. “How’d you know I—”
“You’re not exactly soft-spoken, General. I was passing and overheard you talking to him. Now, what went wrong?”
“You tell me.” He dropped, with a thump, down into his swivel chair. “Kid calls me up—I can guess how he got a security-guarded number like mine—and says Rudy Stern is dead.”
“I heard that part.” Stern had been a friend of his, long ago, before everything had changed. “I’m sorry to hear it. But what’s more important is—”
“The Jones kid was explaining to me what had happened. Then he made a funny noise and stopped talking.” Ross scowled. “You know as much as I do.”
“What is Rick doing in Crater Falls?”
“Don’t you know? I imagine he went to pester Dr. Stern, except somebody—”
His red phone rang. “General Ross here!” he boomed into the mouthpiece. “Thirty-six Chestnut Street, a place called Connelly’s Boardinghouse? Got it. Phone’s still off the hook? All right. I’ll issue instructions on how to proceed shortly. Stand by.” He hung up.
Banner said, “Looks as though someone in Crater Falls doesn’t want Rick to talk to us.”
“Could be, Banner. Or it could be he’s only trying to spoof the brass.”
“Not Rick. He—”
“All kids nowadays are halfwits. When I—”
“Rick phoned you because he didn’t know how to contact me. He obviously needs help. I want to fly over to—”
“Whoa! Hold on, Banner,” said the general. “You seem to forget you’re our guest at Gamma Base—a guest, let me remind you, who can’t leave.”
“Rick’s in trouble. Sitting here and throwing your authority around isn’t going to help him.”
“The entire situation will be handled.” Ross stood up again, planting his fists on his desk. “I don’t want anything to happen to Rick Jones, either, at least not until we learn what he knows about Rudy Stern’s death.”
“But I . . .” Banner got control of himself. There was no use arguing with Thunderbolt Ross. There were other, easier, ways to get away from Gamma Base. “Okay, I suppose you’re right. Sorry I lost my temper. You will, though, keep me informed?”
“That we will,” said the general, some of his frown lines diminishing. “I think you’re making progress already. Good night, then.”
When his back was to the general, Banner allowed himself a smile.
“Humble bachelor quarters, old man,” said Clay Quartermain from the black sling chair.
Banner glanced at the modern paintings on the room’s wall, then down at the thick carpet. “Well, your cell’s furnished on a slightly grander scale than mine, Clay.”
“Proving once again that it is better to be a keeper than one of the kept.”
In the armchair facing his host, Banner was striving to give the impression he was relaxed. “You will see what you can do about Rick Jones?”
“Might even pop over to Crater Falls on the morrow,” said the SHIELD agent, “should no new developments pop up tonight.”
“Do you have your own plane here?”
“Right, and my own piece of hangar to park it in. Another of the advantages of being on the right team.”
“I appreciate your talking to me.” Banner, very carefully, got up. “I was somewhat upset about the general’s refusal to let me see what’s happened to Rick. You’ve helped me get a better perspective, plus which, you brew a terrific cup of coffee.” He already held his cup in his hand and now he took the other man’s off the coffee table. “How about my fetching us one more cup each before I take off for my cell?”
Quartermain hesitated. “Fine, old man, though half a cup will suffice for me. Feel free to putter around my kitchen.”
Banner went into the small kitchen alone. Screened from Quartermain by a partition, he poured fresh coffee into each cup. Along with the coffee, he put three tranquilizers, which he’d managed to avoid taking as prescribed, into Quartermain’s cup.
“Coffee usually keeps me awake,” Banner remarked as he handed over the doctored cup. “Won’t mind tonight, though, since I’ve got some thinking to do.”
Sipping his coffee, the SHIELD agent said, “If it were up to me, old chap, I’d let you dash right over to Crater Falls. The generalissimo, I fear, is determined that you be kept on a very short leash.”
It took nearly twenty minutes for Quartermain to slump over into a doze.
Fourteen
“What do you mean, you’re afraid?”
The rumpled cab driver rolled his frayed toothpick around between his teeth. “Ain’t exactly that, Mister.”
“I’ve already offered you double your regular fee,” said Banner. “So if you aren’t afraid of money—”
“Can’t say exactly what it is”—the man was leaning against the side of his ancient taxi on the main street of the town—“except I k
now I don’t want to drive into Crater Falls at night.”
Indicating the dark sky, Banner said, “It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours.”
“Then I can take you. Daylight’s okay.”
Banner had hiked the two miles into the town of Lee’s Landing from the nearby private airfield. He’d landed the ship he’d borrowed from the unwitting Quartermain there and he’d skipped out before too many questions got asked. Now he wasn’t anxious to lose any more time. “Where can I find another cab?”
“Ain’t none.”
“Look, you still haven’t given me much of a reason.”
The man was perspiring in spite of the night chill. “I tell you, Mister, it’s just a feeling. Feel like life’s a lot safer for me if I don’t go to Crater Falls after dark, almost as though . . .”
“As though what?”
“Oh, I was going to say as though someone warned me not to, ’cept, far as I can recollect, nobody ever did.”
“Crater Falls is fifteen miles from here?”
“About that, straight down the old highway over there.” He pointed south.
“Okay, if I can’t bribe you or cajole you, I’ll have to walk. Maybe I can thumb a ride.”
“Doubt it.” The driver opened his door and climbed inside his cab. “Seems like lately most nobody drives into Crater Falls—not at night.”
Frowning, Banner asked, “How long’s that been going on?”
“Few months, maybe. Don’t exactly know.” He rolled up his window.
Banner left him to begin hiking to Crater Falls. The cab driver turned out to be correct—there were no cars at all going in the direction of the town.
As Banner walked, he slid his hands inside his pockets. To get out of Gamma Base, he’d borrowed one of Quartermain’s distinctive jumpsuits and helmets. But after landing, he’d gotten back into his own clothes. Now the coldness of the predawn roadway was digging into him. He found himself shivering, teeth chattering.
Go back!
Banner slowed. He’d heard the harsh command inside his head.
Go back!
The words came knifing into his brain, bringing pain.
Stay away from Crater Falls!
The pain grew, sizzling through his body, trying to take control of him.
What was it? Some force—an alien force, Banner sensed—was beaming a telepathic message at him: not merely a message, but a command.
Go back until sunrise!
“Damned if I will,” Banner said aloud, his voice shooting across the gray, empty fields beyond the road.
It is death! Death to come farther!
Banner began to run, though the pain was twisting through his body and the orders to stop were drumming inside his skull.
With each step, he realized he was changing. His lean arms grew thick and muscular, ripping the seams of his cotton shirt. His voice grew husky, coarse, until it became a heavy growl. He was no longer the dedicated young scientist.
Once again, Banner’s anger had overwhelmed him. He had changed, had become the mammoth green man-brute known as the Hulk.
The telephathic messages kept stabbing into his brain, sending him warnings and spasms of intense pain. The Hulk ignored it all.
He trotted along the highway edge and the ground trembled at his passage.
Gray light began to filter down through the night blackness. Off in the woods the first bird began to sing.
Linda stopped digging. She climbed up out of the crater along her assigned pathway. Walking in the same somnambulistic way she had used in coming here from town hours ago, the girl carried her shovel to the place in the woods where it was supposed to be placed. She left it, then started back through the woods.
Her fellow townspeople were performing similar tasks. Having quit digging away at the vast hole in the crater’s bottom, they were putting their spades and picks and barrows away and starting their dead-eyed shuffle back to their homes.
It was almost dawn when they arrived on the outskirts of Crater Falls. The town lay silent in the waning night—not even a dog dared bark.
Without a word, Linda went to her boardinghouse, climbed the front steps, and went inside. Slim was only fifty feet behind her, but she paid no attention to him. The lean mechanic came into the house and trudged up to his room without a word or a sign of recognition.
Linda took a shower in her private bathroom. Then, before slipping into her nightdress, she knelt and rinsed the last traces of crater earth down the drain in the floor of the shower stall. She carried her dirty clothes, stained with mud and perspiration, into the washroom and dropped them in the washer. She wouldn’t look at them again until they were washed, wouldn’t remember where she’d worn them.
All this done, the auburn-haired girl went to bed. She slept exactly two hours and thirteen minutes, before her bedside clock radio started playing the music and talk which awakened her each morning.
Fifteen
“Now, who the dickens are you?”
Banner lifted his head from the grass of the town-square park. Sitting up, he blinked at the big man who was squinting down at him. “I must have . . .” He noticed that his clothes were in tatters. “Had an accident . . . guess I passed out.”
He remembered, vaguely, fighting his way to town, struggling against waves of pain. No, that hadn’t been him; the Hulk had done that. And then . . . the struggle must have exhausted him. Yeah, that was it—the Hulk had found the center of town and collapsed on the dawn grass.
The change had come about again. So here was Banner waking up to find the sheriff looking down at him.
“What sort of accident, young fella?”
“Out on the highway.” Banner struggled to his feet. “Car hit mine, I think.”
“Is that so?” Sheriff Anmar took a step backward. “Well, sir, I’m Sheriff Anmar, just exactly the man you need. We’ll hop in my car and go take a look. ’Course, the way things’ve been going, wouldn’t surprise me none if there weren’t no cars there.”
“We can do that later, but—”
“Want to see a sawbones first? Doc Hedley’s office is only about two—”
“No, it isn’t that, Sheriff.” Banner brushed at his tattered clothes. “The reason I came to Crater Falls is to find a friend of mine. I think he’s in trouble. His name is Rick Jones. Do you—”
“You a friend of Rick Jones?” The sheriff’s left eye nearly shut as he scrutinized Banner. “Now, ain’t that interesting. This very same young fella is the source of one of my biggest problems right now.”
“Where is he? Do you know?”
Sheriff Anmar scratched at his gray hair. “Why, I suppose he’s over to the boardinghouse.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, I ain’t seen him since yesterday. Why?”
“Can we get over there right away? It’s on Chestnut Street, isn’t it?”
“Sure thing. Faster to walk, since my car’s parked way on the other side of the square and it’s been acting a mite—”
“Rick phoned me last night. In the middle of the call we were cut off,” lied Banner. “I haven’t been able to reach him since.”
The sheriff set the pace and the two men walked rapidly toward Linda Connelly’s boardinghouse. “How long you known this Rick Jones?”
“Quite a while,” Banner answered.
“How about Doc Stern? You know him?”
“Yes. He used to be a colleague of mine.”
“You a doctor, too?”
“Stern and I worked in similar scientific areas, Sheriff. What can you tell me about his death?”
“I can’t even tell you for sure that he had one,” replied the sheriff. “All I got to go on is hearsay, most of it from your young friend. I don’t have a body—I don’t have anything ’cept Rick Jones’s claim that he and Miss Linda found Doc Stern dead in the woods and glowing like a Christmas tree.”
“Some kind of radiation poisoning,” said Banner, almost to himself.
“If J
ones is up and gone now, then I don’t even have me a witness. Sort of cancels out the whole case.” They turned off the sidewalk and up the path to the boardinghouse door. “You sure he ain’t fond of kidding around?”
“Not Rick. His sense of humor doesn’t run that way.” Banner was scanning the house and grounds. Everything seemed calm, peaceful, with nothing out of the ordinary.
Linda, looking bright and fresh in a pale green cotton dress, anticipated them and stepped out onto the porch. “Good morning, Sheriff. What’s happened to this gentleman?”
“Ain’t right sure, though he claims to have had himself an automobile accident.”
“Why’d you bring him here instead of—”
“I’d like to see Rick Jones,” said Banner. “I’m a friend of his and—”
“Oh, you must be Bruce Banner.”
He noticed she was an extremely attractive girl. Under other circumstances . . . but right now he had to find Rick. “Yes, I am.”
“I’m afraid he’s gone,” the girl said.
“Gone? Where?”
Linda gave a forlorn shake of her head. “I’m really not sure,” she said, glancing from one man to the other. “He didn’t come down for breakfast, and after a while I went up to his room and knocked. When he didn’t answer, I went in. All his things are gone—clothes, guitar, everything.”
“Should have locked that young sprout up,” the sheriff reflected. “Got no more case at all. Anyway, I’m going to get back to my office and see if maybe I can start all over again from scratch on this.” After nodding at the girl and Banner, he hurried away.
Banner was studying the girl’s pretty face, wondering if she were telling the truth. “Last night Rick made a phone call from this boardinghouse, Miss Connelly,” he said carefully. “He was interrupted in the middle of it. Do you know why?”
She shook her head again. “I wasn’t aware that Rick had phoned anyone.”
“Were you home all evening?”
“Yes, of course. About what time was the call put through?”
“About midnight.”
“Funny, I was sure Rick was in his room and asleep long before that.”