But Captain America was wrong.
Far across the world in the Himalayas, a golden-armored figure glinting in the sun was soaring through the azure sky, circling, darting, swooping among the tallest mountain peaks on earth.
“Treacherous downdrafts and updrafts here are the best test for the new transistorized jet-propulsors in my boot-heels,” he thought, zooming at 500 miles per hour toward a mountain cliff, then veering sharply upward to sail safely over its jagged edge. “It’s all working fine.”
To any watcher, it would have been an unbelievable sight—a heavy metallic form gliding through the air with buoyant ease. The steel suit was gilded over the arms, legs, and face-plate, while the torso, gloves, and boots were tinted crimson. In general appearance, it was nothing like a knight of old, but more like a modern manlike robot.
Yet this was no mechanical being. Within the iron “uniform”—unknown to the world at large, and even to his fellow Avengers—was Anthony Stark, millionaire playboy and weapons inventor. His armored costume was not only an outer protection against harm, but an inner protection against death. Without his steel suit, except for brief periods of time, Anthony Stark would die…of heart failure!
It was a strange story…
During a visit to the Vietnam war theater, to demonstrate a transistorized super-weapon, Stark had fallen prey to a Vietcong booby trap—a buried land mine. The blast mangled his body, but skilled surgery by the enemy saved his life and restored him to normal activity—except for his heart. Pieces of shrapnel had lodged so close to his heart that the surgeons could not remove them. And they had warned that any strenuous move on Stark’s part might dislodge the bits of metal to pierce his heart and bring death.
Bitterly, Anthony Stark had resigned himself to face a lifetime as a near-invalid…if he lived any kind of lifetime.
All this while Stark was an enemy prisoner. They had saved his life in order to wrest from him his scientific secrets and gain newly invented weapons. By a stroke of fate, a famous oriental biologist was also a prisoner at that time, in the same stockade. In secret collusion with him, Stark devised a daring plan—to build a magnetized iron suit that would continually pull outward at the pieces of shrapnel within his body and keep them from working inward toward his heart. Also, the knight-like armor was planned as an aid toward their escape from imprisonment.
Pretending that they were collaborating and building a fantastic new weapon for the Vietcong to use, the two prisoners were given free rein in a laboratory to carry out their ruse. Finally, one day, Stark had stepped forth in an iron suit, suitably magnetized to save his heart from puncture, and ingeniously powered by transistorized technology to allow Stark to walk, manipulate his arms and carry on all other normal human activities—plus one other that was unique. By means of miniaturized power-packs in his boots, he could jet-propel himself into the air and fly at supersonic speeds, faster in fact than any jetcraft known. Through this, he had escaped from imprisonment and returned to America.
In order to join the Avengers and battle science renegades and their insidious weapons, Iron Man had later incorporated a wide variety of rays, forces, and devices as his own built-in weaponry.
Now he was proving out the latest advanced design in his flying system: “Mount Everest is the final test,” he thought to himself. “Braving the chilly blasts and roaring winds around its peak, piercing six miles high into the air, will prove whether I really have the all-weather flying ability I want. So, here goes….”
Iron Man jetted upward as the majestic peak reared before him…higher…higher…higher. A fierce canyon gale knocked him 500 feet sideways, but he recovered. A sudden downdraft, like a smashing blow, made him gasp as he plummeted a thousand feet down toward jagged ice blocks. But with a surge of his drumming boot-blasts he jetted back upward into the teeth of the howling downwind.
Next an updraft flung him like a cork, straight up for a mile, way beyond the tip of Everest. He fought his way down from the numbingly cold heights, agilely aiming for the summit. When a vicious whirlwind of air mixed with snow spun him around in a relentless grip, Iron Man turned himself broadside and maneuvered into the quiet “eye,” then safely sped out of one side of the whirlpool.
The next instant, something yanked him downward again, with staggering force. How many tricks did the mighty mountain have to try against puny man?
“Wait, there’s something different about this,” he said to himself. “It’s not a downdraft at all. It feels more like…Magnetism?” The last questioning thought brought a gasp of startled surprise from his lips.
Since when did Everest display magnetic force? It had never been reported by the various expeditions who had reached the top and conducted scientific experiments there. Iron Man poured more jet power into his boot propulsors, but the powerful force kept pulling him downward.
“I can’t break out of it,” he thought, and panic crept into his mind. “If my downward speed keeps increasing at this rate, I’ll smash into the peak at a thousand miles an hour!” He didn’t dare finish the thought that even his intricate, super-reinforced steel suit could never survive that frightful impact.
As his golden form hurtled downward, in the grip of an incredible magnetic force, he suddenly spied something at the tip of Mount Everest. There, in a flat stretch of bare wind-swept rock, was something unbelievable.
“Am I having hallucinations from oxygen starvation?” he thought wildly. “I see a gigantic machine! It must be a powerful electromagnet!”
More details came out as he spun lower and closer. Banks of huge horseshoe magnets ran side by side, on top of a framework support, below which lay a bulging sphere of riveted steel, obviously the power plant. A violet purling glow surrounded the sphere, the telltale sign of a nuclear dynamo. But it must be of enormous power to feed the electromagnets and create enough magnetism to pull Iron Man down from a mile high.
Iron Man read his multiple-data wrist gauge and his eyes grew wide.
“One billion gauss?” Even his thoughts babbled now. “Why, that’s thousands of times stronger than any magnet ever produced in a research lab! That’s enough magnetic pull to tow all the cars on earth after it, or to pull apart a skyscraper beam by beam. It could lift twenty-five ocean liners like the Queen Mary a hundred miles high into orbit. It could, if aimed at the moon, even begin to pull it steadily out of orbit.”
Anthony Stark was not imagining wild things. He was a scientist. He knew exactly what this unprecedented magnetic force could do—the unthinkable.
Now Iron Man’s amazed thoughts turned to other burning questions. How had this supermagnet come here? Who was behind it? What was its purpose?
All this lanced through his mind in lightning rapidity as he fell like a stone, straight down toward that inescapable giant magnet. He noticed several meteorites whizzing past him, also attracted to the huge horseshoe device. They were meteors that had been sailing past earth and were simply yanked out of their age-old space trajectory!
Iron Man saw that arriving meteors did not wreck the supermagnet. Ten feet above the device, they met an invisible cushion and bounced away harmlessly. What sort of superscientific “force field” protected the magnet?
Iron Man rolled up his eyes, breathing a last prayer, as he plummeted down the final hundred feet at meteoric velocity.
Across the world at Avenger headquarters, Captain America glanced at the clock with a slight frown. “What’s with Iron Man?” he thought worriedly. “Why isn’t he here yet?”
He then turned to look into the TV camera, and spoke for the benefit of their vast unseen audience. “This is a special event in the Avengers’ annals. We decided to hold this Memorial Meet in honor of former members of the group in past years, those who are now engaged elsewhere in their own solo activities. But they will never be forgotten for the great services they performed as Avengers in past years.”
The star-spangled Avenger paused to stab his finger at a stud on the podium’s control board. The lights dimmed in the great hall. Then an automatic spotlight swung down to limelight a huge statue standing in an arched niche in the wall.
Neon letters blazed forth—
No doubt a vast cheer went up from millions of homes. But the Avengers sat silently, honoring a former Avenger with an unvoiced accolade. Captain America then spoke their official eulogistic tribute:
“Mighty Thor, the immortal god who journeyed from Asgard to Earth to join the Avengers when we needed him most. Who will forget his mighty hammer, with which he could shatter steel or stone? Or the thunder-and-lightning storms he created to confound our enemies? Or his magnificent courage battling villainous foes who wielded awesome dark powers that even nullified Thor’s magic? Or….”
“Or,” muttered Hawkeye, fidgeting in his seat, “Thor’s pompous attitude and the lingo he used, half flowery and all square?”
“A philologist,” observed the Wasp in defense of Thor, from Goliath’s shoulder, “you are not, Archerman. Look it up in the dictionary….”
“I know,” growled Hawkeye. “Under Ph, not F. You mean Thor has word-skill, eh? That’s funny—under F, not Ph.”
“Does his ability make you Thor?” whispered the Wasp. “Under S, not Th.”
Hawkeye silently threw up his hands in surrender. Captain America was saying, “In conclusion, we can all cry Well done, Thor! At present, he has returned to his abode in Asgard.”
Cap pressed another stud and the searchlight shifted to a statue titled
“Like his name,” said Captain America, “Quicksilver moved with fantastic speed, which came from his being a mutant variety of human being. Back in his Balkan homeland, Quicksilver’s everyday name was Pietro. He guarded his secret abilities well, but often used them as an Avenger.”
Cap’s eyes misted a bit as if looking into the past. “Quicksilver was a blur of motion, able to outspeed cars, trains, or planes as if they were stuck in mud. He could run circles around any Olympic track star. He won every grim race of life and death against Father Time himself.”
“Is Cap for real?” snorted Hawkeye in a low tone. “Methuselah there is giving us cornball jazz that went out with Ben Hur’s chariot. When will he catch up with the jet age? Can’t he dig plain English?”
“Shush!” spat out the Wasp. “Cap came from an earlier generation than ours. You can’t blame him if his speech is behind the times. But when it comes to a fight, he speaks absolutely modern clobberese with his fists, right? So we can forgive him being a bit of a square.”
“Square?” choked Hawkeye. “He’s a cube…cubed. Why, I…Ulk!”
Hawkeye’s whisper choked off, for the simple reason that Goliath’s huge forefinger and thumb around his throat had given a tiny squeeze…enough to make Hawkeye turn purple, unable to catch his breath, let alone talk for the next few moments.
Cap swung the spotlight to a third statue. Another girl like the Wasp was portrayed, but in a witch-like scarlet costume as befitted her emblazoned name that lighted up—
“Pietro’s sister, Wanda,” explained Captain America for the benefit of the TV audience, “was also a mutant, but her special ability lay in witch-like supernatural powers. For a while, both Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were pawns in the hands of Magneto, an unscrupulous mastermind. And originally, they were thus the enemies of the law and fought against a famed band called the X-Men, while carrying out Magneto’s sinister schemes. They voluntarily joined the Avengers later, to make up for their former misdeeds under duress.”
“So?” muttered Hawkeye. “I was also an anti-Avenger at one time, or at least I battled Iron Man time and again. Then, on my own, I reformed and became a good guy. So who pats me on the back? If you ask me….”
“We aren’t asking you a thing, William Tell-it-all,” came from the Wasp icily. “Besides, we current members of the Avengers all get a run-down later, addressed to the TV viewers. Wait your turn, Bow Twanger.” Hawkeye glared at the Wasp. Goliath glared at Hawkeye. Hawkeye decided to glare elsewhere.
The lights came on again and Captain America snapped erect. “In conclusion, let us salute the former Avengers for their deeds, always to be remembered as long as Avengers keep assembling.”
As they started to rise to their feet, a tiny voice buzzed in Goliath’s ear. “Careful, High Pockets…the ceiling, you know.”
Barely in time, Goliath bent his neck and stood half bowed as they all saluted the three statues and said in chorus, “Hail to Thor, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch!”
Captain America now smiled for the cameras, relaxing. But inside he was wondering, “When is Iron Man going to show up? What’s keeping him? Did he run into something unusual?”
Chapter Three: Karrz the Conquerer
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