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| Art by Don Heck |
Read the Previous Chapter HERE!
Chapter Eight: Ice Menace
It was night when a sleek winged bullet rocketed southward, reeling oil’ thousands of miles and continuing past the southern tip of South America over the vast watery wastes at the bottom of the world. Only one hour later, night gave way to clay as they passed into the months-long polar daytime.
Ramparts of glistening ice rose -on the horizon, spreading to the right and left as far as the eye could see. The White Continent...Icebox of the World...Frozen Hell...it had been called many things in the past by hard-bitten explorers.
An enormous ice cap covered a land one and a half times the size of the United States. Uninhabited for countless ages, Antarctica had only within the past decade acquired a population of a few hundred permanent residents in scientific outposts.
“Belgium has a population density of 758 people per square mile,” commented Goliath, “while Antarctica has 1200 square miles per person. How are we ever going to find one small. being, Karzz, in that immensity?” At the controls, Cap angled the rocketplane down and flipped the toggle switch for the retractable skids to start lowering.
“A good question,” he admitted. “However, Iron Man has flying locomotion and can quickly search in all directions from any single point, so I’ll let him and Hawkeye down at the center of the continent.”
“That’s about -the coldest spot, too,” said Hawkeye with a shiver, and he drew his parka’s furred hood over his head. “Iron Pants is lucky, Wearing a heated tin suit. For me, it’s just Shiverville.”
“Keep talking and you won’t freeze,” said the Wasp soothingly. “I estimate the hot air you produce in one hour could heat a city.”
“Don’t bug me, Bug Girl,” retorted Hawkeye.
With a roar of the braking rockets at the nose, the rocketship slid smoothly to a stop in a snowfield. ‘With compact survival packs on their backs, Iron Man and the fur-suited Hawkeye stepped out into the icy blast.
“Good luck!” came from the rocketplane as it soared away again, rising steeply and vanishing in the blue sky.
Iron Man looked at his built-in wrist thermometer. “Hmm…only forty-seven degrees below zero,” he informed. Hawkeye. “A comparatively balmy day for the Antarctic.”
“Anybody who calls that balmy is balmy,” said. the archer. “let’s not just stand here and freeze by inches. Get going, and take me along.”
As agreed on before, Iron Man hooked a short length of chain from his belt to Hawkeye’s parka belt, then took oft. The jet-thrusts from his boots formed frozen-vapor plumes behind them.
“Keep your eyes peeled in all directions,” said the Golden Avenger. “If the Infrared Beamer, whatever it is, is anywhere near the size his ultramagnet was on Mount Everest, We ought t-o spot it miles away.”
But they saw nothing, though Iron Man swung in ever-widening circles that gradually covered large areas in the interior of the ice-locked continent.
“As bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,” Hawkeye granted between cold blue lips.
Iron Man suddenly swung on a straightaway. “I have a hunch that Karzz may be operating along the coast instead of in the interior,” he said. Upon reaching the shoreline of sheer icy cliffs towering a mile high in places Iron Man and his passenger swung to follow the edge bordering the cold seas. They passed high over several scientific outposts, immediately recognizable by their quonset huts or low wooden barracks.
After skirting Antarctica’s rim. for hundreds -of miles, Iron Man turned sympathetically toward Hawkeye, whose skin was frosted, while tiny icicles hung from his hood over his eyes.
“I’m snug in my steel air-conditioned suit but you’re exposed to the frigid winds, Hawkeye. Want to land and build a fire to warm up?”
“N-no, I f-f-feel gr-great,” lied Hawkeye through chattering teeth. “The Wasp always s-says I’m c-c-cold-blooded anyway so th-this is my n-natural element. Keep going, Shell Head. I’m t-t-t-tough.”
Occasionally they passed a penguin flock, strutting comically. At times, skua gulls flapped past. No other animal was seen, for even the Arctic fox and polar bear would succumb in this bitter land where temperatures. could at times plunge to 130 degrees below zero. where bare, wind-swept mountain peaks rose above the monotonous Whiteness, straggling green lichens and mosses grew, and a few hardy insects were known to survive on that food.
Looking down, Iron Man suddenly saw a strange thing. “Look, Hawkeye. Tractor tread marks, but how big!”
Hawkeye gave a long low whistle as he squinted. “The tracks are a hundred fee-t wide. What kind of icemobile could be that big?”
They saw the answer soon, toll-owing the trail over the horizon. There, moving along in strange nuclear-powered silence, was a tractor-tread “tank” as big as a Warehouse. On top was a mast surmounted by a huge searchlight—from which shone forth no light at all. Yet beyond at the coast, the ice cliffs were melting into a Niagara of water that cascaded boilingly down into the Antarctic sea.
Iron Man flipped over a chest-stud, activating his long-range Telstar radiocom transmitter. “Calling Captain America. Located Infrared Beamer. Will try to sabotage it. Over and out.”
“Infrared rays are heat-beams, of course,” said Hawkeye. “Karzz is using that gizmo to melt the edges of the ice cap, but Why? If he wipes out a few scientific camps on the way, how would that be an earth-doom gimmick?”
“One way to find out is to land,” said Iron Man, swooping down; “and I mean on the machine itself.”
He had seen the plastic bubble “pilot’s room” at the front end of the Cyclopean tank. Within it sat Karzz himself, manipulating a complex electronic control board. He seemed too preoccupied to notice the two flying figures that landed feet-first nearby on the hull.
“Let’s take a quick potshot at him right off,” muttered Hawkeye, pulling an arrow from his quiver with numbed fingers.
“Right,” agreed Iron Man. “Maybe we can surprise him and blast him to Kingdom Come before he knows what happened.”
“Three...two...one...fire!” was Iron Man’s countdown.
Hawkeye let loose with the nuclear-tipped arrow, whose miniaturized explosive power was a fraction of that of an A-bomb, but still had enough blast force to pulverize a battleship.
At the same time, Iron Man extended one gauntlet and let fly with five whining rays from his fingertips, each an energy beam in different octaves of the electro-magnetic scale, with enough combined power to shatter a mountain.
The exploding arrow and multiple smash-beams reached the plastic bubble at the same time, creating a pyrotechnical display that hurt the eyes. But when. the smoke cleared, nothing had changed.
“Not even a scratch on his plastic bubble,” cursed Hawkeye. “Not an atom knocked off.”
And now Karzz was staring out at them with a mocking leer. His amplified voice came from a horn above the bubble.
“Bon jour! I expected Avengers here sooner or later. To satisfy your natural curiosity, this Infrared Beamer was constructed on my home planet by my cohorts, using seventieth-century science technology, then it was tele-transported across the time barrier in the wink of an eye to twentieth-century earth.”
“What is your aim with this buggy?” demanded Hawkeye. “Why melt ice here? Or are you going to make ice cubes for a dinosaur-sized cocktail? If this is a menace to earth, I'm a monkey’s uncle’s second cousin.”
“Then harken, anthropoid throwback,” returned Karzz bitingly, "to some Antarctic statistics. The south-polar ice cap holds ninety percent of the frozen water on earth, a total of eleven million cubic miles. If all that were melted to flood into the swollen oceans of earth, it would raise the general water level six hundred feet.
Iron Man and Hawkeye gasped.
“This would drown seventy-five per cent of earth’s major seaports under the new sea level,” Karzz recited, “and would flood inland for a thousand miles in many non-mountainous areas. The dry-land area. of earth would be reduced. to only the highlands and mountain chains, about one-tenth of. the present land area.”
Karzz grinned mirthlessly at them. “Needless to say, at least halt the human race would drown, and the rest would starve, with "all farmlands sunken underwater.”
iron Man controlled his shuddering nerves. “All well and good, but it will take you a hundred years to melt all the ice down by circling the Antarctic coast time after time.”
“True,” agreed the alien conqueror from the future. “But underneath this lnfrared Beamer is a projector radiating a ‘heat current’—I can explain it in no simpler terms—that is pouring all through the ice and building up its charge. When this reaches its peak, enough heat will be stored. ‘ to melt the entire ice cap, releasing trillions of gallons of newly formed. water into the ocean system of earth.”
“That would also create a gigantic tidal wave and smash all ships at sea!” gasped Iron Man.
“Precisely,” gloated Karzz. “I’ve thought of everything.”
“Except one thing,” barked Hawkeye. “That two Avengers will wreck your giant water-wagon, one way or another...starting now!”
“You will never have the chance,” came back coldly, “for you will be wiped out . . . now!”
“Get behind me, Hawkeye!” yelled iron Man. tensely. “My armor is impervious to any of his ray-forces.”
“Except one,” reminded Karzz, “the rust-ray.” And touching his belt studs, Karzz shot forth the same ray that on Mount Everest had begun to crumble away Iron Man’s suit, layer by layer.
iron Man did not retreat, with Hawkeye huddled behind him. He took the full brunt of the droning ray—yet nothing happened.
“You’ll notice,” said Iron Man evenly, “that no red dust is forming through superfast rust action. You see, Karzz, before coming here I did some lab work and devised a plastic-spray coating to protect my steel suit from your ray.”
“Clever,” came Karzz’s microphonic voice in grudging admiration. “Well, no matter. If I cannot destroy you, neither can you bother me within my impenetrable Infrared Beamer machine.”
“We’ll see about that, you overconfident creep,” scoffed Hawkeye. Turning to Iron Man he said, “Fly me in the air I’ve got a couple of fancy arrows to try on his motorized tin can.”
Iron Man complied, soaring hundred feet up with Hawkeye. “But can you shoot while dangling in the air like this?” he asked.
“It’s some trick,” admitted Hawkeye, trying to fit an arrow to his bow while his body twisted in the wind. But finally he aimed downward.
Whung....
“The acid arrow,” said Hawkeye. “Its head contains energized radioactive fluoric acid that can eat through glass or stone.”
The arrow landed on the top of the machine with a wet thud, spreading a yardwide stain all around. A bubbling hiss arose, but as the moments passed the fumes danced away impotently.
“All it did was clean dirt oft‘ the metal,” said Iron Man, shaking his head.
“What kind of superalloy is that?” growled Hawkeye, stunned. “But we’ve got to get inside and sabotage that jalopy. Here goes with my diamond-drill arrow.”
Spang....
Down sped a bulky arrow whose whirling diamond point was driven by a tiny transistorized electric motor. It could drill its way through ten inches of armor plate while barely being slowed. down.
When it met the hull below, it poised on end, grinding away while upheld by the torque of the spin. But gradually its speed diminished. Wobbling like a top that was running down, it finally fell flat.
Hawkeye’s face also fell, while a string of imprecations came from his lips. His fury was not lightened by the mocking, amplified voice of Karzz from his plastic bubble: “Why waste your ingenious arrows, bow-twanger? My machine is coated with a layer of neutronium, a metal made of densely packed neutrons, and ten times harder than mere diamond. Your Stone Age devices are pitiful toys.”
“That clown from the outer cosmos doesn't know it,” rasped Hawkeye, “but his deadliest weapons are those cornball clichés. If people heard enough of them, the human race would commit mass suicide.”
“My turn,” said Iron. Man, jetting them both away from the mighty machine. “See that glacier ahead? Karzz is going to skirt close past one side of it...and I've got ideas.”
Before reaching the glacier, Iron Man deposited Hawkeye on a flat snowfield. “I’ll leave you here. This is a one-man job.”
“Give him the works,” Hawkeye called after the flying figure.
The Golden Avenger soared above the gigantic glacier, beside which even Karzz’s great machine was a tiny mite. All the while, Iron Man had been rheostating up his power-units. His finger poised over a push button on his chest controls.
“Here goes,” he muttered. “An ultrasonic sound wave above the range of human. hearing, but rated at a million decibels. Nothing crystalline can stand up against it.”
As the invisible vibrations struck the glistening glacier, giant cracks appeared at the top and spread. fanwise down the sides. Awesomely, in majestic slow motion, the colossal chunk of ice split with a thunderclap, collapsing into a landslide of pieces bigger than houses.
Countless megatons of the crystalline debris crushed down squarely on top of the Infrared Beamer as it churned past, until it was buried from sight.
Circling in the air, Iron Man held his breath and listened. Not a sound. came from under the ice heap. “I think you hit the jackpot,” came Hawkeye’s thin shout from the distance. “You put Karzz on ice—for good!”
RrrrRRRRR.....
The silence was broken by the sound of tractor treads grinding powerfully. Ice chunks were hurled aside as the seventieth-century tank came crawling out from under broken glacier.
“I—I don’t believe it,” gasped Iron Man, in devastated disappointment. “Not even a dent or a scratch.”
A derisive chuckle, amplified into stentorian volume, came rolling from the machine. “Was there something in my way?”
But now the alien’s voice -turned ugly. “I see I'll have eliminate you two. You annoy me, like mosquitoes.”
The huge machine suddenly wheeled around and straight for a small figure standing unprotected the snowfield. The treads crunched forward, gathering speed.
“Hawkeye!” screeched Iron Man in horror.
“Great balls o’ fire!” choked Hawkeye, rooted to the spot as the machine loomed closer, like a juggernaut. “Karzz is going to run me down!”
The archer broke from his paralysis of fear and began running, futilely. The churning behemoth behind him gained steadily.
Like a comet, the Golden Avenger was streaking down from the sky, piling on all the jet power he could muster. But he had a longer way to go than the machine, to reach Hawkeye.
Death flew alongside Iron Man. Which of them would reach Hawkeye first?
...Find Out Thursday in...
Chapter Nine: Sunken Sabotage!
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