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| Art by John Buscema |
Chapter Sixteen: Alien Hunt
“Keep turning the dial one notch at a time,” instructed Iron Man.
It was the next day and they were back at headquarters, using equipment that came from one of Anthony Stark’s labs. There were four monitor screens attended by the four Avengers present. The monitors were connected to a huge computer, and also to four radar-dish aerials on the roof that pointed in different directions.
“The basic principle is simple,” explained Iron Man. “The radar dishes are locked onto four synchronous satellites put up by NASA for radio signals to be relayed around the world. What we are relaying around the world is a ‘spy-ray,’ you might call it. It does not interfere with the normal operations of the communications satellites.”
He patted an electronic box that fed signals into the system.
“An invention I borrowed from Tony Stark’s labs which he’s developing for the military. This is a good test. Each person in the world has his own special brain-wave pattern, as distinctively different as his fingerprints are from other people’s prints. Now, Karzz’s alien brain waves, which he can’t disguise, would stand out like the well-known sore thumb from the characteristic patterns of human minds, like these.”
Iron Man held up a chart of various human brain-wave patterns that were in flowing waves, differing minutely in the height of the curves, their closeness together, and the dips or peaks of the full string.
“Alien brain waves will be totally different,” said Iron Man. “I don’t know what they’ll look like, but just watch for any freakishly distorted pattern and we’ll have Karzz nailed down, no matter where he’s hiding. Each of us is attuned to a separate syncom satellite which covers a different broad region of earth. The four of us cover the world with our monitor screens.”
“Every square inch?” asked the Wasp in wonder.
“Every square millimeter,” corrected Iron Man “This spy-ray system could be tuned, if we wished, to finding one blue microbe out of a trillion red ones. Take my word for it that, as you turn the dial, you are scanning a different square mile of earth below the satellites, and every person’s brain wave in that area is registered on your screen. The computer will sort out any number of patterns, even millions at the same time.”
“I don’t understand a word of it,” confessed Hawkeye. “You mean I could tune in my own mind and see a Hawkeye brain pattern?”
“No, you’d just get a blank,” said the Wasp slyly. “He said brain pattern.”
“Then take Goliath,” retaliated Hawkeye. “I understand when he grows to giant size, his brain reduces to ant size.”
“Oh, you made me think of Handsome Hank standing guard all. alone at the sea bottom. I miss him so.”
“Hah. That’s like missing the measles---” Hawkeye stopped, seeing that the girl was looking sad. “Sorry, Wasp. Guess I was hitting below the belt.”
“Everybody on the job!” barked Captain America, turning to his own monitor screen.
“It will be a hard job,” warned. Iron Man, “taking your full concentration, hour after hour. If you look away from your screen for a moment, or even blink too much, you might miss Karzz.”
Silence fell as each of them turned his dial and watched the changing patterns of brain waves that sprayed onto the screen constantly. Could they comb the world this Way, picking one alien brain out of three billion people on earth?
Twenty-four hours later, stoically skipping sleep entirely, they were eyesore and numb-nerved.
A radio that Cap tuned in regularly again gave the grim. news.
Key snatches of the newscaster’s words were alarming. “Earth undergoing fantastic change . . . ocean level up five feet . . . Holland dikes threatened...volcanoes erupting in Philippines, Japan, Australia...violent high-altitude wind forces all jets to fly lower...giant comet plunging toward earth on possible collision course.”
“The four Earth dooms of Karzz,” muttered Iron Man. “Building up to their cataclysmic finale—only three days away now. And we still can’t locate Karzz, though we’ve spy-rayed half the world already.”
Five hours later, they had covered nearly the whole world. Iron Man was frowning worriedly. “One hour to go, with only a few small patches of earth left to scan. Is it possible that . . .” His voice trailed away as he worked his monitor dial.
When the hour was up, they all. switched off their screens and stared at one another, dumfounded.
Cap finally said it aloud: “Karzz was nowhere on Earth. Or else he devised. some way of hiding and eluding the spy-ray.”
“Impossible,” said Iron Man. “Impossible, I tell you! Stark’s spy-ray works on the telepathic principle, and nothing can stop telepathic waves from coming through.”
He spun his dial and his monitor showed a single brain-wave pattern ribboning across the screen. '“There’s the brain wave of Goliath, seven and a half miles deep under countless tons of sea water. The deepest mine shaft...the heart of a solid stone mountain...the inside of a nuclear reactor—none of those could prevent Karzz’s brain waves from being radiated and picked up by the spy-ray.”
“Last night I saw upon the stair,” recited the Wasp in a low voice, “a little man who wasn’t there; he wasn't there again today; oh, how I wish he’d go away.”
Iron Man winced. “That’s about it,” he said. “Karzz is somewhere on earth—and yet he isn’t. It’s incredible, inexplicable, inconceivable.”
“Translation-nutty,” said Hawkeye. “Too bad, Shell-head, but your electronic gizmo bombed out.”
“Don’t blame Iron Man,” defended Cap. “It Karzz is still on earth, he must have picked. out some clever hiding place we never suspected . . . Wherever that could be.”
Iron Man suddenly jumped up. “Wait...think once. Where is the one place on Earth we would least expect him to be? The last place we would think of?”
“Huh?” said Hawkeye blankly.
Iron Man turned and ran from the room, banging through door after door in the other section of the building where, as Anthony Stark, he had set up his series of labs and science workshops.
In some of them, his aides were at work. Other labs were dark and temporarily unoccupied. With all his sensors and detectors on, Iron Man paused outside one closed door labeled: ADVANCED RESEARCH LAB. It was used only by Iron Man himself for top-priority science jobs, containing the finest and most prized tools of research.
Iron Man’s sensors hemmed faintly, picking up the tell-tale metabolic warmth of a living form beyond the door. The door was locked, but the Golden Avenger rammed through it.
Within, a man with frosty eyes turned from the work-bench.
“Karzz!” screeched Iron Man... “You were here all the time, in Avenger headquarters, the one place we didn’t think of!”
“Naturally,” mocked the alien. “It was elementary to outwit you dull-brained earthlings.”
The other Avengers had followed Iron Man, and they stared open-mouthed.
“How do you like that?” groaned Hawkeye. “We look for him all over Earth . . . in places twelve thousand miles away. Yet all the while he was practically sitting in our laps. Well, we’ve got him now.”
“Au contraire,” said Karzz coolly. “In the past week, while hiding here, I took the liberty of utilizing the lab’s fine equipment. I constructed two seventieth-century devices. Only the first need concern you now...”
“Grab him, quick,” yelled Iron Man, and all the Avengers rushed forward. “We want him alive.”
But they all seized empty air, as the leering Karzz turned transparent. They could now see the new kind of belt he wore, which glowed with an eerie blue luminescence.
“A fourth-dimensional transporter,” came the fading voice of Karzz. ‘fit allows me to slip through the fourth-dimension and whisk anywhere on Earth in the wink of an eye. In a moment, I’ll be back in my undersea. dome . . . without the necessity of going past your Goliath guard at the sea-hatch door. I’ll just go through the walls, by osmosis.”
His form faded to nothingness, with a last derisive laugh.
“Goliath,” moaned the Wasp. “He’ll. be in danger, not knowing that Karzz will materialize out of thin air, behind his back...”
Dozing, but ready to awaken at the slightest noise outside the sea-hatch door, Goliath. awoke uneasily. He had the feeling that something was wrong...that someone was in the dome with him.
“Impossible,” he told himself. “Now don‘t lose your buttons over the dead silence and loneliness. You’ve got too many people to disgrace—Henry Pym, Ant-Man, and Goliath—all three of us. Keep hold of your nerves, big boy....”
“Garçon!” rang out an insulting voice. “Come up here.”
Goliath sat up so violently that he crashed his head against a low crossbeam.
“Karzz!” he gasped dizzily. “His voice came from the apex room!”
Shaking off his dizziness, Goliath raced up the nearest stairway, moving faster than any man one-tenth of his weight could. Bursting into the apex chamber, he faced the grinning alien.
“How did you get in?” roared Goliath, his mind reeling. “l sat before the sea hatch day and night...”
“What good did that do?” cackled Karzz, “when l oozed in through the wall? Now listen to this story of where I was hiding for a week. It’ll kill you.”
It very nearly did. Goliath felt as horribly shocked as the other Avengers had been when they realized how the alien had duped them with such diabolic cunning. But Goliath had noticed no force-field aura around Karzz...and he now strode forward heavily, huge hands -outstretched. “Well! He who laughs last, laughs last, I always say. I'm going to grab you and hold onto you for the next forty-five hours, it I have to, until the others get here . . . Uh?”
Goliath had stopped in mid-stride. Karzz had whipped a headband around his forehead, to which was attached a concave mirror that shone a violet-green glow into Goliath’s eyes. At the same -time, Karzz barked: “Stop, Goliath. You are under my mental control.”
Sweating and straining, Goliath tried to fight the over-whelming hypnotic force that beat at his brain. But then his body relaxed into a slump-shouldered sag, eyes blank, face wooden. Like a zombie, he intoned, “it will be done as you command, master.”
“Good,” Karzz muttered, a murderous look in his eyes. “When the other Avengers arrive, they will find the biggest and strongest Avenger blocking their Way, opposing them, fighting them. What will you do to them, Goliath?”
“I'll wade into them before they know what is happening,” recited Goliath, following unvoiced telepathic suggestions radiated by Karzz. The giant man's eyes blazed fiercely. “And then . . . I’ll kill them!”
“That is right, Goliath,” voiced Karzz in sinister glee. “Now we will wait for the schweinhunde to enter my trap.”
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