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Chapter Six: Mountaintop Battle
Re-entry came now as they slammed into Earth’s atmosphere. The leading edges of the craft's wings began to glow cherry-red. But the molybdenum-tantalum alloy skin of the Quinjet could withstand any air-friction temperature as they slanted down toward the towering white-capped Himalayas. When aerodynamic control came back, at mere supersonic speed, Iron Man skillfully maneuvered the ship through cloud banks and mists in the mountain system to keep hidden from watching eyes on Mount Everest.
A burst of rocket power at level flight sent them gliding down into a snowfield just below the rim of Everest’s peak. They landed on the retractable skids that had been lowered, plowing up a spray of snow.
“Parkas, anyone?” asked Iron Man, pointing to the fur suits stashed in ceiling receptacles. “It’s cold outside, Well below zero.”
“I expect enough action,” said Cap grimly “to be plenty Warm.” The others nodded.
“Hawkeye and Iron Man will stay here as planned,” said Cap after they stepped out. “The other three of us will approach from three directions. Goliath and Wasp will assume their fighting forms at their own discretion. Okay, this is it....”
With an unvoiced exchange of glances that said “Good luck,” Goliath, Captain America, and the Wasp spread out a hundred yards apart and slowly advanced up toward the ramparts of the peak. They all shivered in the icy winds, but as Avengers they were inured to hardships and discomforts that would incapacitate other people.
Cautiously, they looked over the final ridge. The mighty magnet machine came into sight first, towering high and surrounded by its eerie nuclear glow. Then, as their sight came to eye level, they saw Karzz...facing them with a mocking smile, he swung his gaze to each of them.
“Dumbkopfs,” he greeted them sneeringly. “Did you think to sneak up on me unawares? My ultramonitor saw your craft approach and land. I presume you have come to play the same game Iron Man did. The game of 'Save the Earth', which you will lose.”
He waved at his monstrous machine.
“You won’t wreck my ultramagnet, which is pulling the giant comet into its proper collision course with Earth.”
“Even from yards away, they could see his frosty eyes flash defiantly.
“Five against one, but I can easily hold you off. Earth science pitted against mine is like an atom pitted against a star.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Captain America gratingly, and then he raised his voice to shout, “Avengers Assemble!”
Goliath had already assumed his giant ten-foot size, and he ran forward to pick up a huge boulder weighing at least a ton. Mighty muscles propelled it straight at Karzz, who turned to face the oncoming juggernaut without flinching.
Incredibly, striking the force-field aura in front -of him, the hard stone shattered into countless pieces.
“Yes, we know you’re shielded from the front,” came Captain America’s voice behind him. “But Goliath’s move was only to make you face that way, while I—”
Having raced across the wind-swept rock at his super-Olympic pace, Cap was already within reach. In one head-long plunge, he hurled his body straight at Karzz’s back, ready to send him off his feet with a knockout blow.
Klang!
Though Karzz had not turned, Cap’s shield met another kind of invisible shield and bounced back, nearly knocking out Cap himself.
Slowly turning, Karzz said softly, “After Iron Man taught me that I was vulnerable from the rear, naturally I fixed up my force-field shield to curve all around me. I am now invulnerable from all sides…voilà!”
His hand went to his belt. “Now, spangled Avenger, let us see if your shield can save you from my repertory of weapon rays.”
Lurid beams sprang forth—purple, red, green, blue—each carrying a different form of destruction. But Cap’s shield, coated by Anthony Stark’s inventive genius with a superalloy impervious to known forces, deflected them all. Cap drove forward again. and slammed into Karzz’s force-field aura with such muscle-driven power that Karzz—force-field and all—was shoved back several yards.
“Ach du lieber, what manner of man is that?” said Karzz, startled.
Cap was not just making a grandstand play. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Goliath lumbering toward the giant magnet. He had distracted Karzz from turning and noticing.
Reaching the machine, Goliath put his great arms around one of the steel-truss support legs and heaved mightily. Could he topple the gigantic contraption? Metal groaned as Goliath grunted, straining every massive muscle.
Karzz heard, and whirled as Captain America bounced back again from his force-shield. “Colossal fool!” shouted Karzz. “My dis-beam will turn you into a puff of nothingness.”
He touched a stud on his belt and the ray sprang forth, disintegrating rock close to Goliath.
“My next shot,” Karzz warned, “will get you....Yeow!”
The last was a pained yell as something sharp jabbed into his hand before it pressed the dis-beam button. Something tiny flew before his face, buzzing angrily.
“Some earthly stinging insect,” he muttered. Then. his eyes opened wide. “But it seems to have human form!” he gasped.
“Meet the Wasp,” shrilled a thin voice. “A member of the Avengers. I have the ability, as you can see, of shrinking to insect size.”
“But my force-shield,” said Karzz in a puzzled tone. “How did you get past it?”
“Simple,” buzzed the tiny girl. “I suspected that it’s only a half-shell, stretching down -to the ground. But where the ground is uneven, there are small crevices under the edge of the shield. I slipped through one.”
She had been hovering before his face, vibrating her gauzy wings. Now she swooped down, calling back, “I stopped you from shooting your dis-beam at my man. And now, to keep you too busy to oppose the other Avengers . . .”
A series of howls came from the alien, and he began doing a wild dance as the Wasp’s sting-ray from her wrist device stabbed him again and again, all over his body.
Seeing this, Captain America jumped up and yelled: “Hawkeye! Iron Man! The Wasp is entertaining Karzz. This is our chance to wreck his ultramagnet. Come on.”
Hawkeye and Iron Man came charging, grinning at the cavorting figure of Karzz, trapped with the tiny stinging girl inside his own protective energy shell. Cap joined them, and they raced up to where Goliath was still heaving away but unable to overturn the huge machine.
“Karzz has only a flat shield above it,” said Iron Man, pointing to where another meteor, drawn down by magnetism, spanged off the force-field there. “He has no complete shell around. it, as with himself. That means we can wreck the unshielded machine from down here.”
With that, Iron Man rheostated up his transistorized power and shot a thin laser-beam from a finger of his right-hand gauntlet. The beam began slicing through steel struts as if through butter.
Hawkeye was already joyfully pulling an arrow from his quiver. “Watch the blast arrow do its stuff,” he sang, letting fly, whizzing between struts into the heart of the machine, the bulbous tip of the arrow exploded violently, shattering wires and causing short-circuit sparks.
Unable to help directly in the destruction, Captain America pointed out key sections of the machine for Iron Man and Hawkeye to aim for. “And keep "heaving, Goliath,” he called out. “The whole structure is weakening fast.”
With one last Herculean effort, the man-mountain lifted one support leg clear of the ground. Then, as Iron Man burned through a connecting cable, Goliath yanked the entire leg away.
“Timber!” yelled Cap, and they all scurried back, as the towering machine began to sway and slowly topple. It crashed full length with a resounding thud that shook the whole mountain. Electric discharges flashed. through the wreckage.
“I guess the stinging party is over,” sang out the Wasp, flitting down under the edge of Karzz’s force-shell and rejoining the other Avengers. “Good work, boys. No more supermagnetic force is pulling that giant comet toward Earth.”
“No, but it doesn’t matter...now,” snarled Karzz, approaching and rubbing the bumps the Wasp had raised on his face with her stinger. “I neglected to inform you that my ultramagnet needed only ten more minutes of operation since you arrived to pull the comet into an unalterable collision course with Earth, at top speed.”
He grinned devilishly. “And our battle took eleven minutes before you wrecked it. In other words, Avengers, you failed to stop the approaching Earth doom. To quote from Earth’s French language...c’est la guerre.”
The Avengers looked at each other, dismayed. Karzz had held the trump card. after all.
“But just why are you here to destroy Earth?” queried Captain America.
“Yes,” said Iron Man. “Yon boasted to me that you were Karzz the Conqueror, and spoke of the many galactic worlds that fell to you. Why are you switching from conquest to destruction of Earth?”
“You may as well hear my story, since you can’t stop me anyway,” answered Karate, his frosty eyes mocking them. “I am from your future, some five thousand years from now. Call it the seventieth century, by earth reckoning. My home world, in that future time, was in the solar system of the star you call. Vega. First, as a master-mind of warfare, I conquered, my own planet and people. Then, building a space warfleet, I swept out and took over all of our solar system. But even that did not satisfy me.”
He waved an arm dramatically, as if to include the universe.
“I organized an inter-galactic fleet of war rockets and drove out among the nearby stars. World after world fell before me and became part of my grand cosmic empire. At each planet it was veni, vidi, vici.”
“I came, I saw, I conquered,” murmured Iron Man, as it he were in school.
“Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler were pikers compared to you,” said Hawkeye. “Throw in Genghis Khan too.”
Ignoring him, the alien Warlord went on. “In time, spreading out from my corner of the .Milky Way, I ruled half the galaxy---a total of ten thousand inhabited worlds.”
“Ten thousand Worlds?” murmured Cap in awe. It was on a scale so vast the human mind could hardly comprehend it.
“I was still young,” continued Karzz, “and my ambition was no less than conquest of the entire galaxy with its twenty thousand inhabited planets—but something blocked my plans.”
“Aha!” spoke up Hawkeye. “You ran into a world tougher than yours, with a warfleet you couldn’t lick, eh?”
“Jawohl,” spat out Karzz, his face darkening. “This other world had a technology superior to my own. They had superscience weapons that decimated my fleet, crushed my power, and smashed my hard-won empire.”
“That world,” whispered Cap, suddenly drawing in his breath...“was it called—Earth?”
The others started, in blinding insight.
