by Otto Binder
“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-coldblooded 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, windswept 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 feet wide. What kind of icemobile could be that big?”
They saw the answer soon, following 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 longrange 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 electromagnetic 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 teletransported 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 per cent 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 nonmountainous 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 half 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 Infrared 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 a 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 yard-wide stain all around. A bubbling hiss arose, but as the moments passed the fumes danced away impotently.
“All it did was clean dirt off 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 the broken glacier.
“I—I don’t believe it,” gasped Iron Man, in devastating 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 to eliminate you two. You annoy me, like mosquitoes.”
The huge machine suddenly wheeled around and headed straight for a small figure standing unprotected in 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?
chapter 9
Sunken Sabotage
Meanwhile, Captain America was driving the rocketplane away from the South Pacific. He had left Goliath and the Wasp on a centrally located island, whence their search for the third earth doom would begin.
As the speck disappeared in the blue skies, the Wasp turned to Goliath. “What a search we’ve got ahead of us, High Pockets! There are hundreds of islands, small and large, in this group. On which one is Karzz the Conqueror operating?”
“He’s probably not even here yet,” Goliath answered. “Remember that on our flight here, Cap picked up Iron Man’s radio call, telling how they had found Karzz there with his Infrared Beamer. So he can hardly be here with his Vulcan Machine.”
“Then that means we have to wait for him,” said the girl, happily. “In that case, Big Blue Eyes, why don’t we pitch a little woo?”
Her arms encircled him and her lips drew close to his, temptingly. But his lips began to move upward, out of reach.
“Oh, you spoiler!” she pouted. “Why did you shoot up to your ten-foot size and frustrate me?”
“Because this isn’t the time or place for the Romeo and Juliet bit,” retorted the giant. “After all, we’re on Avenger business.”
“Oh, fine!” said the disappointed girl. “You and your sense of duty! Here we are alone on a desert isle—well, a tropical isle—and what’s on your mind? Anything but romantic thought. Sometimes I could kick you, Henry Pym.”
“You couldn’t reach that high,” said Goliath with a grin. Then he became serious. “Listen, Wasp. It’s possible that Karzz came here first, before going to Antarctica, and left the Vulcan Machine operating under automatic or remote controls. So our hunt should begin immediately. That’s why there’s no time for moonlight and roses.”
“Okay,” sighed the girl. “What’s the plan?”
Goliath was now shrinking back to human size, but he didn’t stop there. “Shrink down with me, Wasp,” he called from her knee. “In insect size, we can visit the islands one by one and find out what’s cooking in the alien’s pot.”
Willing herself to reduce, the girl also began shrinking until both of them stood in a towering forest—of grass.
Almost immediately, a lumbering tiger-beetle charged them from under a rock.
“Look out!” yelled the Wasp.
The tiny Ant-Man, with the strength of a Goliath, met the charge with a swinging fist that cracked the beetle on its snout. It paused dizzily. This gave the Ant-Man time to grasp its hard shell at one side and heave mightily. The beetle flipped over on its back, helplessly waving its legs in the air.
“Have fun working your way upright,” said the miniature Goliath. He turned to the Wasp-girl. “You can shoot out wings at will and fly, but I need a flying steed of the insect world, like the Flying Ant I once used.”
He pointed upward. “And why not a classy type like the one up on that flower?”
Above them, a butterfly drank of the blossom’s nectar, its gauzy wings slowly opening and closing, oblivious to the world in its ecstasy of feasting. Putting a finger to his lips, Ant-Man began climbing the stalk of a nearby flower that towered higher than where his quarry perched.
When he reached the topmost blossom, he stood on the petals and leaped, straight down onto the butterfly’s back. Like a bucking bronco, the startled butterfly flapped into the air, twisting and darting wildly.
“You won’t shake me off,” sang out the Ant-Man, his legs straddling its thorax and his hands holding onto the edge of its carapace. After the butterfly had exhausted itself, the micro-man reached and seized its two feathery antennae at the base, letting them slide through his hands until he gripped the ends tightly.
“My reins,” he called down. “The butterfly will be sensitive to the slightest pull right or left and turn that way.”
He demonstrated, making the butterfly turn gracefully into an immelmann turn and then zig-zag gently on even keel.
The Wasp now came flying alongside under her own power.
“If it were a horsefly,” she said in a tinkling voice, “you’d be a horseman. What are you on a butterfly—a butterman?”
The Ant-Man smiled wanly. “Nice try, Wasp. But I can’t be cheered up. There’s too much at stake here. Now, let’s go. There’s nothing suspicious on this island, so it’s on to the next one.”
Guiding his gaily colored mount upward, the Ant-Man headed for a nearby island, with the Wasp pacing him. A prevailing breeze increased their speed and blew them swiftly across the intervening waters.
They circled over the small atoll, finding it barren of any human habitation or any man-made structure.
“We drew a blank here,” said the Ant-Man. “On to the next island…and the next….”
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They lost count of the tropical isles they visited, some inhabited by natives, some thriving with modem industry, but none of them harboring the slightest sign of an alien machine at work.
They had no survival kits along, for they could not have reduced those to tiny size. But they drank of flower nectars, sweet and satisfying. And when tired, they slept for a short time snugly in tulip-like blossoms, cushioned with soft pollen. All the Avengers had trained themselves to do without sleep for longer stretches of time than other people could endure.
Feeding his butterfly mount at a lily-like “drinking trough,” the Ant-Man felt discouraged. “Are we on a wild-goose chase trying to locate our alien friend?”
Flying over the next island, they looked down into a crater. “Many of these islands are volcanic in origin,” he pointed out. “Very few are live volcanoes, however. This one is deader than a doornail….”
BLAMMMM!
At that moment, with a deafening blast, the supposedly dead volcano split open and erupted flame and smoke.
“Quick!” gasped the Ant-Man. “Fly higher.”
Gaining altitude, they escaped the molten lava discharge that now scorched through the air and showered the surrounding waters with fiery sparks.
The Ant-Man jerked his winged steed around as another blast sounded to the north. “Another volcano erupting,” he said, and then stared incredulously. One after another, a string of volcanic islands stretching into the distance blew their tops.
“Great heavens!” cried the Wasp. “It’s as if a string of firecrackers were being set off.”
“Right,” yelled back the Ant-Man above the thunderous din. “And set off by…Karzz, the Conqueror!”
