by Len Wein
“What are you doing?” Jan asked.
“Trying to pinpoint Ultron’s location. He’s waiting for us out there. And jamming my sensors.”
“Don’t you want to know how I got here?” Jan asked.
“Um. The stork,” Iron Man said deadpan, shifting his gaze from side to side across the ceiling.
“No. I mean here! I decided that I was going to guard Wanda whether she liked it or not, so I got small and sneaked into the Vision’s and her room. I almost caught them at a very bad time, if you know what I mean! Oh, I would have been so embarrassed! Anyway, I hid in Wanda’s glove, and I guess I fell asleep and next thing I know I got a big electric shock . . . and that really put me out, and finally I woke up here and saw you in troub . . .”
“Wasp. I love you. But shut up!”
Abruptly, Iron Man turned his gaze toward the breach in the blockhouse wall. Ultron stood just inside the hole, poised to deal death to the fugitive Avengers!
Instinctively, Iron Man leaped as Ultron fired, no enervating ray this time, but a searing bolt that all at once shattered and melted the massive crane. His desperate leap carried him clear of the ray but huge, red-hot fragments of debris battered him like pile drivers. Dazed, he still twisted to protect Wanda as he fell.
He landed hard. Wanda tumbled from his grasp and lay sprawled on the floor. On one hand and both knees, Iron Man struggled to regain his equilibrium, but Ultron stood poised again to obliterate him.
At that moment the huge steel double doors burst inward, twisted into scrap by a single thunderous blow from an Uru mallet.
“Avengers Assemble!” Captain America shouted, leaping over the debris, leading the charge at Ultron. Hawkeye and Thor followed close behind. The Vision, hardly visible in his intangible state veered off and flew through the various machines and debris in his path toward Wanda. Landing, he knelt and solidified, and cradled Wanda’s head against his chest.
“Good to see you,” Iron Man said weakly, still on his knees.
“We were certain you were dead. Then the signal came on again,” the Vision said.
“Oh, I’m alive, all right. But, you know . . . I don’t . . . feel so good.” The armored man slumped forward, half lying down on his side. “Just got to rest . . . just a minute.”
Meanwhile, a hundred feet away a warhead arrow exploded noisily but harmlessly against Ultron’s chest. In reply, Ultron fired his searing blast beam, not at Hawkeye, but at Thor, who narrowly parried it with his spinning hammer.
“He’s ignoring us,” Hawkeye said aloud to no one, anger blazing in his eyes, “and going for Thor!”
With dazzling speed, Hawkeye nocked and pulled two more warhead arrows firing them simultaneously, blasting away the concrete beneath Ultron’s feet.
“You will pay!” Ultron shrieked as his footing gave way and he fell forward.
“For Midgard!” shouted Thor. Momentarily free of Ultron’s withering fire, he hurled Mjolnir with force beyond reckoning. The shock of the impact shook the island and caused the muddy river to overspill its banks, while the earsplitting crash of metal against metal, mystic Uru against impregnable Adamantium, momentarily deafened all human ears within the blockhouse.
“Odin’s beard!” Thor said, stunned. “The monster doth endure e’en yet!”
Only a small dent in Ultron’s chest marked the point of impact, though it had driven him back half the breadth of the room and deep into the reinforced concrete floor. As the hammer returned to Thor’s hand, Ultron leaped vengefully to the attack.
“Your worst cannot injure me, Thunder God! Now feel the naked power of Ultron without your vaunted hammer to protect you.”
From nowhere, Captain America leaped in front of Ultron, taking with his shield the full fury of Ultron’s blast beam, reflecting most of the force back against Ultron himself. Ultron staggered back a step, but Captain America was bowled over.
“Meddling insect!” Ultron reached a huge, deadly hand toward Cap.
A bolo arrow whizzed down from above, its weighted bolas wrapping Ultron in flexible steel cables. With a shrug he snapped them like so much string, but by then Cap had rolled out of reach.
From his vantage point high in the rafters, Hawkeye followed with a fusillade of arrows, each precisely on target, one coating Ultron with blinding, clinging smoke, others exploding in the very sockets of his eyes, still others emitting sonic and electronic jamming.
Ultron endured it all, undamaged, but angered beyond comprehension. Behind him, he felt Captain America prying with his shield at a plate on his back. The robot whirled to smash this brazen flea, but somehow missed and Captain America was behind him again, slamming his shield edge first into the armor’s seams.
“Come, Demon, let us match strength ’gainst strength!” said Thor, suddenly leaping forward to grapple with Ultron.
“The fires of fusion burn within me, Asgardian!” shrieked Ultron. “The strength of a hydrogen bomb harnessed is mine! You claim to be a god . . . but you are merely flesh! Ultron is supreme!”
The building shook with the sheer power of the struggle. The floor cracked and crumbled beneath their feet as they strove against it for leverage.
“Thou dost weaken, machine! Thou fallest back!” cried Thor. “Behold how thy might doth pale beside the Bringer of Storms!”
“I see only how easily you are tricked, fool,” cackled Ultron, as searing energy lanced from his glowing eyes, striking Thor full in the face.
“Mine eyes! I cannot see!” Thor’s grip faltered momentarily and Ultron broke free, raising his ultra-hard fists to bring down a death blow.
“Cheat!” a tiny voice screamed. The Wasp stung again.
“Arrgh! You again!” Ultron swatted wildly at the elusive winged woman.
“And I,” said the Vision. The hatred in his words chilled the blood. “I have taken my wife to safety.” He stalked menacingly toward Ultron, his mass and density increased to their ultimate, his strength at its awesome peak. “And now, I will suffer your existence no longer.”
His fists, far harder than diamonds and weighing tons, slammed Ultron’s body. The robot struck back, trading blow for blow.
“Help him!” Cap yelled. “He can’t do it alone!”
Thor, his sight slowly returning, struck with his hammer. The Wasp stung yet again. Captain America battered Ultron’s head with his shield.
Up in the rafters, Hawkeye looked down and felt useless. His arrows were gone.
“Great,” he muttered. “Without arrows I’m just another guy in a funny suit. How can I . . .”
Suddenly he noticed that Iron Man had picked himself up and was standing near a large vat in the center of the room, staring at the seething incandescent mass within, being kept molten by concentrated laser fire. He looked up and Hawkeye saw the urgency in his eyes. And Hawkeye caught the drift.
Below, in a paroxysm of fury, Ultron shook off his besiegers and raging, raked them with his enervator and his blast ray at once. Though reeling, Captain America shielded himself and the Wasp, Thor spun his hammer for protection and the diamond-hard Vision, near invulnerable, simply endured the deadly broadside.
A two-ton lathe flew across the room and thundered into Ultron from behind.
“You!” he said, whirling to see Iron Man standing just beyond the vat, ripping up yet another huge machine to throw. “You are the cause of this disruption of my plans!” He hurled himself toward the Armored Avenger.
Ultron’s steel-rending fingers were but inches from Iron Man’s throat when suddenly a blue-and-purple blur swung down from the rafters on a severed electrical cable and slammed hard, feet first, into the robot’s midsection.
Taken by surprise, Ultron lurched sideways crashing into the reinforced side of the vat, tumbling over the edge and into the churning liquid Adamantium. As he bounced off Ultron, Hawkeye’s momentum carried him, as well, toward the vat and death.
But a spinning shield whizzed through the air slamming into his back inches from the l
aser fire. The impact pushed him away from the vat and into Iron Man’s arms.
A bellow of anger came from within the vat. Ultron, unharmed by the 15,000-degree-Celsius heat thrashed about wildly in the molten metal, struggling for purchase against the vat’s Adamantium lining.
“Thor! The lasers!”
Without knowing why, Thor heeded Iron Man’s words, and in a split second mighty Mjolnir had shattered the bank of lasers above the vat.
As its heat source fell in useless shards, almost instantly, the temperature of the flux-phase Adamantium plunged below the critical 15,000°C.
And it hardened.
There was sudden, shocking silence.
The Avengers gathered at the side of the vat. A still-glowing-hot amorphous mass was cooling inside.
“What . . . happened to Ultron?” Jan asked.
“Nothing,” said Iron Man. “The vat was just a warm bath for him. He’s alive and well . . . as alive as he ever was, anyway. But because we cooled the flux-phase Adamantium before he could scramble out . . .”
“He’s stuck!” Hawkeye laughed. “Trapped inside that giant glob of Adamantium till Doomsday! Like a fly in amber! There’s only one thing wrong.”
“What’s that?” Iron Man asked.
“My back is killing me. Why did vou have to whack me so hard with that stupid Frisbee, Cap?”
“You deserved it. That was some boneheaded play, Barton.” Cap smiled.
“Yeah. But it beat what I had in mind,” said Iron Man. “I figured I’d have to dive into the vat and drag Ultron with me. It was stupid, Hawk, but I’m real glad you did it.”
“Well, I was feeling a little . . . Hey, it’s just . . . I’ve been shootin’ off my big mouth as usual lately, and I said a couple things . . . Look, I just thought it was time to put my money where my mouth was.” Hawkeye turned away from the others and started for the door, one hand rubbing his back. “Besides, I like making you bozos look like pikers.”
Moments later, somewhere in Brittany, Ultron’s drone robot ceased to function in the midst of a pitched battle with French armed forces, as Iron Man and the Vision shattered its remote-control computer in Ultron’s Neville Island base. And the threat of the Evil Undying passed once again.
For now.
DAREDEVIL
BLIND JUSTICE
by KYLE CHRISTOPHER
Murdock came awake in the dark suddenly, muscles tensed and nerves like piano wire. Had there been a sound? Perhaps. Or perhaps it had been only that his unique hearing had awakened before the rest of him, to pick out a small meaningless noise from miles away and carry it back down the long tunnel of sleep to where it was translated into something else, something that seemed at first quite urgent but was immediately forgotten.
He sat up quickly, suddenly open to all things, as if all his pores were senses. He felt the slight dip of the mattress at the base of his spine and the gentle tug of the satin sheets—they had been a gift from Karen—as they snagged once on his callused feet before he kicked them away. But when he swung his feet to the floor, his soles came down softly. He could estimate how far they sank into the deep pile of the carpet and be accurate to within a centimeter.
His hand reached the bedside radio unerringly and snapped on the morning news. It was not a clock radio. He had no use for clocks. As soon as he had awakened, he had known from the taste of the air that it was nearing eight o’clock. Now he had a sensation of waves creeping out from somewhere behind his eyes. The waves lapped against the sliding door that opened onto the balcony and carried back the flat hardness of plain glass: he had forgotten to draw the blinds last night. He felt warmth and knew that he would not need a heavy jacket today, but the smell of ozone in the air meant he should carry a light raincoat for later. He stood in his darkness and let the sunlight warm him for a moment.
It took him less than ten seconds to reach the bathroom. He did not count steps. He did not touch the walls.
He enjoyed shaving. He liked the coldness of the razor’s handle, the tickle in his palm before the aerosol propellant gave way to the thick wetness. He took pleasure in the feel of that wetness on his face and the dull scraping of the blade against his cheek.
There was no mirror above the sink.
He chose the navy pinstripe and the maroon four-in-hand. The touch of maroon was vaguely unsettling to him. There was something of Karen in it that he couldn’t place. But there was nothing else on the tie rack that would have complimented the navy. The other ties that might have served were being cleaned.
He skipped breakfast; he wasn’t all that hungry. It was just as well. He should have been at the office an hour ago. There was an amicus curiae he had to file this morning. The paperwork was to have been finished last night, but there had been more . . . pressing concerns. He smiled at the thought. He remembered being pressed against the side of the Tishman Building, sixteen floors up, the large stainless-steel studs that adorned the building’s façade grinding into his chest and stomach like an oversized hobnail boot.
He strode rapidly through the short hallway, almost deafened by the squeak of his new shoes. What dreadful, man-made substance had they come up with this time to replace leather soles? He remembered throwing out four pairs of Corfam loafers the same day he bought them because he couldn’t stand the plastic smell. He briefly considered exchanging the new loafers for a pair of housebroken Hush-Puppies, then remembered his plans for the evening, and realized that his noisy soles might be useful.
The briefcase was in his hand and the door was open before he realized he had forgotten “the shades” again. On those days, all too rare lately, when his partner managed to get up on the right side of the bed, his standard greeting was: “Hey! You with the shades!” He returned to the bedroom and took the dark glasses from the night table, entertaining a silly thought as he felt them settle on the bridge of his nose: Is that You-Know-Who behind those Foster Grants?
He returned to the hall, picked up the briefcase again, and slung his raincoat over one shoulder. He took the cane from the corner coatrack with his free hand and hooked it over his wrist. There was no one in the hall; he could wait until he reached the street before pretending to use the cane.
The tip of the cane had once been white, but now the paint had all but worn away completely. He really didn’t care, but he supposed he should do something about it, for the sake of appearances. Yes, appearances. The cane, the glasses, these were just conventions . . . window dressing . . . concessions to other people’s notions of what he was. And, of course, they were wrong.
In the kingdom of Matthew Murdock, the one-eyed man was a pretender to the throne.
He was something less than sighted, and something more than blind. Blind—he hated the word. Blind alley . . . blind curve . . . blind spot . . . blind impulse . . . So many vivid images conjured up by the word for having no images, all of them pictures of danger or dread or dubiousness. All of them terms for undesirable things—words for less than. But Murdock’s blindness made him more than.
No one but he knew this, of course. To those he passed on the street he was no doubt just another wretched blind man, his fragile cane groping before him, stealing parcels of empty space through which he could pass untouched and unharmed. Just another blind man. A consolation, he imagined, to homeless old women whose lives were stuffed into shopping bags. Here, thank God, was someone less fortunate than they. What would they make of the Cardin suit or the Vuitton briefcase? There’s where his money goes, poor thing. Better he should get himself a guide dog.
It was on the occasional morning like this one, when he would forgo the taxi or the subway and walk the fourteen blocks to his office, that he could allow himself these images of how he supposed strangers saw him. He marveled that others of his kind—or those somewhat like him, for who else but he had his extraordinary gifts?—had more than enough time to fill their sightless worlds with daydream pictures.
For his own daydream time, he had only these morning walks. And the
y were enough. His world was rich with images. Sounds, smells, tastes, the feel of moisture on his skin, the slight cooling of his forehead when the sun passed behind a cloud—his mind’s eye turned all of them into crude pictures, rendering them in a kind of visual code the key to which was known only to him. Things that were perceived dimly at best by the world around him were sharpened to a unique clarity in Matt Murdock. He recognized old friends by the rhythm of their heartbeats, as distinct and individual as fingerprints. He could note changes in a man’s galvanic skin response from a distance of one hundred feet. The pressure of each cubic centimeter against his body was as perceptible to him as the crush of fellow passengers in a crowded elevator.
But the walks were intended only to admit the daydreams, and he allowed them only rarely. In the absence of a case that broke all precedent and engaged his imagination, or any problem that demanded sustained concentration, moving about New York streets in civilian clothes could take on a nightmarish aspect. Indeed, his daydreams were all that kept the city from drowning him in a sensory tide.
Turning east at Columbus Circle, he sensed a traffic jam where Seventh Avenue fed into the circle. He heard the tempo of the footsteps ahead of him change subtly: there was a brief pause before they resumed, sounding different. There was a curb up ahead, and the pause indicated that people were hesitating a moment before continuing, ignoring the “Don’t Walk” sign. The traffic didn’t seem to be moving much. Suddenly he heard a screech of brakes. No thud. No one hurt. Good.
But he could never hear brakes squeal like that without being reminded of a day he’d spent almost twenty years trying to forget. It was his last day of sight.
How different it might have been for him if those brakes had held. He might have sacrificed his life, or at the very least the cultivation of his mind, on the altar of his old man’s failed ambition. All his childhood friends knew as he did the sound of their father’s shuffling footsteps on the stairs at three A.M. They all knew the things the Old Man did to cope, to forget the dreams that didn’t have the good grace to die without a struggle. But the other boys in the neighborhood knew their fathers’ despair by the smell of stale smoke and whiskey. Young Matt knew it by the smell of stale sweat and liniment.
