The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker (7 page)

“Worse yet,” spoke up Goliath, “we only know vaguely where each machine will operate—in the Antarctic, in the South Seas, and in the Sahara. All of those are big places if you don’t know the exact spot.”

“And for that reason,” said Cap, “we can’t turn this job over to the authorities or the military. You can’t send cops or soldiers halfway across the world to an indefinite place. This calls for specialized skills and training. Therefore, it’s a job for the Avengers only.”

“You’re not just beating your gums, Leader Man,” agreed Hawkeye. “But which of the three earth menaces do we tackle first?”

“That brings up the most significant thing,” said Iron Man thoughtfully: “that Karzz, according to the Wasp, will launch his other three earth-wreckers
simultaneously.”

“Right,” nodded Cap. “And that means we have to split up and try to stop all three at the same time, as soon as possible. Let’s see, we’ll pair off like this: Iron Man and Hawkeye to the Antarctic, Goliath and Wasp to the South Seas, and….”

“And you alone for the Sahara?” put in Hawkeye. “Come off it, Dad. Are you trying to pretend you’re as good as any two of us?”

“No, I’m also pairing off,” Cap said with a grin, “with Steve Rogers.”

“Hoo Boy,” groaned Hawkeye. “Alter-ego jokes yet.”

“Well, somebody has to go it solo,” Cap reminded him.

“But look, if any of you others finish your job soon enough, you can rush and give me a hand. Okay?”

They all nodded agreement.

“Since time is of the essence,” Cap went on, “I’ll deliver you all by rocketplane first, then I’ll head for the Sahara.” His face went grim. “But we’d better be in top condition for the most important mission in Avenger history. Take-off will be in six hours. That gives us all time for some sleep, a shower, a hot meal, and checkout of individual equipment. We’ll all take survival kits along, of course. We may be on the job for long hours, if not for days.”

He paused, his eyes going bleak.

“The giant comet that was pulled toward earth will arrive in ten days, Karzz revealed. His other three earth dooms must be timed to occur, or reach their peak, at that same date. In short, if we fail, the end of the world will come before this month is over.”

They all winced.

“The deadline of doom,” murmured Iron Man, “is what we Avengers are racing against this time.”

“And not only doom for twentieth-century earth,” Goliath reminded them, “but for all the thousands of galactic worlds in the future.”

“If we fail,” added the Wasp with a tremor in her voice, “we lose the world and Karzz wins the universe.”

“It’ll serve him right,” drawled Hawkeye. “If all the people on those twenty thousand other worlds are ornery jackasses like humans on earth, then poor Karzz will have some mess to rule over. I’d let him get away with it except for one thing….”

He paused to strike a pose. “I don’t want history to be robbed of my lifelong exploits and fabulous feats of archery. But how can I perform them in the years ahead if earth ends this month? So, between Karzz and me, Karzz has to go. I have spoken.”

“Good boy,” commended Cap. “Your banter lightened the moment, Hawkeye.”

“Banter?” The astonished bowman glared at him. “I was never more serious in my life.”

“You know,” muttered Goliath to Cap, “sometimes I don’t know if that guy is ribbing us, or not.”

Ice Menace

It was night when a sleek winged bullet rocketed southward, reeling off 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 day 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 off. 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 to 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 grunted 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 cliff 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-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.