The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder Read Free Book Online Page A

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 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. “You boasted to me that you were Karzz the Conqueror, and spoke of the many galactic worlds that fell to