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

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 Karzz, 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 mastermind of warfare, I conquered my own planet and people. Then, building a space war fleet, 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 if 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 war fleet 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.

chapter 7
    Four Earth Dooms
    “Da,” said Karzz, like a Russian, in an intense voice. “It was your own earth of the seventieth century, five thousand years from now, that did—or will—smash my drive for galactic domination.” He glared at them with infinite hatred. “You are the ancestors of the future earthians who are destined to be my stumbling block. It is the human race alone that could stand in my way.”
    “So you have come back in time merely for revenge against us?” said Cap, shaking his head. “Because our far-future descendants licked you, you’ve come to give us a bad time.”
    “Nein,” Karzz came back sharply. “I would hardly be that trivial in my aims. Don’t you understand? If I destroy earth of the twentieth century, it will never exist in the seventieth century. Its powerful war fleet and titanic superweapons won’t be there to oppose me. So, when I return to the future, my conquest of the galaxy will succeed, where it failed before.”
    The Avengers stood stunned at the enormity of the concept.
    “But that’s changing history,” protested Cap. “How can you tamper with inexorable fate that way? If earth did exist in the future and did defeat you, how can that event be wiped out? Once a thing has happened, it can’t…well, it can’t unhappen.”
    Karzz sneered, as though he were talking to children. “Of course your primitive minds know nothing of science to come, and future discoveries about branching time. Let me try to explain as I would to bambinos.”
    He drew a breath and went on. “At any crossroads in history, such as the outcome of a war, two different acts of destiny can occur, naturally. If the war is won by one side, their “real’ world goes on. The other outcome, where the war is lost, is merely a branch of destiny that never really occurs. Nicht wahr?”
    “An ‘if’ world,” nodded Cap, “or a ‘parallel’ world.”
    “But if you travel back in time,” pursued Karzz, “and alter the