Post by Admin on Aug 21, 2022 11:58:11 GMT
Summer, 1941: A New Look
Bruce King looked around his lab at all the instruments and fabrication machinery, most of which he had constructed and invented himself. ‘As a teenager fascinated by radio waves, I would NEVER have believed I’d ever be interested in semiconductor physics!' he thought in wonder. 'But when I read the papers of Lilienfeld and Heil I realized that if the devices they described actually worked, I could make my own inventions both smaller and more powerful, I became obsessed.' He laid his hand fondly on one of the devices. 'With my semiconductor fabricator, I can actually create the transistors that those two geniuses only theorized!'
He turned back to a small plastic board, about the size of a postcard, lying on a workbench. It was covered with electronic components on top, their leads stuck through small holes drilled through the thin plastic, while the bottom was covered with a myriad of tiny insulated wires running from one component lead to the other. Still more wires connected a small, flat battery pack from one end of the board and a long flat cable connected to a bulky bracer.
'I’ve replaced all the valves…' (which was another word for ‘vacuum tubes’ at the time) '…in my luggable Black Zero transmitter with transistors, which also allowed me to totally remove the bulky vacuum tube heater circuitry and lowered the power requirements by almost 94% – and… Voila! This bundle of components and wires…' he touched a box the size of a small suitcase which had a panel of switches and dials along one side, then moved back to the plastic board. '… becomes…' As he expounded in his head, he placed the battery pack into a flat oval-shaped container the size of a saucer for a coffee cup, carefully arranged the plastic board next to it, with the flat cables passing through a slot, in the side, fastened everything into place to mounts already attached to the inside of the box, and then firmly fastened on a cover. “...Ta DAH! The new transistorized Black Zero Transmitter!” he triumphantly spoke that last part aloud.
He removed his lounging robe, revealing a bare torso and dark blue, almost black, one-piece tights with attached boots. There was a belt mounted to the oval container; he donned the belt so that the transmitter was held firmly against the small of his back, he arranged the cable to lay flat against his back and then run down to his is right wrist, then he pulled on a skin-tight long sleeve blue top which held the pack and cables firmly in place. 'That took more work than I expected!' he thought in minor dismay. 'I'll have to attach the cable to the inside of the costume somehow in the future! Well, I never expected to get EVERYTHING perfect on the first try!' He slipped the bracer over his right wrist, then pulled on blue gloves and a blue cowl that left the bottom of his face bare, then struck an admittedly cheesy heroic pose.
'With all the improvements I’ve made to the Black Zero transmitter,' he thought proudly, 'I think I’ll adopt an improved name, too.'
Still, he ought to do some testing first… he remembered how he had almost frozen himself solid when he had first discovered the Zero rays, radio waves in the incredibly short 2 x 10-16 cm band that totally cancel heat radiation, producing regions where the temperature could almost instantly drop to absolute Zero, or when he had cautiously applied minimal power to his Blackout transmitter, but a carelessly soldered connection had snapped, dumping full power into that device, and the high powered radio waves of the even shorter band at 6 x 10-17 cm had totally cancelled light waves in a pillar that enveloped his entire house and extended as high into the sky as the eye could see. It was lucky he’d achieved full control over his invention by the time he’d discovered that the shortest band of all, at 6.02 x 10-24 cm, totally cancelled gravity! He might have ended up on the moon before he’d even realized he was leaving Earth! So even though he wanted to rush right out and commit some heroic deeds, he took a few minutes to give his equipment a trial run.
With his left hand, he touched a dial oh his belt – and a black cone-shaped beam flashed out from the bracer on his right. It spread until it was about a foot wide where it touched the ceiling; he knew his Blackout radio waves easily passed through the ceiling, and there was now a cone of darkness shooting upward from his roof that got gradually wider and became less dark the further it reached.
'The Blackout ray works just fine,' he exulted. ‘Let’s test the power and the collimation!'
He rolled first one knob and then another. The beam because less cone shaped, not spreading out at all by the time it reached the ceiling, and he knew it would spread barely an inch in a thousand miles, if he turned the power up enough. As he turned the power down, he could see the beam fade away before it reached the ceiling at all.
'Perfect! Now the Zero ray.'
He pointed his right arm at a pitcher of water in the sink and touched another control – and the water in the pitcher froze so fast it shattered! He carefully rolled another dial, and he could feel the room temperature drop around him.
“If the Zero band wasn’t so dangerous, I could get rich by making air conditioners!” he joked aloud. Actually it was something he thought about fairly often on those two or three days a year when the temperature in Portsmouth, NH, got above 85o.
“Last test!”
He touched another control, set fairly far away on the belt from the Blackout and Zero controls, rose into the air, then floated cautiously around the room, changing directions by pointing his right arm, then set down again.
He was satisfied. He headed towards the door, and as he stepped outside, he announced to the world around him: “It’s Black Zero, the King of Darkness. Time to watch my smoke!”
*****
Who is this mighty hero, Black Zero, the King of Darkness, you ask? And how did he come to be?
The King of Darkness had first appeared in public only last summer (you can read his first case in the next post in this thread, here: Introducing the King of Darkness, or read the original in Amazing Man Comics #24, October 1941, starting on page 36). He had captured 3 notorious spies in his first case and he'd had a number of others, and in Portsmouth New Hampshire and nearby Kerry, Maine, he'd become quite famous, and sighting the tremendous 'Pillar of Darkness' that often accompanied his exploits sweeping down the street or even flashing through the air was no longer a cause for panic among the local citizens. Though Police Commision Jasperson still thought of him as a wanted man, most of the local police welcomed his appearances.
He was in the good graces of United States Naval Intelligence for capturing a foreign submarine that had attempted to sink a British battleship which had just undergone repairs in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in nearby Kerry, Maine (see Amazing Man Comics #25, November 1941, starting on page 45), and he was even getting some national press for his rescue of famous Hollywood actress and pinup girl Gloria Glamour, who had been kidnapped from the Maine coast on-location movie production on the of "It's a Date". And he'd started a romance with Gloria, to boot! (see Amazing Man Comics #26, December 1941, starting on page 38)
And then had come the war, and he'd quickly proved effective against Axis spies who were plotting to destroy the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and he'd even solved police cases in Boston and New York, so he had an in with the FBI, too!
But his famous 'Pillar of Darkness' was quickly becoming his greatest weakness. His allies and his enemies were all closing in on discovering his true identity, merely by observing where the Pillar was most often sighted... and some underworld genius had discovered the secret of seeing in the darkness he created, and that guy had sold that secret to the deadly Red Gang that was terrorizing the Portsmouth area, and probably other mobs as well. So it was more than time for a change in his MO, and along with that change, why not a change in his heroic identity?
*****
Bruce King listened to the morning news on WPRT as he made breakfast, a 'loaded' omelet, toast slathered with butter and strawberry jam, and very strong tea. "Police in St. Louis yesterday reported another missing person, Sherman Leonard, the lead engineer for St. Louis's largest radio station, KSTL. This is the 4th similar disappearance of the chief engineer from a prominent radio station in a big city in the past 2 weeks. The FBI theorizes that these disappearances may be the work of some foreign power that wants to keep America out of the War, by disrupting the operation of stations where the the Editorial stance is that the US drop the current policy of neutrality and immediately enter the war on the side of the England and France." The announcer paused and listeners could hear him shuffling papers, then... "The FBI has no further leads at this time."
"All four of those missing men are members of the SREE!" Bruce thought. "I wonder if there's more to this than some 'stay out of the war' action?" Bruce was also a member of the Society of Radio and Electronic Engineers (SREE®) though he hadn't been to a meeting in several years. "I'll mention it to Boston FBI Chief Ashley Zimmer the next time I talk to him as Black Zero. Can't see why being an SREE member might be a reason for trouble, but these days, you never know..."
*****
Late that night, in his otherwise empty brownstone home on Beacon Street in Boston, National Director of the SREE Dr. Michael Gazeele sat alone in his study, reading an article in the SREE Journal on 'frequency hopping' in radio transmitters and receivers. Though the author had submitted under a pseudonym, Michael knew that the name was a pen for, surprisingly, one of Hollywood's most famous and glamorous actresses. Near his pencil cup on the corner of the desk, he'd placed his latest knick-knack, a small, somewhat bizarre idol seemingly carved of solid jade, that he had only received today in the mail from an anonymous sender.
It took several seconds for a faint hissing from the idol to catch his attention, and then he swiveled his head to look. A cloud of green vapor was issuing from the idol. Alarmed, he pushed his chair violently back away from the desk and tried to get up and rush from the room, but it was too late - instead of rising from the chair, he fell to the floor unconscious. A figure wearing a handkerchief mask over his mouth opened the door and cautiously entered the room, then quickly dragged the unconscious body roughly out the door, meanwhile gloating aloud: "The booby-trapped idol Subducto sent him worked perfectly! The boss will be mighty glad to see this guy!"
*****
Gazeele awakened to discover that he was strapped to a very uncomfortable chair, though that was the least of his worries at the moment. He was in a room filled with fantastic apparatus, resembling nothing more than the lab of a mad scientist from a recent "B" monster move. A few feet in front of him, he looked up and could see a curved polished metal dish, several feet across, with a conical projection in the center ending in a sphere the size of a 9" softball, aimed at his head. This dish was set on the end of a sturdy tube; the tube as mounted to swivel on top of an even thicker pillar which stuck out of a metal box, one face of which was a control panel studded with switches, knobs, dials and gauges. Next to the pillar on top of the box were a pair of tall, thin antennae. Standing in front of the control panel was a bald man, once tall but now with a pronounced hunched back, with a white handle bar mustache and short, pointed white beard, his face deeply lined, his features twisted in malignant triumph.
"Greetings, my esteemed colleague," he spoke in a sneering tone, his voice high pitched and whiney. "I am extremely flattered to have you present to witness one of my humble experiments!" The sarcasm almost literally dripped from his voice.
"Who are you? You look familiar, but I can't place you. What do you want with me?" Gazeele asked urgently. "You had better let me go!"
"I no longer use my original name, which I barely remember, but I am now known as Subducto!" the other replied. "Years ago, you expelled me from the SREE. You and the other fools on the Ethics Panel disapproved of my experiments on humans, but I will have the last laugh. Behold! The Subduction Ray!"
Subducto twisted a rheostat violent through its full range and jammed it into the far stop, laughed an evil laugh when the needle on one of the gauges leaped off the left pin and quickly swept across the dial into the green region. Sparks jumped between the antennae with loud crackles, then a series of blue electrical arcs formed, sizzling as they rose to vanishing with explosive 'ZAP" noises when they reached the top of the wires. The room was filled with a deep, powerful hum that seemed to shake the very bones of the men experiencing it.
The bulb in the middle of the 'radar dish' began to glow, brighter and brighter, and Gazeele was instantly drenched in sweat from the tremendous heat the weird apparatus projected. Even with his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he was sure he would be blinded!
"The HEAT! I can't stand it! Turn it OFF!" he screamed and then collapsed unconscious.
Gazeele snapped back to awareness, with no clue how long he might have been unconscious, and gasped in horror at the terrifying apparition in front of his eyes. The giant leering face of Subducto loomed above him, and Subucto's maniacal laughter thundered against his ears. He closed his eyes and threw his arm across his face, and was instantly aware of differences in how his arm moved - it smashed into his face much sooner than he had expected it to, an impact that should have hurt, but he barely felt it. His eyes snapped open again and this time he took in the rest of the room. Everything in the room appeared to be MUCH larger than before - including the gloating giant Subducto.
"Yes, you are shrunken to the size of a child's doll, fool. Never again will you mock my Subduction Ray!". The giant reached out, easily picked up Gazeele, and squeezed. Almost instantly the panicked, bewildered engineer passed out again from the pain.
He awakened in confusion, and the first thing he saw was the certificates hanging on the far wall of his study, and for an instant, he thought it must have been a dream. But he glanced around and he quickly realized it must have been real - everything around him was huge! He stood on the chair; he could barely see over the top of the desk. "I must be less than 18" tall," part of his mind estimated, while another part gibbered in panic. "I MUST get help! Someone must capture that madman and force him to restore me! He must be stopped!"
He had to fight through the panic, the terror, and the feelings of hopelessness. 'If only I can get to the phone!' he thought desperately. 'Maybe the FBI can can capture Subducto.' Then 'I wonder if this is what happened to the others?"
He stood nervously on the edge of the seat of his chair. If he leaped, he should be able to get his hands onto the desktop and then crawl over the edge. He had never been an athletic man, even in his long-ago youth, but his terror drove him to the attempt. He crouched, leaped - and was astounded when he launched himself into the air, easily leaping far enough to land on top the desk rather than have to make a desperate climb over the edge. He could barely move the handset of the phone; he was forced to crawl beneath the ear end and then stand up, and he almost despaired again when finally he got the heandset out of the cradle and it started to slide toward the edge of the desk - if it went over the edge, he would NEVER be able to haul it back up. But it slid only a few inches. He gasped in relief, then grabbed one of the cutouts on the dial and exerted all his strength - and was relieved almost to the point of fainting when he was able to spin the dial.
The Chief of the FBI office in Boston, Ashley Zimmer, frequently consulted with Gazeele on cases that involved pretty much any kind of electrical technology. It took Gazeele a lot of effort to convince Zimmer that his call was on the level, but when Zimmer finally got annoyed enough at this prank caller who had the high pitched voice of a kid to have the call traced, he immediately dropped everything and hustled over to Beacon St, then brought Gazeele back to his office.
"This is astounding! If I didn't see you with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it! How is something like this possible?"
"Years ago, one of the members of the SREE claimed that ultra-short wavelength radio waves could cause matter to shrink, and he was performing experiments on derelicts he had kidnapped from the streets to prove it. Of course, we thought his theories were idiotic, and we immediately expelled him for his despicable ethical practices, but my condition proves that he must have been right!" Gazeele was emphatic, which sounded ludicrous in his high pitched voice, but this wasn't a laughing matter. "He's MAD! Who KNOWS how many other people he's reduced with his horrid ray?! We MUST stop him!" He paused, and his next words were softer, sounding defeated. "The awful part about it is I was unconscious when the brought me in and out of his hideout. I have no idea where he might be!"
"He captured you only last night," Zimmer reminded his guest. "He must be in the city or nearby. Don't worry, we'll scour the city, and find him. And I'll call in some special help... Black Zero. I've worked with him before, and he seems to know something about the radio sciences. Don't worry, Dr. Gazeele, we'll find this mad scientist and make him restore you, and all his other victims, to normal."
*****
A half hour ago, Bruce King had been sitting in the study in his house, deeply absorbed in this month's issue of the Journal of the Society of Radio and Electronics Engineers, reading a fascinating article by some radio science genius he'd never heard of before on the use of synchronized radio frequency-hopping between a paired set of radio transmitter and receiver used in a radio remote controlled vehicle - such as guided missiles and torpedoes - to prevent enemy interference with the signals.
"This author's mind is astounding!" he thought in amazement. "I would really love to have a chance to chat with him!"
Then, one of the lamps in his study had flickered in the way that indicated that Sergeant Burke of the Portsmouth PD needed to contact him. Burke had notified him of an attack on the big Allomar Chemnotech facility in Wayne, Maine, and the anti-gravity power of his Black Zero Transmitter had him at the plant location in minutes. Security had given him a few tidbits of confusing information, then directed him inside, and nothing had gone well since then!
A flying creature was trashing the plant! It looked like a very large bat - about 6 1/2 feet tall, covered in dark fur, complete with bat ears, fangs, spindly 'arms' that must have been 7' long supporting big leathery wings, stubby legs, and vicious claws on its paws. It was as agile as a bat, able to make changes in flight direction faster than the human eye could follow, the claws were able to tear through wood and thin sheet metal like paper, and its high-pitched screech was a sonic weapon, producing almost instant disorientation in humans, and sometimes deafness through rupturing of the eardrums, while a good number of people who experience that attack were stunned into unconsciousness. The bat was searching the giant plant methodically, and whenever it found a specific treasure, it would carry that something out of the building at high speed and then return and continue searching. By the time Black Zero arrived on the scene, the employees who still retained consciousness had evacuated the plant, carrying their disabled colleagues with them whenever possible. None of the security guards had so far been able to shoot it, unable to hit such an erratically moving target.
When Zero caught up to it, the creature was flying through a very large room which contained 9 giant vats, each filled with some kind of bubbling fluid, each a different color. "Hey, you! Land, right now!" he yelled. The bat was so far away he was surprised when it turned toward him, and then an instant later, he was blasted with a very loud high frequency screech that seemed to make his teeth warm and his ears instantly hurt. He touched a control on his belt and fell out of that beam and managed to get behind one of the vats while he thought hard and fast about how to combat such a sonic weapon.
His headgear now included bulky radio earphones which practically cancelled any outside noises; part of the bulk was an amplifier that he could turn on when he actually wanted to hear things around him. He turned that off, and then zoomed back toward the ceiling, pointing toward the last position of the bat to aim his freeze ray. But the bat had moved. He twisted in place to try and spot his opponent again, and he could feel the effects of the sonic beam even though he couldn't hear it. Once again his teeth were getting warm, and his whole body was vibrating unpleasantly, and the effects were getting stronger. He aimed his right fist at the new position of the bat and fired both a beam of darkness and another of intense cold, and this time, they both struck before the bat could dodge. The sonic attack ended as the bat darted to one side, and then began again as soon as his enemy was out of the beam of darkness. He had to stop attacking to dodge; he could tell that a bit longer exposure to that sonic screech would start to have debilitating effects on him.
They sparred this way for several unsatisfying minutes, each able to escape the most devastating effects of the other's power - but both taking damage with every exchange. Bruce realized that like a true bat, his opponent must be able to use echolocation to 'see' in the dark, even through the absolute pitch black of the Blackout beam - but he couldn't use his voice to attack and echolocate at the same time. And Bruce couldn't hold the cold beam on him long enough to have an effect. The bat's fur protected him from short exposures, and Bruce had to stop moving to take effective aim for longer hits, and every time he stopped moving, the bat would hit him with his sonic weapon. They were wearing each other down with this long range jousting but it definitely was not clear who the winner of the joust would be, or when the end might come.
Suddenly the bat changed his tactics, and flew at Black Zero at high speed. Bruce waited until he got close, and then zoomed upward toward the ceiling, but the bat was incredibly agile and managed to slash Black Zero's leg as he flashed past. Bruce's two layer insulated costume was shredded across his thigh, but it prevented him from losing the leg. This was getting serious!
Black Zero turned and fled, back through the much smaller clean room through which he had entered the vast vat room. The bat swooped after his fleeing prey, but when it entered the smaller room, Black Zero struck back!
Ever since he had miniaturized and refined his original suitcase sized-luggable Black Zero transmitter and made the new smaller unit part of his costume, Bruce had also been refining his fighting techniques, using directional Blackout beams and focused Zero rays. He could still use the big, showy effects, like a Pillar of Darkness that covered an acre and seemingly reached up to infinity, or dropping a big room to 100 below zero in an instant, but the smaller battery pack he used to power his wearable transmitter still ran down faster than the bigger (and incidentally MUCH heavier) battery he used in the 'luggable' transmitter. Even with his new techniques, he made a habit of replacing the battery once a day. But he rarely got into battles where he used so much power in such a short time as this one. He needed to end this fight soon!
Since darkness prevented the bat from using his sonic weapon, Black Zero would hit him with darkness; since his fur protected him from cold beams long enough to fly out of the way, Black Zero wouldn't give him any place to escape to... He slipped on his 'see in the dark' goggles, and turned up the heat in his heated costume, and as soon as the bat entered the clean room, Black Zero turned up the rheostats on both the Blackout transmitter and the Zero transmitter - and the room plunged instantly into absolute darkness and the temperature dropped to a hundred below zero. Every drop of moisture in the room froze solid in instants, and even the bat's fur didn't protect him as he was encased in a solid block of ice and crashed to the floor.
Outside, everyone within miles was stunned to see a new Pillar of Darkness envelope a good portion of the giant chemical plant. It actually heartened the viewers; over the course of his career as the King of Darkness, people had come to associate the Pillar of Darkness with the heroic deeds of the King of Darkness!
The 'low power' indicator on Bruce's battery beeped plaintively for a second until he turned the costume heater rheostat back down and shut off the beams. Every light bulb in the clean room had exploded due to the abrupt drop in temperature, but Bruce's goggles allowed him to see. He had spotted some firefighting equipment in the vat room - he zoomed out and came back with a fire axe and started chopping the bat's head free of the ice. When the head was mostly free, he made sure to hold the axe in front of his foe's head.
"Can you see this? Do you know what it is?" he demanded. This creature was the size of a human, but there was no guarantee that it knew English - or ANY language. "If you struggle, I'll use this on your head! If you attack me again, I'll use it on your head!"
The bat replied. His voice was screechy and high pitched, but he spoke perfect English. "Please don't use that on me! I won't attack you; you have my word of honor!"
"Who are you? Why are you attacking this plant?" Black Zero demanded.
"I am Nightscreecher!" the bat replied defiantly. "I once worked here, the lead chemist on a Top Secret government project, until an experiment I was performing went wrong, and transformed me into the sorry creature you see before you. The management blamed ME for the failure, and fired me, refusing to let me try to find an antidote to my condition. I don't have the resources to do the research I need to change back, so I was taking what I need. If you stop me, I may be doomed to spend the rest of my life as a monster!"
That horror of that struck home hard... but before Bruce could reply, Nightscreecher turned his head as if focusing on something far away, and then spoke urgently.
"In the clean room on the other side of the vat room - someone needs help! Can't you hear her screaming?" Bruce turned the amplifiers on his earphones to max - and he was sure he could hear a woman screaming, faintly, from across the room. "It's TRUDY! You must save her!" the bat insisted desperately.
Bruce was torn, but then a louder screech convinced him. "I'll save her! But you will do no more damage to this plant, or the next time you may pay with your life!"
He zoomed away, and soon rescued Trudy Fawn from the wreckage caused by their battle that had trapped her. By the time he got back to the room where he'd left Nightscreecher encased in ice, the bat had used his claws to break free and was gone. But he didn't return to attack the Allomar Chemnotech plant again... at least not that day!
Black Zero hurried back to Trudy and as he gently carried her out of the plant, she confirmed much of Nightscreecher's story. He had been a biological chemist named Jon Bertlam, working on a classified government project. She couldn't divulge the details, but she had heard that the military was really interested in any innovation that would allow a soldier to see in the dark.
Just as he was setting Trudy down safely, the gauntlet of his Black Zero transmitter began to vibrate, in a pattern that told him that Ashley Zimmer, Chief of the FBI office in Boston, needed to speak to him urgently. He zoomed back to his lab, swapped out the battery of the Black Zero transmitter, changed his shredded tights, and then was headed to Boston at his highest speed.
It only took Black Zero a few minutes to fly from Portsmouth, NH, to Boston, Ma. The weather changed drastically in that short distance; it had been bright and sunny in Portsmouth, but Boston was covered with low-hanging gray clouds. Zero swooped through the window into Zimmer's office on the top floor of the massive FBI building and was stunned to see the 18" high man standing on the desk. He was even more stunned to recognize that tiny person as Dr. Michael Gazeele, Director of the Society of Radio and Electronic Engineers, someone he'd met several times through Bruce's membership in the SREE. If that really WAS Gazeele, he'd need to be careful not to give away his Bruce King identity.
Of course, it really WAS Gazeele. Zimmer and the miniature Gazeele quickly brought Black Zero up to speed on a story we readers already know well. Though they both asked him dozens of questions, Gazeele could only recall one other clue - he'd noticed the postmark on the anonymous package containing the insidious idol; it had been mailed from Boston two days before it was delivered. This helped confirm their theory that Subducto's headquarters was somewhere in the Boston area.
"The package was probably hand-delivered to the counter in one of the Boston branches," Zimmer theorized. "I'll send some agents out to interview the clerks. It's a really slim chance - they probably get small packages mailed over the counter all the time, so unless the mailer really stood out we probably won't learn anything." He called in Damon Bodacious, one of the most dedicated 'Agents in Charge' in the Boston office and gave him the details, and sent Jim Varney, his best detective, to search Gazeele's brownstone yet again, this time checking to see if the wrapping for the idol package was still in Gazeel's trash.
"If there's anything to find, those two will find it!" Zimmer declared confidently. "My theory is that this Subducto's base is somewhere near MIT... so I'm going to join the search team in Cambridge." Gazeele nodded; that made sense, Subducto might want to be close to the school where they were advancing radio technology every day.
"I think he'd want to be isolated - I'm going to investigate the harbor islands," Black Zero replied. "I'll be he's set up shop in one of the deserted Revolutionary War Forts!"
In his headquarters, Subducto sat in front of a screen, embedded in a control panel which had dozens of switches and dials. The screen showed the scene of Zimmer's office, rendered in black and white, taken from Gazeele's viewpoint. The villain roared with laughter. "My subducted camera planted on Gazeele, and my fantastic futuristic heterodynamic televisor are working perfectly... of course! The fools have no idea where to find me. But I have a surprise for THEM!" He rubbed his hands together, gave some orders to his henchmen, and turned back to the televisor screen.
Zimmer made arrangements for his staff to keep Gazeele comfortable, and then he and Black Zero departed on their separate searches, Zimmer to the north and Black Zero flashing west. Zimmer's car was on the Longfellow Bridge when the road noises around it stopped suddenly and the engine started to race, as Zimmer could feel the car ascending into the air like an elevator cab. It soared upwards and vanished into the heavy cloud cover. When it rose through the top of the dark clouds into the clear skies and brilliant sunshine above, Zimmer was stunned to see a giant dirigible with a giant open door on one end of the gondola. The car was pulled through the door. Hoping he was going unnoticed, Black Zero followed the car closely, trying to remain concealed against the bottom of the chassis.
The car was drawn into a large room in the giant gondola that resembled an airplane hanger. As it swept toward the far wall, Black Zero flashed from under the car to concealment behind what appeared to be a jet-powered bi-plane. It was quickly apparent, though, that his entrance to the dirigible had been noticed, when he heard a gunshot and a bullet crashed into a wooden crate that was standing near the futuristic biplane.
"I'm not going to just flitter around and be a damn target," he thought. He adjusted power to the Blackout transmitter and the hanger was filled with darkness. "Hope they haven't got 'see in the dark goggles like the Red Gang!" There was a few more shots, but they were all loosely aimed at the area of the biplane, and Black Zero was not longer even close to that spot. He zoomed around the hanger, looking for targets, and whenever he spotted someone, he unleashed the Zero beam, the power set carefully at a level that his extensive past experience using the freeze ray against bad guys had taught him would usually take those minions out of action for 10 to 15 minutes, while minimizing serious damage from frostbite or being frozen solid. Sometimes someone hit by this beam would take months to fully recover, but Black Zero had little sympathy for people who were trying to kill him. He was pretty certain they would all live, at least...
A powerfully amplified voice rang out through speakers set throughout the hanger. "You idiots STOP SHOOTING instantly; do you want to kill us all? We are in a hydrogen dirigible, you FOOLS! Black Zero, stand down, or I, the Subductor, will kill my hostages!" It wasn't exactly clear to Bruce how to 'stand down'; he stopped attacking the minions, but didn't drop the darkness. Several seconds later, Subductor's amplified voice rattled the hanger again."You will return our sight IMMEDIATELY or the hostages will die. You have 2 seconds!"
The Blackout transmitter was turned off instantly. At the far end of the hanger, standing on a balcony, Black Zero could see the Subductor, microphone in hand, next to a minion holding a tiny squirming human figure. "Now, foolish hero, you will COME TO ME! Or the hostages die!" He turned and walked through a door behind him, followed by his minion, and left the door open. Hoping to be as difficult a target as possible, Black Zero zoomed through the air, and then slowed and floated through the open door only a few seconds after the master villain.
Expecting nothing and everything, Bruce was still stunned and astounded by what he saw. He was in a well-equipped radio lab, perhaps as extensively and extravagantly equipped as his own. In one corner, he saw the Subduction Ray that Gazeele had described, and in another corner there was a big cage. The minion was just now stuffing Ashley Zimmer back into the cage, and one of the other prisoners was... Gloria Glamour?
"You FIEND! Why have you captured Gloria Glamour?!" Zero yelled in anger. He was as stunned by the villain's answer as he had been to discover his love interest as a captive.
"You recognize her as a sultry Hollywood starlet, but her genius in the radio sciences is second only to my own! When I combine her discoveries with my own inventions, I will be able to spay on and subduct ANYONE in the world without leaving my control room, and then it will be easy for my minions to capture them. No one will dare resist me! I'll shrink and capture all the world's geniuses, military and political leaders and they will work FOR me or remain shrunken FOREVER! BWAA HAA HAA HAA!"
The vision of the world at the mercy of this evil monster was too much for Black Zero. He brought his right arm up and triggered a cold blast, intense enough to freeze Subucto instantly solid, heedless of the fact that this would kill the villain - and Subducto only laughed as the beam splattered against something before it reached him. "Did you think to catch me unawares, you FOOL"! My imperviglass is proof against ANY degree of heat or cold, and shatterproof as well. BWHAA HAA HAA HAA!"
The door to the hanger slammed shut, and a stream of very high pressure green vapor blasted from the mouth of a large green jade idol that was sitting on a bookshelf not far from where Black Zero was standing - and within seconds, he and the shrunken prisoners were all unconscious.
Bruce was a little surprised to awaken at all, but less surprised that he was now shrunken to the size of the other prisoners and penned in the cage with them. Gloria was tending him while the others were discussing how they could escape - discussions that had so far proved futile.
He instantly noticed the difference in his body as he sat up... he moved more quickly than he expected, and he reached the seated position more quickly than he expected so his motion ended very abruptly and awkwardly, and then he became aware that his right hand was bare - and his hand whipped up to where he could see it and the added speed of his movement actually caused him to hit himself in the face, and then he could see that his gauntlet was gone and the flat ribbon cable that connected it to his Black Zero transmitter had been cut.
"Subducto ordered one of his lackeys to remove it as soon as you passed out," Gloria explained. "He said you would be powerless without it. That bracer around your wrist - it contained a flexible antenna for ultra-short radio waves, didn't it?"
Surprise, astounded, stunned? "How could you know that? I've never told anyone!"
"We've canoodled every time we can make our schedules match up for over a year now, and you still think I'm just some brainless Hollywood bimbo?" There was just the tiniest trace of bitterness in her voice. "I'm not even blonde!"
She calmed down a little, and said reflectively, "Well, maybe it's partly my fault - I DO have to keep my brains a secret. Most men seem to prefer their sexy, sultry actresses to be a little naive and a bit dumb. But..." she paused for a second, "... your powers and that suitcase you used to carry all the time reminded me for some reason of some obscure radio theories I'd read once, so I tried to figure out how they work. Ultra-short radio waves, transmitted through a flexible antenna with unconventional shape and construction, could theoretically produce the same effects as your powers."
Bruce nodded, dazed to hear this analysis coming from a woman who he had heretofore indeed considered naive and not very intellectual. He had a wild and not very generous thought: 'Could the shrinking process have made her a genius?' He quickly considered his favorite paradox - the infinite set paradox - "Which is larger, the set of all numbers, or the set of all even numbers?" and didn't have any new insights - so she really must have been this smart all along! He wasn't sure if that idea was scary or intriguing... quickly decided 'intriguing' would be safer, and then replied to her astonishing statement.
"You are absolutely correct. That unconventional antenna was built into the bracer on my gauntlet, along with some mechanisms for altering the shape - stretching it, compressing it, twisting it, for example. And Subducto is correct: without it, I'm powerless!" He sounded helpless: It took me almost two months to build the first one. I've another, built into my first, luggable suitcase Black Zero transmitter - but that's back in my lab. It I could use the tools and equipment in this lab..." he pointed at the larger room outside the cage "...I might be able to make another one in a couple of days - assuming I could work any of the tools and equipment at this size!"
"Well..." she unbuttoned the cuff on her blouse and pulled up the sleeve to reveal an unusual bracelet on her wrist, "...would this work?"
"SAINTS BE PRAISED!" he yelled in unbelieving utter astonishment. "Where did you GET THAT?" The other men looked at him, then turned back to their escape planning.
"That" was a bracelet of unusual design. A flexible cylinder created by a woven crosshatch of heavy, flat wires, the wires were silver and coppery colored. At the top and bottom they were attached to rings, in some of the intersections, they passed through silvery colored beads, the size of pearls in a necklace.
"Do you like it?" she asked with a lazy smile. "As I worked out the antenna parameters for controlling ultra-short radio waves I thought the design would make a unique bracelet - and very expensive: too, the bands are gold, the beads are platinum, and the cross-hatch wires are silver and copper. So I made one. Lucky Subducto's idiot lackeys didn't search me!"
"You're a jeweler, too?" She winked at him; his jaw hurt from dropping so hard and so often! But he was thinking fast. "Without the distortion mechanisms in the bracer that allow me fine control of the beams, if we can just attach your bracelet to the wires from my transmitter, it should work well enough for the big stuff! And then that Subducto can just sit back and watch my smoke!"
The giant, urgent problem of escape was suddenly eclipsed by a smaller, more urgent project. "Say, boys, does any of you happen to have a penknife?" Gloria asked their fellow prisoners.
Zimmer was the first to reply in the affirmative. While Gloria removed the bracelet, Bruce attacked the ribbon cable with the knife, stripping off several inches of insulation from the two conductors embedded in the flat cable which led from his wrist to the transistorized Black Zero transmitter strapped to his back. Just them the door to the lab opened, and one of Subducto's minions stormed in, unlocked the cage and entered, then locked it again and dropped the keys through the bars about a foot away - easily within his own reach, but well outside the reach of any of the tiny prisoners.
He waved an odd-looking pistol at the prisoners, who were now gathered in a bunch. "Time for a little fun with dolls!" he said in a malevolent tone. "Girly, get over here!"
The male prisoners immediately moved to stand between the bad guy and the shrunken actress. The minion fired, and a bolt of electricity zapped one of the radio engineers, who immediately collapsed, hopefully and not dead.
"No more foolin' around, I want the teeny tiny babe over here, RIGHT NOW!" the minion snarled, and aimed the gun directly at another of the small prisoners. "Or this time I use full power and burn one'a yous to smoke!"
"I'll keep him busy; you finish the wiring!" Gloria whispered to Bruce, then raised her voice. "Don't shoot any more of them! I'm coming!"
Black Zero didn't want to see what was about to happen with Gloria; he just knew he had to get his powers working as fast as possible. Instead of watching, he shuffled around behind the other prisoners, and while the minion's attention was on Gloria, who was doing her best to strut sexily across the cage, even at only 18' tall, he got back to work. He hastily wrapped one bare conductor around the 'top' golden ring of Gloria's bracelet and twisted it around itself into as solid a contact as he felt was safe - if he twisted it tighter and it broke off now, he'd probably never get another chance to try this. He then repeated the operation with the other conductor. And then... disaster!
His hand was too big to slip through Gloria's bracelet! As he strained, the minion picked up the miniature starlet in one hand, and holding her close to his leering face, started to tear off her blouse with the other! "Always wanted to do this to one'a you stuckup Hollywood broads!" he laughed. His breath was hot and almost unbearable, but she forced herself not to turn away.
"Hey! Cut it out!" she yelled, sounding almost like the chirping of a baby bird. "That's the only top I've got that fits!" He hesitated for just a second. "Here; I'll take it off for you!"
"I'll buy ya tons of clothes from the doll section of the Five and Dime," he laughed. "You ain't never gonna have to worry about clothes again, Dolly! Boy, dis is gonna be FUN!"
Bruce grabbed his right hand in his left and squeezed, then squealed in pain as he forced the compressed hand through the two too-tight golden rings. The scraped skin started bleeding, which helped lubricate the process, and as the minion turned to the other prisoners to see what was causing the commotion, he forced it into place! Gloria leaned as close to his face as she could, reached as far as she could and slugged him in the nose as hard as she could. He dropped her, as she had hoped, then he reached for his nose with both hands - then screamed with terror as he suddenly went blind!
With no fine control, Bruce couldn't just shoot a well-controlled focused beam of darkness; instead he produced a miniature version of his patented Pillar of Darkness that speared through the bottom and top of the dirigible - and incidentally filled almost the whole room they were in.With his goggles, Black Zero was the only one who could see.
He activated his anti-gravity rays and zoomed forward at full power towards the minion's midsection, and hit him HARD in the solar plexus with his shoulder. Quickly, he put the bracelet against the bad guy's chest and activated the Zero transmitter at the lowest power setting. Even at the lowest power setting, without the fine controls, the temperature in the entire room dropped to under freezing in only seconds - and the minion, who was actually in contact with the antenna, was frozen into a block of ice. Bruce hastily turned off the transmitter before he killed everyone else in the room...
Now it was everyone else's turn to be stunned at their quick turnaround in fortune. Except Gloria. "We've got to get out of here - and find a way to disable that idol before Subducto finds out we're loose!"
"I could..." Black Zero started and then stopped. He'd been about to volunteer to just shatter the idol - but would that just release more gas? Until they were out of the lab, they couldn't take that risk!
It wasn't too difficult to recover the keys. Zimmer took off one of his shoes, unlaced it partially, then threw it past the keys and pulled it back by the shoestring. None of the shrunken prisoners could reach the lock, but Black Zero could fly, although he had to be very careful without his fine tuning controls. And then, things went wrong again!
The door opened and an enraged Subducto stepped into the lab, and instantly fired his lightning gun. Black Zero slapped at his belt control to fire a Zero beam and try to freeze the villain. But something went wrong; there was no intense cold... but something else went right, the lightning bolt from Subducto's gun was somehow deflected, and it crashed into the Subduction device. The projector was spun around and somehow the electrical bolt activated it - and the spinning beam swept across Subducto, and he instantly shrank - but didn't stop at 18 inches; instead he continued shrinking until he simply vanished.
He zoomed to the open door - as far as he could see, Subducto had been alone. He zoomed back... "You guys go stand near the door in case this goes wrong!" he ordered. "If I get knocked out again, wait until the gas clears before you come back in for me!"
When they were outside, he touched the bracelet to the idol and gave it full power. It was instantly encased in a thick block of ice that he knew would take hours to melt. He could see cracks on the surface of the jade, but until the gas could seep through the ice, the lab was safe. He called the others back in, and together they examined the Subducto ray. The controls were easy enough - a 3 position switch, labeled "Enlarge...Off...Subduct", which was currently set on 'Subduct' and a rheostat for controlling the power, with four labels as well: "Off...Low...Normal...High".
"It's still turned off," one of the shrunken radio engineers noted. "Somehow, Subducto's lightning gun energized it." He reached out and flipped the Subduct switch to the Off position.
"Good idea - don't want it shrinking us by mistake!" another radio engineer approved.
"But, do we dare use it? What if it shrinks us even more, like it did to him?" the third wondered, sounding very worried. "Or, suppose it grows us to giant size?"
"The don't write movie roles for living dolls!" Gloria spoke up, then paused for a second. "Well, actually, they do, don't they? They write roles for me all the time! What I mean is, they want their living dolls to be life size!" She clicked the switch to "Enlarge" and turned the power to "Low". "If it turns me into a giant, I'll be a natural for that horror movie script that's making the rounds in Hollywood now - "Attack of the Giant Woman". I've already read for the part - just think how they'll save on special effects!"
Before anyone could stop her, she stepped into the beam... and expanded until she was about 3 and a half feet tall. "Well, at least we know it's set for 'Expand'." She stepped out of the beam and back in - and she was back to normal!
"OK, fellas, your turns!"
Black Zero went next - how could he hesitate after his girlfriend had showed the way? As soon as he was full-sized, he zoomed out of the room, looking for Subducto's minions and the crew of the dirigible who might still want to put up a fight. The others were all returned to normal when he came back into the room, carrying several lightning pistols and some regular pistols as well, herding a man in an overdecorated uniform.
"This is Captain Turner. He and his crew will be happy to land this dirigible wherever we direct, and then surrender to the FBI. Isn't that right, Captain?" he prodded the uniformed officer in the back with one of the lightning pistols, and Turner nodded vigorously. He handed the pistols to the former prisoners. "All we have to do is keep them under surveillance until we're down and Zimmer's crew has them in custody. With my restored powers and command of all the weapons on board, that shouldn't be too difficult."
It took several hours - Boston didn't have an airfield equipped to handle a dirigible, much less the largest dirigible in the world, but the crew was very competent - Subducto had shrunken out of existence any incompetent crew members; the rest had improved quickly! Zimmer opined, and many of them overheard, that a few of them would probably be recruited by the military, at least as closely monitored dirigible flight instructors, so they might escape prison time... which co-incidentally encouraged them to perform better.
In a couple of hours, crews of men were tying down the descending airship to buildings, trees, blocks of cinder blocks, large boulders and heavy construction equipment at the nascent Boston Auxuliary Airport near Lexington, Ma, a facility that would be renamed "Hanscomb Air Base" during the upcoming war.
After that, all that was left was the paperwork. Black Zero flew Gloria back to Boston hotel where she was staying during the on-location filming of her current movie. She promised to spend a few weeks in Portsmouth once the filming was over, and made Zero promise to fly to Boston every weekend ("It only takes you 10 minutes!"), and after the appropriate good-byes between the two, he zipped back to Portsmouth.
Be sure to visit your newsstand next month for the next exciting issue of "Black Zero, King of Darkness"! On sale on or around August 1st. All in color, only a nickle!!
Bruce King looked around his lab at all the instruments and fabrication machinery, most of which he had constructed and invented himself. ‘As a teenager fascinated by radio waves, I would NEVER have believed I’d ever be interested in semiconductor physics!' he thought in wonder. 'But when I read the papers of Lilienfeld and Heil I realized that if the devices they described actually worked, I could make my own inventions both smaller and more powerful, I became obsessed.' He laid his hand fondly on one of the devices. 'With my semiconductor fabricator, I can actually create the transistors that those two geniuses only theorized!'
He turned back to a small plastic board, about the size of a postcard, lying on a workbench. It was covered with electronic components on top, their leads stuck through small holes drilled through the thin plastic, while the bottom was covered with a myriad of tiny insulated wires running from one component lead to the other. Still more wires connected a small, flat battery pack from one end of the board and a long flat cable connected to a bulky bracer.
'I’ve replaced all the valves…' (which was another word for ‘vacuum tubes’ at the time) '…in my luggable Black Zero transmitter with transistors, which also allowed me to totally remove the bulky vacuum tube heater circuitry and lowered the power requirements by almost 94% – and… Voila! This bundle of components and wires…' he touched a box the size of a small suitcase which had a panel of switches and dials along one side, then moved back to the plastic board. '… becomes…' As he expounded in his head, he placed the battery pack into a flat oval-shaped container the size of a saucer for a coffee cup, carefully arranged the plastic board next to it, with the flat cables passing through a slot, in the side, fastened everything into place to mounts already attached to the inside of the box, and then firmly fastened on a cover. “...Ta DAH! The new transistorized Black Zero Transmitter!” he triumphantly spoke that last part aloud.
He removed his lounging robe, revealing a bare torso and dark blue, almost black, one-piece tights with attached boots. There was a belt mounted to the oval container; he donned the belt so that the transmitter was held firmly against the small of his back, he arranged the cable to lay flat against his back and then run down to his is right wrist, then he pulled on a skin-tight long sleeve blue top which held the pack and cables firmly in place. 'That took more work than I expected!' he thought in minor dismay. 'I'll have to attach the cable to the inside of the costume somehow in the future! Well, I never expected to get EVERYTHING perfect on the first try!' He slipped the bracer over his right wrist, then pulled on blue gloves and a blue cowl that left the bottom of his face bare, then struck an admittedly cheesy heroic pose.
'With all the improvements I’ve made to the Black Zero transmitter,' he thought proudly, 'I think I’ll adopt an improved name, too.'
Still, he ought to do some testing first… he remembered how he had almost frozen himself solid when he had first discovered the Zero rays, radio waves in the incredibly short 2 x 10-16 cm band that totally cancel heat radiation, producing regions where the temperature could almost instantly drop to absolute Zero, or when he had cautiously applied minimal power to his Blackout transmitter, but a carelessly soldered connection had snapped, dumping full power into that device, and the high powered radio waves of the even shorter band at 6 x 10-17 cm had totally cancelled light waves in a pillar that enveloped his entire house and extended as high into the sky as the eye could see. It was lucky he’d achieved full control over his invention by the time he’d discovered that the shortest band of all, at 6.02 x 10-24 cm, totally cancelled gravity! He might have ended up on the moon before he’d even realized he was leaving Earth! So even though he wanted to rush right out and commit some heroic deeds, he took a few minutes to give his equipment a trial run.
With his left hand, he touched a dial oh his belt – and a black cone-shaped beam flashed out from the bracer on his right. It spread until it was about a foot wide where it touched the ceiling; he knew his Blackout radio waves easily passed through the ceiling, and there was now a cone of darkness shooting upward from his roof that got gradually wider and became less dark the further it reached.
'The Blackout ray works just fine,' he exulted. ‘Let’s test the power and the collimation!'
He rolled first one knob and then another. The beam because less cone shaped, not spreading out at all by the time it reached the ceiling, and he knew it would spread barely an inch in a thousand miles, if he turned the power up enough. As he turned the power down, he could see the beam fade away before it reached the ceiling at all.
'Perfect! Now the Zero ray.'
He pointed his right arm at a pitcher of water in the sink and touched another control – and the water in the pitcher froze so fast it shattered! He carefully rolled another dial, and he could feel the room temperature drop around him.
“If the Zero band wasn’t so dangerous, I could get rich by making air conditioners!” he joked aloud. Actually it was something he thought about fairly often on those two or three days a year when the temperature in Portsmouth, NH, got above 85o.
“Last test!”
He touched another control, set fairly far away on the belt from the Blackout and Zero controls, rose into the air, then floated cautiously around the room, changing directions by pointing his right arm, then set down again.
He was satisfied. He headed towards the door, and as he stepped outside, he announced to the world around him: “It’s Black Zero, the King of Darkness. Time to watch my smoke!”
*****
Who is this mighty hero, Black Zero, the King of Darkness, you ask? And how did he come to be?
The King of Darkness had first appeared in public only last summer (you can read his first case in the next post in this thread, here: Introducing the King of Darkness, or read the original in Amazing Man Comics #24, October 1941, starting on page 36). He had captured 3 notorious spies in his first case and he'd had a number of others, and in Portsmouth New Hampshire and nearby Kerry, Maine, he'd become quite famous, and sighting the tremendous 'Pillar of Darkness' that often accompanied his exploits sweeping down the street or even flashing through the air was no longer a cause for panic among the local citizens. Though Police Commision Jasperson still thought of him as a wanted man, most of the local police welcomed his appearances.
He was in the good graces of United States Naval Intelligence for capturing a foreign submarine that had attempted to sink a British battleship which had just undergone repairs in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in nearby Kerry, Maine (see Amazing Man Comics #25, November 1941, starting on page 45), and he was even getting some national press for his rescue of famous Hollywood actress and pinup girl Gloria Glamour, who had been kidnapped from the Maine coast on-location movie production on the of "It's a Date". And he'd started a romance with Gloria, to boot! (see Amazing Man Comics #26, December 1941, starting on page 38)
And then had come the war, and he'd quickly proved effective against Axis spies who were plotting to destroy the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and he'd even solved police cases in Boston and New York, so he had an in with the FBI, too!
But his famous 'Pillar of Darkness' was quickly becoming his greatest weakness. His allies and his enemies were all closing in on discovering his true identity, merely by observing where the Pillar was most often sighted... and some underworld genius had discovered the secret of seeing in the darkness he created, and that guy had sold that secret to the deadly Red Gang that was terrorizing the Portsmouth area, and probably other mobs as well. So it was more than time for a change in his MO, and along with that change, why not a change in his heroic identity?
*****
Bruce King listened to the morning news on WPRT as he made breakfast, a 'loaded' omelet, toast slathered with butter and strawberry jam, and very strong tea. "Police in St. Louis yesterday reported another missing person, Sherman Leonard, the lead engineer for St. Louis's largest radio station, KSTL. This is the 4th similar disappearance of the chief engineer from a prominent radio station in a big city in the past 2 weeks. The FBI theorizes that these disappearances may be the work of some foreign power that wants to keep America out of the War, by disrupting the operation of stations where the the Editorial stance is that the US drop the current policy of neutrality and immediately enter the war on the side of the England and France." The announcer paused and listeners could hear him shuffling papers, then... "The FBI has no further leads at this time."
"All four of those missing men are members of the SREE!" Bruce thought. "I wonder if there's more to this than some 'stay out of the war' action?" Bruce was also a member of the Society of Radio and Electronic Engineers (SREE®) though he hadn't been to a meeting in several years. "I'll mention it to Boston FBI Chief Ashley Zimmer the next time I talk to him as Black Zero. Can't see why being an SREE member might be a reason for trouble, but these days, you never know..."
*****
Late that night, in his otherwise empty brownstone home on Beacon Street in Boston, National Director of the SREE Dr. Michael Gazeele sat alone in his study, reading an article in the SREE Journal on 'frequency hopping' in radio transmitters and receivers. Though the author had submitted under a pseudonym, Michael knew that the name was a pen for, surprisingly, one of Hollywood's most famous and glamorous actresses. Near his pencil cup on the corner of the desk, he'd placed his latest knick-knack, a small, somewhat bizarre idol seemingly carved of solid jade, that he had only received today in the mail from an anonymous sender.
It took several seconds for a faint hissing from the idol to catch his attention, and then he swiveled his head to look. A cloud of green vapor was issuing from the idol. Alarmed, he pushed his chair violently back away from the desk and tried to get up and rush from the room, but it was too late - instead of rising from the chair, he fell to the floor unconscious. A figure wearing a handkerchief mask over his mouth opened the door and cautiously entered the room, then quickly dragged the unconscious body roughly out the door, meanwhile gloating aloud: "The booby-trapped idol Subducto sent him worked perfectly! The boss will be mighty glad to see this guy!"
*****
Gazeele awakened to discover that he was strapped to a very uncomfortable chair, though that was the least of his worries at the moment. He was in a room filled with fantastic apparatus, resembling nothing more than the lab of a mad scientist from a recent "B" monster move. A few feet in front of him, he looked up and could see a curved polished metal dish, several feet across, with a conical projection in the center ending in a sphere the size of a 9" softball, aimed at his head. This dish was set on the end of a sturdy tube; the tube as mounted to swivel on top of an even thicker pillar which stuck out of a metal box, one face of which was a control panel studded with switches, knobs, dials and gauges. Next to the pillar on top of the box were a pair of tall, thin antennae. Standing in front of the control panel was a bald man, once tall but now with a pronounced hunched back, with a white handle bar mustache and short, pointed white beard, his face deeply lined, his features twisted in malignant triumph.
"Greetings, my esteemed colleague," he spoke in a sneering tone, his voice high pitched and whiney. "I am extremely flattered to have you present to witness one of my humble experiments!" The sarcasm almost literally dripped from his voice.
"Who are you? You look familiar, but I can't place you. What do you want with me?" Gazeele asked urgently. "You had better let me go!"
"I no longer use my original name, which I barely remember, but I am now known as Subducto!" the other replied. "Years ago, you expelled me from the SREE. You and the other fools on the Ethics Panel disapproved of my experiments on humans, but I will have the last laugh. Behold! The Subduction Ray!"
Subducto twisted a rheostat violent through its full range and jammed it into the far stop, laughed an evil laugh when the needle on one of the gauges leaped off the left pin and quickly swept across the dial into the green region. Sparks jumped between the antennae with loud crackles, then a series of blue electrical arcs formed, sizzling as they rose to vanishing with explosive 'ZAP" noises when they reached the top of the wires. The room was filled with a deep, powerful hum that seemed to shake the very bones of the men experiencing it.
The bulb in the middle of the 'radar dish' began to glow, brighter and brighter, and Gazeele was instantly drenched in sweat from the tremendous heat the weird apparatus projected. Even with his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he was sure he would be blinded!
"The HEAT! I can't stand it! Turn it OFF!" he screamed and then collapsed unconscious.
Gazeele snapped back to awareness, with no clue how long he might have been unconscious, and gasped in horror at the terrifying apparition in front of his eyes. The giant leering face of Subducto loomed above him, and Subucto's maniacal laughter thundered against his ears. He closed his eyes and threw his arm across his face, and was instantly aware of differences in how his arm moved - it smashed into his face much sooner than he had expected it to, an impact that should have hurt, but he barely felt it. His eyes snapped open again and this time he took in the rest of the room. Everything in the room appeared to be MUCH larger than before - including the gloating giant Subducto.
"Yes, you are shrunken to the size of a child's doll, fool. Never again will you mock my Subduction Ray!". The giant reached out, easily picked up Gazeele, and squeezed. Almost instantly the panicked, bewildered engineer passed out again from the pain.
He awakened in confusion, and the first thing he saw was the certificates hanging on the far wall of his study, and for an instant, he thought it must have been a dream. But he glanced around and he quickly realized it must have been real - everything around him was huge! He stood on the chair; he could barely see over the top of the desk. "I must be less than 18" tall," part of his mind estimated, while another part gibbered in panic. "I MUST get help! Someone must capture that madman and force him to restore me! He must be stopped!"
He had to fight through the panic, the terror, and the feelings of hopelessness. 'If only I can get to the phone!' he thought desperately. 'Maybe the FBI can can capture Subducto.' Then 'I wonder if this is what happened to the others?"
He stood nervously on the edge of the seat of his chair. If he leaped, he should be able to get his hands onto the desktop and then crawl over the edge. He had never been an athletic man, even in his long-ago youth, but his terror drove him to the attempt. He crouched, leaped - and was astounded when he launched himself into the air, easily leaping far enough to land on top the desk rather than have to make a desperate climb over the edge. He could barely move the handset of the phone; he was forced to crawl beneath the ear end and then stand up, and he almost despaired again when finally he got the heandset out of the cradle and it started to slide toward the edge of the desk - if it went over the edge, he would NEVER be able to haul it back up. But it slid only a few inches. He gasped in relief, then grabbed one of the cutouts on the dial and exerted all his strength - and was relieved almost to the point of fainting when he was able to spin the dial.
The Chief of the FBI office in Boston, Ashley Zimmer, frequently consulted with Gazeele on cases that involved pretty much any kind of electrical technology. It took Gazeele a lot of effort to convince Zimmer that his call was on the level, but when Zimmer finally got annoyed enough at this prank caller who had the high pitched voice of a kid to have the call traced, he immediately dropped everything and hustled over to Beacon St, then brought Gazeele back to his office.
"This is astounding! If I didn't see you with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it! How is something like this possible?"
"Years ago, one of the members of the SREE claimed that ultra-short wavelength radio waves could cause matter to shrink, and he was performing experiments on derelicts he had kidnapped from the streets to prove it. Of course, we thought his theories were idiotic, and we immediately expelled him for his despicable ethical practices, but my condition proves that he must have been right!" Gazeele was emphatic, which sounded ludicrous in his high pitched voice, but this wasn't a laughing matter. "He's MAD! Who KNOWS how many other people he's reduced with his horrid ray?! We MUST stop him!" He paused, and his next words were softer, sounding defeated. "The awful part about it is I was unconscious when the brought me in and out of his hideout. I have no idea where he might be!"
"He captured you only last night," Zimmer reminded his guest. "He must be in the city or nearby. Don't worry, we'll scour the city, and find him. And I'll call in some special help... Black Zero. I've worked with him before, and he seems to know something about the radio sciences. Don't worry, Dr. Gazeele, we'll find this mad scientist and make him restore you, and all his other victims, to normal."
*****
A half hour ago, Bruce King had been sitting in the study in his house, deeply absorbed in this month's issue of the Journal of the Society of Radio and Electronics Engineers, reading a fascinating article by some radio science genius he'd never heard of before on the use of synchronized radio frequency-hopping between a paired set of radio transmitter and receiver used in a radio remote controlled vehicle - such as guided missiles and torpedoes - to prevent enemy interference with the signals.
"This author's mind is astounding!" he thought in amazement. "I would really love to have a chance to chat with him!"
Then, one of the lamps in his study had flickered in the way that indicated that Sergeant Burke of the Portsmouth PD needed to contact him. Burke had notified him of an attack on the big Allomar Chemnotech facility in Wayne, Maine, and the anti-gravity power of his Black Zero Transmitter had him at the plant location in minutes. Security had given him a few tidbits of confusing information, then directed him inside, and nothing had gone well since then!
A flying creature was trashing the plant! It looked like a very large bat - about 6 1/2 feet tall, covered in dark fur, complete with bat ears, fangs, spindly 'arms' that must have been 7' long supporting big leathery wings, stubby legs, and vicious claws on its paws. It was as agile as a bat, able to make changes in flight direction faster than the human eye could follow, the claws were able to tear through wood and thin sheet metal like paper, and its high-pitched screech was a sonic weapon, producing almost instant disorientation in humans, and sometimes deafness through rupturing of the eardrums, while a good number of people who experience that attack were stunned into unconsciousness. The bat was searching the giant plant methodically, and whenever it found a specific treasure, it would carry that something out of the building at high speed and then return and continue searching. By the time Black Zero arrived on the scene, the employees who still retained consciousness had evacuated the plant, carrying their disabled colleagues with them whenever possible. None of the security guards had so far been able to shoot it, unable to hit such an erratically moving target.
When Zero caught up to it, the creature was flying through a very large room which contained 9 giant vats, each filled with some kind of bubbling fluid, each a different color. "Hey, you! Land, right now!" he yelled. The bat was so far away he was surprised when it turned toward him, and then an instant later, he was blasted with a very loud high frequency screech that seemed to make his teeth warm and his ears instantly hurt. He touched a control on his belt and fell out of that beam and managed to get behind one of the vats while he thought hard and fast about how to combat such a sonic weapon.
His headgear now included bulky radio earphones which practically cancelled any outside noises; part of the bulk was an amplifier that he could turn on when he actually wanted to hear things around him. He turned that off, and then zoomed back toward the ceiling, pointing toward the last position of the bat to aim his freeze ray. But the bat had moved. He twisted in place to try and spot his opponent again, and he could feel the effects of the sonic beam even though he couldn't hear it. Once again his teeth were getting warm, and his whole body was vibrating unpleasantly, and the effects were getting stronger. He aimed his right fist at the new position of the bat and fired both a beam of darkness and another of intense cold, and this time, they both struck before the bat could dodge. The sonic attack ended as the bat darted to one side, and then began again as soon as his enemy was out of the beam of darkness. He had to stop attacking to dodge; he could tell that a bit longer exposure to that sonic screech would start to have debilitating effects on him.
They sparred this way for several unsatisfying minutes, each able to escape the most devastating effects of the other's power - but both taking damage with every exchange. Bruce realized that like a true bat, his opponent must be able to use echolocation to 'see' in the dark, even through the absolute pitch black of the Blackout beam - but he couldn't use his voice to attack and echolocate at the same time. And Bruce couldn't hold the cold beam on him long enough to have an effect. The bat's fur protected him from short exposures, and Bruce had to stop moving to take effective aim for longer hits, and every time he stopped moving, the bat would hit him with his sonic weapon. They were wearing each other down with this long range jousting but it definitely was not clear who the winner of the joust would be, or when the end might come.
Suddenly the bat changed his tactics, and flew at Black Zero at high speed. Bruce waited until he got close, and then zoomed upward toward the ceiling, but the bat was incredibly agile and managed to slash Black Zero's leg as he flashed past. Bruce's two layer insulated costume was shredded across his thigh, but it prevented him from losing the leg. This was getting serious!
Black Zero turned and fled, back through the much smaller clean room through which he had entered the vast vat room. The bat swooped after his fleeing prey, but when it entered the smaller room, Black Zero struck back!
Ever since he had miniaturized and refined his original suitcase sized-luggable Black Zero transmitter and made the new smaller unit part of his costume, Bruce had also been refining his fighting techniques, using directional Blackout beams and focused Zero rays. He could still use the big, showy effects, like a Pillar of Darkness that covered an acre and seemingly reached up to infinity, or dropping a big room to 100 below zero in an instant, but the smaller battery pack he used to power his wearable transmitter still ran down faster than the bigger (and incidentally MUCH heavier) battery he used in the 'luggable' transmitter. Even with his new techniques, he made a habit of replacing the battery once a day. But he rarely got into battles where he used so much power in such a short time as this one. He needed to end this fight soon!
Since darkness prevented the bat from using his sonic weapon, Black Zero would hit him with darkness; since his fur protected him from cold beams long enough to fly out of the way, Black Zero wouldn't give him any place to escape to... He slipped on his 'see in the dark' goggles, and turned up the heat in his heated costume, and as soon as the bat entered the clean room, Black Zero turned up the rheostats on both the Blackout transmitter and the Zero transmitter - and the room plunged instantly into absolute darkness and the temperature dropped to a hundred below zero. Every drop of moisture in the room froze solid in instants, and even the bat's fur didn't protect him as he was encased in a solid block of ice and crashed to the floor.
Outside, everyone within miles was stunned to see a new Pillar of Darkness envelope a good portion of the giant chemical plant. It actually heartened the viewers; over the course of his career as the King of Darkness, people had come to associate the Pillar of Darkness with the heroic deeds of the King of Darkness!
The 'low power' indicator on Bruce's battery beeped plaintively for a second until he turned the costume heater rheostat back down and shut off the beams. Every light bulb in the clean room had exploded due to the abrupt drop in temperature, but Bruce's goggles allowed him to see. He had spotted some firefighting equipment in the vat room - he zoomed out and came back with a fire axe and started chopping the bat's head free of the ice. When the head was mostly free, he made sure to hold the axe in front of his foe's head.
"Can you see this? Do you know what it is?" he demanded. This creature was the size of a human, but there was no guarantee that it knew English - or ANY language. "If you struggle, I'll use this on your head! If you attack me again, I'll use it on your head!"
The bat replied. His voice was screechy and high pitched, but he spoke perfect English. "Please don't use that on me! I won't attack you; you have my word of honor!"
"Who are you? Why are you attacking this plant?" Black Zero demanded.
"I am Nightscreecher!" the bat replied defiantly. "I once worked here, the lead chemist on a Top Secret government project, until an experiment I was performing went wrong, and transformed me into the sorry creature you see before you. The management blamed ME for the failure, and fired me, refusing to let me try to find an antidote to my condition. I don't have the resources to do the research I need to change back, so I was taking what I need. If you stop me, I may be doomed to spend the rest of my life as a monster!"
That horror of that struck home hard... but before Bruce could reply, Nightscreecher turned his head as if focusing on something far away, and then spoke urgently.
"In the clean room on the other side of the vat room - someone needs help! Can't you hear her screaming?" Bruce turned the amplifiers on his earphones to max - and he was sure he could hear a woman screaming, faintly, from across the room. "It's TRUDY! You must save her!" the bat insisted desperately.
Bruce was torn, but then a louder screech convinced him. "I'll save her! But you will do no more damage to this plant, or the next time you may pay with your life!"
He zoomed away, and soon rescued Trudy Fawn from the wreckage caused by their battle that had trapped her. By the time he got back to the room where he'd left Nightscreecher encased in ice, the bat had used his claws to break free and was gone. But he didn't return to attack the Allomar Chemnotech plant again... at least not that day!
Black Zero hurried back to Trudy and as he gently carried her out of the plant, she confirmed much of Nightscreecher's story. He had been a biological chemist named Jon Bertlam, working on a classified government project. She couldn't divulge the details, but she had heard that the military was really interested in any innovation that would allow a soldier to see in the dark.
Just as he was setting Trudy down safely, the gauntlet of his Black Zero transmitter began to vibrate, in a pattern that told him that Ashley Zimmer, Chief of the FBI office in Boston, needed to speak to him urgently. He zoomed back to his lab, swapped out the battery of the Black Zero transmitter, changed his shredded tights, and then was headed to Boston at his highest speed.
It only took Black Zero a few minutes to fly from Portsmouth, NH, to Boston, Ma. The weather changed drastically in that short distance; it had been bright and sunny in Portsmouth, but Boston was covered with low-hanging gray clouds. Zero swooped through the window into Zimmer's office on the top floor of the massive FBI building and was stunned to see the 18" high man standing on the desk. He was even more stunned to recognize that tiny person as Dr. Michael Gazeele, Director of the Society of Radio and Electronic Engineers, someone he'd met several times through Bruce's membership in the SREE. If that really WAS Gazeele, he'd need to be careful not to give away his Bruce King identity.
Of course, it really WAS Gazeele. Zimmer and the miniature Gazeele quickly brought Black Zero up to speed on a story we readers already know well. Though they both asked him dozens of questions, Gazeele could only recall one other clue - he'd noticed the postmark on the anonymous package containing the insidious idol; it had been mailed from Boston two days before it was delivered. This helped confirm their theory that Subducto's headquarters was somewhere in the Boston area.
"The package was probably hand-delivered to the counter in one of the Boston branches," Zimmer theorized. "I'll send some agents out to interview the clerks. It's a really slim chance - they probably get small packages mailed over the counter all the time, so unless the mailer really stood out we probably won't learn anything." He called in Damon Bodacious, one of the most dedicated 'Agents in Charge' in the Boston office and gave him the details, and sent Jim Varney, his best detective, to search Gazeele's brownstone yet again, this time checking to see if the wrapping for the idol package was still in Gazeel's trash.
"If there's anything to find, those two will find it!" Zimmer declared confidently. "My theory is that this Subducto's base is somewhere near MIT... so I'm going to join the search team in Cambridge." Gazeele nodded; that made sense, Subducto might want to be close to the school where they were advancing radio technology every day.
"I think he'd want to be isolated - I'm going to investigate the harbor islands," Black Zero replied. "I'll be he's set up shop in one of the deserted Revolutionary War Forts!"
In his headquarters, Subducto sat in front of a screen, embedded in a control panel which had dozens of switches and dials. The screen showed the scene of Zimmer's office, rendered in black and white, taken from Gazeele's viewpoint. The villain roared with laughter. "My subducted camera planted on Gazeele, and my fantastic futuristic heterodynamic televisor are working perfectly... of course! The fools have no idea where to find me. But I have a surprise for THEM!" He rubbed his hands together, gave some orders to his henchmen, and turned back to the televisor screen.
Zimmer made arrangements for his staff to keep Gazeele comfortable, and then he and Black Zero departed on their separate searches, Zimmer to the north and Black Zero flashing west. Zimmer's car was on the Longfellow Bridge when the road noises around it stopped suddenly and the engine started to race, as Zimmer could feel the car ascending into the air like an elevator cab. It soared upwards and vanished into the heavy cloud cover. When it rose through the top of the dark clouds into the clear skies and brilliant sunshine above, Zimmer was stunned to see a giant dirigible with a giant open door on one end of the gondola. The car was pulled through the door. Hoping he was going unnoticed, Black Zero followed the car closely, trying to remain concealed against the bottom of the chassis.
The car was drawn into a large room in the giant gondola that resembled an airplane hanger. As it swept toward the far wall, Black Zero flashed from under the car to concealment behind what appeared to be a jet-powered bi-plane. It was quickly apparent, though, that his entrance to the dirigible had been noticed, when he heard a gunshot and a bullet crashed into a wooden crate that was standing near the futuristic biplane.
"I'm not going to just flitter around and be a damn target," he thought. He adjusted power to the Blackout transmitter and the hanger was filled with darkness. "Hope they haven't got 'see in the dark goggles like the Red Gang!" There was a few more shots, but they were all loosely aimed at the area of the biplane, and Black Zero was not longer even close to that spot. He zoomed around the hanger, looking for targets, and whenever he spotted someone, he unleashed the Zero beam, the power set carefully at a level that his extensive past experience using the freeze ray against bad guys had taught him would usually take those minions out of action for 10 to 15 minutes, while minimizing serious damage from frostbite or being frozen solid. Sometimes someone hit by this beam would take months to fully recover, but Black Zero had little sympathy for people who were trying to kill him. He was pretty certain they would all live, at least...
A powerfully amplified voice rang out through speakers set throughout the hanger. "You idiots STOP SHOOTING instantly; do you want to kill us all? We are in a hydrogen dirigible, you FOOLS! Black Zero, stand down, or I, the Subductor, will kill my hostages!" It wasn't exactly clear to Bruce how to 'stand down'; he stopped attacking the minions, but didn't drop the darkness. Several seconds later, Subductor's amplified voice rattled the hanger again."You will return our sight IMMEDIATELY or the hostages will die. You have 2 seconds!"
The Blackout transmitter was turned off instantly. At the far end of the hanger, standing on a balcony, Black Zero could see the Subductor, microphone in hand, next to a minion holding a tiny squirming human figure. "Now, foolish hero, you will COME TO ME! Or the hostages die!" He turned and walked through a door behind him, followed by his minion, and left the door open. Hoping to be as difficult a target as possible, Black Zero zoomed through the air, and then slowed and floated through the open door only a few seconds after the master villain.
Expecting nothing and everything, Bruce was still stunned and astounded by what he saw. He was in a well-equipped radio lab, perhaps as extensively and extravagantly equipped as his own. In one corner, he saw the Subduction Ray that Gazeele had described, and in another corner there was a big cage. The minion was just now stuffing Ashley Zimmer back into the cage, and one of the other prisoners was... Gloria Glamour?
"You FIEND! Why have you captured Gloria Glamour?!" Zero yelled in anger. He was as stunned by the villain's answer as he had been to discover his love interest as a captive.
"You recognize her as a sultry Hollywood starlet, but her genius in the radio sciences is second only to my own! When I combine her discoveries with my own inventions, I will be able to spay on and subduct ANYONE in the world without leaving my control room, and then it will be easy for my minions to capture them. No one will dare resist me! I'll shrink and capture all the world's geniuses, military and political leaders and they will work FOR me or remain shrunken FOREVER! BWAA HAA HAA HAA!"
The vision of the world at the mercy of this evil monster was too much for Black Zero. He brought his right arm up and triggered a cold blast, intense enough to freeze Subucto instantly solid, heedless of the fact that this would kill the villain - and Subducto only laughed as the beam splattered against something before it reached him. "Did you think to catch me unawares, you FOOL"! My imperviglass is proof against ANY degree of heat or cold, and shatterproof as well. BWHAA HAA HAA HAA!"
The door to the hanger slammed shut, and a stream of very high pressure green vapor blasted from the mouth of a large green jade idol that was sitting on a bookshelf not far from where Black Zero was standing - and within seconds, he and the shrunken prisoners were all unconscious.
Bruce was a little surprised to awaken at all, but less surprised that he was now shrunken to the size of the other prisoners and penned in the cage with them. Gloria was tending him while the others were discussing how they could escape - discussions that had so far proved futile.
He instantly noticed the difference in his body as he sat up... he moved more quickly than he expected, and he reached the seated position more quickly than he expected so his motion ended very abruptly and awkwardly, and then he became aware that his right hand was bare - and his hand whipped up to where he could see it and the added speed of his movement actually caused him to hit himself in the face, and then he could see that his gauntlet was gone and the flat ribbon cable that connected it to his Black Zero transmitter had been cut.
"Subducto ordered one of his lackeys to remove it as soon as you passed out," Gloria explained. "He said you would be powerless without it. That bracer around your wrist - it contained a flexible antenna for ultra-short radio waves, didn't it?"
Surprise, astounded, stunned? "How could you know that? I've never told anyone!"
"We've canoodled every time we can make our schedules match up for over a year now, and you still think I'm just some brainless Hollywood bimbo?" There was just the tiniest trace of bitterness in her voice. "I'm not even blonde!"
She calmed down a little, and said reflectively, "Well, maybe it's partly my fault - I DO have to keep my brains a secret. Most men seem to prefer their sexy, sultry actresses to be a little naive and a bit dumb. But..." she paused for a second, "... your powers and that suitcase you used to carry all the time reminded me for some reason of some obscure radio theories I'd read once, so I tried to figure out how they work. Ultra-short radio waves, transmitted through a flexible antenna with unconventional shape and construction, could theoretically produce the same effects as your powers."
Bruce nodded, dazed to hear this analysis coming from a woman who he had heretofore indeed considered naive and not very intellectual. He had a wild and not very generous thought: 'Could the shrinking process have made her a genius?' He quickly considered his favorite paradox - the infinite set paradox - "Which is larger, the set of all numbers, or the set of all even numbers?" and didn't have any new insights - so she really must have been this smart all along! He wasn't sure if that idea was scary or intriguing... quickly decided 'intriguing' would be safer, and then replied to her astonishing statement.
"You are absolutely correct. That unconventional antenna was built into the bracer on my gauntlet, along with some mechanisms for altering the shape - stretching it, compressing it, twisting it, for example. And Subducto is correct: without it, I'm powerless!" He sounded helpless: It took me almost two months to build the first one. I've another, built into my first, luggable suitcase Black Zero transmitter - but that's back in my lab. It I could use the tools and equipment in this lab..." he pointed at the larger room outside the cage "...I might be able to make another one in a couple of days - assuming I could work any of the tools and equipment at this size!"
"Well..." she unbuttoned the cuff on her blouse and pulled up the sleeve to reveal an unusual bracelet on her wrist, "...would this work?"
"SAINTS BE PRAISED!" he yelled in unbelieving utter astonishment. "Where did you GET THAT?" The other men looked at him, then turned back to their escape planning.
"That" was a bracelet of unusual design. A flexible cylinder created by a woven crosshatch of heavy, flat wires, the wires were silver and coppery colored. At the top and bottom they were attached to rings, in some of the intersections, they passed through silvery colored beads, the size of pearls in a necklace.
"Do you like it?" she asked with a lazy smile. "As I worked out the antenna parameters for controlling ultra-short radio waves I thought the design would make a unique bracelet - and very expensive: too, the bands are gold, the beads are platinum, and the cross-hatch wires are silver and copper. So I made one. Lucky Subducto's idiot lackeys didn't search me!"
"You're a jeweler, too?" She winked at him; his jaw hurt from dropping so hard and so often! But he was thinking fast. "Without the distortion mechanisms in the bracer that allow me fine control of the beams, if we can just attach your bracelet to the wires from my transmitter, it should work well enough for the big stuff! And then that Subducto can just sit back and watch my smoke!"
The giant, urgent problem of escape was suddenly eclipsed by a smaller, more urgent project. "Say, boys, does any of you happen to have a penknife?" Gloria asked their fellow prisoners.
Zimmer was the first to reply in the affirmative. While Gloria removed the bracelet, Bruce attacked the ribbon cable with the knife, stripping off several inches of insulation from the two conductors embedded in the flat cable which led from his wrist to the transistorized Black Zero transmitter strapped to his back. Just them the door to the lab opened, and one of Subducto's minions stormed in, unlocked the cage and entered, then locked it again and dropped the keys through the bars about a foot away - easily within his own reach, but well outside the reach of any of the tiny prisoners.
He waved an odd-looking pistol at the prisoners, who were now gathered in a bunch. "Time for a little fun with dolls!" he said in a malevolent tone. "Girly, get over here!"
The male prisoners immediately moved to stand between the bad guy and the shrunken actress. The minion fired, and a bolt of electricity zapped one of the radio engineers, who immediately collapsed, hopefully and not dead.
"No more foolin' around, I want the teeny tiny babe over here, RIGHT NOW!" the minion snarled, and aimed the gun directly at another of the small prisoners. "Or this time I use full power and burn one'a yous to smoke!"
"I'll keep him busy; you finish the wiring!" Gloria whispered to Bruce, then raised her voice. "Don't shoot any more of them! I'm coming!"
Black Zero didn't want to see what was about to happen with Gloria; he just knew he had to get his powers working as fast as possible. Instead of watching, he shuffled around behind the other prisoners, and while the minion's attention was on Gloria, who was doing her best to strut sexily across the cage, even at only 18' tall, he got back to work. He hastily wrapped one bare conductor around the 'top' golden ring of Gloria's bracelet and twisted it around itself into as solid a contact as he felt was safe - if he twisted it tighter and it broke off now, he'd probably never get another chance to try this. He then repeated the operation with the other conductor. And then... disaster!
His hand was too big to slip through Gloria's bracelet! As he strained, the minion picked up the miniature starlet in one hand, and holding her close to his leering face, started to tear off her blouse with the other! "Always wanted to do this to one'a you stuckup Hollywood broads!" he laughed. His breath was hot and almost unbearable, but she forced herself not to turn away.
"Hey! Cut it out!" she yelled, sounding almost like the chirping of a baby bird. "That's the only top I've got that fits!" He hesitated for just a second. "Here; I'll take it off for you!"
"I'll buy ya tons of clothes from the doll section of the Five and Dime," he laughed. "You ain't never gonna have to worry about clothes again, Dolly! Boy, dis is gonna be FUN!"
Bruce grabbed his right hand in his left and squeezed, then squealed in pain as he forced the compressed hand through the two too-tight golden rings. The scraped skin started bleeding, which helped lubricate the process, and as the minion turned to the other prisoners to see what was causing the commotion, he forced it into place! Gloria leaned as close to his face as she could, reached as far as she could and slugged him in the nose as hard as she could. He dropped her, as she had hoped, then he reached for his nose with both hands - then screamed with terror as he suddenly went blind!
With no fine control, Bruce couldn't just shoot a well-controlled focused beam of darkness; instead he produced a miniature version of his patented Pillar of Darkness that speared through the bottom and top of the dirigible - and incidentally filled almost the whole room they were in.With his goggles, Black Zero was the only one who could see.
He activated his anti-gravity rays and zoomed forward at full power towards the minion's midsection, and hit him HARD in the solar plexus with his shoulder. Quickly, he put the bracelet against the bad guy's chest and activated the Zero transmitter at the lowest power setting. Even at the lowest power setting, without the fine controls, the temperature in the entire room dropped to under freezing in only seconds - and the minion, who was actually in contact with the antenna, was frozen into a block of ice. Bruce hastily turned off the transmitter before he killed everyone else in the room...
Now it was everyone else's turn to be stunned at their quick turnaround in fortune. Except Gloria. "We've got to get out of here - and find a way to disable that idol before Subducto finds out we're loose!"
"I could..." Black Zero started and then stopped. He'd been about to volunteer to just shatter the idol - but would that just release more gas? Until they were out of the lab, they couldn't take that risk!
It wasn't too difficult to recover the keys. Zimmer took off one of his shoes, unlaced it partially, then threw it past the keys and pulled it back by the shoestring. None of the shrunken prisoners could reach the lock, but Black Zero could fly, although he had to be very careful without his fine tuning controls. And then, things went wrong again!
The door opened and an enraged Subducto stepped into the lab, and instantly fired his lightning gun. Black Zero slapped at his belt control to fire a Zero beam and try to freeze the villain. But something went wrong; there was no intense cold... but something else went right, the lightning bolt from Subducto's gun was somehow deflected, and it crashed into the Subduction device. The projector was spun around and somehow the electrical bolt activated it - and the spinning beam swept across Subducto, and he instantly shrank - but didn't stop at 18 inches; instead he continued shrinking until he simply vanished.
| "In my rush, I managed to turn on all 3 of my ultra-short radio wave transmitters - the one that cancels light, the one that cancels heat, and the one that cancels gravity - at the same time, instead of just the Zero beam," Bruce spoke slowly, trying to figure out what had just happened. "But when I've done that in the past, I've always floated into the air, surrounded by darkness and cold. But none of my normal powers was activated, instead of all 3 at once. Instead, it's like somehow I have a new power - to deflect electricity..." Gloria was already solving antenna theory 3rd order linear equations in her head. "I think..." she replied slowly, "... it's the way you needed to stretch the bracelet in order to put it on. You can probably able to modify your own bracer to replicate the effect once we get it back..." Dark Zero simply nodded and hoped that his mask concealed his bewildered expression. He would have to use pen and several pads of paper to figure that out... but later! Right now they needed to escape. |  |
When they were outside, he touched the bracelet to the idol and gave it full power. It was instantly encased in a thick block of ice that he knew would take hours to melt. He could see cracks on the surface of the jade, but until the gas could seep through the ice, the lab was safe. He called the others back in, and together they examined the Subducto ray. The controls were easy enough - a 3 position switch, labeled "Enlarge...Off...Subduct", which was currently set on 'Subduct' and a rheostat for controlling the power, with four labels as well: "Off...Low...Normal...High".
"It's still turned off," one of the shrunken radio engineers noted. "Somehow, Subducto's lightning gun energized it." He reached out and flipped the Subduct switch to the Off position.
"Good idea - don't want it shrinking us by mistake!" another radio engineer approved.
"But, do we dare use it? What if it shrinks us even more, like it did to him?" the third wondered, sounding very worried. "Or, suppose it grows us to giant size?"
"The don't write movie roles for living dolls!" Gloria spoke up, then paused for a second. "Well, actually, they do, don't they? They write roles for me all the time! What I mean is, they want their living dolls to be life size!" She clicked the switch to "Enlarge" and turned the power to "Low". "If it turns me into a giant, I'll be a natural for that horror movie script that's making the rounds in Hollywood now - "Attack of the Giant Woman". I've already read for the part - just think how they'll save on special effects!"
Before anyone could stop her, she stepped into the beam... and expanded until she was about 3 and a half feet tall. "Well, at least we know it's set for 'Expand'." She stepped out of the beam and back in - and she was back to normal!
"OK, fellas, your turns!"
Black Zero went next - how could he hesitate after his girlfriend had showed the way? As soon as he was full-sized, he zoomed out of the room, looking for Subducto's minions and the crew of the dirigible who might still want to put up a fight. The others were all returned to normal when he came back into the room, carrying several lightning pistols and some regular pistols as well, herding a man in an overdecorated uniform.
"This is Captain Turner. He and his crew will be happy to land this dirigible wherever we direct, and then surrender to the FBI. Isn't that right, Captain?" he prodded the uniformed officer in the back with one of the lightning pistols, and Turner nodded vigorously. He handed the pistols to the former prisoners. "All we have to do is keep them under surveillance until we're down and Zimmer's crew has them in custody. With my restored powers and command of all the weapons on board, that shouldn't be too difficult."
It took several hours - Boston didn't have an airfield equipped to handle a dirigible, much less the largest dirigible in the world, but the crew was very competent - Subducto had shrunken out of existence any incompetent crew members; the rest had improved quickly! Zimmer opined, and many of them overheard, that a few of them would probably be recruited by the military, at least as closely monitored dirigible flight instructors, so they might escape prison time... which co-incidentally encouraged them to perform better.
In a couple of hours, crews of men were tying down the descending airship to buildings, trees, blocks of cinder blocks, large boulders and heavy construction equipment at the nascent Boston Auxuliary Airport near Lexington, Ma, a facility that would be renamed "Hanscomb Air Base" during the upcoming war.
After that, all that was left was the paperwork. Black Zero flew Gloria back to Boston hotel where she was staying during the on-location filming of her current movie. She promised to spend a few weeks in Portsmouth once the filming was over, and made Zero promise to fly to Boston every weekend ("It only takes you 10 minutes!"), and after the appropriate good-byes between the two, he zipped back to Portsmouth.
Be sure to visit your newsstand next month for the next exciting issue of "Black Zero, King of Darkness"! On sale on or around August 1st. All in color, only a nickle!!