Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus Prose Novel E-Book

James Lovegrove

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When the Silver Surfer appears, all is lost: Galactus is coming. The Fantastic Four - Mr Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing - must take on a desperate mission, risking everything to stop the apocalypse. A pulse-pounding apocalyptic tale based on the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Perfect for fans of Marvel comics. Marvel's First Family faces a desperate battle for survival against a planet-devouring god. Inspired by the seminal origin stories of the Fantastic Four, Galactus and the Silver Surfer by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The sky is on fire. Across the globe, the people are convinced that the end is nigh. They're right. Galactus is coming. His herald, the Silver Surfer, has come to Earth and judged it perfect for his master's needs. And his master is hungry. The odds are impossible, the outcome is certain—nothing can stop the devourer of worlds. When all seems lost, Earth looks to the Fantastic Four. They'll find a way to stop Galactus and save the world. They have to.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Novels of the Marvel Universe by Titan Books & Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

In the Beginning…

13.7 Billion Years Later

Not on Earth, Not in Another Dimension, But…

Seventy-Two Hours Later

Meanwhile, On that Third Planet from the Sun…

Back In the Very Dim and Distant Past

Back to the Baxter Building

Galactus

Clobberin’ Time!

A Long Time Ago…

The Silver Surfer

Elsewhere

A Few Days Later…

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

FANTASTIC FOUR: THE COMING OF GALACTUS

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A NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus

An original novel by

JAMES LOVEGROVE

TITAN BOOKS

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FANTASTIC FOUR: THE COMING OF GALACTUS

Print edition ISBN: 9781803369044

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803369037

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: June 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2025 MARVEL

MARVEL PUBLISHING

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Cover art by Jack Kirby. Paints by Dean White.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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This one’s forPaul Wilson

Silver Surfer super fan

In the Beginning…

…IT WAS the end of everything.

The universe was dying.

Its multibillion-year lifespan was coming to a close. As all things in nature must decay, the whole of creation was decaying. A rot had begun to spread from the center outwards, moving from solar system to solar system, world to world, bringing oblivion wherever it touched.

It was a plague of dark radiation which altered the very building blocks of existence. It broke the bonds within molecules. It dissolved atoms. It unentwined DNA strands. It dispersed matter into nothingness.

The dark radiation fed on destruction, and with every planet it reached and every species it extinguished, it grew stronger and proliferated faster.

It was an inexorable spaceborne cancer, and nothing could stop it.

* * *

THERE WAS a world at the universe’s edge, and its name was Taa.

Taa was a veritable paradise, the most advanced civilization in existence. It was a place of scientific marvels, social harmony and everlasting peace. Its denizens spent their long lives pursuing the arts and the acquisition of knowledge.

In the tall, shining towers of their cities, Taa-ans devoted themselves to contemplation and recreation. In their civic spaces they raised vast statues in tribute to the noted forebears who had helped make Taa the beacon of progress and reason it had become. They toiled enthusiastically in fabulous laboratories and gazed at the night skies from ultra-sophisticated observatories.

They traveled across their world in transparent thought-spheres to further their studies. The thought-spheres could hover amid the lava spewed from the mouth of a volcano, and endure the pressures of the deepest ocean depths, with no danger or discomfort whatsoever to their passengers.

In the entire universe, there was nowhere else quite like Taa. It was the civilization other civilizations aspired to be.

And one of its foremost inhabitants, and perhaps its greatest mind, was the man called Galan.

* * *

FOR MONTHS, Galan had been absent from Taa. He had taken himself off into the farthest reaches of space aboard a quantum-drive starship capable of subspace travel. He had journeyed far and wide, making surveys, taking readings, gathering data.

He wished either to confirm or to disprove certain observations he had made from the surface of his homeworld.

His researches led him to one dire, inescapable conclusion.

When he returned to Taa, he broke the news to his race.

The universe was doomed.

At first, Galan—an impressive figure in his gleaming metallic-blue armor-like outerwear, with a high forehead and strips of close-cropped hair—had difficulty finding words to express himself. He was addressing a room full of his scientific peers, with the event being broadcast planetwide to the transceiver units implanted in the brain of every Taa-an at birth.

When great Galan made an announcement, all listened. When he had information to share, all paid attention.

“I can scarcely speak,” he said at last. “Of what use is speech at a time like this? A time of dread catastrophe. It is as I feared. Taa—and, indeed, the universe itself—has not long to live.”

There was rumbling consternation among the assembled scientists, and likewise across the whole of Taa.

“Our world,” Galan continued, “is one of the last still in existence. A terrible radioactive plague is sweeping towards us, here at the fringes of the known cosmos. I have watched as countless races have fallen before the contagion. I have seen billions upon billions of lives snuffed out, planets reduced to dust, suns become little more than clouds of cinders. It is hopeless. There is no avoiding this plague, and no remedy for it that I know of.”

“Can it truly not be defeated, Galan?” a member of his audience cried out. “There must be a cure, and surely we Taa-ans, with our knowledge and our technology, stand a better chance than anybody of finding one.”

“I have applied my mind to the question,” Galan replied. “My thoughts during my return journey were occupied by little else. I programmed my starship’s computer to run a septillion scenarios. It calculated and recalculated, and every time the answer was the same, confirming my suppositions. Nothing can escape the plague. The dark radiation defies being repelled. There is no countermeasure, no antidote. Perhaps, if we had decades, we might collectively be able to devise such a thing. But we do not have decades. The plague’s progress is accelerating, and it is nearing Taa.”

“How soon?” asked another audience member. “How long do we have before it is upon us?”

Galan’s already grim visage became ever more somber. “Days, my friends. We have only days left.”

There was, then, an outpouring of grief and horror from the entire population. Whether through speech, or via their transceiver units, person communicated with person, sharing their shock, their sorrow, their dismay, their anguish. It was some while before all these voices quietened and Galan was able to sum up the situation.

“What must we do, my friends?” he asked rhetorically. “I can think of only one thing. It is all we can do. We must prepare for the inevitable. We must simply await the end of all that is.”

He looked down for a moment, then raised his noble head. His eyes glistened. His jaw was set.

“Our race must die with dignity,” Galan said, “in a manner befitting Taa.”

* * *

AND YET, Galan thought later, it was not fitting that all must perish.

Evening had come, and Taa’s threefold suns were setting, creating that remarkable interplay of deepening colors and multiple crisscrossing shadows which made its dusks so incomparably beautiful.

Galan stood on the balcony of his apartment, at the summit of a forty-story tower, beholding the dying embers of the day with the heaviest of hearts. He had carried the knowledge of the universe’s impending demise all by himself during his time in space, and had thought that revealing it to everyone else on Taa would relieve him of the burden.

But, in fact, he now felt the weight of it even more.

It seemed extraordinary that Taa should die. All that erudition, all that genius, everything Taa-ans had accomplished over countless generations—shortly to be snuffed out, as though it had never been.

Inconceivable.

There had to be a way, surely, for the glory and grandeur that were Taa to live on.

Galan brooded on the matter, even as Elder Child, Taa’s largest sun, sank below the horizon. Its two siblings, Middle Child and Youngest, followed in swift succession, and night fell.

The sky bristled brilliantly with stars. But there seemed to be fewer than usual, and as Galan watched, he could have sworn he saw one or two of them wink out of existence.

A plan, born of hope and desperation, began forming in his brain.

* * *

IN THE days that followed, Galan roved back and forth across Taa in a thought-sphere. He guided the vehicle with his mind, visiting several specific locations: the homes of Taa’s preeminent chemists, physicists and biologists.

He could have contacted these scientists by transceiver, but he elected to visit them in person instead. So much more could be achieved through a one-to-one conversation than remotely.

His proposal to each was this. They would assemble every scrap of knowledge on Taa and commit it to databanks. Then, together, they would depart the planet in Galan’s starship with those databanks on board and head for the very source of the dark radiation, at the universe’s heart.

To call this mission hazardous was an understatement. It was suicide.

And yet there was a chance—a very remote chance—that where the radiation originated from, there they might be able to fathom its nature best, and thus perhaps find a way to combat it. The starship’s computer, loaded with the accumulated brainpower of an entire race, would be put to work, to aid them in coming up with a solution.

The dark radiation, Galan reasoned, did not just appear out of nowhere. It had emerged from something, and in that something might lie the key to salvation.

From each scientist he garnered agreement, and a date was set for them to assemble at Galan’s home and launch into space.

During those days, as Galan mustered his scientific allies, the effects of the dark radiation began to be felt on Taa. Journeying across the continents, Galan saw death laying its dark hand, now here, now there, arbitrarily, capriciously, as though this was all just some childish game to it.

Cities were slowly becoming necropolises as the sinister, invisible plague crept over them. People collapsed and died in the streets. Thought-spheres crashed to earth as their occupants were suddenly struck down. Towers cracked and fell. Forests and jungles turned brown, then black. Seas dried and became turgid swamps. Great ocean beasts floundered in the shallows, gasping their last. Mountains literally crumbled.

Galan hardened his heart to these apocalyptic scenes. He focused on his mission. He could not afford to give in to despair. With him and his colleagues rested Taa’s one slim hope of survival.

* * *

AT LAST the day came.

The scientists gathered at Galan’s residence. Several of them did not make it; death had claimed them in the interim.

The handful who did boarded Galan’s starship, and they lifted off and rose into the sky, escaping the moldering, death-riddled shell that was once Taa. They felt some guilt at abandoning their fellow Taa-ans, their friends and their loved ones; but more than that, they felt dread and trepidation. Ahead of them lay an uncertain destiny. The only thing they knew with any surety was that they were more than likely going to die.

They flew through the darkness of a hollowed-out universe, on a course for its very center. Galan had erected an antimatter field around his starship which he hoped would mitigate the dark radiation’s effects. Eventually the field would succumb to the plague and become useless, but it ought to protect the vessel long enough for them to reach their destination.

The fearful voyage soon neared its end. The starship’s long-range sensors detected an extraordinary phenomenon ahead: what appeared to be a seething, blazing cauldron of sheer cosmic energy, vast as a sun. Galan and his colleagues analyzed it and came to an inescapable conclusion.

The pulsating energy mass was the source of the dark radiation. As Galan had theorized, the plague had to have come from somewhere, and this was it.

But not only that.

The energy was sentient.

The starship decelerated on its approach to the energy mass. Its protective antimatter field was by now just the thinnest of skins, barely keeping the dark radiation at bay. The vessel’s life could be measured in hours.

Nonetheless, the Taa-an scientists, led by Galan, set about studying the phenomenon, trying to comprehend what it was made of, why it lived, and how its malign influence on the universe might be counteracted.

It was an urgent race against time, the greatest intellects of the greatest ever civilization applying themselves to penetrating what was perhaps the ultimate mystery—and in doing so, saving themselves and everything that was.

They failed.

The antimatter field gave out. No longer were they shielded from the plague.

All at once, the starship was inundated by the dark radiation. Here, right at its point of origin, it was stronger than anywhere else.

It dismantled the starship like a wave crashing over a sandcastle.

It flooded the scientists’ bodies, reducing them in a nanosecond to their component elements and scattering those elements into nonexistence.

All of them save one.

Galan.

GALAN FELT himself being swept up by immeasurably powerful tides.

He felt himself being drawn towards the energy mass.

He did not know why or how.

He was as helpless as a leaf in a hurricane.

He plunged into the heart of the energy mass, a vortex of swirling, elemental forces which tore at him this way and that. He opened his mouth to scream, but his cries were lost amid the churning maelstrom like the squeaking of a mouse amid a raging cataract.

He knew that the energy mass in which he was now enfolded was analyzing him, much as he and the other scientists had earlier analyzed it. It was examining him with curiosity, as Galan himself might have peered at an amoeba through a microscope. It was poring over him, picking him apart, probing, subjecting him to scrutiny of the most intense, most intimate kind.

He had no choice but to submit to the procedure. He did not doubt that once it was over, he would die—and how appropriate it was, in the most ironic of ways, that a scientist such as he should spend the last moments of his life as an object of scientific study.

Then the energy mass spoke. Its voice resounded inside Galan’s head. He felt rather than heard its words.

“Galan, last son of Taa,” it said, “hear me. I am the Sentience of the Universe. I am the living embodiment of all that is, was, and ever shall be.”

On Taa it had long been theorized that the universe was not merely a random agglomeration of galaxies and nebulae, and that an intelligent entity permeated its essence. All of creation could not exist, surely, without there being some consciousness behind it, giving it purpose and function.

And this was that very entity, and it was conversing with him.

Galan’s mind reeled. He did not know whether to laugh or howl.

“Like yourself, Galan of Taa, I am dying,” the Sentience of the Universe said. “I have lived long, I have aged, and now eternal night beckons. A sickness has come upon me and has infected every corner of my being, eradicating me bit by bit. All that remains of me is this last vestige of self, which even now I struggle to maintain. Soon I will no longer be able to support my own mass and collapse beneath my abysmal weight.”

Galan sensed the truth of this. He had the impression of those mighty forces all around him turning inward, seeking some focal zero point and rushing to it. The Sentience of the Universe would be scooped into this infinitesimal terminus, taking Galan with it. Thereafter, all would be only void.

“But though we both must die, you and I,” the Sentience of the Universe continued, “we need not die without an heir. That is why I have drawn you into me. Come, Galan of Taa, surrender yourself to my embrace and let us become as one. You are an explorer, a discoverer. You have dedicated your life to learning. Your mind has ever been open to new experiences. You, more than anyone, would wish to know what lies beyond the end of all that is.”

There was no denying this. To find out what lay beyond the veil of existence? To pierce the greatest secret of them all and be enlightened? Galan, in spite of everything, felt a thrill of excitement at the proposition.

“I can gift you that opportunity,” the Sentience of the Universe said. “Let our death throes serve as birth pangs for a new form of life. In a time beyond time shall be born a new universe, and into that universe I shall dispatch a being like no other—an organism who possesses a matchless power and a raging appetite. It will be you, Galan, born anew, suffused with the last of the energies which animate me. Do you consent?”

Galan did not need to reply. The Sentience of the Universe was aware what his answer must be.

There was an almighty rending.

A coalescing.

A condensing.

* * *

THEN, FOR a time, there was stillness.

That which had been Galan of Taa remained in a nascent state, even as around him a new universe exploded into life. From nothing, all at once there was everything. In a huge flash of light and a burst of incredible incandescent heat, atoms formed, particles gathered, and matter began distributing itself in all directions. An expansion began, boundless, endless, like a balloon inflating faster than the speed of light. Neutrons, protons and electrons flooded the emptiness, the raw stuff from which an entire cosmos would grow.

At the epicenter of it all, Galan hung suspended within the remnants of his starship, which had been reformed by the Sentience of the Universe into a life-sustaining cocoon.

Insensate, unaware, Galan waited. Snug inside the artificial cocoon, he was slowly transformed. As millennia passed and the newborn universe settled and cooled, his body changed and developed, much like a chrysalis on its way to becoming a butterfly.

Though he slept, Galan was conscious of two thoughts. They were lodged deep in his mind, at some primal, instinctual level.

One was that his name was no longer Galan. The Sentience of the Universe had given him a new one.

Galactus.

The other thought was simply this.

He hungered.

13.7 Billion Years Later

EARTH.

The Himalayas.

The Hidden Land.

The Great Refuge, home of the genetically altered race known as the Inhumans.

Outside which four costumed, super-powered adventurers currently stood in various states of dismay and despair.

The Great Refuge had nestled for centuries in a remote valley in this mountainous region, surrounded by a palisade of snowy peaks and, until today, undiscovered by humankind. It was a city of teetering baroque architecture, all spirals and spires, buttresses and balustrades, everything glossy and gleaming. Elevated walkways linked the buildings, while broad, leafy plazas sat between, adorned with soaring statuary and shimmering fountains.

All of that majesty and wonder, however, had just been confined within a huge dome, a hemisphere of dense, solid sound perhaps a mile in diameter and half a mile high. Its surface was like a bank of swirling fog, impossible to see through.

The dome had been erected by Maximus, the black sheep of the Inhuman royal family and a man who truly lived up to his nickname: Maximus the Mad. This twisted intellectual prodigy had activated a device of his own making, the Atmo-Gun, which had brought the opaque, impenetrable sonic barrier down around the city, decisively cutting it and its inhabitants off from the rest of the world.

His motive was simple. He coveted the throne presently occupied by his older brother Black Bolt. Since only he himself knew how to lift the dome, Maximus anticipated that the Inhuman citizenry would come to him on bended knee and beg him to deliver them from captivity. He would agree to their request, but only on condition that they deposed Black Bolt and made him king in his stead.

The super hero quartet—known the world over as the Fantastic Four—had been witness to these events, and had barely managed to escape the Great Refuge before the dome descended.

Now, one of their number resolved to pierce the barrier and get back inside.

His name was Johnny Storm, and he was gifted with the ability to generate and manipulate fire, and also to envelop his whole body in flames and fly. Hence he was commonly referred to as the Human Torch.

He leaned forward and unleashed a jet of flame from his right hand.

“I can do it,” Johnny said, teeth clenched in determination. His breath emerged as puffs of pale vapor in the chilly high-altitude air. “I can cut through this thing. I can get back to her. I can free her.”

He was talking about Crystal, another member of the Inhuman royal family. She and Johnny had met by chance a few days ago in New York, and had fallen hard for each other, only to find themselves separated almost immediately. It was one of the reasons why Johnny and his three teammates had flown halfway across the world, so the two young lovers could be reunited. Unfortunately, it was then that Maximus the Mad had chosen to hatch his villainous scheme, and Johnny and Crystal were now parted again. And this time, it looked permanent.

Unless, that was, Johnny could burn his way through the barrier, as he hoped.

His flame, however, scattered across the dome’s murky surface ineffectually, not even so much as singeing it.

Johnny let out a cry of pure, agonized determination and ramped up the power. The jet of fire went from orange to white. Its brightness was blinding, the heat it gave off as fierce as a blast furnace.

Still it did not even leave a mark on the barrier, let alone burn a hole.

“Johnny,” said one of his teammates. This was Reed Richards, also known as Mister Fantastic, and not only was he the leader of the Fantastic Four and possibly the smartest person on the planet, he was married to Johnny’s older sister, Sue. He laid a gently restraining hand on his brother-in-law’s upper arm. “Johnny, stop. It’s not making any difference. Remember how Maximus said his Atmo-Gun was designed to create a wall of negative-polarity sound? I don’t think anything known to science can breach that.”

Reluctantly, ruefully, Johnny turned off the flame. His eyes were brimming with tears.

“I can’t believe it,” he murmured. “I’ll never be with Crys again. There—there isn’t even a chance.” All at once, his expression brightened. A metaphorical lightbulb popped into life above his head. “Wait a minute. Wait a damn minute. What am I thinking? Lockjaw! Lockjaw can just teleport her out of there. He can teleport all of the Inhumans out of there.”

Lockjaw, a gigantic, slobbery, but very intelligent bulldog, was Crystal’s pet and constant companion. The size of a hippo, and sporting a pair of antennae that together formed a kind of curving Y-shape, he had the ability to teleport himself and others wherever required.

Reed shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m afraid not, Johnny.”

“What do you mean? The big mutt just has to fire up that wacky tuning fork on his head, and blammo, the Inhumans are home free.”

“I’ve already considered that,” Reed said, adopting his customary air of scientific authority. “There are three reasons why it won’t work. One: if it did, Lockjaw would already have teleported out by now, if for no other reason than to establish whether he could. Two: negative-polarity sound functions all the way down to the subatomic level. Its resonations interfere not just with solid matter but with any kind of transmission going in and out, and that includes teleportation. Chances are, if Lockjaw tried it, he and anyone he was taking with him would boomerang back, ending up right where they started. Or, worse, they’d be shredded apart, obliterated at a molecular level. Which leads me to three: that’s precisely why Maximus chose to use negative-polarity sound for his barrier, because he knows even Lockjaw can’t get through it. He may be a mad genius, but he’s still a genius.”

Johnny was crestfallen. “So it’s impossible,” he groaned.

“Aw, nothin’s impossible, Johnny,” said another of the Fantastic Four, Ben Grimm. He was the strongman of the team, with a broad, squat, squarish physique. His entire body was covered in a rock-like hide the color of rust, and his facial features were correspondingly rough-hewn and lumpen. To the world at large he was known as the Thing, and while it might not be a flattering name—like something belonging to a creature from a black-and-white B-movie—it fit. “We’ll find a way. You just have to be patient.”

“You’re only saying that!” Johnny yelled at him. “There isn’t a way. I’ve lost her forever. And it’s your fault. If not for you, I’d still be in there with Crystal.”

At Reed’s urging, Ben had yanked Johnny away from his girlfriend’s side just as the dome began to form, and had manhandled him out of the Great Refuge, oblivious to his protests. Reed had made the calculation that Johnny was better off sticking with his own people rather than remaining trapped with the Inhumans. Johnny was not so sure about that.

“Yeah, maybe so, kid,” Ben said. “C’mon then, take a poke at me. It’ll make you feel better.”

Ben offered Johnny his jaw to hit.

The gesture was sincere, but both of them knew that punching the Thing would do nothing except leave Johnny with bruised knuckles if he was lucky, a broken hand if he wasn’t.

The fourth member of the team, Sue Richards, née Storm, slipped an arm around Johnny. Her ability to turn herself invisible and project similarly transparent forcefields had earned her the title the Invisible Woman. It was an unpretentious name, barely hinting at what she was truly capable of. For instance, if Sue hadn’t deployed one of her forcefields to create a temporary tunnel beneath the dome as it lowered, the Fantastic Four might never have made it out of the Great Refuge at all.

“Reed was right to tell Ben to grab you, Johnny,” she said. She was the senior of the two siblings by several years and cared for her little brother deeply, even though she found his behavior juvenile and infuriating at times. “And Ben was right to do it. One day you’ll thank them for it.”

Johnny just glared at her despondently.

“Yeah,” observed Ben. “Sure he will. Look at him. He’s just a big happy bundle of gratitude.”

Johnny turned his gaze to the barrier one more time. He thumped a fist against it. Then he swung round and walked slowly away, shoulders slumped.

His three teammates followed him, heading for their nearby Pogo Plane, the VTOL intercontinental aircraft that had brought them to the Himalayas and now stood ready to take them back home.

THE TEN-HOUR flight was a glum affair.

Every time someone tried to engage Johnny in conversation, he just grunted, or else blanked them.

In his mind’s eye, visions of Crystal danced and swam. He recalled stumbling across the gorgeous young redhead while wandering through a Manhattan slum neighborhood that was due to be demolished and redeveloped. He’d been instantly captivated by her. She was sitting all alone and, in that derelict setting, with her filmy white dress and long flowing hair, she clearly did not belong. She seemed almost unreal, like something out of a fairy tale.

It should be noted that Johnny was, at that time, on the outs with his then-girlfriend Dorrie Evans. For some while, Dorrie had been giving him the runaround, and then, seemingly out of the blue, she had declared that it was over between them. Johnny was unreliable, she’d said. He was always off super-heroing, she’d said. He never seemed to have time for her, she’d said.

So Johnny did what almost any other teenaged boy, feeling jilted and lovelorn, might do when confronted with an unknown but incredibly attractive girl more or less his own age: he approached her. It couldn’t hurt just to chat with her awhile, could it? Maybe ask her to join him for a soda or a milkshake…

The girl, catching sight of him, leapt to her feet, startled. She looked ready to bolt.

“Wait!” Johnny called out. “Don’t go away. I’d just like to talk to you. Don’t be alarmed.”

“No!” she replied. “Stay back. You mustn’t.”

Next thing Johnny knew, a ferocious wind whipped up as though from nowhere. Debris whirled around him—scraps of timber, sheets of newspaper, even chunks of house brick. He was knocked off his feet and thrown to the ground, where he lay covering his head with his hands.

When the gale subsided, as abruptly as it had arrived, the girl was nowhere to be seen. Johnny wondered why she hadn’t been sent sprawling by it too. The only explanation he could think of was that she herself had caused the wind. She had conjured it up in order to get away from him. She, as he did, had super-powers.

He searched the neighborhood thoroughly, but there was no sign of her.

Back at the Baxter Building, the uptown skyscraper Johnny called home, he moped around, thinking about the girl. He was obsessed. He could not get her out of his head.

Eventually, stumped for a better idea, he went back to the slum neighborhood to search for her again. Somewhat to his surprise, he found her. This time, she tried to repel him with a bolt of flame, but that held no fear for Johnny Storm, Human Torch. He burst into flame himself to counteract the danger, fighting fire with fire.

When the girl perceived that Johnny had super-powers too, she relaxed, and the two youngsters took the first tentative steps towards becoming friends, and more than friends.

Johnny learned that the girl’s name was Crystal and that she could exert psionic control over earth, air, fire and water, the four classical elements. She was an Inhuman, a race whose every member had some form of special ability. They weren’t born that way. Instead, each was exposed as an infant to a strange, transformative substance known as the Terrigen Mist, which changed their biology at a genetic level.

In next to no time, a passionate adolescent ardor sparked between the two of them. They were separated soon after, thanks to a series of adverse circumstances and misunderstandings, and it had been unbearable for Johnny.

The feeling, it so happened, was mutual, as was their joy upon reuniting.

Now, they were separated once again, perhaps forever.

Johnny heaved the deepest, most heartsick of sighs.

Sometimes life could be so unfair.

* * *

FORMER USAF pilot Ben Grimm, at the aircraft’s controls, heard the sigh and glanced over his shoulder at Johnny.

He felt sorry for the youngster. He wasn’t so old himself that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in love at that age. The all-encompassing magnitude of it. The gut-wrenching torment of it. Teen love could be worse than any super villain, the way it toyed with you and dominated you, wore you down and sometimes even drove you nuts. Ben would rather go ten rounds with the Hulk or the Sub-Mariner than endure all that tsuris again.

He was glad he was in a settled, stable relationship these days. No dramas, no traumas. Just him and the best woman he’d ever known, someone he trusted and could count on, no matter what.

Alicia.

Keeping one eye on the plane’s instruments and a steady grip on the yoke, Ben let his thoughts drift to his lady love, much as Johnny’s had to his own.

Ben and Alicia had met perhaps a year and a half ago, when the Fantastic Four were attacked by her stepfather, Philip Masters, the villainous Puppet Master. His specialty was molding puppets from a certain rare type of radioactive clay, which granted him mental control over the person whose likeness the puppet was made in. He had tried to kidnap Sue, and also taken over Ben’s mind and pitted him against his teammates. He’d even, for reasons best known to him, started a riot at a maximum security jail.

After that encounter, the Puppet Master had returned to plague the Fantastic Four on a couple of further occasions. He was an aggravating little pest, and odd-looking, too, with his large, egg-shaped bald head and weirdly doll-like facial features.

His stepdaughter, the adopted child of his late wife, was as unlike him as it was possible to be. Alicia was kind, forgiving-natured, and beautiful. Virtually the only thing they had in common was a talent for sculpture, and in particular recreating the human form. Though sightless since she was young—the result of a laboratory accident that also killed her birth father—Alicia needed only to run her fingers over a face or figure, and could then fashion an exact replica.

But her skill ran deeper than that. Her pieces managed to represent not just how the subject looked, but what kind of person they were inside, their character traits, their flaws and foibles, even their emotions.

Naturally, this meant Alicia’s work was in demand at all the best galleries in New York, London, Paris and everywhere else. The wealthy queued up to commission from her.

From the moment they met, Alicia had sensed a nobility within Ben Grimm. She’d told him this on numerous occasions since. His physical appearance had no meaning for her. She did not see, as others did, a hulking, misshapen being with a craggy face and skin like a cracked, dried-up riverbed. She saw the man beneath the surface, the true Ben, and she had fallen in love with that.

When the Thing came walking down the street, folk tended to shy away. Some gasped. Others cried out in revulsion. Little children wailed and hid their faces. One elderly woman had even fainted at the sight of him. He was frequently treated like a monster.

Not by Alicia. Never by Alicia.

She didn’t mind that Ben was gruffly spoken and sometimes bad-tempered, not to mention a habitual wisecracker who never seemed to take anything too seriously. She knew this was all just a defense mechanism, his way of coping with the cruel hand life had dealt him.

She knew what lay at the core of him, and whenever he was with her, Ben did his best to live up to her impression of him. She made him want to be a better person. She did make him a better person.

Being with Alicia was the best thing that had ever happened to Ben Grimm. It almost made life as an ugly, cumbersome mockery of a man bearable. Almost.

As he guided the Pogo Plane out across the coast of China and over the Pacific, Ben found he was smiling to himself.

He couldn’t wait to get back home and see Alicia again.

* * *

SUE LOOKED across at Ben in the pilot’s chair, sitting there with a happy, wistful look on his face, and had a pretty good idea what he was thinking about. Or rather who.

Ben deserved the love he had found with Alicia.

Just as Johnny didn’t deserve the misery of being separated from Crystal.

Sometimes Sue couldn’t help but marvel at the ups and downs of their lives as the Fantastic Four.

There were definite benefits to being who they were. They were global celebrities, lauded as the greatest super team of all. They had saved the world countless times, and while that was its own reward, it was nice to be feted and acclaimed for it.

They didn’t even have secret identities, the way so many other super heroes did. They didn’t go around masked: their names and faces were known to all, and this meant they were perhaps better trusted by the public than any of their peers.

But there were drawbacks too. They were always in danger. Threats loomed on all sides, whether from alien races who wished to conquer Earth, such as the sinister, shape-shifting Skrulls, or human enemies like the Mad Thinker, the Red Ghost, the alchemist Diablo, or, worst of all, the armored Latverian despot Victor Von Doom.

Having super-powers came at a cost. Ben knew that more than any of them. But all four paid a price for being who they were. They all had burdens and responsibilities they hadn’t asked for. So often the world’s safety depended on them, at the potential risk of their lives.

Sue frequently wondered what it would be like if the four of them had never gone into space aboard Reed’s experimental rocket ship. The events of that momentous day, a couple of years back, were etched indelibly in her memory.

Reed cajoling Ben into piloting the ship, even though both of them were aware the design was untested and the risks considerable.

Ben agreeing, because he knew that with him at the helm, the mission stood the best chance of success.

Sue insisting she accompanied them, unwilling to let her then-fiancé face danger without her by his side.

Johnny tagging along too, mostly because he was an adrenaline junkie and this ride into space sounded like fun.

The authorities had kept refusing Reed clearance to launch his craft. An appropriations board in some Washington backroom wanted to cut funding for the project and reallocate it to the military instead; and as long as the board members argued and prevaricated, and Reed protested their intransigence and lodged objections, nothing could happen. The project remained stalled, in limbo.

The more Reed waited, the less likely it seemed that the inaugural test flight would ever happen. And so he eventually decided to take matters into his own hands.

He and his three allies stole inside the spaceport under cover of darkness, avoiding the guards posted at the perimeter fence.

Takeoff was perfect. The rocket ship performed beautifully all the way into the ionosphere and beyond. It seemed that nothing could go wrong.

Until the cosmic rays hit.

Reed had made a tiny miscalculation. The ship’s radiation shielding was insufficient. The cosmic rays penetrated the four astronauts’ bodies. The pain was intense. Sue remembered her head pounding, as though it was going to explode. She remembered the cosmic rays passing through her, unseen, intangible, yet feeling like a million icy needles. She remembered the terrifying tac-tac-tac sound of the onboard Geiger counter going crazy.

The cosmic rays interfered with the rocket ship’s telemetry. The craft veered around wildly, resisting Ben’s best efforts to keep it on course, and began plummeting back towards Earth.

At the last moment, Ben was able to regain some semblance of control, and they came down, if not smoothly, then at least in one piece.

The four of them emerged from the crashed ship, shaken and unnerved. They had landed in a patch of wilderness not far from the spaceport.

Sue was the first to learn that they had somehow been irrevocably changed. Her body began fading out of sight, and only by a huge effort of will did she turn herself visible again.

Then Ben began to metamorphose into a thickset, rocky, orange-hued version of himself, blessed with incredible strength. Unlike Sue, he could not revert to his original state.

Reed was next. His limbs became as pliant as rubber, and he found he could stretch and contort himself in all sorts of extraordinary ways.

Finally, Johnny. He burst into flames, and discovered that in this blazing form he was lighter than air and could fly.

The four of them understood that the cosmic rays had transformed them into something other than human, something more.

Sue recalled what Reed had said next.

“Listen to me, all of you. Together we have more power than any humans have ever possessed.”

Ben had butted in. “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot. We understand. We’ve got to use that power to help mankind, right?”

“Right, Ben. Right.”

As a manifesto for the Fantastic Four, Ben’s words could not be bettered, and the quartet had made a solemn vow there and then to do just as he said. They had tried to live up to it ever since.

It hadn’t been easy.