Amazing Adventures (1970 series) #14

Beast confronts Iron Man at the Stark test center where Shellhead and now Hank are dodging hunter missiles. Iron Man is impressed with Beast’s agility. Guards arrive and Iron Man asks them to stay back but an overly zealous guy shoots Beast, which he heals from almost instantly. Beast learns what happened when they met previously but it doesn’t explain anything so he departs, grateful that Shellhead referred to him as a man. Then Iron Man fires the trigger-happy guard….

Hank returns to his apartment, thinking of his girlfriend Linda Donaldson and how she doesn’t know he’s a mutant monster (but then he doesn’t know she’s an enemy agent). Then Linda buzzes him and asks to come up. Hank left his elaborate disguise back at the lab (issue #12) and hurriedly dons a damaged mask with a scarf to cover the hole in the neck, hiding his furry hands and hunched gait. He admits her, claiming to be suffering from a cold.. She wants to get all intimate but he chases her away, claiming to be seriously contagious. Linda leaves but the mystery woman [Vera Cantor] goes up and rings his bell but by this time, Beast has jumped out the window to head to the Brand campus…

…where, attempting to sneak in quietly, he jumps the fence and lands in the midst of a company of soldiers. He flees, leaping over the Baxters as well. Reaching the lab building, Hank crashes through a window and the building is surrounded. Then Hank turns up in his full disguise where he explains that he has been home sick; Linda arrives to sort of back up this explanation. Baxter confronts Hank but Patsy asks him go easy on the sick man. He claims he was with Linda all day but she denies it. Only a report of the Beast on the other side of the campus stops Baxter from arresting Hank. Alone, Linda says she couldn’t lie to Baxter and assures Hank she loves him. He apologizes for being mean to her….

Later, as he works in his lab, pondering his troubles, he spies the Beast prowling though the dark building. Removing his disguise, Beast catches up to the creature and finds it is the sinister “living computer” known as Quasimodo. Q explains his desire to be human and hearing of the Beast, decided that his metabolism was what he needed to be truly human and so he adapted himself to be able to steal Beast’s life force, leading Hank to call him a vampire machine. Quasi insists that Beast die so Quasi can becomes more human; their fight leads them to crash through a wall and land on scaffolding for construction ten stories up. Quasi keeps firing eye-beams at Hank, who taunts his foe to keep him uncertain. Quasi snatches up a rivet gun and shoots Hank who is shocked to find his recuperative powers have failed him. Quasi grips Hank and starts draining him but realizes that Hank struggles in the face of death itself. Realizing he is only a machine with delusions of grandeur and will never have that level of humanity, Quasimodo jumps to his death. Hank notes the irony that Quasi’s lack of logic made him closer to human than ever. But Quasi’s reference to reports from Number Nine and Mastermind lead him to suspect there is more at stake than he knows….