Ben
“the Thing” Grimm is sleeping peacefully in the Baxter Building when Tigra the
Were-Woman creeps into his room and wakes him, after a few tries, jars him
awake. He is glad that he knocked out the building’s burglar alarm the previous
night or she would have been electrocuted on entering. They head to the gym
where Thing exercises, wrecking his equipment while Tigra fills him (and the
reader) in on her background. She now asks him for help in locating a villain
called the Cougar, a renegade member of the Cat People whom she has been tasked
with capturing. What makes him dangerous is that he possesses the Null-Bands,
which Ben remembers from the FF’s battle with the Tomazooma robot. They are
suddenly interrupted by a band of gunmen seeking to take Tigra with them. Ben
and Tigra clobber the baddies and discover they had a device designed to track
her by her body temperature, courtesy of the Cougar. Ben locks the baddies in
an electronic-field cell and head for Reed’s safe. Ben uses a special key that
reads his brain waves to enter so they can find a device to track the
Null-Bands back to the Cougar….
Meanwhile,
the Cougar, in his guise as Curt Rankin, big shot at Conklin Industries, owned
by Sheila Conklin, who hired him to save the company. Now Sheila is uneasy
about many of the changes made by Conklin but he assures her, his employer and
lover, that everything is for the best. After she leaves, Thing and Tigra
arrive to confront him but he foresaw this situation and pulls a lever that
gasses the two heroes into unconsciousness….
They
awaken to find Tigra chained up and Ben stuck in a huge device connecting him
to Rankin. The machine is designed to use the Null-Bands to transfer the power
of the Thing to the
Cougar,
who intends to dominate the humans and the Cat People. He starts the machine
and Ben cries out in pain—and then the power goes out. Ben seizes the
opportunity to break free and also free Tigra. Rankin transforms into the
Cougar and fires a blast from the Null-Bands at Tigra but Ben intervenes,
taking the blast himself. The two heroes tussle with the villain whose power
exceeds theirs. Cougar snatches up a positive-charge annihilator which will
tear their atoms apart while the Null-Bands protect him. Then he is shot down
and Sheila Conklin steps forward with a gun. She reveals that she knew Curt
Rankin was one of the Cat People and was using him to save her company by
making him think he was using her. Then she reveals that she didn’t like how
greed was warping Rankin’s brain and so rejected his path….