File:Fantastic Four Vol 1 271 001.jpg

Description
Reed Richard's 40th Birthday is a celebration for the family, Johnny & Alicia, & She-Hulk & Wyatt. Reed's memory is fading & needs jogging. He relates a story that took place before Richards and his three comrades had been exposed to the cosmic rays that would give them their superpowers. Gormuu was a warrior invader from the planet Kraalo, a twenty-foot-tall misshapen green creature. Gormuu's competitive advantage regarding world conquest was that his size increased whenever he was struck with any form of broadcast energy. Richards, upon examining a ten-foot-long and inches-deep footprint left behind by the already-enormous alien, realizes that the only way to stop this menace is to continue to strike him with more and more broadcast power. For any creature large enough to leave a ten-foot-long footprint behind should also leave an impression several feet deep, if its mass were increasing at the same rate as its volume. Discovering that Gormuu's growth was at constant mass, not constant density, Richards feeds the alien so much energy that he grows larger than the Earth, and less dense than the background of space, until he becomes an insubstantial and decidedly nonthreatening footnote in our nation's atomic-age history. The day after this story was related, the team flies in the Fantasticar to the Richards Family Estate in Central City, California. They meet with Giles Peacock & his wife, faithful retainers though the Richards' have not visited them in 6 years. Reed's father vanished 12 years ago. Lately there have been "cowboy ghosts" near the lab. They break in and discover a time machine much like Doom's but which was invented first. It is set for yesterday, arriving from 18 years ago. Reed interprets the data & declares his father may be alive on a parallel Other Earth.