The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (15 page)

They did not monkey with two of the caves. One was the cave which contained nothing but the great cauldron, with its inner and outer tangle of coils on coils of fused quartz. The other was the cave of the mastodon.

The mastodon was a marvelous thing. Even the human rats working here dimly realized that. A giant thing preserved, to every last hair, from another age! What it wouldn’t bring in good, hard dough if they could get it out! But how could they get it out! How are you going to get a mastodon through an eight-foot door, and what are you going to do with it once you’ve brought it into the open?

“How’d they get the damn thing in there in the first place?” growled one of the men.*

* (
It was later conjectured that the ancient race forced the mastodon, still living, into the cave through a long, lofty tunnel, and later filled the tunnel in. But this is only a guess, for there was no sign of such a tunnel.
)

The red-haired fellow shrugged. “Built the caves around it, maybe. What do you care? Get going.”

They stayed out of the mastodon cave—but there were occupants in it, just the same! There were three people in it, to be exact. Brent Waller, Fergus MacMurdie, and Josh Newton. They all sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, staring at the mastodon. They had nothing else to stare at but the overgrown thing. “Reminds me of Smitty,” said Mac sourly.

Waller said: “Smitty? Who’s he?”

“One of our crew,” said Mac. “He’s about seven feet tall, and four feet thick, and he uses crowbars for toothpicks.”

“I wish he was here now,” said Waller, earnestly.

Mac and Josh wished the same thing; but wishing didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

“Josh, do ye think maybe the chief or somebody may have heard that last squawk on the radio?” Mac demanded. He had demanded it a good many times before.

Josh replied, as he had replied before, “I don’t know, Mac. There was no answer of any kind. And then the radio was smashed.”

Waller sighed. “My sister heard
my
last yell, all right. I yelled, ‘The mast—’ and then was yanked from the radio. You see, I had heard a sound and turned—and there was a guy that I thought was the ancient master of mastodons who has his pictures on all these walls. But the guy turned out to be nothing but a yegg from New York who’d gotten cold and grabbed the first fur thing he saw. Which was the traditional costume of the old master preserved in here. But it sure gave me the creeps. I thought the guy really was immortal, like the pictures claim.”

“Maybe,” said Mac dourly, “he is.”

“Don’t be like that,” said Josh.

“No? Without doubt the mummy guarrrds in these caves move! We’ve all seen ’em! Where there’s movement there must be life. So maybe the master of mastodons really does live and—”

“And what?” snorted Josh.

“And stays around to guard the caves,” Mac finished weakly.

Waller laughed bitterly. “If so, he’s doing a bum job of it. Look at the way the men outside are stripping the caves.”

Josh suddenly came back to one point in Brent’s yarn. “Wait a minute! You said your last words were, ‘The mast—.’ But I heard you say others after that. You said, ‘There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now; good night.’ ”

Brent Waller swore feelingly. “I said no such thing. That wasn’t me. That was the man who clipped me. I heard him later, when I was sitting here bound. Smart guy! Thought if my sister
had
heard too much, he could kill her suspicions by giving her a phony O.K.”

Mac almost smiled a dour, bleak smile. “He outsmarted himself, Brent. Those few words were just enough for us to pick out this general location with a direction-finder. We might never have located the place without it. But I wonder how the skurlies outside got the location?”

Waller swore again. “There was a kind of a map on one of the first pages of a manuscript Lini took to New York. There’s the same map in every bundle of pages, just as there’s a language key in every bundle. I didn’t pay much attention; thought sure any map so old would be worthless. But I guess it was all too good! Because in a damn short time after Lini radioed me that she’d submitted the sample relic to the Foundation, these thugs descended on me.”

There was silence for a little while. The three men shifted in unconscious effort to ease their cramped bodies. They had been in these positions a long time. Waller said, “Who’s to blame for all this, anyhow? How many people did Lini show that bundle of old skins to?”

“Only the Wittwar Foundation—four directors,” said Josh. “Your sister was very cautious, Brent. She didn’t broadcast the discovery at all.”

“Why, say! Then one of the four eminently respectable Wittwar Foundation gents must be behind this!”

“One of three,” corrected Mac. “One of them is dead! He was murdered just before we left. A skurlie stuck a needle in his brain—”

Josh coughed suddenly in warning. They hadn’t told Brent what had been done to Lini. It was too hideous a thing to tell him at a time like this.

“Needle in his brain?” Waller repeated curiously. It was evident that he hadn’t studied that ancient manuscript his sister had taken east. “That’s an odd way to kill a man.”

“Isn’t it?” said Josh evasively. He and Mac looked at each other with deep sympathy in their eyes for Brent. They might as well have saved some for themselves. It didn’t look as if they were ever going to get out from under the glacier!

On the point where the fir trees hid them, Nellie and Lini looked at the descending plane of The Avenger as impersonally as if it were some alien thing having no connection with them. Beside them, the man whose face and body were concealed, chuckled harshly. Directly in line with the plane’s pontoons were those little things that looked like innocent small chunks of ice but were in reality miniature bombs. “He can’t miss them!” the man rasped. “He’ll hit them in sixty seconds or less now.”

The ship came lower, wind screaming through its struts, motors silent. Lower, lower. And the speed of the plane was at minimum. Scarcely ten feet separated pontoons and water! Then something happened!

The pilot of the plane cut the speed too low. The plane’s tail sagged, the nose reared up. And there was a hasty roar of motors again, with the props pulling the seaplane out of a bad landing. Up and away, for another try.

The man with the two girls clenched his fists in anger. “The clumsy fool! Doesn’t he know how to fly?”

“Oh!” said Nellie. Even the exclamation was without life. On her lovely face there was little more than indifferent curiosity. “Look! Look there! I believe he’s going to crash.”

The belief sharpened into certainty in about six seconds. The plane hadn’t been sent up sharply enough. It was wheeling to get out to sea, but it was plain that it would never make it. It was too near shore—and the tall fir trees there.

At the very last, the plane banked hard, and almost missed. Almost, but not quite. A wingtip fouled! The plane slewed around. It smashed among massive trunks and thick branches!

“Got him anyway!” snarled the man with the dark glasses. “Everybody! Surround that plane!” The shouted command was unnecessary. Already men were jumping from behind trees and rocks and racing for the wrecked plane. At a more leisurely pace, the man with the dark glasses followed, and with him dutifully went the two girls.

They reached the wreck just in time to see the men lifting four still, dark forms from the cabin. One body took three to handle; it was so big. That was Smitty. The second was the pretty Negress, Rosabel. Another was slight and rather undersized. That was the relief pilot. The fourth was of average size with thick white hair in which a crimson thread of blood trickled from a scalp wound.

And that was The Avenger. Trapped and unconscious in the hands of his enemies!

The assorted crew of cutthroats had been busy enough in the caves before. Now with their dreaded opponent, The Avenger, out of the way, they became even busier. They swarmed from outer cave to boats with the priceless relics. Others rowed rapidly to the freighter, which had come obediently back within a stone’s throw of the glacier’s towering foot at the radioed command of the man with the dark glasses. The caverns would be emptied in about another hour at that rate.

Meanwhile, in the cave of the mastodon, there were nine people instead of three, leaning bound against the rock wall. Benson, Lini, Nellie, Rosabel, Smitty and the young relief pilot had joined Mac and Josh and Brent. There was a full load of tragic despair in that group.

Brent Waller was half out of his mind. A glance at Lini had told him that something terrible must have happened to her. In the first place, she had barely recognized him when she was led in. In the second, she had nothing whatever to say—because the man with the glasses who had made a robot out of her had left no instructions about what to say when he brought her in here. Her work was done.

Benson had told him quietly what was wrong. Brent had been too crazed to listen further for a moment. Then Benson had told him that he was sure he could repair the damage. He thought that if an electric current were run into that needle, to cauterize the brain injury as the metal was withdrawn, that Lini would be normal again in a few weeks. Nobody had to point out, however, how slim the chances looked of their ever getting free to try the delicate operation.

Nellie was almost as stricken as Brent. “It’s my fault, chief,” she said, almost weeping. “All my fault. It was a crazy stunt. I shouldn’t have tried it.”

“It was a good stunt,” said The Avenger, voice remarkably gentle. “It deserved success. Just one bit of bad luck ruined it.”

The giant, Smitty, had been struggling back to consciousness at last. He heard the latter remark, stared at Nellie, then looked bewildered.

“Hey, Nellie! You don’t look so much like a wooden Indian. Didn’t you get . . . Did I make a mistake?”

“Probably,” said Nellie. “You make a lot of mistakes. But which one in particular?”

“You know good and well which one. You got me to thinking you’d been stuck with one of those needles.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” said Nellie tartly. She was tense and taking it out on Smitty for the ghastly mistake she felt that she herself had made. “It was an act.”

“There wasn’t any needle at Conroy’s—”

“The man over me dropped it when you nailed him. It happened to fall on my left hand; so I managed to palm it, even with my hands bound. I had a flash then of what seemed a good stunt.”

“Stunt?” yelled Smitty. “What stunt? Going off and leaving us in that lake?”

“You don’t have to shout,” said Nellie. “I thought if I pretended to have been made into a robot, I could probably get straight to the side of the leader of this business, through Lini Waller. I thought I could then radio the chief and steer him straight to the place instead of his wasting hours trying to get the exact location. I thought that if I were in the crooks’ headquarters, unsuspected, I might— Oh, I don’t know what I thought! Capture them all single-handed, maybe, or something else equally silly. And all I did was lead the chief into a trap!”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Benson repeated quietly. “I got everything you radioed me.”

“Radio?” put in the young relief pilot, staring. “Were you receiving messages, sir? I didn’t hear the radio.”

“You noticed that it was on just before we landed, didn’t you?” said Benson.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear a sort of rustling coming from it?”

“Why, I believe I did,” admitted the pilot.

“That rustling was Miss Gray sending me messages,” said The Avenger. “She has a radio at her waist, though it isn’t big enough to be seen. She was rubbing her finger gently over the transmitter, sending me code messages. She directed me straight to these caves first. Then, as we were about to land, she warned me again.”

“And we crashed,” said Smitty, eyes blinking with the pain of a head that had come in contact with a seatback.

“We crashed,” nodded Benson, face a mask, eyes as cold and calm as if he were in an easy chair in Bleek Street, instead of sitting bound, under a glacier, with death near. “I, in my turn, put on an act. I pretended to rise from a bad landing, to crash in the trees. Then I had intended to crawl out with Smitty and gas the men as they ran to take us. But there was one lone tree-stub where I couldn’t see it till too late. Instead of stripping the wings from the plane and coming to a comparatively safe crash landing, the tree-stub caught the right pontoon and swerved us so the crash became a genuine one.”

MacMurdie’s optimism suddenly reared its head. When everything looked impossible, then the Scot was the most cheerful. “Well, we’ll get out of here all right,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” said Smitty, ironically. “Easy!” Then he looked accusingly at Benson. “Chief, you knew Nellie wasn’t hurt the way I thought she was, and you didn’t tell me?”

“I couldn’t, with Lini there,” said Benson. “I got an inkling of her plan when we freed her in Conroy’s library. Her manner was wooden and queer, as if the missing needle were in her brain. But her words, about your rush against the three men, were not those of a person without a will of her own. But if I had given the show away to you, Lini, a robot spy in our midst, might have found out and ruined whatever plan Nellie had in mind when she got to this end.”