The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (17 page)

Mac got it first. “Mon!” he gasped. “Mon—those would open and release the gas in about ten minutes! And if ye had four or five of them, they’d knock out everybody on the ship for at least four hours!”

“I put eight of them in his pocket,” said Benson. “I let them decide their own fate. That ship would be a ship of sleeping men, helpless at the glacier’s foot, before the anchor could be raised. Very well. If they left the glacier alone, they could eventually wake up and sail off. If they brought the front of the glacier down to annihilate us, they would annihilate themselves: the ship would be sunk like a floating match box under tons of ice.”

The quiet words,
“I let them decide their own fate,”
seemed to hang in the air. It was The Avenger’s way. Never take life; but if enemies tried to destroy him or his aides, manipulate them like pawns on a chessboard so that in attempting to kill, they killed only themselves. Nellie sighed deeply. “There’s only one thing to regret. Now, we’ll never know who the leader was.”

“The leader,” said Benson, awesome, death-mask face still turned toward the sea, “was Wittwar.”

“Wittwar!” exploded Mac. “But the mon had no reason! He didn’t need money; he’s rich. He didn’t have to steal the relics; his own Foundation was buying them easily.”

The pale eyes flicked to Mac’s. “Haven’t you caught the reason yet, Mac? It was the lighted rods, which he took from the cave he left us in. Light everlasting, with no visible source of power. Cold light. A thing science has been searching for ever since there has been science. That was what Wittwar was after.”

Benson’s brooding eyes still stared over the seething sea. “I thought it was Wittwar when he twice helped Lini get away from the Foundation office when I wanted to stay with her. I thought it was Wittwar when I found a corner torn from the ancient map in Mallory’s office. That hide was too tough to tear accidentally, which meant that a bit had been deliberately torn off and hidden to incriminate another man, along with a measuring compass and a chipping hammer. And who had such easy access to any building or office in the Wittwar Packing Co. as Wittwar himself? I
knew
it was Wittwar when I found a report in his desk on the financial position and earnings of every power company in the country. He was calculating the possibilities of the cold light, estimating the fabulous sums he could extort from the power industry to keep it off the market. From the first he was little interested in the ancient relics. It was the cold light Lini had told about that he wanted. That would tempt even a man as rich as he was.”

Smitty glared at the approximate spot where the tramp freighter had been anchored. A spot that now had three great ice fragments jostling each other, like great ghosts rubbing shoulders in glee above the sunken boat. “While he was at it,” said the giant, “he thought he’d pick up the relics too and shift the two-and-a-half-million-dollar purchase price, through Lini, from the Foundation’s account to his own. Right?”

The Avenger nodded, manner growing absent, inhumanly detached. “That thievery alone wouldn’t have tempted him. But as long as he was going after the secret of the cold light by violence, he figured he might as well take the money and the relics too. What irony! For the cold light could never have meant anything to him.”

“Eh?” said Mac, staring.

“That quartzlike substance was set to flowing,” The Avenger said, “by the enormous friction-power of the glacier. To reproduce the light you’d have to reproduce the glacier as well. Or some other power source equally vast. But Wittwar didn’t know that his supposedly priceless secret was commercially impossible.”

Brent Waller shook his head and tried to laugh. “When I saw that guy in the dark glasses and saw that he looked very old and yet seemed young, you know what I thought? I thought the ancient master of mastodons was after us. I thought the old guy really had everlasting life, like the pictures in the cave proclaimed.”

“The make-up of an amateur,” said Benson, in his detached, impersonal tone. “White hair, stain for the skin. It’s the first thing a layman thinks of.”

“There was more,” said Brent, now not even trying to laugh. “The everlasting-life stuff seemed to be borne out by the fact that some of those dead sentries moved. I’ll swear they moved. And the mastodon too. Just a little.”

They all looked at Benson. For all had the same impression. They felt a little silly at his patient words. “Of course they moved a little. For thousands of years they’d been preserved in the glacial cold. Then the cave doors were opened to the outer world. It got a bit warmer in the caverns. The bodies disintegrated a very little; and as they did so they moved a bit—the mastodon included.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Brent, his ears red. “Of course!” He turned anxiously to his sister, standing with them like a wooden image. “You said you could take that needle out of her brain, sir?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. Plainly, he didn’t even hear. He moved along the shore, alone.

“Sh-h-h,” said Nellie, taking Brent’s arm as he would have repeated his question. “Yes, he can cure your sister. He can see to it that the ship out there is raised; so you’ll get your money from the relics. He can do anything. But don’t bother him now.” Nellie knew the man with the white, awesome face and the terrible, colorless eyes a little better than the rest. Well enough to know what he was thinking, in the chill and lonely desolation of his soul.

Once more he had destroyed a supercriminal. Once more a band of human vermin had annihilated itself when it tried to kill Benson. Complete success! But in the success was no sweet taste for The Avenger. There was nothing but a longing for the next brush with streamlined crime. And in that one maybe he would die.

For it was becoming increasingly clear to his aides that Benson wasn’t trying to avoid death in his dangerous work. He was half courting it. He
wanted
to die. Fate, with proverbial perversity, was keeping him alive while again and again he battled murderers and thieves to avenge his own crime-caused personal loss.

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