The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (6 page)

“Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”

“Of course I’d know one—a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”

“See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.

They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.

He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.

“U-huh.
Going in and out of this clearing at will, in spite of the fence! I get it.”

“Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.

“The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.

“No motor could
be
within a mile or two. I told you there wasn’t a road for cars or trucks through the woods. And no plane could land with the men, and, besides, we’d have heard a plane motor.”

But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.

“You described your father, at Bleek Street, when you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.

Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.

“You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.

Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.

“The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”

Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.

“That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”

“He . . . he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.

“Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”

“No! He . . . I never saw that man before!”

Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.

The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.

And there was no sign of that pool, now!

The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.

“That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”

“He wasn’t my father! He
wasn’t!
” cried Lila. And then she burst into tears, leaving a perplexed and dismayed giant with the prospect of getting a hysterical damsel ten miles through woods, at night, on foot.

The Avenger had a laboratory that could not have been beaten even by the great commercial laboratories. And he could use that lab as few men ever born could use scientific equipment. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, pick any branch you please.

But Dick Benson was being baffled, now.

He had a pigeon that thought it was an eagle and tried to attack everything moving, and he couldn’t find what had made it savage.

He had taken one live and one dead pigeon from the public library. He had tested and vivisected the dead bird in every way known to man, and he could find no variance from normal in it. So he was now concentrating on the live one.

And this one was certainly something to write home about.

The bird was in large cage. It kept to the side of the cage nearest to anything moving. Then it flew at the bars—most of the feathers were out of its head from beating against the wires—and tried to get at what made the movement, regardless of the size of the thing.

“ ’Tis strrrange,” burred MacMurdie, who was working with The Avenger. Of course, Mac, though an outstanding scientist himself, was only a capable helper when his knowledge was compared to the knowledge of Dick Benson.

“You bird’s mad,” said Mac dourly. “Yet, ’tis a consistent kind of madness. It acts as if it would like to destroy every livin’ thing except itself.”

The Avenger’s head, with its virile, heavy black shock of hair, nodded slowly.

“It almost seems,” Dick said, “as though the pigeon has a fiendish hate for everything alive; as if the brain or nervous system were subtly deranged. But there was no sign of injury in the other bird.”

Mac shrugged.

“ ’Tis sick in the head—but only the head, Muster Benson. Ye’ll obserrrve that the pigeon is healthy enough. It eats when ye feed it—after ye’ve drawn back so it doesn’t try to fly at you.”

“Yes, it’s healthy enough,” conceded Dick, colorless eyes like wells of ice in his impassive face.

The Avenger paced slowly up and down the laboratory. Mac stared. It was the first time he had ever seen Dick baffled by anything of laboratory nature. But, he had to admit, it was the first time he had ever seen a problem of so unique a nature brought home to anyone.

“Ritter,” said The Avenger, stopping his pacing.

“Eh?” said Mac.

“Ritter was at the library,” Dick explained. “He’s no scientist, as far as I know. But he is an intelligent man. I’d like to ask him what he observed about the behavior of the birds. Besides—”

The Avenger didn’t go on with that last sentence.

Mac said: “Ritter’s gotten to be a big figure, politically, hasn’t he?”

“The biggest,” said Benson. “He’s quite apt to be a presidential candidate in the coming election, and there is a good chance that he’ll be our next president.”

“D’ye think it’s possible that Ritter knows something about this?” said Mac.

But Dick made no reply to that. He summoned Cole Wilson from the vast, top-floor room. Wilson came barging in, dark hair back on his forehead, black eyes blazing, eager for a job.

“Do you remember Edwin Ritter, the man who was at the library when we visited it?” Dick asked Cole.

Cole nodded.

“I wish you’d go and have a talk with him about it,” The Avenger said. “Find out exactly what he observed about the birds. He may have seen something we missed. Also, try to find out how he happened to be there just at that time.”

Both Wilson and Mac stared swiftly at Dick, at that. It sounded as if The Avenger were beginning to have curious doubts about Ritter. And yet, prominent as Ritter was it wasn’t possible there could be real suspicion directed against him.

Mac helped Benson some more while Dick tackled the mystery of the mad pigeon. But there was to be no report on Ritter from Wilson.

Each of The Avenger’s aides carried a tiny two-way radio set in a curved case at his waist. A belt set designed by Smitty. Wilson’s voice came over his small set after his signal had sounded.

“Cole reporting, chief. Ritter isn’t in town. He left, by plane, for Detroit, earlier today. His servant, a little fellow by the name of Knarlie, says Ritter went there to attend a banquet af automobile manufacturers. The banquet’s just about beginning now. Any further orders?”

After a minute, Benson told him that there were no further orders for the moment. Even in the fastest of planes, Cole couldn’t have reached Detroit in time to take in that banquet. And there seemed no reason why anyone should go to it anyway.

All of which only proved that occasionally even The Avenger failed to divine the importance of some occurrence. For, as it turned out, the banquet in Detroit was to be highly important, indeed.

The Book-Brunswick Hotel is impressive with marble and uniforms and lobbies and general richness of appearance. The Green Room, where important meetings are held, looks like something out of Versailles Gardens.

The gentlemen in the Green Room that evening, congregated around a large oval table, were the sleekest, most polished bunch you ever saw. And the richest gathering you were ever apt to see. Each was owner of a great motor kingdom.

There was Leslie Fox, sponsor of the Fox 8, and also manufacturer of motorboat engines. There was Horace Weyland, truck and tractor king. There was John Ainslee, white-haired old-timer who had started before the days of steering wheels with the Ainslee twin-cylinder. There were George Moppert, Alfred Vanden, Gervaise Childs, Charles Swing—

There were twenty-nine men there, and twenty-eight of them were the heads of giant corporations bearing their names.

The twenty-ninth was Edwin C. Ritter.

Ritter sat at the right of the toastmaster of the evening, and Ritter wore a perpetual, pleased smile. For this banquet, announced to the public as a yearly meeting of the motor association, was not that at all. It was a banquet in his honor, at which had already been pledged the support of these influential men in his forthcoming presidential campaign.

It was a little past ten o’clock. Till now, the evening had gone smoothly enough. The dinner had been eaten, with an accompaniment of red wine and white. The coffee and cigars had been served. Several short speeches had been made. And now it was time for Ritter’s speech of acceptance.

The well-known public figure had never looked more impressive. He stood up, with his prematurely white hair like a white banner over his good-looking face. He started to say something, but whatever it was was never said.

Leslie Fox, a beefy man with frosty-gray eyes, and John Ainslee, with fire in his own aged orbs, had been whispering about something for several minutes. Then the whispering had grown a little louder, with neither of them paying any attention to anyone else.

Both of them had been getting madder and madder, if the mottled red rising in their cheeks was any true sign.

Now, just as Ritter’s first smooth word was about to come forth, old Ainslee suddenly leaped to his feet and his fist smashed down on the table with a force to make the coffee cups jiggle in their saucers.

“You rat!” he howled at Fox. “You double-crossing louse! You—” There followed a name like an explosion, which jerked every head there in the direction of the two men.

Fox was on his feet, too, by now. The two glared at each other like two animals about to battle to the death.

“Gentlemen,” pleaded Ritter. “Please—”

One of the other men said: “What’s up, Les? Why the commotion?”

“He should tell you what’s up!” exploded Ainslee. “Go on, tell ’em, you slug!”

“What I want to do in my own plant is my own business,” howled Fox.

“The hell it is! It’s the business of every one of us. We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?”

“What are you talking about?” rapped out Alfred Vanden.

“You know we’re all going to get a lot of airplane business,” said Ainslee. “There’s even been talk of suspending automobile production for a while to get caught up on planes. Well, listen to this: Fox just hired eleven hundred plane mechanics at eight cents an hour
above
the standard scale!”

That was a bomb in the room all right. Vanden jerked around to where Fox and Ainslee stood and caught Fox’s arm.

“You . . . you didn’t!” he choked.

Fox said nothing, but looked ferociously at Ainslee.

“You cheap chiseler,” shouted another of the men. “You know we’re all going to have to have plane mechanics, and you steal a march on us by hiring a lot in advance—at excess pay! Now we’ll
all
have to pay that much. Where do you get off, endangering our profits like that?”

“Gentlemen—” pleaded Ritter once more. But no one even heard him.

“You old hyena!” roared Fox to Ainslee. “Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut? I was trying to do you a good turn. You could have hired some yourself, ahead of the rest. So do you thank me? You do not! You blab around. Why, I’ve a good notion to—”

Fox finished with what he had a good notion to do. That was to let go with a good right hook to the older man’s firm jaw.

Ainslee spun around twice on his way back and fell to the floor. Fox started toward him and was grabbed by a couple of the others. He struck at them, and one thing led to another—

A sleek, polished bunch, all right—when they got into the place. When they got out, there were several black eyes, a few bloodied noses and a whole lot of bruises in places where they would show. It had been like a battle in the bleachers after an unfair decision by the umpire against the home team, or like a rotten-tomato battle against rival gangs of tough street kids.

Certainly not like a meeting of motor magnates.

And the hard feelings didn’t break up with the banquet. They persisted till next morning. They had full possession of old Ainslee as he sat at his desk in the administration building of the vast plant bearing his name.

Ainslee was thinking of Fox, and his eyes flashed with a fire younger than his years.

“I’ll fix his wagon,” he said finally.