The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (19 page)

They did not go out simultaneously. First one went out; then, after about two seconds, the other went out. Preceding each little death of light, there was a tiny
spattt
of sound no louder than if someone had snapped a small twig.

“Hey, there must be a draft in here,” called one of the men near the copper cable.

“Light up again,” ordered the voice of the man who had been in shadow.

There was a pause, shuffling steps, the rasp of a hand over rock.

“I can’t find the damn things,” complained a voice.

“You dumbbell, don’t you carry matches?”

A match flared.

“I still can’t find ’em,” said the man. “I’d have sworn they were right here—”

“Never mind,” said the man off to one side. “Throw that switch.”

“You’re sure
we
won’t get it in the neck?” said one of the gang uneasily.

“Of course, I’m sure. Stay a few feet away from the switch, that’s all.”

The men all huddled at the end of the cave, not far from the man who spoke—except the one who was to throw the switch.

“Go on, go on!” snarled the man off to one side. “There’s nothing to fear. It’s the chemical that’s dangerous, and that’s three or four feet away in another cave, with those meddlers who work with Benson sitting on it.”

“Okay, then,” said the man, reaching far out to grasp the switch. “Here goes—”

“Wait!”

The word was not loud in the darkness. But it seemed to fill the cave with the icy crackle of authority. And it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“What the hell—”

The man who had been hunting for the candles lit another match. It revealed the huddle of men not far from the switch—and that was all.

“I’d have sworn that was that guy Benson,” said somebody nervously.

“It was,” came the glacial voice.

“He’s in
here!”

“Don’t let your imaginations run away with you,” the man off to one side snarled icily. “Benson is in the next cave. There must be some trick of acoustics by which he can hear from out there and make us hear him.”

“I hope you’re right,” said one of the men. “What you want, Benson?” He raised his voice, as if to call to far distances.

The answer came in a voice not raised at all.

“I want to tell you not to throw that switch.”

The men milled around in the darkness. Now and then one lit a match, but the little glare didn’t illuminate anything more than a yard or so away.

There was a thumping sound, and footsteps, then silence. The men lit matches frantically, but could see nothing.

“I am giving you just this one warning,” came the cold, measured voice, like the voice of doom itself. “Don’t try to destroy us by throwing that switch. If you do, you will never live to regret it.”

“Bah!”
snapped the man who was leader here. “It’s a stupid trick to try to delay things. Throw the switch.”

There was a silence, no click of bar meeting conduit. The man at the switch wasn’t awfully anxious to act.

“Throw that switch, I say!”

“Look, boss,” came the voice of the man commanded.

“I’ve heard a lot about this Avenger guy and the way he works. Try to kill him, and you only kill yourself. It’s happened before—”

“Damn you all for a pack of cowards,” raged the man. “I’ll throw it myself. Get out of my way!

There were crisp, purposeful steps in the blackness.

“Chief!” said Mac again.

No answer.

“Guess he’s still out,” sighed Smitty. “And I guess we don’t go on calling to him, or doing anything else, much longer. This stuff we’re on must be soaked plenty.”

“Wonder what it is,” said Mac. The Scot, even at this moment on the brink of death, was irked that he couldn’t guess at the nature of the chemical. After all, Mac was one of the best chemists in America. He felt he should have been able to guess.

“Whatever it is,” said Smitty, straining at his bonds in the darkness, even though he knew it was useless, “it’s a shame the government hasn’t got a supply in its secret War Department vaults. It could certainly fix any invading enemy right up.”

“If Muster Benson had only had a chance,” bemoaned Mac. “But that Nevlo must have met him at the bottom of the chute with a club, just like he met us—”

“Mac!” yelled Smitty.

For suddenly the world had gone up in a blinding flash of blue flame!

It was by far the strongest at the entrance to their cave. But it penetrated the farthest corner, like lightning. It seemed to break through the closed eyelids of the two men and sear their brains.

Then it died. And with it died all sound. There had been a confusion of yells in the far distance outside. But now these had disappeared.

There was just the dark and the terrible silence.

“Whoosh!”
moaned Mac. “Smitty, we’re dead.”

There was no answer.

“Smitty!”

The silence persisted.

“I always said he didn’t live right,” moaned Mac. “I’ve gone to heaven, and he’s gone to the other place. Poor Smitty—”

“Shut up, you chump!” snapped the giant. “I hear something. Somebody coming toward us. At least, I think I do. If you’ll just stop your caterwauling—”

“But we’re dead, Smitty. We must be. Somebody threw the switch outside, and there was that blue flame.”

“The flame came from the cave outside here, you Scotch raven,” barked Smitty. “It didn’t come from this cave at all. The drums we’re on are all right, and we’re all right. And I’ll swear I heard steps.”

“You did,” came a voice from the cave mouth. It was The Avenger’s voice.

“Chief!”
yelled Smitty.

There was a flickering light, which rounded the corner and entered the little cave. The light came from a candle in a steely, slim hand. It flared upward, illuminating, as in an amber spotlight, Dick Benson’s face.

“We thought ye’d got socked in the darkness by that guy,” said Mac almost tearfully. “We thought maybe ye were dead. And ourselves, too, to be frank about it.”

“It’s the others who are dead,” said The Avenger.

He cut the two loose.

In the larger cave outside, Smitty and Mac stared with chilling blood at a spectacle never seen before on earth—and probably never to be seen again.

The spectacle of over a score of men after they had been transfixed by all the mighty voltage of this area of earth’s surface.

There had been a huddle of the men away from the cable at the far end of the cave. There was nothing recognizably human left. That whole end of the cavern presented a bluish, fused look where tremendous power had flared.

There was no sign of copper cable or of the switch bar. In the rock of the floor, a perfect circle was fused, where a steel drum had been standing, a drum consumed to the last atom in the blue flame.

At this terrible scene, the pale eyes of The Avenger stared broodingly.

“I told them not to do it,” he said, voice so low it could scarcely be heard. “I warned them.”

Smitty cleared his throat and stared at the things that had been men. The things varied in size according to the distance they’d been from the drum.

There were a few cindery objects almost half as big as bodies. But most of the gnarled black lumps were no larger than a skull, while a few were scarcely fist-size.

And where the switch had been, there was nothing at all. Not one trace to tell that a man had stood there.

Smitty stared at The Avenger.

“I cut loose with Ike, in the darkness,” Benson said, tone still brooding and low.

“We thought you’d been slugged. We heard a thump—”

“That must have been when I broke the copper cable fastened to the ceiling of our cave. I broke it near the drums, took the broken end, and bent it out the cave door.

“Then I came back and got the drum I’d been sitting on. I carried that out, too, as near to the men as I could without getting in the light of their candles. I shot the candles out with Mike, then carried the drum over near where they were. After that, I connected the broken end of the cable once more to the drum.”

Smitty exclaimed loudly, “So that when the switch was thrown, the current went right through them instead of us!”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

Mac stared at the little black lumps that had been men—if you wanted to call professional killers men.

“Which one of these was Nevlo?” he asked.

“None of them,” said The Avenger.

The two stared quickly at him.

“There wasn’t any Nevlo,” said Benson. “I suspected that from the start, and the suspicion was confirmed when you, Smitty, found that body under the floor of Plant 4.”

“But I—” began the giant, bewildered.

“The body had a curiously deformed neck. The muscles of the left side were a little withered. That indicated that it was Nevlo, who held his head habitually to the left, from descriptions we got. And the body showed signs of torture.

“Nevlo was a great engineer. He discovered this chemical principle of creating an electrical vacuum. With it, he rendered Plant 4 useless out of pure vindictiveness. Blake saw further. He—”

“Blake?”
said Smitty.

“Yes, he’s the one responsible for the wholesale power failures. In Nevlo’s petty use of a mighty secret he saw a chance to get untold millions through its use on a vaster scale. No one was able to ‘find’ Nevlo for weeks. That was because Blake had found him first. Had found him, tortured him unmercifully to get his secret from him, then killed him and hid his body in the convenient trench in the powerhouse floor, after decapitating him to make his identification impossible. Then he went ahead blackmailing the power barons. One, it seemed, wouldn’t knuckle under. That was Hooley, of Bar Harbor, who was murdered.”

“If Nevlo’s body is under the powerhouse floorrr,” said Mac, “who played the part of Nevlo later?”

“I don’t know,” said Benson. “That is, I don’t know his name or identity. But I know the type. He was some broken-down, punch-drunk prize fighter or wrestler Blake picked up. The man was dim-witted, foolish, but just sane enough to take orders and follow them. Probably, Blake introduced him to his henchmen as Nevlo. He needed a Nevlo, you see, to be the mouthpiece for his blackmail demands, so he himself wouldn’t be suspected by the other power magnates.”

“You knew that as far back as the time when the power gang met in Cleveland,” accused Smitty.

“I accepted it as probable,” said Benson. “I didn’t quite
know
it. But I made up as Nevlo, entered the conference of power executives, and learned there that Blake was actually the ringleader.”

“How’d you get onto the guy?” said Smitty.

“I named a blackmail sum, ridiculously small,” said Dick. “Five million dollars. It might just as easily have been fifty million. And some such sum, no doubt, was what Blake had coached his ferocious moron to say. When he heard his follower say five million, he gave himself away. The rest showed relief at the smallness of the amount. But he gasped with anger and amazement. For just a second his face was an open book.”

The Avenger stared at the spot where Blake had stood when he had thrown the switch. If you knew just where to look, you could see a curious little button of metal on the rock floor, an amalgam formed by a gold crown, several silver dental fillings, and a gold pocketknife. That was all.