The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (3 page)

“Mac didn’t do anything,” said Josh. Inasmuch as there was no one in the store but the youth who had ordered the chocolate malted, he didn’t bother to talk as a black man is expected to talk. He only saved his drawl for public places, as protective coloration. With friends, he spoke as crisply and precisely as any college professor.

“All right,” snapped the giant Smitty, “if Mac didn’t haul the juice out of my experiment, what did?”

“A transformer down the line must have blown out,” shrugged Josh. “Or else there was a power-plant failure for a few seconds.”

“Well, if that was all—” Smitty began.

A man came hurriedly into the drugstore. The man had on a worn brown suit and a taxi-driver’s cap.

“Got a phone, pal?” he asked Mac.

“Booth in the rear, left side,” said Mac.

The man started for it. Another cab-driver hurried in. He nodded to the first.

“After you on the phone, Joe. Got a little ignition trouble, and I want to give the shop fits about it. The idea, sendin’ a guy out with a can that goes dead on him—”

“Did your heap go dead, too?” asked the first man.

“Yeah! Yours?”

“Uh-huh! I can’t find anything wrong, either. Points all right, plugs okay, battery up—”

Smitty had been listening more and more intently. He broke in now.

“Both your cabs went dead?” he said.

The two drivers looked him up and down.

“That’s right, Sampson,” Joe said.

“When was this?”

“Just a coupla minutes ago.”

“Let’s go out, now,” suggested Smitty, “and see if they’re still dead.”

“Look! Don’t you think we guys know something about ignition—”

“It won’t hurt to shove down on the starter, will it?” said Smitty.

So they went out. And Joe got into his cab and pressed the starter. The starting motor hummed merrily, and the cab engine started.

So did the other man’s.

“That,” said Joe slowly, “is doggone funny!”

Smitty’s eyes were round with amazement and with a dawning, vague horror. To him, it was something far more than peculiar.

For fifteen or twenty seconds the juice had been cut off in Mac’s store. Nothing startling about that. But it began to seem that during those seconds these two cars at the curb had had their ignition systems go dead, too.

And the little power plants of the taxis had nothing whatever to do with the big power plant that supplied juice to Mac’s drugstore, along with thousands of other buildings.

He turned and strode back into the store.

“Mac, there’s something pretty fishy going on. Try to get the chief on the phone, will you? I’ll be back with a report in a little while.”

The giant began an investigation that made his eyes pop out more and more as it proceeded.

He talked to bus-drivers. For a few seconds their buses had gone dead. Traffic cops told him that the Stop-and-Go lights had gone out for a little while. They guessed the power plant had a breakdown, and the juice had failed till emergency generators could be hooked in.

He phoned to widely separated points on Manhattan Island, covered by three or four plants. It developed that for those few curious seconds the whole island was without power.

He went to the docks. A tugboat captain said his engines had gone dead. He phoned Newark and Long Island, powered by still other plants. Same story. He contacted Pennsylvania, Chicago, Denver, Toronto.

And the thing grew and grew till, to a man with an electrical training like Smitty’s, it took on colossal, nightmare proportions.

He radioed a liner just off the three-mile limit. Its power had gone dead for a few seconds; the chief engineer was unable to explain why. Not till Smitty had contacted a ship a hundred and ten miles out did the story vary. This ship had had no trouble.

He came back to Mac’s drugstore as if the devil were after him and galloped into the back room.

“Muster Benson’s on the radio, now,” Mac said from beside a big cabinet at the rear of the room.

The large cabinet contained the last word in television radios, far beyond anything the commercial laboratories had as yet devised.

On the screen was a face. It was a very young face for a man so famous, so eminent in almost any profession, for a man who had accomplished so very much in every corner of the world. But Dick Benson had crowded a full, prosperous and adventurous life into his early years and was now still in his twenties.

And his was a handsome face—strong, sharp features, with a thick crown of virile, coal-black hair. But the awe that struck Smitty as he looked at the image on the television screen—though long familiar as he was with his chief—was caused by the eyes set in the calm, expressionless face. They were eyes so light-gray in color as to seem without any tint at all. Pale, flaming, cold holes. It seemed that you could look far down into those icy pits into a world of gray fog and personal desolation. Desolation of a soul seared by the treacherous machinations of crime, the underworld which Dick Benson had dedicated his life to smashing in order that other innocent persons might not be similarly injured.

“Yes, Smitty?” came The Avenger’s vibrant, compelling voice.

“Something big, chief,” said Smitty. “Something so big, and so impossible, that I can hardly believe it happened. A general electric-power failure, lasting, as far as I can judge, from fifteen to twenty seconds.”

“How general, Smitty?” came the calm, cool voice.

“I mean
general
!” said Smitty excitedly. “It seems as if every power unit on the North American continent—I didn’t take time to try South America—failed for the short length of time I mentioned.
Every
unit! Not just the regular power plants, but ignition systems of cars, boats, everything. It’s incredible, chief!”

The pale eyes were taking on a glitter that made them resemble twin diamond drills.

“I happened to be in a place where power failure would not show up, Smitty. So I didn’t observe the phenomenon you describe. But if it was as you say, then it is incredible indeed. And rather horrible in its implications. You and Josh and Mac had better hurry to Bleek Street.”

Mac hastened to the giant’s side. Having listened to the first of the giant’s words, he had gone to the phone booth, then hurried back.

“I put a call through to the Newark Airport,” he said. “Two planes landed in the last fifteen minutes and reported their ignition systems had gone dead, too.”

Which seemed to make it unanimous.

Impossible as it appeared, apparently every electrical unit in North America—in the air, on the ground, on the waters—had gone completely dead for about twenty seconds!

The man kept his head down so that his hat brim hid his face and, particularly, his eyes. He was nearly out of his mind with terror. Nearly—but retaining just enough sanity to know that’ it must show in his face.

Anyone looking into his appalled eyes and seeing the twitching, distorted mask of his face would have reported him at once to the police. And the cops would have detained him for questioning, to see what on earth was the matter.

He didn’t dare be detained. He had to get on to New York to a certain address on Bleek Street. Over this address, he had been told, was a small sign with the simple legend, Justice, Inc., lettered on it.

Justice, Inc., where a man called The Avenger helped those who were in dreadful danger, or who were the possessors of such horrible secrets that the regular police could not safeguard them.

This man had to see The Avenger and tell him a colossal thing. And he didn’t know if he could manage to stay alive till he got to The Avenger’s headquarters.

He had left Cleveland hours ago. At the very outset, he had almost been murdered. A car had raced up beside him at the depot, and from the car’s windows had poured a well-directed hailstorm of bullets.

The man had fallen to the walk and rolled behind a parked car, then crouched and leaped to the next, as slugs battered through the body of the first in deadly search of him.

He had fled to the New York train, scrambled aboard the last car as the train was pulling out—and immediately been grabbed by the arm and yanked into a compartment. A pair of masked men, there, had held guns on him and had said not one word. But the situation was plain enough. As soon as the train rolled clear of the city’s outskirts, the two were going to shoot him and throw him off.

The man could scarcely tell, himself, how he had gotten out of that trap. He wouldn’t have even tried if the urgency of his message to The Avenger hadn’t been so terrific.

There was a confused memory picture of a lunge toward one of the men, two instant shots at him, a searing pain in his right shoulder, and then a picture of one of the two men falling, drilled in the head by his own pal.

He had then slugged the other man and left the compartment.

At Harmon, the man had slid from the train and gone to the nearest freight platform. There were two trucks. He had waited till one pulled away, then had climbed into the cab of the second with a gun in his hand.

“New York, fella, and don’t ask questions!”

The driver had taken one look at the dreadful, white face and the terrorized, desperate eyes—and started for New York. The drive down the state had been without incident.

But there, the man knew, the peacefulness was going to end.

They wanted to kill him before he could get to The Avenger.

Who “they” were, he did not know. But he knew why they didn’t dare let him get to Bleek Street alive. It was because of what he knew, because of the strange thing on which he, as an expert electrician, had stumbled at Plant 4 near Marville, Ohio.

A mad, tremendous, world-shaking thing!

“They” had lost track of him when he escaped the trap on the train and came on to New York by truck. But they would have a guard posted near his destination. For they knew where he was bound for.

The chances of his getting to Bleek Street, and to the door under that small but mighty sign, Justice, Inc., were very, very slim.

But he
had
to do it.

It was late afternoon when he got within a block of Bleek Street. He debated waiting till night but decided against it. The street lights would pick him out almost as much as daylight. No, he might as well try it now.

The man, as he thought this over, was careful to stay in the heart of an after-work crowd streaming down the sidewalk from their various places of employment. In crowds lies safety, he thought. So he went down the walk with people elbowing him in every direction, like a piece of driftwood on the current of a stream, approaching the corner of Bleek Street.

There, he didn’t know quite what he should do.

There was a crowd on this avenue. There would be none on Bleek Street, from what he had heard of the place.

Bleek Street, where Dick Benson had his headquarters, was a quiet little back bay in the midst of lower Manhattan’s roaring activity. It was only a block long. One side of the block was taken up by the back of a tremendous concrete warehouse, fronting on the next street.

In the center of the other side were three old redbrick buildings that had been thrown into one. To right and left of the three buildings were empty loft, store, and small warehouse structures all owned or under long lease by The Avenger.

In effect, Richard Benson owned the block. And no one ever went in there save people wanting to see him, which meant that few people would be around. No crowds to shield a man, there.

The Marville electrician bit his lip as he neared the corner. Somebody bumped his right arm violently.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, wincing, keeping his head down. That arm had only just ceased oozing blood from the deep groove cut in it by the bullet at Cleveland.

He reached the corner. Bare walk stretched from the crowded avenue to the center entrance, seeming as vast in extent, and as desolate, as the Sahara. He groaned. How could he ever traverse that distance? There’d be guns in every doorway, probably.

He clenched his hands. A sort of moan came from his lips. Then, wildly, blindly, he began to run toward his goal.

He ran like a crazy man, zigzagging, now in the center of the empty street, now on the right-hand side, now on the left, as he strove to put as great a distance as possible between himself and doorways.

He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he realized, with a stifled scream, that it was too late for him to escape his fate!

There would be no bullets. No one would try to kill him now. That was because it wasn’t necessary any more.

That hard jostling in the crowd back there, when someone unseen had bumped into his right side. The man’s right arm was aching like fire now, with more than the bullet wound. But even as the fiery pain became apparent, it faded, and the arm went numb.

His legs started to go numb, too. Face dreadful, death in his eyes, he staggered on toward the doorway of Justice, Inc.

The top floors of the deceptive-looking three buildings on Bleek Street had been thrown into one tremendous room. Up here was the heart of The Avenger’s headquarters. It was to this place that Dick Benson had called Mac and Smitty and Josh.