The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (7 page)

Blake, president of Grant Utilities Corp., was in Cleveland most of the time at the general office. But he had been in the smaller Marville offices a great deal lately, while the best electrical brains in the country tried to straighten out Plant 4.

He was there now, and in residence at his Marville estate. And he saw Benson in a hurry when that rather mythical name was sent in to his private office.

“I have heard of you as a great electrical engineer,” he said. It was a common greeting. Doctors had heard of Richard Benson as a great physician; financiers as a wizard promoter; lawyers as a master of law. For The Avenger was profoundly skilled in more professions and activities, perhaps, than any other man on earth.

“More recently,” said Blake, “I’ve heard of you as an investigator. And now you are in Marville.” He gnawed at his lower lip a moment, making no effort to mask the fact that he was agitated by the visit. “You have been out to Plant 4?”

“Yes,” nodded Dick, his pale eyes taking the measure of the big, sleek man who headed Grant Utilities Corp. A worried man. A harassed man. A
frightened
man! Fear rode in his eyes and underlay his outwardly composed manner.

Blake wasted no time in stalling.

“If you’ve been out to the plant, I suppose you know of the trouble there.”

Benson nodded.

“The men have strict orders not to talk—” began Blake.

“It was necessary that they do so,” said Benson, “so they did. I understand your present chief engineer is a man named William Burton. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Where is he now?”

The fear showed more plainly.

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“Is the name Janet Weems familiar to you, Mr. Blake?”

Blake jumped a little. “Why, yes. She is Burton’s secretary. That is, part of the time she helps him. make out his reports, and the rest of the time she is in the Marville office. She . . . hasn’t been around lately, either.”

“Nor your former engineer, Nevlo?”

“Nor Nevlo,” said Blake. And then he began to swear, though he didn’t look like a man who was often profane. “Nevlo, damn him! He’s responsible for the failure of Plant 4. For a long time I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that a man could stop a power plant. But I believe it now. I’m beginning to be convinced that no power on earth can get Plant 4 running again if Nevlo doesn’t want it to.”

“How could he keep it from working?”

“I don’t know,” said the unhappy Blake. He spread his hands. “I’m in a bad spot, Mr. Benson. I don’t mind admitting it. I’m president of this corporation, but I’m answerable to the stockholders. And they’re beginning to ride the daylights out of me because Plant 4 doesn’t begin operations. And the directors—” He shrugged helplessly.

“I can understand how it might take some explaining,” said Benson quietly. “And you have no idea where Burton or Miss Weems can be reached?”

Blake said nothing. He was staring over the Avenger’s shoulder at something.

Blake’s desk was placed so that, if he looked a little to the left, he saw a corner window. He was looking there now, rigid, eyes unblinking.

“You don’t know where Burton and the girl are?” The Avenger repeated.

Still Blake said nothing. And now his eyes began to take on a glazed look from sheer horror. A sort of croak came from his distorted lips, and he tried to point.

Mac and Smitty and Benson whirled toward the window.

“Whoosh!
” exclaimed Mac in a suffocated tone.

“For—” gasped Smitty.

Benson said nothing. He jumped for the window.

Out there, hanging onto no visible support at all, as far as could be seen, was a sort of mad gorilla form. A man, yet with the face of an insane beast, dressed in clothes that were burned and torn till they were little more than rags.

“Nevlo!”
panted Blake.

The hideous face disappeared. Benson got the window up and looked down.

Blake’s office was on the second floor. Down below, a crooked, distorted gorilla form was just dropping from the serrated bricks of the wall onto the sidewalk.

They saw him knock aside several screaming pedestrians and then disappear around the corner of the building. Smitty and Mac raced for the stairs, but they knew they’d not reach the street in time to see the apelike figure.

“Nevlo—mad!” whispered Blake.

Benson said nothing. It was not necessary to add words.

A man discharged, formerly just vindictive. Now a lunatic from a misdirected experiment. A madman loose with a tremendous destructive secret in his crazed brain.

A madman with power to shake the world!

Practically on the threshold of The Avenger’s odd Bleek Street headquarters, a man had died. He had died mumbling about the date April 27th, which had been only a few days away at that time.

The man had come from Marville, where a power plant had failed, and he was an electrician. It was obvious that he was connected with that plant. Furthermore, it was a probability that he had discovered something about the nature of that failure and had come running to tell Dick Benson about it. Death had stopped him!

But he had managed to gasp the one statement: “Midnight, April 27th—”

What would happen then? Almost certainly a thing that had occurred before.

Another general power failure, perhaps brief, perhaps permanent.

Of course, all this was deduction, not provable; and the date might have to do with something else. But it was the most reasonable assumption to be made; so The Avenger was acting on it.

Acting on it in the air.

Patient checking of the power failures during that as yet not much commented on, but grimly significant, interval when nearly all electrical units were useless had revealed a curious thing.

The dead area was in a huge, rough diamond shape on the map that took in most of North America. The diamond shape was bounded vaguely by a line drawn from some point in New England, down toward the equator, up to some point in California, toward Hudson Bay in Canada, then back to New England.

Within that diamond shape, no electrical power. But the few power units outside the diamond—like the ship at sea radioed by Smitty and a few small plants in British Columbia and Alaska—had not been affected.

In one section, no power; outside the section, no trouble.

Benson wanted to know the exact location and slant of any one of those four lines forming the diamond. The two slanting south from New England and north toward Hudson Bay were the nearest at hand. However, the southern line lay out to sea, as far as could be judged. Any plane going dead out there might drown its pilot. So that line was out.

There remained the northern line to investigate.

Now, at a few minutes to midnight, April 27th, all five of Benson’s aides and Dick, himself, were up cruising.

There were five planes—Mac, Smitty, Nellie, and Dick piloted one each, and Josh and Rosabel were in the fifth. The five planes had orders to tack back and forth at twenty-mile intervals along the line, as at present located, and search for the demarcation point, on one side of which the ignition systems functioned and on the other side of which they went blank.

The five kept in communication with each other.

“Smitty, chief,” the giant’s far voice came over the radio. “Four minutes to twelve. Nothing’s happened, yet.”

Benson nodded a little. Josh’s precise tones sounded.

“Everything all right so far, Mr. Benson. Three minutes to go.”

Nellie reported, then Mac. The minute hand of Dick’s watch began to edge onto the midnight hour.

The Avenger banked his plane and started back along the line he had just taken. A line designed to cross at a right angle the vaguely placed line of power failure. And his four other planes performed the same kind of maneuver, up and up toward Hudson Bay, twenty miles apart.

The second hand moved toward the exact second of midnight. Benson, as nearly as he could calculate, was in the diamond, heading toward the area that had not been affected by the last failure. There was no guarantee, of course, that a second failure—if there were a second one—would occur in precisely the same section. But all he had to work on was the last one.

He was in the dead area, as far as he knew. The second hand passed the minute mark, and it was midnight; and his motor thrummed steadily along.

Midnight, and everything was disconcertingly all right.

Benson banked again and began retracing his line. It was possible that he had gone farther northeast, away from the diamond, than he had calculated. He’d go southwest again.

It was a moonless, black night with the stars like white diamonds on blue velvet—clear, but not giving off much light. Beneath The Avenger and ahead were the lights of a town. Not many lights because the village was small, and it was late. But enough to show a town was there.

He passed over it at twenty-five thousand feet, and went on—

His motor went dead!

There was no slow failure, no sputtering around and then catching and then coughing again.
Zing!
The motor shut off as if he had cut the ignition switch.

This was it!

Benson looked behind, pale eyes like ice under a glacial moon. The lights of the village still blazed behind him. But here, not three miles beyond, was the dead area.

He planed slowly downward with a dead motor, wheeling and gliding for the lights. Just as he was about to cross directly above them, his motor caught again.

There it was. The curious line of demarcation with light and life on one side and blackness and power-death on the other. Literally a dead line.

Benson had it now. He spread his map and charted his exact position. Meanwhile he glided lower and lower, back and forth across the line.

It was eerie. The motor went dead, caught again when he retraced his flight, went dead on the return. It was as if he passed through an invisible wall and into a spot where other-world conditions prevailed, and electricity, among other commonplace phenomena, did not function.

During a “live” period he tried to raise the others on the radio. There was no answer from any of the other four planes. It looked as if all had been caught in the fatal diamond.

Then, abruptly, his motor caught while he was to the
south
of the line. At the same moment, lights burst out in a formerly black area far ahead on the horizon, as a town that had been plunged in darkness began receiving power again.

The strange blackout was over.

But whereas the first one had only lasted between fifteen and twenty seconds, this one had endured for over eight minutes!

Dick’s radio chattered. It was Mac.

“Motor and radio dead for eight minutes, Muster Benson,” came the Scot’s burring voice. “I had enough altitude to keep in the air with a dead motor. Now, radio and motor okay.”

The rest radioed in, too, one by one. All but Dick had been too far within the diamond and had been caught when their ignitions failed.

One by one, The Avenger told them the same thing.

“Meet me at the Portland flying field immediately.”

Smitty was the only one whose curiosity caused him to question his chief’s orders.

“Portland it is. Heading for it now at three-eighty an hour. But why Portland, chief?”

“Because,” said Benson, “the power line, as I charted it, slants down from the north magnetic pole at an angle bringing it directly to or through Portland, Maine.”

Dick Benson and his associates knew every landing field in the country, plus a great many emergency landing spots known to few pilots. In a very short time The Avenger’s plane nosed down on a long slant toward the distant lights of Portland.

Stars like diamonds on a midnight-blue velvet background. Stars that twinkled in the clear night but gave off very little light. The night was so dark, indeed, that even the pale, infallible eyes of The Avenger didn’t see the things for quite a while—till the plane was almost unavoidably upon them.

The first thing he saw was a star, low on the horizon, blink mysteriously out like a light that has been turned off, and then blink on again. After that, he saw a section of night-light design of Portland ahead of him similarly blotted out.

And with that he brought the nose of the plane up in a screaming zoom and gave the motor everything it would take.

His face was calm and expressionless; his eyes were unwinking in their deadly coldness. Yet, with the brief blinking out of the star and the ground lights, he knew at once what faced him.

Balloons—with, no doubt, net or cable between to catch him. Someone had heard his radio command to the rest to come to Portland airport. Someone had instantly managed to get hold of some test balloon-barrage equipment, with which the army had been experimenting near Portland, and had sent the death trap up into the black night sky. A short notice of that army test with balloons and netting similar to London’s aerial defense had been in the papers recently.

Probably no other man could have caught the fleeting hints of the deadly bags so soon in the blackness of a moonless night and could have acted on it so swiftly.