The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (8 page)

Benson leveled off high above the altitude at which he had barely raked the top of the net. His pale eyes were like agate with cold embers behind them as he debated a calmly considered bout with death.

Mac’s plane had been nearest him along the mythical power line. Mac would be in here, on the same side of the field, in a few minutes. And there was that aerial death trap in his way.

By a thousand-to-one chance, he might escape as Benson had. But The Avenger didn’t consider thousand-to-one chances on the safety of his aides if he could help it.

He glided down again, watching with eyes like the eyes of a hawk. Now, forewarned, he could get a glimpse of the bags from closer up, outlining them by the stars they eclipsed. There were six of them, three high, three low, spread far apart, making it almost impossible to land on the Portland field from the west. Perhaps more than six—

The Avenger reached for a bracket above the control board. There was a gun there looking at a casual glance much like a standard army rifle. A closer examination would have disclosed a lot of difference, however.

The gun had a smooth bore; was unrifled. It loaded both at muzzle and breech. Into the breech went a powder cartridge without a charge. Into the muzzle went a thing that looked like an apple on a long stick. The stick just fitted the barrel of the gun. The “apple” was an explosive case containing colored powders that gave off skyrocket flares when they were released.

The thing was like a miniature trench mortar, designed for night signaling. But it could do excellent work right now. Work that had nothing to do with sending signals.

Benson swept back along the top line of gas bags. The gun thudded with its extra-heavy recoil against his shoulder. There was a bonfire in the sky, and then there were five balloons.

Six flashing trips back and forth. Six shots. Six aerial fires. And down below, somewhere in the night, was a heap of tangled cable, a trap that had been destroyed before it could destroy.

When Benson landed, wondering field attendants surrounded his plane, puzzled and alarmed by the fires in the sky.

“Captive balloons with cable,” Dick explained briefly. “Stolen from the army warehouse, no doubt. They were a menace, so I shot them down. Phone the warehouse; have the loss checked and government operatives set to tracing the thieves.”

In the sky could be seen the lights of Mac’s plane as it passed serenely through a space that would have caught it in a deadly web if The Avenger hadn’t intervened.

“When that plane lands,” Benson commanded quietly, “direct the pilot to the administration building. I’ll be in the manager’s office. There will be three more planes landing in the next half-hour, with the lettering ‘Justice, Inc.,’ on their fuselages. Send the occupants to the manager’s office, too.”

He went off, a gray steel bar of a man, leaving the attendants gaping.

The plane Benson had pointed to came in. A man with the map of Scotland on his homely, freckled face stepped out and was told where to go.

In a short time Benson’s five aides were in the manager’s office with him. The manager himself, alternately thrilled and alarmed at the presence of a man like Benson, was outside at his stenographer’s desk. Benson called him. He ordered a car.

“What’s the next stop, Muster Benson, how we’re together?” asked MacMurdie.

“The Portland radio station.”

Their eyes asked more questions.

“Needles,” Dick said. His pale eyes narrowed as he recalled the seemingly senseless mumble of Janet Weems at the hospital. “Needles with roots. I can’t imagine as yet what the roots might be. But I think we may find out at the radio tower.”

The Portland radio station was like most in the country. There were the glass-walled broadcasting chambers and the larger rooms where the audience could watch through sound-proofed windows and hear through an amplifier.

It was two o’clock in the morning when Justice, Inc., got there, but the place was fairly full.

It was the vogue at the moment to conclude night parties with a visit to the station and an earful of dance music.

Smitty and Mac were a little behind the others as they entered the building housing the station.

“Needles with rrroots,” burred Mac. When he was deeply puzzled or moved, he had a tendency to roll his r’s. “I can’t see what needles with roots have to do with a broadcastin’ station.”

Smitty had been increasingly thoughtful since leaving the airport.

“A radio tower looks a little like a needle,” the giant said slowly. “A great big needle sticking up into the sky—”

“Sure,” said Mac sardonically, “with a root on it!”

“Well, there’s a ground cable, isn’t there?” snapped Smitty.

“Is there?” said Mac, who left all things electrical to the huge fellow with the china-blue eyes.

“A ground cable,” worried Smitty. “And a radio tower, like a great big needle—”

Something huge and breathless, some blinding flash of intuition as to what this was all about, was almost edging into the door of his brain. But he couldn’t quite get it.

They all went into the audience chamber of the broadcasting station and sat down. Through the heavy glass between them and Studio B they could see an announcer at a microphone.

The man was standing there with a script in his hand, and with the little preliminary smile on his lips affected by those who try hard to project their personality over the ether waves.

“Good morning, folks,” the announcer said. “It is now exactly two o’clock, and you are about to hear some of your favorite music as arranged by Jimmy Truetone and played by Jimmy’s orchestra. We’ll hope this broadcast will not be interrupted as was the one at midnight.”

The man’s lips retained the shape of their smile, but for a moment lost its spirit. However, his voice continued to be smooth and carefree, with an implicit chuckle in it.

“Everything’s normal, now, after the little power tie-up. You know, folks, that was a funny thing. It looks as if it is to become the studio mystery—a mystery that our radio experts are unable to explain. Anyway, they haven’t explained it yet. All the power tubes blew at once, and the program went dead. And that’s then only comment on the matter. I could tell as much about it myself, and your announcer is no radio expert, folks.”

He glanced at the control man, who good-naturedly shook his fist, grinned, and went on.

“There’s a story around here that somebody saw a crazy gorilla or something go up the radio tower. Maybe it was the monkey that blew the works. If so, folks, there will be no more monkey business. Take it, Jimmy.”

The music of the Truetone orchestra faded in, and a girl stepped with a bright smile to the mike to go into a torch number with the repetition of the chorus.

Smitty nudged Benson suddenly and pointed furtively. Sitting ahead of them, and as yet seemingly unaware of their presence in the back row, was a man alone. It was the man who had run into the power plant at Marville, Ohio, with the tale of seeing Nevlo blasted into a mad, crippled thing.

“Pretty long hop from Marville to Portland,” Smitty whispered. “And you wouldn’t think a power-plant roustabout had the dough to go traveling around like that.”

Benson nodded, eyes like chips of stainless steel in his dead face.

“Watch him, Smitty. When he leaves here, trail him and see where he goes. Report to me on your belt radio.”

He was gone, then. And his disappearance was almost as swift and simple as the sentence. He was there, instructing Smitty, and then he wasn’t there, and his exit was pointed by the soft closing of the door. The Avenger could move as silently as a ghost, and as swiftly as flickering moonlight.

Benson went to the radio tower.

It soared above him into the starry, but black, sky, a skeleton of an obelisk two hundred feet tall. But The Avenger did not look up for a moment. He looked down.

The tower had four spraddling legs, and at the foot of the leg pointing roughly northwest, about in line with the magnet’s north pole, he found it. Something vaguely reminiscent of the yarn told by the man at Marville about Nevlo.

The man had said something about a blue hole in the ground, there, at the spot from which Nevlo had stumbled with a warped brain and a distorted body.

There was a blue hole here.

It was a most peculiar hole. It was perfectly concave, about two and a half feet across and five feet deep. Two deep, regular indentations encircled the hole at about the center. A certain similarity of shapes was instantly plain.

The hole looked like the shell of a standard oil drum, two and a half by five feet, with two bracing ridges around its middle. Had a drum been made of wax to reproduce a steel one faithfully, buried in hard-packed earth, then been melted carefully and pumped out, the result would have been a hole like this, cast in the ground.

The earth at the sides of the hole was fused and bluish, as if it had been exposed to tremendous heat. And if there had ever been anything in it, at least there was nothing now. Whatever had blistered the solid earth had burned any contents to nothingness; or else, if there had been traces of something, it had been removed before The Avenger arrived on the scene.

Benson looked up, then, having examined the ground first.

Far overhead, like a red star, burned the warning beacon placed there to keep planes from colliding with the steel skeleton. Between the red star and the man with the colorless, deadly eyes was an iron ladder, up the spindly steelwork, so thin that it seemed to have been fashioned of black cobwebs.

The Avenger began to climb the ladder.

Up he went, smoothly, effortlessly, seeming to flow along the rungs rather than laboriously climb them. A little faster than an ordinary man would have mounted a similar number of steps, he was at the top. Such was his physical condition that his breathing wasn’t even accelerated.

He looked first at the beacon light.

It was a new one, standard, lens and all. And from it went new cable. Where the old light had been, the tip of the tower was pitted and burned. It looked as if some sort of super-rat had chewed the solid metal as ordinary rats chew bites out of cheese.

And the serrated edges had the same blue tinge, a fused, glazed tinge, like the hole in the earth at the foot of the structure.

It was then that the tower began to lean!

The average person would have thought at first that he was suffering from some illusion induced by the height. But The Avenger, with his perfect sense of equilibrium, knew instantly that it was no illusion, but an actual tilting of the tower.

He stared down. Even his telescopic gaze could reveal no figure at the base of the tower, so far down in the black night with nothing but the blackness of earth as a background. But he did see something.

A single blue-white flash. Someone down there was working on the slender legs with an acetylene torch, held under a shield to guard its flashing fire from other eyes.

If the tower was leaning, it must mean that at least one other leg had been seared through . . .

There was a heavy tremor, and the tower tipped some more! This time it kept on tilting. The killer on the ground had done enough!

Two hundred feet high. And on the top of that tower, like an insect on the top of a falling yardstick, was Dick Benson.

The thing was like a stage act with chairs piled ten high and an acrobat on top. Slowly, at first, the tall tower leaned, then more and more swiftly till it was rushing toward the distant ground with moaning speed.

At the very tip, Benson paused, ice-pale eyes calmly regarding the uprushing earth. Then he poised and leaped far out from the collapsing steel, into thin air!