The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (9 page)

Smitty didn’t wait for the man from the Marville plant in the audience chamber. He went out a minute or so after Benson had left and took up a stand in a dark doorway.

Meanwhile, Smitty had passed the word to Mac.

The man knew by sight The Avenger, Mac, and Smitty. Benson and Smitty had left the audience room. When the fellow finally got up and made for the door, Mac did his share of keeping the man in ignorance of their visit by bending down as if he had dropped something, thus concealing his face.

The man wandered out the street door. There, he looked at a watch on his wrist and began to hurry a little. Behind him, a huge shadow detached itself from the gloom of a doorway and began to follow.

The man didn’t go to a car, nor did he call a cab. He went on foot into the fringe of the city—a very dirty, poverty-stricken fringe where the lighting wasn’t very good and where few pedestrians showed on the sidewalks.

It was the kind of spot where the cops tend to walk in pairs instead of patrolling alone.

The man went to a dark and dingy house at the blind end of a particularly malodorous street. Not a light showed at any window of the place, but when the man knocked lightly at a scarred door, the door was promptly opened.

He disappeared within, and Smitty drew closer.

That there
was
light within the place seemed evident; it was improbable that the occupant who had opened the door for the Marville visitor would be sitting around in pitch darkness.

Nevertheless, Smitty had made the circuit of every downstairs window without seeing a streak of light, so cleverly was inside illumination concealed, and without getting any other sign that the place was not deserted, before he got a hint of habitation.

A faint sound came to him from a basement window in the rear.

There was a rear yard, piled high with refuse. The giant crouched behind a rotten packing case next to the basement opening. Again the slight sound came to him. It was the sound of a voice, too indistinct for words to be made out.

The window was old and out of repair, like all the rest of the place. It was broken, and a rag had been stuffed into a small chink. Smitty very cautiously pulled the rag out, and found himself looking at a dark blanket. He slit an inch-long opening in that.

The basement was as dirty and unkempt as the yard. Among the tin cans and broken old furniture five or six men were standing. They were all looking at one spot.

Widening the slit in the blanket a little with his knife blade, so that he could see, too, Smitty looked in the same direction.

On a rough pallet of dirty blankets and burlap lay a girl. And at sight of her face, Smitty shut his teeth hard to restrain a betraying exclamation.

He had seen the girl before, recently, at General Hospital in New York.

For the girl was Janet Weems!

Smitty swore silently but fervidly. Janet was still in a daze. That was plain from her eyes; they still had the blank look they’d held at the hospital.

She must have been boldly snatched from the hospital and flown up here to Portland. Why she had been brought here instead of being killed, Smitty could not guess. And he didn’t care. There was only one thing to think about. That was how to get her out of the place.

There were half a dozen men in the basement and no telling how many in the upstairs rooms of the place. But Smitty hunched his huge shoulders and prepared to go into action in spite of the odds. He paused only long enough to whisper into his belt radio the report to The Avenger.

The Avenger had shot from the top of the falling radio tower like a bird. A bird without wings.

He proceeded to remedy that at once.

He had perfected the world’s most compact parachute some months before. Its bulk was unbelievably tiny. It was made of transparent stuff no thicker than the cellophane on a cigarette package. It greatly resembled cellophane, as a matter of fact, but its tensile strength was such that even Smitty couldn’t take a sheet of it and rip it in his vast hands.

Folded, the parachute could rest in a flat pack under a man’s coat and not be noticeable unless you knew about its being there.

The Avenger owed his life to methodical precautions, as well as to marvelous skill with hands and brain. One instance of his precaution was never to go up in a plane, no matter how short the hop or for what purpose, without wearing one of these little ’chutes.

He had put one on before ascending to locate the strange power line, then had hurried to the radio station without bothering to take it off. So he had it on now when the tower fell.

He didn’t, couldn’t, take the second necessary to remove his coat. So, as he plunged out into nothingness while the tower plunged beneath him, he simply spread his shoulders.

Not a big man. Not a bulky one. But the steel cables Dick had for muscles simply would not be confined when they were tensed and when his chest was expanded.

The coat ripped from tail to neck, and he pulled the ripcord. Had the tower been twenty feet lower he couldn’t have made it. As it was, there was just enough height to let the ’chute save him.

He glanced swiftly around. There was no sign of the man who had brought the tower down. There wouldn’t be, of course. With the first waver of the thing, he’d have raced off untraceably into the darkness.

With his eyes as calm as they were cold, and with almost no expression on his handsome face, Benson went to the nearest phone. If there was a single thought left in his brain about his narrow escape, it didn’t show in any of his actions.

He phoned various radio stations in California. He asked just one question. In the recent power failure, did the power tubes of that particular station blow out?

At Los Angeles he got the answer he’d been waiting for.

“Who are you?” snapped a voice when The Avenger had put that question. “Some reporter or something? We don’t want a lot of publicity on a power failure—”

“I’m not a reporter,” Dick said quietly. “This is Richard Benson talking. I can give you references from—”

“Mr. Benson!” The man’s voice was very, very different. “Say,
you
don’t have to give references. Yes, our tubes blew with the power failure. Funny, too. Why would a failure blow the tubes? Why didn’t a fuse blow first—or a transformer or something? I don’t get it at all.”

Benson didn’t bother to explain or tell why he had asked the question.

“Send a man at once to your radio tower,” he said. “Have him see if there is a peculiar, bluish hole at the base.”

Back came the answer:

“Yes, Mr. Benson, there
is
such a hole at the base. The hole’s in a northeast line from it. A curious round hole as if an oil drum had been buried there and then removed so carefully that it left its exact print in the hole. But how did you know—”

“Is your beacon light all right at the tip of the tower?”

“No, sir. That is completely gone, and its standard along with it. Looks as if it had been
burned
off.”

The Avenger hung up.

In Portland, Maine, a tall tower had been charred by a current mightier than radio ever uses. In Los Angeles, a similar tower had been similarly treated.

He called the Montreal meteorological station.

They reported a phenomenal increase in the intensity and brilliance of the aurora borealis during the time of the power failure. It flared up with it, then died down again when it had ended. So, no doubt, a vast electrical disturbance in the Heaviside layer of earth’s atmosphere, or beyond, had caused the trouble.

Benson didn’t bother to point out that perhaps it had been the other way around, that perhaps the trouble had caused the electrical storm.

There was a slight vibration at his waist, from the belt radio. One of his band wanted to talk to him.

From his vest pocket came an earphone hardly larger than a quarter. Smitty’s tense, low tone came to him as he put it to his ear.

“I trailed the man, chief. Nailed him at a green house with a double porch at the foot of Vermont Avenue. He’s in here now, with six or a dozen thugs around him. I’m at a basement window of the place, looking in. There’s more than the man here. They’ve got Janet Weems! I don’t know how they took her out of General, but she’s here now, tied and gagged. Still out of her mind, I think. Now there’s another person coming into the basement— For the love of Heaven!”

The radio went dead, as if the giant’s explosive, horrified exclamation had blasted the tiny transmitter.

In the refuse-littered yard, Smitty crouched in the shadow of the packing case and glared through the slit in the blanket into the basement. His tiny radio had been forgotten in the sight that met his eyes.

“Another person coming into the basement,” he had said. Now this other person was in full view.

Smitty saw a big-shouldered, bulky figure, dressed in cheap but fairly good clothing. The man swayed from side to side as he walked, with arms hanging low. He had the arm length and the walk of a gorilla.

The man turned so that the giant could see his face.

It was the face of a brute rather than a man. The eyebrows, ridged and heavy, made little pits of the black, dull eyes. The nose was flattened and smeared half to one side. The ears were masses of gristle with no resemblance whatsoever to human ears.

The man even wore his clothes as if unaccustomed to such things, as a trained bear or a great ape might wear clothes. A gorilla of a creature! He made even the hoodlums in the cellar uneasy, Smitty could see. Two of them promptly stepped back, with their arms raised a bit, when he lunged a step toward them.

But the brutish figure’s destination was not the men. He started toward the girl, heavy arms crooked out in a gesture so much like a wrestler’s that it would have been comical if it had not been so grim.

“Is
it a gorilla?” Smitty whispered to himself. But he knew the answer.

It was a man, all right, inhuman as it appeared. It waddled with its wrestler’s posture toward the girl who lay bound and gagged . . .

There was a ghost of sound behind Smitty. The giant turned swiftly and looked up.

A man stood behind him with a crowbar in upraised hands, just ready to flail down on Smitty’s skull.

Smitty, enormous as he was, looked like the type of person who would be so muscle-bound that he’d get in his own way if he tried to sit down. But he was not that way at all.

For all his near seven feet of height and his almost three hundred pounds of brawn, he was nearly as lithe as Dick Benson himself. And he could move nearly as fast.

Now, in the split second before that murderous bar could flail down, his huge right hand shot up, and his big body eeled to one side.

The bar came down with dissipated force on his shoulder, instead of full strength on his hand. Under his colossal pads of muscles, he felt dull pain. And he didn’t like it.

Meanwhile, his right hand had found its mark, which was the man’s throat.

The man didn’t raise the bar again, nor did he make any noise, though doubtless he would have made a lot of strange and anguished noises if Smitty’s hand hadn’t been pressing his neck into a thing that could have been fitted by a size 10 collar.

The bar dropped, and the man would have followed, save that Smitty had risen from his crouch and held him upright.

A minute would have been enough. But Smitty, still angered by the stinging in his shoulder, held him for two. And when the man dropped, he fell in such a way that you knew he would never again rise under his own power. The Avenger never took a human life. But his aides did, now and then, when the provocation was sufficiently great.

Smitty loped to the back door. It was open a crack. He bent over, so that his great height shouldn’t betray him, and became simply an anonymous shadow in the night.

“Okay out there?” came a whisper from somebody peering out the slightly opened door. “Anybody say something? Or was it a cat?”

So his exclamation at the sight of the warped figure entering the basement had given him away, Smitty gathered. It had been heard and a man sent to investigate. Well, he would be investigating the sulphur situation in hell at about this moment.

“Okay out there, now,” he whispered back, truthfully enough.

He opened the door, not too swiftly or urgently.

It opened onto a pitch-black hall or corridor, instead of a room. Barely to be seen was the dim white blotch of a man’s face in the darkness.

But Smitty, silhouetted against the stars, was more easily to be observed.

There was a gasp as the man inside noticed the unfamiliar size of the one who opened the door. The gasp was preliminary to a shout. But the shout was never uttered.

Smitty’s right hand took up its throttling task on a new throat. It shot forward for the neck under that dim white blotch of a face and found it comfortably.

This time Smitty had no personal animosity exaggerating the power in his huge fingers. He calculated time by counting slowly to himself, as calmly as if he were timing a soft-boiled egg, and he opened his hand with the count of fifty. Slow. This fellow would probably breathe again. Smitty wouldn’t have gone so far as to guarantee that, but
probably
he would.