The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (17 page)

So Benson went on in that dialect and answers came with dull obedience from his hypnotized captive. Not very revealing answers, they concerned the man’s companions rather than the leader Dick was after.

Many men worked for this leader, a man with a crooked eyebrow. Each man was from a back-country section of a different Central European nation. Each spoke a different language and only that language. Thus, these hirelings could speak to no one, not even to each other, and perhaps spill secrets.

They had come in under quota and reported to this man. But they did no laboring work. They did what this man commanded, which several times had been murder.

The Avenger’s pale eyes reflected an icy glint of disappointment. He had cleared up the seeming muteness of the gang: none knew English or the other’s tongue, and so could communicate only with each other by sign language. He had established the fact pretty definitely that the sabotage of the United States’ rubber industry was the act of a foreign nation at war.

But that was all.

This man knew nothing of the means of sabotage. He knew nothing of the leader, the fellow with the crooked eyebrow, Old Mitch’s renegade son. He knew nothing of real value.

There was a buzz at the door and Josh stared at the tiny television set that showed whoever was in the vestibule. It showed a messenger in uniform.

Benson admitted him at once, and took from him a small package carefully done up in oiled silk.

“A new angle on the factory disease,” Dick said. “I analyzed the blood of one of the workmen and got nowhere. It occurred to me to analyze scrapings from the lungs, also, since this thing seems to be spread by means of ventilating systems. This is a sample from a workman who recently died. I’ll be in the laboratory, Josh, if I’m needed.”

Josh nodded. He and Rosabel were the only ones with The Avenger in the big top-floor room. Mac was downstairs in bed, sick. Smitty was supposed to be in the same place.

Nellie Gray was still out on the trail of that scrubwoman. The woman had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. It was pretty certain she had not left Manhattan. That island, reached only by tunnels and bridges, can be closed promptly and thoroughly by the police. They had so closed it at Richard Benson’s orders and were ready to stake their reputations on the statement that no such woman had tried to get away.

But if she was still in Manhattan, where on the island was she?

Nellie had followed every angle and got nowhere. Now, she was on about the last one she could think of. She was trying to trace the store where the woman might have bought the envelope in which that secret formula had been found.

It was practically an endless job; but Nellie was not scheduled to follow the racing very far. It was just after dark, when she turned out of her eighteenth notions-and-stationery store in the neighborhood of the rear-house, that her little belt radio vibrated almost soundlessly as a sign that she was being paged by one of the crew.

She put the tiny phone to her ear.

“Smitty talking. Anybody catching this please answer. Smitty talking!”

“Smitty!” Nellie was furious. “Are you at Bleek Street in bed? And if you’re not, why aren’t you?”

“I’m not at Bleek Street,” came the giant’s far voice. “I thought I could do some good by talking to Old Mitch again, and now both of us are in trouble.”

“You big—” Her voice broke. “You were in no condition to get out of bed. Oh, if I ever get my hands on you— Where are you? And what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know where I am,” confessed Smitty, voice slow and laborious with the alarming malady. “But there’s plenty wrong. Old Mitch and I were slugged by his son’s gang, I guess. It looks as if his son is going to commit patricide. We’re in a basement. I think at the rear-house.”

“There isn’t any basement under the rear-house,” Nellie snapped. “The police reported that. They tore up some floor boards to make sure.”

“Then I don’t know where I am. But Old Mitch and I were taken in his ground-floor room at the rear-house. Get the chief. Maybe he can tell, from a look around, where we were taken.”

His voice died, and Nellie started explosively for Old Mitch’s alley, which was only about six blocks away.

En route, she tried to get in touch with The Avenger. But at that moment Benson was in his laboratory, with his small radio left outside because of certain magnetic experiments he was trying. And both Josh and Rosabel were downstairs exclaiming over the fact that Smitty had gotten up and gone out.

Nellie arrived at the rear-house without having been able to contact any of the others. So she stopped trying and crept soundlessly to Old Mitch’s door to get to Smitty on her own hook.

The big dope, getting up out of a sickbed and going to fight a gang of killers when he had about as much strength as a sick calf! She could have killed him. At the same time, without a second thought about it, she was quite prepared to face death to get to his side.

At Old Mitch’s door, she stood a long time, in the darkness of the miserable alley. She was listening. Apparently, Old Mitch and Smitty had been ambushed in the room into which she was preparing to go.

She didn’t want to be ambushed, too. That wouldn’t help the big fellow any.

The little belt radio could be used as a sort of stethoscope, with a hundred times that instrument’s amplification, by turning it off wave length, putting one earphone against a wall or door and plugging in a second earphone. You could hear a person breathe through six inches of brick wall with that.

Nellie had this to the door and was listening—and hearing nothing. She was sure there was no one in there. So she picked the lock of the door and swung it open.

She leaped inside and to the right, just to make sure she didn’t walk too easily into waiting arms. But still there was no sound so, feeling foolish, she snapped on her flashlight and turned its beam around the empty room.

This was the first time she had been in the place, and its bare squalor shocked her. How could anyone live in a room with dirty, cracked walls and ceiling dripping moisture; with only rags to sleep on, a broken chair to sit on, and a stove made out of an old oil tin in which to burn bits of refuse found in the streets?

But Old Mitch’s financial status was not the thing she had come here to explore. She wanted a key to Smitty’s whereabouts. She began to look around.

Something glittered on the floor. She picked it up. It was a coin. The coin had been given Old Mitch by the casual stranger on the street just before Smitty had approached the old man; and when Old Mitch fell in here, it had slipped out of a hole in his ragged pocket.

Nellie had no way of knowing all that. But she did know that a man of Old Mitch’s extreme poverty would not willingly go off and leave a coin lying in plain sight on his floor! It corroborated Smitty’s statement of violence.

She put the coin in her purse and looked around some more. And suddenly she felt hostile eyes on her!

She whirled to the door. It was still closed. She examined each of the four walls. They were cracked all over the place, but no crack seemed to go through and allow anyone to see in. She stared up at the ceiling.

From the center of the ceiling hung the one light bulb which was Old Mitch’s entire system of illumination. There was a rusted tin knob on the ceiling from which the wire dangled. And at the edge of the metal wire guard there was a small hole.

With her flash aimed at that hole, Nellie was suddenly sure she had seen an eye, just before that eye had been whisked away. She started to go a little closer to the center of the room, where she would be right under the light cord.

Somebody hit her from the rear! She was crashed to the floor like a football runner with four unblocked tacklers hitting her at once.

She got a whirling glimpse of an open door where there had been a closed door a moment ago. She saw two more men rushing toward her from the alley. Then one of them stepped on her flashlight; there was a grinding noise of glass and the white beam went out.

In blackness, she fought a number of arms that were trying to strangle her and at the same time club her into unconsciousness.

She got one, and her slim white fingers, that looked so rosily frail but were so deft and strong, found a nerve center. The arm wobbled and jumped convulsively in its effort to be drawn away.

She gave another arm a deft twist and heard an incoherent yelp. A hand was over her mouth, roughly keeping back any screams for help she might have had in mind. She used her small white teeth to excellent advantage, cried out once, then was clapped to silence again.

The men holding her must have been the most surprised crew in existence at the amount of force necessary to subdue one small girl. But they had the force, and to spare, with such odds.

One of the swung gun butts, or whatever weapon was being used, clipped her over the ear. And that ended that!

Something rubbing away at her wrists finally penetrated her blackened senses.

It was annoying. It hurt. No doubt the rubber thought he was being gentle and helpful, but it felt like an application of sandpaper, with her skin due to come off at any moment.

“Hey!” she thought she yelled.

Actually, it was hardly more than a sigh, accompanied by an opening of her eyelids.

Smitty was staring down at her, looking worried to the point of lunacy. He kept on chafing her wrists, till Nellie said:

“Stop it! Do you want to saw my hands off? There’s certainly one thing you’ll never use to win hearts—that’s the softness and delicacy of your hide. It’s like a washboard!”

Smitty didn’t care what she said as long as she said something.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

“Not yet,” snapped Nellie. She struggled to a sitting position and looked around.

A windowless cement wall surrounded them. The room it made was very large. The ceiling seemed to be of concrete too, with a square trapdoor or something in the center. A fine line around a large oval on the end wall showed that the door was a massive slab of cement.

Smitty still hovered beside Nellie. At her other side, more gruff now than snarling and surly, was Old Mitch. His rheumy eyes showed more concern than you’d have thought the old tramp had in him to feel for anyone.

Nellie felt exasperated.

“This is a basement. But there isn’t any basement under the rear-house. Where are we?”

In the laboratory, Benson had raced through a series of chemical experiments on the scrapings from the dead workman’s lungs so delicate and precise that they’d have made any world-famous chemist exclaim with admiration.

And from the test tubes had emerged a bizarre story.

Also, other bits of the puzzle of the slow-motion scourge had clicked into place in The Avenger’s coldly flaming brain. A pattern had almost completely emerged. A pattern so obvious that The Avenger felt icy rage at not having seen it from the beginning, yet knew that he had been thrown off by its very obviousness.

When Dick emerged from the laboratory, Josh knew from the glitter in the pale, dreadful eyes, that the chief had discovered a great deal. And at the question in his face, The Avenger nodded.

“The lung scrapings give the answer,” he said. “It explains the impossibly swift, deadly anaemia that seems to attack the workmen and the odd slow-motion symptom that goes with it. It explains everything.”

In his vibrant voice was glacial fury, and his colorless eyes were dreadful.

“In the scrapings,” he said, “were traces of powdered benj, rubber dust, emery dust, and an oxide with a single atom of oxygen instead of a complete molecule.”

Josh was a highly educated man, but aside from mention of emery and rubber dust, none of this meant a thing to him.

“Benj?” he said.

“A drug made from powdered, baked hemp,” explained The Avenger. “It’s as old as the Arabian Nights, and as evil as Satan himself. The chemical is what caused the slow motion. That stuff acts on the motor nerves, slows them way down, though the person affected doesn’t realize that at first. So workmen would suddenly begin feeding machines at only one fifth of normal speed, without knowing it, and the machines would jam or race emptily.”