The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (7 page)

The rest of the Indians must have slid out of the boat again, because the other gang were pouring out, too. They were shooting as they went, with no time for the two they left behind.

“I don’t get it,” said Smitty, going to the opening.

“Two enemies can be better than one,” said Nellie. “That is, if you can get them fighting each other instead of you.”

“Oh!” said Smitty.

He looked out. The little monkey men were worming through the shed wall with the others close behind. It was probable, after shots that would draw every cop for blocks around, that the gang would never use that abandoned boat as headquarters again, would never come back to the yard again.

“Okay to leave—” began Smitty.

“Look out!”
Nellie cried.

Smitty didn’t know what it was he was to look out for, but he ducked instantly and instinctively. One of the now-familiar little darts ticked against rusted iron where his head had been.

Smitty jumped away from the opening. One of the Indians was moving; he had been knocked out, it seemed, instead of killed. He tried feebly to get away from the giant after having shot a dart at his back.

Smitty kicked the bamboo tube from his fingers and held him with one hand while he ran over his skinny but sinewy frame with the other. He found no more darts in the little quiver the Indian carried.

He picked the fellow up and held him under one arm.

“Beat it,” he said to Nellie. “We’ll take this one back to Bleek Street as a souvenir. It’d be a good idea to get out before the police get here. We’d just waste time in questions for which we haven’t the answers, yet.”

They rolled down the street in Smitty’s car a little before the first squad car arrived. They went to Bleek Street, with their apelike captive silent but squirming on the back seat.

“All that trouble at the boat just for this!” said Nellie, staring distastefully at the Indian.

“Oh, we got more than him,” Smitty said. “I overheard some things that might be useful to the chief. For one thing, that gang has set out to snuff us all out. ‘Eliminate’ us, was the nice word they used. It’s well to know ahead of time that you have such enemies. For another thing, they’re going to try to get Heber again. One of them said so. They seem to be dead set on killing Heber.”

“Why do they want to eliminate
us?”
asked Nellie petulantly. “What have we done to them?”

“I don’t think they want us to go to South America,” said Smitty. “They’ve probably guessed that’s what Heber came to ask us to do—go back with him. And the idea doesn’t seem to appeal to them.”

“It doesn’t seem to appeal to me much, either,” confessed Nellie. “What with poisoned arrows, gangs—white and Indian—thirsting for our blood, and a crazy kind of disease at the end of the journey that makes monkeys out of humans before finally killing them. I think I’ll learn to knit.”

“I can see you sitting domestically beside a lamp and tatting a sock, or whatever it is they do to socks,” jeered Smitty. “But I guess the chief will be only too glad to have you stay home out of trouble. That way he won’t have to detail two or three of us to keep you from getting into a jam—”

“Is that so!” flamed Nellie. “Who rescued whom from what, a few minutes ago on that boat?”

It was pretty hard to find an answer for that. Smitty was still trying, unsuccessfully, when they got to Bleek Street.

All of Justice, Inc., knew of The Avenger’s anxiety to get to Brazil, to the aid of Stahl, in a hurry. Dick had said quietly that Stahl was an old friend. That was enough.

They all knew that the man with the thick black cap of hair and the pale, infallible eyes would stop at nothing to help a friend.

But all realized, of course, that it was senseless to start the trip before something had been done about that dread disease, the green killer, that lurked at their destination. Otherwise, they’d just go there and get it themselves, and that would be that. No help to anybody.

They confidently expected The Avenger to conquer the disease. But they couldn’t even guess at the probable time element. Maybe weeks. Maybe, with luck, only a matter of days.

Which proved that even Justice, Inc., was unable, sometimes, to comprehend fully the real genius of its leader.

Because the solution proved only a matter of hours.

Dick came out of the laboratory shortly after Smitty and Nellie returned to headquarters with their sullen, silent little captive. The Avenger carried with him a small vial which he handled very carefully. In the vial was a pinkish mixture.

“Ye surely haven’t found the answer so fast?” gasped Mac.

Benson nodded, face calm. “I found it. That’s a very odd disease, Mac.”

He stared with glacial, expressionless eyes at Heber, who looked back at him, and at the pinkish vial, with dawning hope in his eyes.

“It’s a filterable virus,” said Benson. “I had to use almost the full power of the electron microscope to see it. When I did see it, I saw something that I believe no modern eyes have seen before.”

He stared absently at the little vial.

“The germ causing this disease is so near the line of nonliving, inanimate matter, so crude and low a form of life, that I believe it to be prehistoric.”

“Gosh!” said Smitty. “You mean—a prehistoric disease?”

“Why not?” The Avenger was talking more to himself than to them. He was off in a realm of pure science where few could follow him, with the mundane affairs of an everyday world—even the predicament of his friend Stahl—for the moment disregarded.

“There have been animals, millions of years ago, such as no man living has ever seen. Plants, too. Prehistoric, we call them. If plants and animals—why not germs, bacteria?”

“Gosh!” breathed Smitty again. Then he tried to follow a little way into the tremendous vista this opened up. “A prehistoric disease that makes humans into monkeys. At least in body, if not in mind. Why, say—that opens up the whole question of evolution again. The theory that man is an ape who gradually evolved a bigger brain and learned to walk upright may be all wet. Perhaps it was man who started, not ape. Perhaps half or more of the original tribe got this sickness, turned from man to monkey, instead of the other way around, and stayed that way through all the centuries. Perhaps—”

“Loo,” came an impatient interruption. “If that pink stuff is the cure for what I’ve got, why don’t you give me a shot of it. I’d like to get well.”

It was Heber. He walked toward them, knees so gnarled and bent that his knuckles dragged the floor like an orangutan’s. His low forehead, with the coarse, flaming red hair an inch above the eyebrows, seemed even lower than it had been the night before.

“Of course,” said Benson. “We’ll start injections at once.”

“Mind telling me what that stuff is, exactly?” said Heber apprehensively.

“A simple antitoxin,” said The Avenger. “I used the principle already very familiar in disease preventives. From dead bacteria causing the disease, I produced this serum. It can be used to inoculate those who have not already had the disease. And injections of it should cure those who suffer from it already. So, if it is proved in a day or two by your beginning recovery, we’ll leave at once for the radium fields where Stahl is held. If he is still alive down there—”

As he spoke, The Avenger had bared Heber’s arm. He shot a bit of the pinkish stuff into the man’s veins.

Heber had come in after Smitty and Nellie entered. He had not seen their Indian captive, in his anxiety about the antitoxin. Now, for the first time, he saw the little monkey man.

He screamed like a maniac and ducked behind a chair.

“What on earth—” gasped Nellie, who had almost forgotten their souvenir. Then she saw what Heber was afraid of.

“He’s all right,” she said. “We searched him. He hasn’t any poisoned darts. He can’t hurt you.”

“Keep him away!” yelled Heber. “He’ll kill me. Or his pals will. Or that gang that almost got me in the truck. I want to get away from here!”

It was a surprising, and seemingly insane, tangent Heber had gone off on. A moment before, he had been fairly composed. Now, suddenly, all the fears he’d been running from came out on him like a rash, at sight of the harmless captive.

“I want to get out of here! They all know I’m here. They’ll bust in and murder me. I want to get away and hide!”

“That,” said Mac, “is the last thing you ought to want. To get away from here. This is the safest place in New York—”

“Let me out! Let me out!”

The Avenger looked at Josh. Such was the closeness of contact between the members of Justice, Inc., that the look was order enough for Josh.

He took Heber’s arm.

“We’ll go down to your suite,” the gangling Negro suggested. “You’re safe there. You can rest there. And we’ll be leaving for Brazil very soon now, anyway.”

Heber quieted a little. But his eyes were still wild with fright as he looked at the Indian. And he kept turning to look back at the silent, morose little native, till he had gone out the door, urged by Josh.

“That’s a funny one,” said Nellie. “All of a sudden he goes completely out of his head and wants to get away from here!” The Avenger’s face expressed no emotion, as usual. And, as usual, he did not waste words on idle speculation.

“Get that girl up here, will you, Nellie? I’d like to question her a little and see if she has recovered at all from the spider’s bite.”

The girl was so beautiful that it was heartbreaking that she should be such a moron—at least, for the time being, while the effects of the spider bite lasted. Nellie looked at her and shivered as she thought that she herself could have been in that condition if she hadn’t jerked her hand back in time at the junkyard.

At the same time, Nellie was perplexed by something she sensed rather than saw about the girl’s looks.

The girl’s skin was an extremely attractive, but rather unusual, shade of gold, like dark honey. Her reddish-brown hair had lighter streaks in it that enhanced its beauty, but, somehow, didn’t seem to belong there. She didn’t have muscles that stuck out to mar the symmetry of her body, but it was nevertheless plain at a glance that she had more muscle than most young ladies.

It all tried to spell something to Nellie, but she couldn’t guess what.

Benson took the vacant-eyed beauty by the hand and led her to a comfortable chair. Then he sat in front of her, staring into her eyes with his own eyes like polar ice in moonlight.

“There may be a hint of her identity that could be brought out by word association,” he said. So then he tried it.

“Jungle,” he said to the girl.

She didn’t say anything, just looked at him.

“Mine.”

“Radium.”

There, that had drawn an answer.

“Snakes,” said The Avenger.

“Uncle.”

Nellie looked at Smitty. That was pretty senseless. Unless the girl had an uncle she didn’t much care for.

“Guide.”

“Snake,” said the girl, vacant-eyed.

Now she was just parroting The Avenger’s previous word, Nellie decided.

“Distance,” murmured Benson, looking as if this was, impossibly, making some kind of sense to him.

No answer.

“Radium.”

“Towers,” said the girl.

Nellie gave up. But The Avenger didn’t, till he had asked two more questions—or rather, had uttered two more words.

“Letter.”

“Radium,” said the girl.

“War.”

“Home,” said the girl, like a phonograph that plays what it is set to play, but has no choice about it.

“I think she’s just a little bit better,” said Benson to Nellie.

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” Nellie said. “How much longer will she be like this?”

“Days. Maybe weeks. She’s lucky to be alive. The bite of that spider is fatal in two cases out of three.”

Nellie shuddered again.

“Take her to her room again,” The Avenger said.

Nellie went out, leading the girl. Smitty turned impatiently to the man with the deadly, pale eyes.

“We can start for Brazil right away, now, can’t we?” the giant said. “You’ve got the antitoxin ready. We don’t have to wait around here any more, do we?”

“We can start at once,” nodded The Avenger. “Heber can guide us—”

Nellie burst back into the room, blue eyes blazing, face showing excitement.

“Heber!” she cried. “He’s gone.”

“What?”

They all stared at her. Even The Avenger’s pale eyes were narrowed a bit, though that was the greatest extent to which emotion ever showed in his masklike countenance.

“He’s gone,” repeated Nellie. “And Josh— He hit poor Josh in the back of the head with a lamp base or something!”

That was enough for the pretty Negress, Rosabel. When something happened to Josh, she flew.