The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (2 page)

He reached the building, with the younger man racing right behind. The younger man was so close that he’d have caught up if his quarry had gone into the building. Perhaps it was this fact that made the older man change his mind in mid-stride.

Instead of entering The Avenger’s headquarters, the man veered sharply right and jumped into the ordinary-seeming old sedan at the curb.

He just made it. The younger man pounded at the glass and wrenched futilely at the door handle as the other threw a lock. The big car whirred into life and moved off. Whoever had parked it had left the ignition key in the dash.

And now, abruptly, violently, two of the three things that had seemed so ordinary and normal a moment ago became different—with a deadly difference!

The first was the little middle-aged man at the wheel. The second was this car.

The man driving the purloined auto was now almost as dark as an African chieftain. But with a darkness that was still of purple-black tints, down under the skin, rather than of brownish tan. Also, he was now obviously quite mad.

The madness showed in the things the innocent-looking old car suddenly began to do under his direction.

It skidded into the crowded north-and-south avenue off Bleek Street at twice the speed a right-angle curve demands. It clanged against a bread truck, righted itself and went north.

The bread truck, meanwhile, toppled over on its side with a crash that could be heard for blocks. Bread, rolls and assorted pastries paved square yards of the avenue. The whole side of the truck was ripped as if by a can opener. But the car that had done the ripping hadn’t even a bent fender.

It rolled on, a juggernaut in the hands of a lunatic.

Blackening fingers fiddled with things on the dash. And with each heedless touch something else happened.

The exhaust of the car showed grayish. At once, cars and pedestrians behind the car folded up and seemed to lose all volition. A touch of the grayish vapor and men and women fell and slept on the sidewalks, or slumped and slept over steering wheels. Popping crashes all along the street told of driverless cars smacking each other.

The gray vapor stopped rolling out. From the right-hand side of the car, under the running board, a curved steel rod shot up and in.

The flexible, clutching rod wouldn’t have caught anyone if an impatient youth hadn’t been jaywalking.

He was one of those street crossers in a vast hurry to get to the other side and stop and lean against a building and light a cigarette. He was edging into traffic, standing within inches of speeding cars to duck a few feet farther. He was so occupied with risking his life for an extra second that he didn’t see the commotion down the street from the big sedan, nor did he notice the flash of the rod.

The thing caught him as a hook catches a sack of mail; it held him pressed flat against the car body. Yelling, he was carried along, glued to the side of the juggernaut.

From the rear of the trick sedan a heavy metal bar with a curved end protruded. The sedan was shooting through a red light at the moment, and consequently through a stream of cars hastily broken in the middle to let this crazy projectile through. The swinging bar coupled onto the bumper of a car just grazed, as if directed by human hands, and this car jerked around at a right angle and was towed in the sedan’s chaotic wake, with the woman at the wheel screaming and trying to brake against the hidden enormous power of the machine pulling her.

No one could have told how many other things might have been done by the misdirected monster of steel if the man at the controls hadn’t suddenly reached the end of his endurance.

That strange darkness of skin had reached more than Negroid proportions now. He was fighting for breath, as if nine-tenths of his throat were closed. Great drops of sweat stood out on his forehead. His eyes were glazed and almost unseeing.

As if realizing he had no more time left him, he cut off the motor and turned the car sharply. It coasted toward the curb, sideswiped a parked car, leaped to the sidewalk and crashed into a plate-glass window.

The man at the wheel had sagged like an empty sack. As he did, he caused one more disturbance—if you could call it by so mild a word.

His dropping hand touched a button in the top of the old-fashioned gear-shift lever. There was a deadly
dit-dit-dit-dit,
and a machine gun under the leading edge of each front fender poured slugs in an awful hail.

The store behind the shattered plate-glass window was a ladies’ dress shop. The shrieking clerks dropped flat and were safe; but while the drums of the guns lasted, wax figures crumpled as though under blowtorches, and hangers of dresses whipped and shredded as if in a mighty wind.

Then there was silence. A deathly, awful silence, which was shared by the slumped figure at the wheel of the still undented car.

Outside, for a dozen blocks, the avenue was a mess. No one had been killed, but many had been bruised. The youth held against the side of the car like a fly was unconscious, either through fear or concussion.

Following the confused wake, two squad cars came screaming. With drawn guns, four cops from the cars leaped to the sidewalk and loped toward the machine that was half in and half out of the display window. They were white with rage, both as officers of the law and as citizens. They’d have shot the hoodlum who had driven a car like that as quickly as they’d have talked to him.

But the justified outrage soon died in them.

“Why, it’s one of Dick Benson’s cars!” said the man in the lead. He sheathed his gun and pointed to the small special insignia over the license plate. Every policeman in New York—and many in far corners of the land—knew what that little
J
stood for: Justice, Inc.

“Sure, an’ The Avenger never drove like that,” said a second man, big and red and Irish. “He helps folks; he doesn’t mangle ’em.”

“Somebody must have stolen it, then.”

“Boy, imagine stealing
Benson’s
car! This guy’ll wish he was dead before he gets out of
this.”

The oldest of them, in plain clothes, with the lines of experience seamed on his face, said before even the car door had been opened, “This guy is already dead.”

They could see it, then, all of them. The awkward pose of the body in the driver’s seat, the horrible limpness, the dreadful stillness, told the story.

“Broke his neck when the car hit,” shrugged one. “Serves him right.”

“Maybe,” the oldest said. “But a busted neck wouldn’t explain the guy’s color. Look at him. He’s
black!”

It was not an exaggeration.

The dead man wasn’t just dark; he was precisely what the plainclothesman had said. He was black. His hands, neck, face, all the exposed parts of him, were as black as if coal dust had been sifted thickly over him and caked on with moisture. The corpse was as black as ink!

The member of The Avenger’s little band who had left the car at the curb with the key in the ignition lock was Smitty.

Algernon Heathcote Smith—to give him the full name, which few people could use without getting a sock in the jaw—was a giant. Six feet nine, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he looked huge even in the huge room which was Justice, Inc.’s, inner sanctum.

This room took up the whole top floor of the three buildings that had been thrown into one. The way it was furnished told just a little of the tremendous wealth behind the organization. But at the moment, all in the room were gathered in front of one object in a corner near the rear windows.

This object was a television cabinet, but it housed a television set such as few in this world have ever seen. Designed by Smitty, it was far advanced over even the secret-laboratory experimental sets of the big corporations.

The big cabinet had received a recent change. On its side was fastened a small additional cabinet, like a small annex on a building.

Nellie Gray pointed to this addition.

“I still don’t get it,” she complained.

Nellie Gray, standing beside the vast bulk of Smitty, made a contrast to draw the laughter of an observer.

She was barely five feet tall, weighed barely one hundred pounds, and was as dainty and delicate-looking as a porcelain doll. Strong men had been fooled by that look of tiny helplessness, to their sorrow.

“I don’t understand it,” the tiny blonde repeated to Smitty.

The giant explained.

“It’s a television scrambler—or unscrambler, as the case may be. You know how they scramble sound, then sort it out at the other end by use of a code pattern, so that anyone trying to listen in hears only gibberish? Well, this scrambles the images of television the same way. Anyone trying to get the image receives only a meaningless jumble of moving lines on his screen, unless he has an unscrambler that sorts it all out and makes a regular image of it.”

“Uh-huh,” said Nellie doubtfully.

“You’ll see how it works in a minute,” said the giant. “The set in Mac’s drugstore is fixed up. At just two-thirty, Mac will transmit a moving picture of his homely mug and you can see just how it works out.”

The “Mac” referred to was Fergus MacMurdie, another member of Justice, Inc. Mac was a tall, bony Scot with sandy hair, sandy ropes of eyebrows, bitter blue eyes and outstanding ears. He was a brilliant chemist and spent much of his time in a sort of superdrugstore that Dick Benson had set up for him.

The drugstore wasn’t super from the standpoint of size. It was, in fact, a rather small place. It was super because of the way it was divided. The store part in front took up only a third of the total space. In back was the heart of the store—a great room divided down the center, with a complete chemical laboratory on one side and an equally complete electrical workshop on the other.

It was in the electrical half, which was Smitty’s domain, that there was a television set matching this big one in the Bleek Street headquarters.

“Mac’s image will be sent in the usual way,” Smitty went on. “However, the scanning of the image will be scrambled. This will be done by scanning a code pattern by means of the auxiliary television-like pickup tube and utilizing the electrical impulses of the pattern to control the scanning of the image being broadcast. At this end a similar pattern which is synchronized by a television-scanning tube will unscramble the irregular television impulses so that the receiving tube reconstructs an image identical with the scene to be picked up at the transmitter. Clear?”

“Clear like mud,” said Nellie with a grimace. “Life gets so complicated that I sometimes wonder how much longer we can go on living.”

“That’s a swell idea for war,” said Cole Wilson thoughtfully. “You could send maps, or printed messages, With no chance of an enemy picking them up.”

Cole was one of the newer members of the organization. He was compactly built, almost too good-looking, dark of hair and eyes, with the straight features of an Indian. He was chain lightning in a fight.

“Someone else is working on this idea,” Josh Newton put in. “I can’t remember what I’ve heard about it, or who the experimenter is.”

Josh was a six-foot gangling Negro with the biggest feet in captivity. He looked dull-witted and when with strangers, assumed a sleepy, exaggerated drawl. Actually he had a brain like a trap and was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute. His pretty wife, Rosabel, who was never far from his side if she could help it, was also a Tuskegee graduate.

“Several good men are working on the same idea,” Smitty nodded. “For all I know, one or two may have accomplished it. But I’ll send the details to the secret government files as soon as I’ve perfected them, to be sure our country gets the device.”

“When did you say Mac was going to send a scrambled image and start the experiment off?” said Cole Wilson.

“At two-thirty on the dot,” Smitty repeated.

“It’s two thirty-one now,” Cole said mildly.

The giant glared at the clock. “Hey, it is! A minute past the time!” He glared at the blank, cold screen on the front of the television cabinet. “What’s the matter with the confounded Scotchman?”

“Maybe the matter is with the radio expert,” Nellie put in sweetly. The tiny blonde was always getting the big fellow’s goat. They ribbed each other unmercifully. But it was a sad day for anyone else who tried to rib either of them in front of the other.

“Yeah?” said Smitty, hotly defending his baby. “This thing may need some smoothing down, but it’s developed to a point where it will work, and work well. You’ll see.”

But they didn’t see. Two more minutes passed, and the screen remained blank.

“It might be,” said the giant uncomfortably, “that the dial isn’t set just right.”

There was a dial on the separate box. He moved this a very little. The screen stayed blank. A little more—

“Either Mac has monkeyed with the dial in the drugstore,” said Smitty wrathfully, “or—”

“There she goes,” said Cole.

Movement began to show on the screen. It waved, blurred, cleared again. Smitty was more intent on adjustment so that a maximum of clarity was attained on the screen than he was on what the screen itself showed. But little Nellie was staring at the emerging picture with a frown on her dainty forehead.

“That’s queer,” she said. “What was Mac going to do in this test—stage a play or something?”

“A play?” repeated Smitty absently. “No, he was just going to stand in front of the transmitter and maybe put out a wisecrack or two. Or a pun. That guy’s puns—”

“He isn’t just standing in front of the drugstore set now,” said Nellie. “Nobody’s standing in front of it. And he must have set up a whole stageful of scenery. Stage sets. Because he sure has disguised the store.”

“What are you yipping about?” snapped Smitty. “Of course it’s the store. It—” He really looked at the screen then. And on his fast face came a frown to match Nellie’s. “Say, that
is
funny.”

Instead of seeing the back end of the drugstore laboratory on the screen, they seemed to look into a crypt-like room. It had great, stubby Gothic arches, and the arches and walls were of heavy stone that dripped moisture in places, indicating that it was far underground somewhere.