The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (12 page)

“Then,” said the captain, “your fortune will be doubly large! We shall pay you for that as well as for the white death when the time comes to use the antidote.”

He went on. Veshnir, eyes glittering at all the money he was going to collect in the next few months, came back, after locking the door, and stood over Mac and Josh.

“Ye skurlie,” said Mac, through set teeth. “Ye not only let a terrible epidemic spread in ye’r own city, to gain a few measly millions; but ye now have the antidote to it—my antidote—which ye’ll hold in the face of spreading death for a few more million!”

It is probable that Veshnir could not have watched a rabbit killed without wincing at the blood. But he could think of many human beings dying, with no wince at all, as long as they died out of his sight. There are many men like that, and probably all have the philosophy Veshnir expressed.

“Look,” he said, as if arguing with himself rather than his prisoner, “there’ll be war soon. There have always been wars, and there always will be. In the war, millions will be killed. But nobody gets excited about that, do they? Then why get excited if a few hundreds, or maybe thousands, have to die in New York over a war weapon? There are a hundred and thirty million people in this country. Do you really think a few thousand more or less will make any difference?”

“Skurrrlie!” burred Mac, writhing in his bonds.

“Suppose I made cannons,” Veshnir went on. “They would kill as many as this new weapon. But I would be respected and looked up to just the same. I don’t see that I’m doing anything so wrong.”

“A few minutes ago I’d have called ye a gangster,” grated Mac. “But ye’re worse.”

Veshnir shrugged, then turned to the table nearest the men. There was a tray on the table. And rubber gloves, elbow length. Veshnir began working the gloves up over his forearms.

“A little damage will be done,” he said, “till the nation buying the mold has captured what territory they please. Then they will spread the antidote over there, and I will see that it is passed around over here. After that, everything will be all right. My customer wins a war, and I live out my life in a vast fortune.”

“A fortune built on the foundation of thousands of your own countrymen’s bodies!”

“Think what you like,” said Veshnir. “You’ll help in my plans just the same.”

Josh spoke up, holding his eyes open as if by a great effort from the claims of peaceful slumber.

“How’s that, boss? We goin’ to wuhk fo’ you-all?”

“That’s right,” said Veshnir. He stared curiously at the Negro.

“The report is that you are a trusted aide of this man, Benson,” he said perplexedly. “And you were trusted with one of the two jars of the antidote. That seems odd to me. You don’t look very bright.”

“Oh, I’se smaht ’nuff,” said Josh smugly.

Veshnir shrugged.

“It must be that Benson thought you were so inconspicuous that you’d be a good messenger boy. But thanks to the method and efficiency of my foreign friends, it didn’t work. If that jar of antidote had gotten to State hands, all our plans would have failed.”

“What you-all pay fo’ wuhkin’ here?” said Josh.

Veshnir smiled coldly.

“That’s rather humorous, if you had intelligence enough to realize it,” he said. “You won’t be in condition to appreciate wages while you’re with me.”

Mac stared with new eyes at the ten men working in the low building. Their automaton actions. The lack of intelligence in their eyes. Their clay-colored faces and lead-colored lips.

“The white mold,” Veshnir said, “is primarily a war weapon. The little glass capsules of it, rained down from planes, will capture a nation in short order. But Targill and I discovered a curious little incidental use for it.”

The gloves were in place. Veshnir took up a long, slim glass tube, about the size of a soda-fountain straw. He dipped it into the mold on the meat tray.

“Targill and I,” he went on, “discovered, by experimenting with animals, that if a small bit of the mold is lodged at the base of the nasal cavity, the spores work up into the brain. There, they devour the surface cells. In the process, the person’s power of conscious thought is taken away from him, as in certain types of brain illnesses. The spores work much more slowly on the nerve cells than on muscle fibers. The person will live four days to a week, after lodgement of the spores in the nasal cavity, where he would die in a few hours if the spores started on the body surfaces.”

“But during the four days to a week,” Mac said steadily, “the victim is a kind of robot? Like these men in here?”

“That’s right,” said Veshnir.

“And ye intend to make automatons out of Josh and me? And worrrk us at those two vacant tables?”

“Right again,” said Veshnir, looking kindly and benevolent. There was whitish mold in the end of the glass tube now.

He stepped to Mac’s side, with the glass tube in his hand directed toward Mac’s face.

Mac promptly seemed to explode into writhing limbs and bucking body. The bonds held him powerless, but they didn’t keep him from wriggling around like a cat on a hot stove.

“Everybody. Here,” called Veshnir, raising his voice as if for the benefit of slightly deaf ears.

The ten dull-eyed human machines in the place left their tables and came to the dour Scot. With ten pairs of hands on him, Mac was held as moveless as a rock.

Veshnir inserted the tube, and blew into Mac’s nostrils. Just once. Very lightly.

He turned to Josh with what was left of the stuff that looked like fine snow in the little glass tube.

Josh was still. There was no need for the ten to hold him. Veshnir repeated the process.

“There,” he said, pleasant-voiced, straightening and stepping back. “In about four hours you will be ready to obey orders, without a thought of your own to interfere.”

He went to one of the dull-eyed men, already back to their worktables and filling little glass capsules with the frosted death.

“When the clock strikes three in the morning,” he said, “release those two and put them to work at the two empty tables.”

He went out. Mac glared at him with raw murder in his bitter blue eyes.

But Josh seemed strangely still, and resigned.

The many windows in the enormous room on the top floor at Benson’s Bleek Street headquarters seemed to have Venetian blinds over them. But they were not Venetian blinds.

The slats were not wooden strips and could not be tilted. They were strips of nickel-steel, set at a forty-five degree angle; so no bullet could penetrate the windows. Their ends were embedded in the masonry of the building.

Through the slits, the flaring colorless eyes of The Avenger stared down from a rear window. The view back there was over the low roof of a one-story garage, fronting on the next street.

There were two men on the roof. They were in regular suits; but their coats were cut a little long, and looked almost like military garments. The erect, stolid carriage of the two men looked military, too.

Benson paced with his panther tread to the front of the room and looked out on Bleek Street.

There were two men across from the doorway, over which hung the Justice sign. There were two more at the dead end of the block. There were three at the opposite end of the street.

The Avenger’s face, dead as wax, motionless as gray steel, disappeared from behind the slats of the blind. His colorless, marksman’s eyes were as brilliant as moonstones with a light behind them.

This was no crew of thugs. This was no criminal gang. It was something on the order of an army corps stationed all around the Bleek Street headquarters. He was up against the method and precision of a military machine, not fighting unorganized killers.

Nellie Gray watched him from the long table in the center of the room.

“How are you going to get out of here, chief?” she said.

“I’m not worrying about getting out,” Benson said. “But I want to get out unobserved. And that seems a bit tricky.”

He walked to the television radio and tried once more to get Mac at the drugstore. But the call was unanswered by either Mac or Josh.

“They wouldn’t have left,” said Benson, “unless Mac had discovered what he was hunting for: an antidote to the frosted death. And if he had found that, they wouldn’t have rested till they had come here with it.”

Nellie nodded, her shrewd brain pacing his own.

“So,” she said, “something has happened to them.”

“And to the antidote it is reasonable to suppose Mac found,” Benson nodded.

He glanced once more at the two big, square-shouldered men on the garage roof.

“Is Miss Sangaman down on the second floor?” he asked.

Nellie Gray nodded. “She’s asleep, poor lamb. Worn out.”

“What room has she? I wouldn’t want to disturb her.”

“The blue room, in front.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Benson. “Unless something goes wrong, she won’t hear anything.”

He went down to the second floor.

The corridor there ended in the rear, it seemed, in solid plaster and brick wall. But Benson went toward the wall as if he intended to walk right through. Which, as a matter of fact, he did.

He pressed a certain spot. The end of the hall, five by seven and a half, moved a little. The entire end wall was a secret door, leading out onto the garage roof. Out there, serrated edges of red brick, that you would never notice when they were properly in place, moved a bit with The Avenger’s push.

Having unbarred the secret door, Benson opened a panel in it which consisted of one brick that telescoped down into the false one beneath it, at the touch of a button. He peered out the little opening.

One of the two men out on the roof was staring over the edge into the narrow areaway beside the garage. The other—glared with startled eyes directly into Benson’s colorless ones. He had just happened to be looking right at that spot of innocent brick wall when one of the bricks seemed to melt out of it.

Benson’s right hand whipped down to the calf of his leg. It whipped up again with Mike, the silenced, special .22, leveled through the aperture.

The Avenger didn’t seem to aim at all. Yet the slug that lisped from Mike’s silenced muzzle hit its target within a sixteenth of an inch. As, indeed, it would have to, to conform to The Avenger’s rule of disabling but never killing with his own hand.

It went through a stiffly worn derby at precisely the spot to slam against the very top of the man’s skull, to “crease” it, and stretch the man out on the roof as unconscious as if he had been chloroformed.

The man had started to yell to his comrade when the bullet clipped him. However, his gasp must have warned the other, at the roof edge, for he whirled and saw his prone accomplice.

The result was funny, in a mad, dangerous sort of way. The man didn’t know what had happened. Something had knocked his comrade out, but nothing was in evidence. There was no other person on the roof. On one side was thin air, where the garage fronted. On the other was blank wall for ten feet, and then closed windows of the top-floor room.

The man dropped swiftly to his knees, gun whipping out. He looked all around, trying to see in every direction, at once—and saw nothing, anywhere.

The Avenger coldly and calmly ended his dilemma for him by squeezing Mike’s trigger again. The second man went down, unconscious.

Benson opened the secret door, walked out onto the roof, and picked up the nearest of the two. The limp figure was beefy, must have weighed around two hundred pounds; but The Avenger carried him without taxing his superb physique in the least.

He took the man into the building, shut the concealed door tightly again, and carried him lightly up the stairs.

In the big room he nodded wordlessly to Nellie. She knew what the nod meant. She went to a corner and got a small but very compact case and brought it to her chief.

A major miracle was about to occur.

The tremendous nervous shock that paralyzed Benson’s face had left it in a curiously plastic state. The features couldn’t move of themselves. But under prodding fingers, they could be molded into any shape desired—and would stay there. The result was that Benson had really two names to the underworld. He was The Avenger.