The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (5 page)

Along the other wall was a similar bench. But the first long table had chemical apparatus laid out on it, while this second one was cluttered with all the things an electrical engineer might need for the most advanced experiments.

At the back of the room, taking up about equal spaces, were finished results from the two long tables. There was a cabinet full of vials containing drugs and chemicals such as no ordinary chemist dreamed existed. Beside this was another cabinet which did not open but which had a screen for a front. This was a television set more perfect than any commercial laboratory would be able to put out for years to come.

At the chemist’s side of the strange room was working the proprietor of the freak drugstore, Fergus MacMurdie.

Mac was about six feet tall but looked taller because he was so angular and bony. Knees and elbows were knobbed and protruding. Protruding, too, were his ears, which were like sails. His skin was reddish and coarse, with big, dim freckles just under the surface. His eyes, though, took away any humor of appearance.

MacMurdie’s bleak, hard blue eyes, set like stones in his homely Scotch face, reflected the tragedy of his life; loss of his family when a racket bomb exploded in one of his drugstores. Since then, he had worked for The Avenger against crime, having been set up in this drugstore by the immensely wealthy Benson.

Mac had the glass Mason jar, brought by Benson from Braun’s apartment, on the workbench. Beside it were ranged a super-mircroscope, weighing half a ton, various gelatins used for bacterial culture, and an ordinary piece of beefsteak covered, it seemed, with fine snow crystals: the same stuff that had made a snow man out of Braun.

He turned.

“Whoosh,
mon!” he exclaimed. “ ’Tis altogether the most dreadful stuff I’ve ever seen under a lens.”

The man he addressed, lounging in a chair in front of the big cabinet that had a screen over the front, was named Algernon Heathcote Smith. But if you wanted to stay in one piece, you never called him that. You called him Smitty.

Smitty was a Hercules. He stood just three inches short of seven feet tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds. He had a fifty-three-inch chest and reduced haberdashers to despair by calling for size nineteen collars. He looked as dumb and good-natured as he was big; but the looks didn’t mean anything.

The underworld could have testified as to how good-natured he was! As to looking dumb—Smitty was an outstanding electrical engineer. It was for his genius, indeed, that the bench across from MacMurdie’s had been outfitted; and it was his genius that had devised the marvelous television set at the rear of the room.

“It fairrr gives me the shiverrrs,” the Scotchman burred, scowling at the snowy stuff.

“Looks like ordinary confectioner’s sugar to me,” said the giant, Smitty. “Or dandruff,” he added.

“Heaven grant ye never have dandruff,” Mac said.

“Got a report on it yet?” said Smitty, glancing at a high window in one wall of the lab. The things that went on in here were not for public view; therefore the windows were set more than head high. It was dawn outside.

Mac nodded his sandy-reddish head.

“Yes, I have a report. Will ye get the chief for me?”

Smitty switched on the television set. He waited a moment for it to warm up. Then he said, at the screen:

“Smitty and Mac reporting, chief.”

There was a minute in which nothing happened. Then the screen seemed to fog over. The fog gathered into form and became a face.

The face of The Avenger.

White as linen, dead as wax, terrible as a poised sword, the paralyzed face stared from the screen. In it, steady and emotionless, the eyes burned forth.

“Yes, Smitty, Mac.”

“I’ve analyzed the stuff ye sent me, chief,” Mac said. “Leastwise, I’ve got a sort of preliminary report as to its nature.”

“Well?”

“It’s impossible, chief. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d not have believed it. The stuff’s a kind of mold. It grows like lightning. The spores are dust-fine; they hang in the air for minutes before settling to the ground. They seem to be a kind of bridge between the animal and the mineral kingdoms.”

“Artificially cultivated, Mac?”

“Yes! I’m sure of it.”

“Go on!”

“It doesn’t act like other molds. It doesn’t fasten on jellies or decayed substances. It attacks only one thing. That is, meat. And only fresh meat, too. When disintegration has set in, it refuses to germinate on it. Oh, ’tis a very snooty kind of stuff, this mold.”

“Any more?”

“On meat, it reproduces fastest, like I said. It has hair-fine feelers. No—finer than any hair. Ye have to use the big microscope to see them. The feelers go down into any tiny irregularities—”

“On a human body, then,” Benson cut in, “I suppose the pores and hair follicles would be attacked?”

“That’s right, Muster Benson. If the stuff got on a person’s body, it would kill him in a hurry. It would clog all the pores, which is enough for death. But more, it would of course sift into the lungs and coat them, too. So ye’d have a phenomenon like pneumonia, only faster than any pneumonia could ever worrrk.”

“One more thing, Mac. I have my own opinion on this point, but I want yours, too. Is the stuff deadly to the public at large, do you think?”

“Muster Benson,” said Mac urgently, “it’s the deadliest thing I’ve ever had the bad fortune to look at! I’m sure it’s contagious. I’d say that any mon gettin’ some of it on him—even a bit as small as a pinhead, would die. He’d die fast or slow, dependin’ how little of it stuck. ’Twould take a longer time to cover him. But—die he would!”

“Then?”

Mac said the thing that had burned in his bitter blue eyes since first examining the snowlike substance:

“If any of this mold gets out, Muster Benson, we may have an epidemic that would make the Black Plague, in the Middle Ages, look silly. Because, d’ye see, some people escaped from that. And from this—no escape. One touch is death!”

Mac chewed his lip, then asked the question he scarcely dared put into words.

“Has . . . has anybody been exposed to this?”

“Yes, Mac, several have,” Benson said quietly. “And I’m afraid we’ll be hearing from them soon.”

Into headquarters marched the doctor who had been called by John Braun just before he sank into the coma of death. The doctor’s face and lips were the color of ashes, but he was calm. It was, however, the calm of a brave man past all hope.

He went to the commissioner’s office.

The commissioner normally wouldn’t have been up for three hours yet, for it was half past four in the morning. But he had come down in a hurry at the report of the “snow man.” There are some things you can
feel
are terrible, even if they seem meaningless and fantastic at first. This was one of them. It called the commissioner to his duty.

“You attended Braun?” he repeated, to the ashen-faced physician. “I see. I meant to get in touch with you first thing in the morning. You have something to say to us?”

“I have,” said the doctor. His voice was like his face—perfectly composed, drained of all emotion. Even of terror. “Rather, I have something to show you.”

He took overcoat and suitcoat off. He unbuttoned his shirt and let it hang from his belt. Under that was a white undershirt, of the athletic type. But the commissioner, half rising from his chair in horror, didn’t look at the athletic shirt. He stared at the doctor’s arm.

The arm, from wrist to shoulder, seemed to have been turned to snow.

“Good heavens!” whispered the commissioner. “You, too—”

“I touched Braun, of course, in the pursuance of my examination,” the doctor said steadily. “I washed in the usual strong disinfectants. It seems they weren’t strong enough. I have what Braun died of.”

“You’ve seen other doctors? There is something you can do?”

“There is nothing on earth I can do,” said the doctor quietly. “Except to die! I think that will happen in about six hours. Evidently just a little of the white substance got on my hand. It took a long time to spread to the elbow—but a much shorter time to go to the shoulder. Now, if you look carefully, you can see it spread even as you watch.”

“There
must
be something, man—”

“I have kept my arm literally bathed in strong germicides. It hardly even slows the stuff! I have kept scraping it off. It comes back immediately! Indeed, it does little good to scrape it because that doesn’t get the growth from the pores; and it is this that is deadliest.”

“But, man alive, if this gets around to others—”

“That’s why I came here, instead of waiting for death at my home. To warn you. You must sequester everybody who went near that corpse—keep them quarantined as people have never been quarantined before. You must get hold of every one even thought to have contacted them. You—”

The commissioner’s phone rang. In the urgency of the physician’s visit, the commissioner was disposed not to bother to answer. But finally he did.

The homicide man whom the doctor had called to the Braun apartment was on the wire.

The detective was a brave man, too. He had shot it out with gunmen, risked bullets and knife-blades. But he wasn’t as brave, in the presence of a microscopic organism that looked like snow crystals, as the physician was.

He was screaming, was almost incoherent. He had gibbered into the phone for over a minute before the two got what he was driving at; though their intuition whispered the message to them before the detective’s words did.

The detective had suddenly remembered, a few minutes before, that
he
had touched the corpse, too. He had just barely brushed it with the back of his hand. So he had gotten up from bed and turned on the light.

His hand and wrist and part of his forearm looked as if unseen hands had gently sifted powdered sugar over them.

Sangaman, broken fugitive from the law, stared out the window of his retreat.

Veshnir’s Maine cabin, so kindly put to his use, was an elaborate place. Log cabin it might be; but it was two stories tall, contained eight rooms and two baths, and had its own electric plant including water pump.

It was in about the center of the thousand or so acres of almost virgin Maine woods that went with it. No soul was in that area, save for Sangaman himself. You couldn’t see a hundred yards clear in any direction because of the thick trees. About a mile to the east was the seacoast; but along here the coast was as deserted as the woods.

It was the perfect hideout for—a murderer.

Sangaman, staring absently out the window, had aged ten years in the hours succeeding the murder of Targill. He had been a rich man, respected, prominent in business and society. Now he was a hunted thing, with only a little in cash that he had managed to withdraw secretly before he fled.

His brain had cleared a bit, and he was pretty sure, now, that he had
not
murdered Targill. Still, he could not
swear
that he had not done it.

But if he had not—then who had? There were two theories to follow that. One was that some employee had sneaked into the laboratory, unknown to the others, and killed Targill. The other was that Veshnir had done it!