The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (7 page)

He never finished the sentence. Suddenly the light flicked out in The Avenger’s hand, and his steely, slim fingers compresed on the giant’s forearm.

There was a sound at the door!

Both faced that way. The sound was unmistakable: some one was fooling with the lock.

“The window—” Smitty breathed into Benson’s ear.

But The Avenger’s hand tightened in a negative gesture on Smitty’s arm. If the police had been entering, Benson would have slid out to avoid being discovered. But the furtiveness with which the lock was being manipulated convinced him that someone besides the police was at the sealed laboratory door.

Some one stealing secretly in here to get something. If that person could be caught—

Instead of heading for the window and the slim cable still trailing up to the grappling hook on the cornice, he headed for the door. There the two took up their stand, with the giant on one side and The Avenger on the other. Whoever came in here was going to have a surprise.

It developed, however, that the surprise was, for once, going to be the other way around!

The door finally opened, a hand slid along the wall past Smitty’s shoulder till it found a switch, and light flared in the laboratory.

Smitty grabbed the hand, and then yelled: “Watch out, chief!”

The most capable of men are sometimes caught off-base by an unpredictable event. It was so in this case. Benson had prepared to capture the one or two or three men who were sneaking into the laboratory for some furtive reason. What neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen was that, not just a couple of men, but a young army of them, was coming into the room!

Smitty held in his vise-like grip the one who had turned on the lights. Benson held another man as helpless as a child. But more came on!

Men boiled in through the doorway till the lab seemed to be half full of them. At least twenty. And all converged on Smitty and The Avenger.

They were all about the same type—stocky, heavy-shouldered fellows with fleshy, foreign-looking faces and close-cropped hair.

The Avenger threw the man he held at the approaching squad and stooped in a lightning-swift movement. His hands jerked from holsters at the calves of his legs two of the world’s most curious weapons.

One, from the right leg below the knee, was a little .22 revolver that looked like a slim length of pipe with a small bend for the butt. It had a silencer on it. Benson, with bleak fondness, called the deadly little gun Mike.

The other, from a sheath strapped to his left calf, was a specially designed throwing-knife with a needle point and a razor edge. The handle was a hollow tube, which gave it an arrow flight when it left The Avenger’s grim hand. And this weapon, he called Ike.

One of the foreign-looking men had an automatic out. Ike flashed forward like a silver bullet from The Avenger’s left hand. The blade deftly sliced the man’s knuckles so that he dropped the gun with a yell.

Mike, the special little .22, spat out a small slug. The shot could hardly be heard, but the man next to the one who was nursing a dripping hand went down as if he had been slugged. Which, in effect, he had been. The .22 bullet with marvelous accuracy, “creased” him—hit the exact top of his skull so that he was knocked out instead of killed. The Avenger, even in moments of stress, followed his iron-clad resolution not to take life himself.

But the two out of the running were only two drops in a very large and active bucket. There were nearly a score left. And they were on the two before Mike could do more than spit out one more leaden pea and send a third man to the sidelines.

There was no more appearance of guns. Evidently the one Benson had silenced had been a hotheaded error. These fellows didn’t want any sound of gunshots to bring people around. Silently but furiously they swarmed at Smitty and The Avenger.

The giant knocked down two, with two blows that came so fast they seemed like one motion. He got a third by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him at a fourth. The Avenger, meanwhile was clubbing with Mike.

The little gun, even as a club, was deadlier than you’d imagine. It was a slim steel length, with silencer and all, of about ten inches. In swift, scientific taps, it cracked down; and with every venomous, deft crack, a man sagged to the floor.

But two men, even such as these, couldn’t overcome twenty. A concerted rush by the attackers, who were skilled fighters themselves, took the giant off his feet. And Benson swayed and went to his knees, too. A blackjack glanced off Smitty’s skull, bringing a gasp to his lips.

Benson’s hand dipped into his pocket and came out with something like a small handful of glass marbles. He dropped one on the floor at his knees, and threw the rest with a scattering motion.

There was a succession of tinkling sounds as they broke. And the light in the laboratory began to fade out.

The men fighting the two broke their silence, then. One of them cried out in the surprise of seeing an electric cluster of lights slowly dimming, for no discernible reason. A couple of the others swore in a guttural foreign language.

The lights kept on dimming.

With a movement that was really no more than a blur in quickly gathering gloom, The Avenger retrieved Ike, the throwing-knife that had pierced the wrist of the first gunman.

No words needed to be exchanged between Benson and Smitty. The two always worked in perfect unison. Smitty knew all about what had happened: The Avenger had broken half a dozen of the “darkness” pellets he always carried with him. The pellets released a black pall so impenetrable that even electric lights were quickly blotted out by them.

These were blotted out now, less than thirty seconds after the release of the ink-black liquid within; liquid which had such an affinity for oxygen that it volatilized instantly and spread as an odorless, tasteless black gas.

The air was as black as the water is around a squid after it has discharged its concealed ink. In the blackness, Smitty and Benson got to the window. Benson went up the silk cable to the roof; while Smitty, helped by darkness, held the groping enemy at bay. Then Smitty kicked over the workbench under the window with such force that it knocked his attackers down like ninepins, and joined his chief on the roof.

They drew up the silk cable. But they did not go. One of The Avenger’s most often-used tactics was to apparently flee—but actually stay near and return to the scene. He did so now.

They heard the laboratory door slam. The men who had so unexpectedly overwhelmed them were getting away, fast, carrying their wounded with them. Then Benson silently slid down to the laboratory again.

A little of the black pall was settling. It did not last long. It was light enough for him to see what he wanted to. And that was a thing he’d been pretty sure he’d see.

The mold-covered pig was gone!

The men had come in here to look around and make sure that no incriminating trace had been left in the laboratory by the person who had killed Targill last night. They might not have found the pig in the incinerator chute. But they had gotten it, now, through Benson’s having lifted it out to the lab floor.

It was logical that further examination of the laboratory would not reveal the secret of the frosted death. Benson swung out of the window and back up the cable to join Smitty on the roof.

The residential section called Clapham, out on Long Island, is for the very rich. The estates are larger, the grounds of each better kept, and the servants more profuse, than in any other spot.

One of the biggest of these estates belonged to a man named August Taylor.

August Taylor, sixty-seven, a semi-invalid and a most irritable and unpleasant man, was remarkable for three things. One was that he possessed nearly twelve million dollars. Another was that no woman had managed to grab him as a husband; so he was a bachelor with his moneybags. The third was that he had four million dollars sunk in the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp., which in a way made him a silent partner; and he also had himself insured for another three million with the corporation as beneficiary.

August Taylor did not often show up at the Sangaman-Veshnir Building. He let his millions represent him there. For the most part, he rarely stirred from his Clapham estate. And that was natural enough. The estate was a beautiful place in which to spend all one’s time.

At the moment, however, on the morning after the night raid on the Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory, old August Taylor was not enjoying the beauties of his surroundings.

August Taylor was dead!

Four doctors, distinguished specialists whose names were known wherever medicine was practiced, were gathered around the body.

Taylor had died of something that no one of the four of them knew anything about. It was something that made his body look like it had been covered with powdered sugar. They were busy examining the strange phenomenon now, fascinated as specialists always are by something new in diseases, and at the same time feeling a little afraid.

A gray-haired doctor with rimless spectacles scraped some of the white stuff from the dead millionaire’s cheek. In a moment the cheek was covered again, with no clear space showing.

“It’s a kind of mold,” he marveled. “But mold is usually bluish gray—this is white. And what is mold doing on human flesh?”

There was a silence; then a man named Caldwell said: “The mold evidently gets into the lungs, too. That accounts for the symptoms resembling those of pneumonia.”

They all looked pretty grim. The whitish mold, that looked like fine snow, or powdered mica, was pretty dreadful stuff. And they recalled reading about an odd fungus death in New York. As physicians, they had more than an inkling, now, of how terribly they had misjudged when they touched the whitish stuff.

As if on signal, they all turned and raced for the luxurious bathroom. They washed in carbolic solution, so strong that burns resulted. Caldwell suddenly looked at his right hand. It seemed that the middle knuckle of his second finger was whiter than it should be. But that might have resulted from the powerful disinfectant he had just used.

Fergus MacMurdie could have told them that carbolic did no good. He had experimented with every known germicide in an effort to get hold of something that would be an antidote for the frosted death. And as yet he had found nothing.

Any disinfectant strong enough to kill the fungus was more than strong enough to kill living flesh, too; to eat it away, burn it up, shrivel it.

The mold was a low-grade organism practically indestructible. You could freeze it at two hundred degrees below, Fahrenheit, and it didn’t hurt the spores. In this respect, it was not too unusual: there are several low-grade organisms able to stand even the absolute zero, and the airlessness, of outer space. But in addition, this whitish stuff could take treatment that would destroy any other known form of life.

Yet there must be an antidote for it. There must be something to combat it! MacMurdie dared not let himself think otherwise. There
had
to be—with the white death loose in the great city. If not—chaos!

So Mac, with eyes black-rimmed from lack of sleep, was working night and day in his drugstore laboratory to find the answer.

Meanwhile, The Avenger was tackling the thing from the human angle.

At the moment, he was in the anteroom of Veshnir’s big top-floor office. He had passed the door of the laboratory in which he had been so busy the night before, with his eyes impassive and inscrutable. He had given his name to Veshnir’s secretary, in the anteroom.

Veshnir came out himself, staring at the white, dead face and the colorless eyes of his visitor with his own face benevolent, sad and kindly-looking.

“I’ve heard a little about you,” he said. “And I’ve heard that you were interesting yourself in the tragedy we have had around here. I’m very glad to see you at such a time. Come in.”

He stood aside for Benson to go into his private office, then followed him in and closed the door.

“I can hardly realize all the things that have happened,” Veshnir went on, as he waved Benson to a chair, and seated himself behind his desk. “Terrible. Terrible!”