The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (9 page)

Then—

“Back everybody!” The Avenger’s voice was like the crack of a bullwhip. There was such command in it that everyone in earshot stopped in his tracks as if a hand had been laid on his shoulders.

Then they moved again. People are like that, too. You can’t make them obey a command for any length of time without telling them why. And Benson couldn’t take the precious seconds to try a real explanation.

“Poison gas—around that doorway!” he called in his whiplash voice.

That did it. The crowd shrank hastily back from the doorway near which the dreadful, white mist was hovering in air. A few with extra-good eyes saw the mist, and talked volubly about the spectacle to the rest.

“Smitty!” The Avenger rapped out.

The giant turned from the light gray cloud.

“Nearest butcher shop,” Benson snapped. “Get a side of beef—any big chunk of meat. Bring it here instantly!”

There was a butcher shop on the far corner. The giant raced for it, running as fleetly as a stripling, for all his great size.

“The . . . frosted death?” whispered Claudette, staring with fearful eyes at the faint, shimmering mist.

“Yes,” said Benson. “Aimed at you! Fortunately it is still, without wind, at this moment. So the stuff stays where it is. If a breeze were to spring up and scatter it before Smitty gets back—”

The giant was on his way back, already, with a quarter of beef, running as lightly with it as if it had been a pork chop. He reached the corner and looked at his chief. Few words were needed between The Avenger and his aides!

Benson nodded toward the gray cloud. Smitty tossed the beef so that it hit at the base of the patch of faintly shining mist.

The result was as weird as it was horrible.

The shining, translucent patch suspended in the still air began to funnel down on the meat like water streaming through a faucet. It was as if the microscopic particles composing the misty patch were little particles of steel, and the beef was a powerful magnet.

In less than half a minute there was no trace of the thin grayish cloud. It was all on the meat.

The crowd couldn’t understand that at all. Poison gas, this man with the emotionless, dead face and icily flaring eyes, had yelled. And some had seen the “gas” cloud. But gas settling like that on meat? It seemed
worse
than gas. Now that the danger was over, had they but known it, they all got back to an even safer distance than when it had hung by a thread over their unknowing heads.

Benson drew a deep breath, as the crisis passed.

A uniformed patrolman was hurrying toward the crowd. He started to pass Benson, saw the white, still face of The Avenger and his awesome, colorless eyes, and stopped.

“You, Mr. Benson!” he said respectfully. “What’s wrong, sir? It must be important if you’re here.”

“It is,” nodded The Avenger. He put his lips close to the patrolman’s ear, so that the words wouldn’t be overheard by others and start a panic.

“The frosted death!”

The cop’s hands clenched convulsively. He knew more than most about the frosted death. He had been a close friend of the homicide detective who had been unfortunate enough to let the back of his hand brush against the body of John Braun.

“There?” he whispered back. “That stuff?” He pointed to the beef, which was beginning to look as if invisible hands were slowly sifting powdered sugar on it.

“That’s right. Listen, and follow instructions to the letter. Get more men and rope this area off. Then get kerosene—gallons of it—and pour it over that side of meat. Burn it where it is. Don’t try to take it to the city incinerator or anyplace else. Burn it on the spot!”

The patrolman’s face was the color of putty.

“Oh, no!” he said. “Not me! I wouldn’t go that close to it for—”

“It’s all right as long as you don’t actually touch it,” said Benson. “We’ve found that out about it. When it has once settled on something, it fastens there. It doesn’t float off, even for another victim, by itself. Unless a bit of it is actually placed on your hand, you’ll be all right. Just keep from actually touching it.”

“I’ll say I will,” exclaimed the cop, sweat glistening on his forehead.

He blew his whistle for help in keeping the crowd back, and The Avenger and Smitty and Claudette Sangaman moved off. The girl was brave. She was pale, but composed.

Benson saw a cab driver he knew he could trust. He waved him over and held the cab door open.

“Go home,” he said to Claudette, “and pack a few things, then come back to my place at Bleek Street. I don’t want you to show your face outdoors for the next few days.”

“You think there will be more attempts?” faltered the girl.

“I know there will be.” The Avenger turned to the driver, a stalwart young fellow with a twisted nose who looked like a thug but with whom you could have left a thousand in cash, uncounted, and have known you’d get it all back again.

“Mike, go into Miss Sangaman’s apartment with her while she packs. If anyone—servant or friend or anyone else—tries to get near her, knock him into the next room.”

“Yes, Mr. Benson,” said the driver.

The cab rolled off.

Smitty and Benson soon found the window from which the glass capsule had been tossed. But it told them nothing. The window opened onto a long-vacant office in an old building next to an apartment house. Prints in the dust had been smudged. There were no fingerprints or clues of any kind.

Benson called the Sangaman-Veshnir Corp., and got the personnel manager on the phone. He asked if any executive, or anyone connected with the laboratory, was absent at that moment.

There was, it seemed. A chemist named Mickelson, now elevated to Targill’s place with the latter’s death and formerly Targill’s assistant, hadn’t come in that afternoon from his lunch period. All the rest were there.

“Complications?” said Smitty, as The Avenger slowly hung up the receiver.

“I don’t know,” said Benson, eyes icily thoughtful. “A new piece in the puzzle, at least. But we’ll make it fit, before we finish.”

The curse of the frosted death was spreading, slowly but inexorably.

It spread slowly because every health and law department in the city was concentrating on checking it and quarantining those even suspected of having been in contact with it.

It spread inexorably because such a deadly thing
couldn’t
be quite corked up.

Here a woman, servant to August Taylor who had touched her master when he called in the early morning for help, died with helpless doctors in attendance. There a man, boarding at the home of the detective who’d touched Braun, and who had been with his friend in death, saw hands and arms turn to snow limbs. In another home, over a big delicatessen store with a foreign-sounding name on it, half a dozen men suffered and died of the frosted death without daring to call doctors at all.

These latter were those of the crowd that had jumped Smitty and Benson in the laboratory. They hadn’t been told the full nature of their task and had ignorantly touched the dead pig.

An epidemic slowly, ominously getting started that would be worse than the Black Plague of the Middle Ages if it were not stopped. It was like a black storm cloud—no, a white, smothering one—that was slowly spreading a pall over the city and obscuring the clear and healthy sun.

While all this was going on, a man sat at the soda fountain in MacMurdie’s drugstore, and methodically and endlessly consumed maplenut sundaes.

The man was a tall, gangling Negro, and so sleepy-looking that he was instantly nicknamed Sleepy.

“Ah’ll take ’nuther one,” Sleepy said. The boy behind the fountain looked at him in awe. He had had four maple-nut sundaes already. And his long, skinny, Negroid body was so thin you’d have thought they would show.

“They’s sho’ good,” the colored man added.

He didn’t have to talk like that. Joshua Elijah Newton was an honor graduate from a famous college. He could talk as excellent English as any professor, and he did when among friends. But when with strangers or in public places, Josh talked and acted as people expect Negroes to talk and act. It was good protective coloration.

“It’s only when a houn’ dawg barks that folks pay attention to him,” he often said. “When he sleeps in the sun, they let him alone.” For Josh was a dusky philosopher with a deep store of wisdom.

Furthermore, Joshua Elijah Newton, no matter what he looked like, was one of The Avenger’s aides—and an invaluable one. Josh and his pretty wife, Rosabel, had helped in many a desperate fight with criminals too brilliant for the regular police to handle.

It was Josh’s habit, when waiting for orders, to hang around in Mac’s drugstore. And while he was there, he saw no reason for not indulging in his consuming passion—maplenut sundaes. He downed them till, as Mac sometimes said: “Mon, ’tis a wonder ye don’t look like a string of beads with all those sundaes in ye, one on top of the other.”

Mac appeared at the door of the rear room now.

“Josh,” he called softly.

There were no customers in the store. If there had been, Mac would not have openly called and Josh would not have openly entered the laboratory. As it was, Sleepy eyed the last third of the maplenut sundae sadly, and left it to go to Mac. Mac shut the big lab door behind them. The dour Scot was red-eyed from continuous work.

“I’ve got it!” he said.

Josh instantly shed his sleepy look. His eyes shone with clear intelligence—and with an admiration too great to be put into words.

“You have? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure!” said Mac.

“If that is true, you should have statues put up in your honor all over New York! You’re a great man, Mac.”

“There’ll be no statues, because no one’ll ever know,” Mac said Wearily. “As for bein’ great—I’d call it just stubborn, that’s all.”

Josh looked at a dozen cuts of meat on Mac’s lab workbench. Each was covered with the powdered sugar that spelled death—except the last one. That one was fresh and clear, without the white mold.

“You’ve found the exact nature of the stuff?” he said.

“Yes,” nodded Mac.

A fine brain had been snuffed out when that first doctor, the one who attended John Braun, died. He had guessed immediately the type of thing that had smothered Braun. He had deduced the species of fungus, if not the exact type.

“It’s a new thing, Josh,” Mac said. “But very, very close to a well-known one. Selectively cultivated from it, I should say. In all but appearance and action, the mold is identical with saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast ferment.”

“So the most harmless things,” observed Josh, “can be turned into the deadliest weapons—if the minds of men desire it.”

“Yes! Here’s an instance of it.”

Josh stared at the one piece of meat not covered by the mold.

“And you’ve actually found the antidote for it? Something to stop it?”

Mac nodded, too tired for superfluous words.

“Then we must start phoning at once—give the formula to every doctor and laboratory in town—”

“That’s the catch,” said Mac. “There’s no formula to give. This antidote isn’t a chemical to be mixed up, Josh. It’s a living organism, itself. A kind of parasite that attacks the white mold and devours it. Having devoured it, the parasite withers and dies. It can be cultivated swiftly—as swiftly as the mold. But only from its own kind.”