The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (16 page)

Cranlowe stopped his convulsive struggling and stared up at Jenner in a great silence. His eyes seemed to withdraw farther into his skull than ever.

“What . . . do you mean?” he whispered at last.

“Would you hold your formula as more precious than your son?”

Cranlowe was silent, glaring.

“Robert Cranlowe is being held at this moment,” said Jenner. “He will be unhurt, if we get the formula. If we do not—”

“You wouldn’t kill him,” whispered Cranlowe. “You wouldn’t do that, Jenner. No matter what else you’ve become, you’re not a murderer.”

“Do you want to wager Robert’s life on that?” said Jenner. “Or—do you want to write out the formula?”

Cranlowe began struggling again, exhausting himself against the tightness of his bonds. Finally he stopped. Jenner said, emotionlessly:

“I swear he’ll die, Cranlowe, if you don’t do as you’re told. And he won’t die a very pretty death, either.”

The inventor lay very still and straight, staring up at the plant president.

“Well?” said Jenner.

Cranlowe spoke, then, in a tone that was hoarse and cracked, but still indomitable.

“With that formula, a warlike nation could conquer the earth, and uncounted thousands would die in the process. With the formula in the wrong hands, I would become a kind of monster, for inventing such a thing. Whereas, used for peace, it can be a great blessing. My answer, Jenner, is— No!”

“It won’t be used for peace if something happens to you. It will die with you, and all your work will have been for nothing. And your son will have given his life for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” said Cranlowe hoarsely. “At least the weapon will have been kept from evil uses. I am sorry. I hope for forgiveness. But my own son will have to die for the sake of a threatened humanity.”

It was a complete failure for the plant president, apparently. But he only smiled.

From his pocket he drew another of the black disks. He came toward Cranlowe with it. He clicked a tiny knob on its side, like the stem of a watch, only smaller. There was a tiny, shrill buzzing sound, which almost at once went up beyond the range of Cranlowe’s hearing.

Jenner had paid no attention to Benson as he did these things. Why should he? The white-haired man was his machine, with will completely chained—

The Avenger’s foot danced out in a move almost too swift to follow. It caught Jenner on the wrist, and the black disk flew to the far end of the room.

With his mouth literally open with surprise, Jenner jumped for Benson. A lashing fist caught him on the jaw with delicate precision. He fell as if anaesthetized.

“I guess,” said The Avenger quietly, “I’ve learned about all I could in my role as automaton.”

“So you’re friend and not enemy,” said Cranlowe, as Benson began to untie him. “And it’s Jenner who is the false friend—the brains behind these attacks.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said The Avenger.

“The round black thing,” said Cranlowe, bewildered. “And your obedience to Jenner’s orders—”

“The one was the cause of the other. At least, Jenner thought so. I went to his office, some hours ago, to have a talk with him. Suddenly I heard a tiny buzzing sound, like that which came from the disk a minute ago when he began to work on you. It kept going up in volume and pitch. But I still kept hearing it, when most people would not have. My ears are pretty keen. The answer came to me before it was too late: something about that disk was what made men go mad—or at least obey someone’s orders to do mad things. I pretended to be in a deep trance, before the pitch of the thing had reached a point where I really would have lost control of my voluntary thought-processes. And the sound stopped at that point. And stayed there.”

Benson drew out the disk Jenner had said to keep always with him.

“Can you hear the buzz of this thing?” he said.

Cranlowe shook his head.

“Queer,” said Benson, colorless eyes glittering. “I can. My hearing must be quite different from that of most people.”

He turned the little stem of the thing slowly counterclockwise. And the high pitch of the vibrating thing inside lowered as his fingers moved. He pressed the stem, and the intense, high noise stopped.

He opened the black disk.

“A tiny but powerful battery, and a vibrating tongue between two little hard-rubbed diaphragms,” he mused. “With a rheostat action to slow or hasten the vibrator.”

He set the rheostat back as far as it would go, and started the shrill little vibrator again. Now he could hear it as plainly as any other sound. Even Cranlowe caught it, a little bit.

“I’ve heard that sound before,” he said swiftly. “Yes, now I remember. Vibration— Bacteria—”

He took the thing in his fingers.

“Years ago,” he said, “I performed an experiment at Garfield Gear. I tested the effect of rapid vibration on bacteria. It was my thought that possibly vibration, at the precise pitch might kill bacteria. So I devised a vibrating machine. Like this, only not so compact and perfected. The experiment didn’t work out satisfactorily; so I abandoned the whole thing. But I remember—one of the workmen acted queerly during one stage of the affair.”

Benson nodded, pale eyes like ice in his white, dead face.

“Somebody else remembered,” he said. “And somebody continued to work on it, not to use against bacteria, but against people.”

“I still don’t quite comprehend—”

“Vibratory hypnosis,” said The Avenger. He stopped the little thing. While the sound was audible, it hurt the eardrums.

“Vibration may not destroy bacteria as you had hoped it would,” he said. “But it appears that the right kind of vibration, up beyond the range of hearing, numbs the voluntary nerve centers and makes a man a machine to obey the orders of a ruthless master. The rheostat, for subtly changing the pitch, indicates that every individual has a slightly different vibration point at which hypnosis is reached. Whoever holds the vibrator would slowly increase the pitch till the reaction of his victim told him the proper point had been reached. Then he would hold it there; as long as that vibration played on the man’s brain, he was that man’s master.”

“And you divined that,” said Cranlowe, “and pretended to be hypnotized before the exact pitch had been reached?”

“Yes.”

“Thank heaven you had the wit for it. For if Jenner had turned one of those things loose on me, he’d certainly have the formula by now, to sell to whatever greedy nation offered the most money—”

“I don’t think Jenner would have sold it to anyone,” said Benson. He bent over the prostrate form of the plant manager, began going through his pockets. “The formula would have meant nothing to Jenner, personally—”

His fingers felt a disk in Jenner’s vest pocket. He drew it out.

“I think we’ll find, when Jenner comes to, that he hasn’t the faintest idea how he got out here, or what he did after he arrived. More, I think we’ll find that Jenner doesn’t know anything he has done for weeks.”

“You mean—”

“I mean Jenner is the tool and not the master. I think he was probably the first person one of these diabolically clever little disks was used on. Since then he has been playing an unknown master’s game, seeming to be the head of the conspiracy, but actually only acting that part.”

“A hypnotized man hypnotizing still others?”

“Exactly!” said The Avenger.

Cranlowe shook his head. “Someone is as smart as the devil himself—I think we’d better see what those shots were awhile ago. Evidently my men repelled an attack of some kind—”

“That’s what
you
think,” came a snarling voice from the door.

Kopell stepped into the room, submachine gun leveled. And behind him came nine men comprising the cream of Garfield City’s underworld.

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes drilled into Kopell’s dull, black ones. Benson stood with his hands raised a little, and death pointing at him from half a dozen sources. But even at that there was something about his gray steel, limber body that filled the men with uneasiness.

“Well,” Benson said, voice as emotionless as his dead face, “I’ve seen carefully planned criminal actions, but never one more methodically plotted out than this one. If none of the many previous thrusts were successful, you were to come in here and complete the thing by brute force. Is that it?”

“Something like that,” said Kopell. He grinned at the jolly-looking fat man who was one of his most murderous lieutenants. “Looks like you owe me five grand, Fats. The dough I paid you to put this white-headed guy and his pals out of the way. You may have pushed their sedan into the lake, but they didn’t stay in the sedan! So you’ll just kick back with the money. See?”

Fats was swearing in a half-awed tone.

“They must be wizards or something to have gotten out of that jam.”

“Well, we won’t go into it, now. We’ll do what we came here to do. Get that formula—”

A sort of scream from Cranlowe interrupted him. The inventor’s self-control had shattered to bits with this last of a day full of intolerable surprises.

“You won’t get it! You hear? You’ll never get it! You drove mad, and then murdered, my financial backer to get me out of my protected home. You injured my driver so that a spy of yours could take his place. You made my secretary kill herself, to try and get another spy in here. You sent Dr. Markham out to try to mesmerize my secret from me. You sent my wife out, hypnotized—as I can see now, thank heaven—for the same purpose. You hold my son’s life in your hands. Now you burst in here with guns.
But you will not get the formula!
Never, never, never!”

Self-control gone. But not his indomitable will. That would not crack, no matter what was done.

Kopell stared at the inventor with something like grudging admiration in his eyes.

“You’re kind of a tough customer,” he said. “But you’re licked before you start. As you’ll find out soon—”

“You can kill me, but I won’t tell you what you want to know,” screamed Cranlowe hysterically—but unchangeably.

“Maybe we’ll do that, too,” shrugged Kopell. He looked at Fats. “Tie him up, again.”

The fat man and the big fellow who should have been named Gargantua, retired Cranlowe in the heavy drapes.

“Now go out the back way and round up whatever guards the guy Pete didn’t get,” Kopell snapped. “And get rid of any dogs that might be left alive.”

Three of the men went out. In a moment there were four quick shots, then the tramp of returning feet. Five pairs of feet coming back, where only three had gone. And the owner of one of the pairs moaned as he was forced along.

“Lock the monkeys upstairs,” said Kopell. “Then we’ll have the whole joint, all to ourselves, to play around in.”

Benson’s eyes were like chips of ice under a polar moon. But he could only watch, for the moment, while this crew of murderers went from one triumph to another.

There was another who could only watch, fruitlessly, for the moment. That was a diminutive blonde who could see out a crack in the hall-closet door and into the library, by the aid of a mirror hanging on the library wall just inside the portal.

Nellie Gray had crept in here, in the back of Mrs. Cranlowe’s coupé, and couldn’t get out again past the dogs and guards. Now she was glad she’d had to flit from hiding place to hiding place like a ghost for these past few hours. For now she felt that right here was precisely where she should be, to help the chief, if possible.

She bit her short, pretty upper lip as she saw the previous rescue work of The Avenger, when he knocked out Jenner and untied Cranlowe, being all undone again. Then she pressed her hand against her lips to keep back a cry as she saw something else.

The big head of a man who must be a giant, so far was that head from the floor, poked into the hall from the garage corridor for an instant. Smitty!
He
was here!

Smitty and Mac and Josh were all in that narrow corridor. They had slipped into the house after Kopell and his men without much trouble, because Kopell was so utterly without suspicion that anyone but his gang was within miles of the Heights. Now the three were just hanging around waiting to edge into the game at some effective moment.

But this was not that moment. Not with nine heavily armed men—some with submachine guns in their hands—present and alert. They had almost taken a chance on it when the three went out back to get the surviving guards. But they had let the moment slide.

“And we won’t be gettin’ another chance as good,” whispered Mac, pessimistically. “That cooked us when we didn’t take advantage of it.”

“Will you stop your croaking?” Smitty snapped back, in an answering whisper.

“Croakin’, is it?” retorted Mac. “When ye’re six feet under, lookin’ like a sieve from tommy bullets, ye’ll wisht ye’d had sense enough—”

“We’d better not even whisper,” said Josh. “We aren’t any too well hidden in this hall.”

Black of skin and wearing dark clothes, the colored man could scarcely be seen at all. Only white eyeballs and a flash of ivory teeth showed where he was.

“You
are hidden well enough,” Smitty grunted. But there was wisdom in Josh’s words. So they kept silent after that.

They crept to the mouth of the corridor again, and for a second time Smitty poked his head out to look around. There was no one there. They were entirely unseen and
unsuspected—

They did not, of course, know of the lone figure that had trailed
them
in here. They could not guess at the presence of the slim, well-dressed young man behind them, right now, who had put over his face a mask made of a dark-blue silk handkerchief that hid all his features.

They didn’t hear him creep up on them, slowly, one noiseless step at a time, till he was within six feet of the giant, Smitty.

He stood there, with his hand held flat, clutching something.

If there had been a dog around, the dog would have howled. But there was no dog, and Smitty, of course, could not hear the thin, high vibration that was being directed at him!

Four guns were leveled on The Avenger. The four men who held them were in awe, almost afraid, of the man’s absolutely expressionless face. They did not know of the paralysis responsible for its utter immobility. All they knew was that here was a man who showed no emotion of any kind in a situation where any one of them would be scared witless.