The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (12 page)

No, not their fault; but it would be Nellie and Mac’s death if the mob got their hands on the two!

There was a sudden battering at the door. The portal split clear down the center. They had a battering-ram or something outside.

“String ’em up, they murdered Morel! Sheriff said so.”

“Kill ’em!
Kill—”

Incarnate hatred held that mob. Murderous hatred!

“So?” said Nellie evenly.

“I guess the trap has worrrked,” burred Mac, eyes steady, though his freckled face was pale.

“Wouldn’t it,” said Cole Wilson, “have been better if we had come up
with
Mac and Nellie instead of sending them on ahead?”

He and The Avenger were in the cabin of another of Benson’s planes, with Kinnisten, Maine, just over the skyline.

Dick shook his head, pale eyes fixed on the altimeter.

“You were out, and I couldn’t leave my laboratory for several more hours; so I sent Nellie alone. I wouldn’t have come up with you, now, but there have been no reports from them. I don’t care so much for that.”

“It was a dangerous thing to try—walking right into a trap,” sighed Cole.

Wilson was absolutely fearless, himself. Walking into a trap was precisely the sort of thing that appealed to his reckless nature. But, like so many fearless persons, he could always feel fear for others’ safety. The Avenger himself was like that.

“Some day,” said Dick evenly, pale eyes lambent and icy-clear, “all of us will have to die. Now or fifty years from now. Fifty years is a short span in the history of the human race.”

Cole nodded his comprehension. What the man with the colorless, deadly eyes meant was that no one could go on indefinitely cheating death as he and his helpers did in their crime battles. Some trap some day would close on one or all of them—and stay closed!

“I hope this isn’t the day for—” Cole began.

Then he stared ahead and downward.

“There are the lights of Kinnisten. And a red light, an uncertain light— One of the buildings is afire!”

Benson nosed the plane downward and, at the same time, shut off the twin motors. With only the shriek of the wind sounding, he planed toward the fire.

“It’s the jail,” he said crisply. “And there’s a yelling mob around it,” he added, a moment later.

“Nellie and Mac are supposed to be at Morel’s laboratory, miles from here,” Cole said uncertainly.

But The Avenger kept right on going down toward the blazing building. When there was trouble in a district, with his aides anywhere in the vicinity, the trouble was apt to be whirling right around the aides.

And a mob is always a murderous thing to be stopped.

The Avenger’s steely right hand went out to stop them; went toward the instrument panel where a small knob glistened among innumerable dials. The dials were standard for planes of this type. The knob was not. Only this one plane had that knob.

The Avenger pulled it out on a sliding rod and zoomed down straight for the milling people. Some looked up, saw the plane and shook fists at it in blind frenzy. The rest paid no attention at all. They cavorted like maniacs around the building.

Now, Cole and Benson could see two figures crowded back toward the rear of the roof, away from the fiercest flames. Nellie and Mac.

The plane roared over the crowd scarcely twenty feet above them. It rolled sharply, banked and came back.

Twice, this maneuver was repeated; and each time the plane zoomed over the crowd, from its leading wing edges came fine spray, released by the tug at the knob. It was like spraying a potato field for bugs. But this spray was a different thing, and the creatures on which it acted were not bugs.

“Chief!” gasped Cole, for once in his life trembling in every limb. “They’re not— Look!”

There was no more surflike roar of fury from the mob. There was no sound or movement at all. On the street around the blazing building, instead, were hundreds of prone bodies. It was as if the whole town had suddenly sighed, yawned and lay down in their tracks to sleep.

“They’re not . . . dead?” quavered Cole. “All those people— They’re not—”

“Quantity production of Mac’s sleeping gas,” said The Avenger. And his eyes had never been colder nor his voice more calm. The street rose as the plane nosed toward it. The wide main street would barely land a ship, with such wizardry as The Avenger’s at the controls. “They’ll be all right in a few hours.”

Cole saw Mac and Nellie drop in a hurry from the roof of the one-story building. Nellie had on the nose clip, and Mac was breathing through his lapel as they ran for the plane. Both had known, at sight, the meaning of Dick’s swoops with the plane and the way the people lay down.

“Whoosh!
” said Mac, beating out sparks on his clothes when they were in the sealed cabin. “That was hotter’n I like, in more senses than one. Those people got some of Morel’s hate drug, Muster Benson. Will they be like that, full of hate and murrrder, permanently?”

“I think not,” said The Avenger. He gunned the motors. “My experiments lead me to believe that the effect of the drug is quite temporary when it is taken internally. Injected, the effect lasts much longer and is more serious. So many people must have had it given them internally, in food or water. It would be impossible to inject them all. I think they’ll be all right soon— What is it, Nellie?”

“There was a deputy in that blazing building,” Nellie said in a low, stricken tone. “We had no chance to get him out. Unconscious—in those flames—”

“When a mob of people are possessed by hate,” said Dick, with his voice as icily calm as ever and yet holding profound sadness in it, “that is the sort of thing that happens. There was nothing to be done about it. Where is Lila?”

Nellie pointed toward the old mill, too shaky to speak. By a miracle of piloting, The Avenger got the plane up off the avenue, then flew to the wheatfield where the ship Nellie had flown here was staked.

Cole took the controls of that plane, with Lila beside him, after they’d called her from her hiding place in the mill building. The two ships zoomed back to the city.

It was stalemate. The jaws of the death trap had clicked shut on emptiness. But Mac and Nellie had learned nothing from their hazardous experience.

Nellie and Mac were in the laboratory at Bleek Street with The Avenger.

Dick had a small vial of ruby-red liquid. The stuff glinted evilly in the light as if it had a life of its own. A satanic life.

“That’s a duplication of Morel’s drug?” asked blond Nellie.

“Yes,” nodded Dick, pale eyes fixed on the evil red fluid. “I was pretty sure of it before. Now, I am certain it is an exact duplication.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes had never been so coldly flaring. They were like chips of polar ice under moonlight.

Then the door opened and Smitty came in, bulking gigantic in the apparatus-crowded lab.

“Smitty!” said Nellie, with a soft shine in her eyes, which told for a fleeting instant her true feelings for the giant. But the soft shine was instantly wiped out and she looked covertly and self-consciously at Mac and at Dick.

“About time you showed up, Gargantua,” she said crisply. “We work around here. Remember?”

“Hey!” said Smitty indignantly. “If you think I haven’t been working you’re out of your head. Josh and I just got to town, chief. We trailed Ritter here from Detroit. Seems to me I haven’t slept for months. Josh is after Ritter, now. I left him at the airport and came to report.”

Dick Benson nodded.

“Catch some sleep, Smitty. There’s nothing more to be done for a while. Josh can take care of Ritter, wherever he may be, now.”

Ritter, at the moment, was in Wall Street. To be more specific, he was in the Palmer Building on Wall Street. This small building was the heart of the nation’s financial system. For it housed the biggest banking promoting and financing company in the world.

Ritter had gone into these portals, and Josh, following like a dark shadow half a block behind, was stuck. It was about as easy to get into the Palmer Building as it would be to stroll whistling into Fort Knox without a pass and a guard beside you.

Josh, however, didn’t give up too easily in anything. He looked thoughtfully at the building across the street. This building was a standard skyscraper with batteries of windows facing the Palmer Building. Josh entered it and walked up four flights of stairs.

The main corridor on each floor ended at the street side in a window. So Josh went to the window on the fourth floor and looked across the narrow canyon of a street.

There was no sign of Ritter in any of the offices he could look into. He went down a floor.

As soon as he looked across from this floor he knew he was looking at the important offices of the Palmer Building because the windows over there, on that floor, were opaque. You couldn’t see through their frosted expanses.

It was an unreasonably warm day, however; so most of the windows were open a few inches. Normally you couldn’t see in. But The Avenger’s crew went prepared for the abnormal.

Josh drew out a small telescope that was a marvel of its kind. The world’s finest lens maker had ground the lenses for this little cylinder. When he looked at the middle window again, through the narrow crack at the bottom, faces leaped at him.

They were faces every newspaper reader knew.

One was Ritter’s. The other three were the faces of the top three partners of the great financial house. And Josh had caught them at a moment when something of unusual import must have happened. For the three faces were twisted in an insanity of hate and anger.

The faces were brought so near by the little telescope that it seemed silly that Josh couldn’t hear the words spoken. But of course he couldn’t. He could just see lips writhe and twist in furious words tossed from partner to partner, but he could hear not one syllable.

Ritter simply sat there, in the big office, looking distressed. Now and then, he opened his mouth to speak, as though he would say something to calm the three down. But he didn’t get a chance to put in any words.

He read enough of one sentence to gather that it was a hot accusation of chiseling thrown by one partner at another. He gathered that the other made a furious offer to buy up the first man’s share of the business so that he could get out if he didn’t like the way it was ran. Then the third partner’s lips moved in words so menacing that Josh hated to believe he had read them right.

It seemed that this third one, the most powerful of the lot, was threatening to split the firm wide open and drive the other two out and to hell with them.

At this point, Ritter got up, said a few words resignedly and left. So Josh had to leave, too, almost holding his breath over that third partner’s speech.

He couldn’t have gotten that right! It wasn’t possible!

Civil war in this vast institution that controlled billions of dollars in money and physical assets? Why, that would crack the nation’s whole financial structure to bitter fragments! It would produce a panic on the Exchange; alter the economic structure of the land almost as drastically as real war itself could alter it.

Ritter came out the doorway of the Palmer Building, and Josh slid from the door across the street. Josh felt murder stir in his heart as he saw that a little smile was on the politician’s lips.

Ritter had caused that vital conflict in there. He had gone to the Palmer Building only to make trouble. And he had succeeded. Several million people would be unemployed, thousands of small companies would go broke, great hardship would be suffered, because of this gently smiling, handsome man who would be president.

The combination of a hellish drug and a ruthless monster of ambition was shaping into the worst scourge the United States had ever suffered from. For there was no doubt the drug had subtly been used back there. In no other way could the terrible quarrel between partners, each of whom in sane moments
knew
the awful results of such a fight, have been caused. The financial leaders were under the influence of Morel’s drug.

Josh trailed Ritter from the financial district, up along Manhattan Island, and out the Henry Hudson Parkway to Ritter’s estate on the river. And there, at a window, Josh got a brief glimpse of a face that set him urgently to contacting The Avenger on his belt radio.