The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (2 page)

Fergus MacMurdie’s drugstore looked like any other drugstore to the casual glance. The fact that it was not, that it was a highly unusual and significant place, was beginning to be harder and harder to conceal from an admiring public.

The front room of the store contained just what every medium-sized drugstore contains. But the rear room of the place was not at all what you’d expect to find.

It was huge, over twice as big as the store part, and it housed not one, but two complete laboratories.

Along one side was a great bench holding about all the paraphernalia ever devised for intricate and subtle electrical and radio experiments.

Along the other was an equally complete array of chemical apparatus.

The electrical half belonged to Algernon Heathcote Smith. The chemical apparatus, and the knowledge to use it as few chemists can use such equipment, belonged to MacMurdie.

Mac was in the front, regular part of the store when Josh entered with his tattered burden.

“Whoosh!” said the Scotchman. “What have we got here? A bundle for the laundry?”

The words were flippant, but the look in Mac’s bleak eyes as he surveyed the old man was not.

He helped Josh with the old bum, his hands—which could form into bone mallets of fists—being very gentle about it. The lanky Negro and the tall, sandy-haired Scotchman took the shivering wreck into the rear room, with Mac nodding to the bright-faced boy who helped with the store to take any customers who might enter.

“Easy now, mon,” said Mac, as the old fellow mumbled curses and snarling statements that he was all right and just wanted to be let alone. “Smitty, clear out that big chair, will ye?”

The electrical wizard who shared the dual laboratory with Mac had been at his bench, working with a new radio-tube idea.

Algernon Heathcote Smith was his name. But nobody—save occasionally MacMurdie—dared call him that. He was Smitty, and you’d better be careful about it. You would be careful, too, after one glance at him.

Smitty seemed to have come from a heroic age of thousands of years ago when men were men and ate saber-toothed tigers raw for breakfast.

He was six feet nine, weighed almost three hundred pounds, with every atom of it solid bone and muscle.

Topping this mountain of brawn was a moonface, looking more good-natured than intelligent, and in which were naïve-looking, china-blue eyes. You’d never have taken him for the electrical and radio wizard he was. And you’d never have guessed, probably, that he was another of the hair-trigger, dangerous aides of The Avenger.

Smitty jumped forward and took a bunch of miscellaneous junk off the tattered easy-chair mentioned by Mac. Then, as easily as if he had been but a feather, he picked the old man up and deposited him in it.

And the old tramp continued to snarl and curse and demand that they take him outside again and let him alone.

They made no move to do such a thing. They looked at the stubborn old coot with sympathy, and that was all. For they had no way of guessing the colossal significance hidden in the shivering distress of an aged hobo.

“May be ’tis malnutrition,” said Mac. “Are ye hungry, mon?”

“No, I’m not hungry,” snapped the old man, clawing at his straggly whiskers.

“Just how do ye feel?” inquired Mac, who was a pretty good doctor, as well as a chemical and pharmaceutical genius. “Maybe if we heard the symptoms—”

“I feel perfectly all right,” snarled the old bum, shivering.

“You certainly don’t look it,” rumbled the giant, Smitty.

“Maybe it’s his heart,” said Josh, abandoning his drawl and speaking like the educated man he was.

“It’s not my heart!” rapped the old man. “It’s nothing at all, I tell you. Let me—”

Mac put a stethoscope to his ragged breast. He looked at Smitty and shrugged.

“Heart’s as good as ye could expect. This shiverin’, now—’tis an odd thing.” He stared at the old man. “Do ye have recurrent malaria, anythin’ like that?”

“Will you let me go!” stormed the aged bum.

He tried to get up, and fell back into the chair, panting and shuddering.

Mac went over him. He found nothing definitely the matter, nothing that could be responsible for the man’s condition. So he swung back to his first thought—malnutrition.

“We’ll take ye to a restaurant and get a square meal under yer belt,” he said cheerfully. “Then if that doesn’t do the trick, we’ll see about a clinic—”

Into the filmed brown eyes came shrewdness. The old bum had had but one thought in mind through all this—to be let alone. Evidently, there was a fierce spark of independence in him and he saw in Mac’s words a chance to indulge it.

“All right,” he snarled. “All right, I’m hungry, then. But I don’t want to go to no restaurant. Take me home. I got some food at home.”

Smitty half grinned at Josh.

“Be it ever so humble,” he said in an aside. “You wouldn’t think a guy like this had a home. I thought he was a foot-loose tramp.”

“Probably a piano box somewhere,” said Josh, also in a low tone. “But it’s to his credit that he has a place to live.”

“All right, then,” said Mac, soured by the snarling ingratitude of the man they were trying to help, “home it is. And where would that be?”

The aged relic told them. It was a number on a street that even Mac couldn’t place for a moment, and then managed to locate. The difficulty with his memory was that it wasn’t a street at all; it was an alley. Mac had never even known before that it had a name.

Smitty’s car was at the curb. It was an ancient-looking coupé, but under the dull paint of the hood was a motor almost big enough to have powered a tugboat.

He and Josh went with the old man, stopped at the alley entrance because it was hardly big enough to get a car into. New York has practically no alleys. The few that do exist often date back a hundred years to a time when they were streets. Narrow, ill-lighted, noisome streets which were abandoned as thoroughfares as soon as the city grew.

The building to which the old man grudgingly let himself be helped, looked as old as the slimy alley. It was not big, a former carriage house perhaps. It was at a slant, indicating that it would sigh and collapse of its own weight some day. It was at the rear end of a narrow lot, with the shabby brick wall of a larger house cutting off all air and light. The brick house faced on the street just south of the alley.

A rear-house, this type of place is called. There are many of them in the land—rattletrap structures taking up the back half of a building lot and bringing in a few dollars extra rent. A slum building, usually, never getting sunlight, surrounded by higher, newer buildings as if it were in the bottom of a well. At least this one was like that.

There were two doors opening into the alley from this squalid place. The old man hobbled to the right-hand one, clutching his pitiful bundle of gleanings from the streets under his left arm, fishing out a key with his right hand.

Growling and snarling, mumbling in his scraggy beard, he opened the door.

Smitty and Josh got one glimpse of the room inside. It was worse than the outside. Rags for a mattress, one broken chair and a propped-up table. Beside a rusted old stove was piled wood from old packing cases which could be used to cook with in summer and for heat in the winter.

That was all they saw,

“Just a minute, let me help you in,” said Smitty kindly.

And the old man wobbled inside faster than they’d thought he could move. The ancient door slammed in their faces.

“Why, the—” began Josh.

But Smitty grinned.

“No charity case here,” he said. “But I kind of admire the old boy. Won’t take help, manages to keep together his own home, such as it is. He’s got guts.”

They looked at the door, shrugged and walked back down the alley toward where Smitty had left the car. And then Smitty lost some of his grin and looked as he felt—lazily curious.

“Did you notice the door next to his?” he said to Josh.

Josh shook his head.

“No! What about it?”

“The locks,” said Smitty.

“Why wouldn’t it have locks?” Josh said. “No matter what kind of a place a person has, it’s home and he tries to protect it. Even that old bum had a lock of sorts on his door.”

“Not like the locks on the door next to him,” said Smitty. “Now that I think of it, they were certainly some locks! The biggest, heaviest, most expensive kind you can buy. But the door itself looked as if a breath would break it in. Funny.”

They got in the car and went back to the drugstore, quite naturally forgetting the whole affair.

The factory appeared to be about a mile long, and it was four stories high. At night, with all the lights on and the very air humming with activity, it seemed to be an entire city all by itself.

In a way, that’s what it was. It certainly housed a small city of workmen. And it had all the requirements of sanitation and supply and policing of a small city.

It was the central plant of the Wardwear Tire & Rubber Company, in Akron, Ohio.

The place was a maelstrom of activity. It was that way twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. That was because of war.

With war scattered over half the world and still spreading, the Wardwear Company was booming. Tires and a host of other rubber goods are essential in modern war. They are ordered by the million, and Wardwear was getting its huge share of the business.

So the mammoth factories buzzed and whirred with speeded-up assembly belts and wheels. And none of their plants was quite as busy as the central plant. And of this plant, no department was quite as busy as the crude-rubber department, where the raw rubber was converted into a more refined product which should presently go into the myriad molds and undergo the heat treatment to make tires.

It was in this department that it happened. And it started near the triple line of mammoth rolls into which the crude rubber was fed as the first of an unmerciful beating the stuff required for refining.

The rolls took the crude, masticated it with loud popping and snapping noises and spewed it out again. The rolls were like the steel lips of a giant; and the brownish raw rubber it flattened and worked was like chewing gum. The steel lips blew out the chewing gum into bubbles and awkward masses and seemed to suck it in again and chew it over like a cow chewing a cud, before finally giving it up.

The building trembled with the power of the rolls; and over all floated the impalpable dust, compounded of talc and rubber particles, that can never quite be cleared out of a rubber factory, even with the most powerful ventilating systems.

Men fed the raw rubber into the rolls in the blue haze of the daylight illumination, and everything was going smoothly. Till just before midnight. Then all of a sudden everything was not at all smooth!

Over near the inside wall, near the steel door that led to the power room, a man started to throw crude into a hopper. And his actions, abruptly, were very odd.

He had been working at a fast pace, keeping up with the machine in his charge. Now, suddenly, he began to move very slowly.

Very, very slowly! It was almost funny how slowly he moved. He began to look like a subject for a slow-motion picture. It was as if he had some young apprentice there and, by moving very slowly, an act at a time, was teaching him his job.

But there was no apprentice around. There was just the man, moving at about a fifth normal speed, taking three seconds or more to each step.

As if the thing were some sort of epidemic, it swept along the line, and finally all through the vast room!

One man after another slowed from normal pace to that somehow dreadful slow motion. In a couple of minutes the whole crew were going around like creatures in a dream with twenty pounds of lead on each foot, and on each hand, too.

The machines, however, did not slow down. They kept clanking along at their normal pace, and in a short time the discrepancy began to raise hell. The machines needed crude rubber fed to them and were not getting it. They began to clank emptily. And the trembling of the building increased till the vibration jarred your teeth.

The department foreman came into the place from the direction of the front office. He took one amazed, open-mouthed look at a crew of men, walking like badly coordinated robots; then he leaped, bellowing, for the nearest machine.