The Avenger 35 - The Iron Skull (3 page)

When the image of MacMurdie exploded, the giant had thrown himself to the sidewalk. The concussion of the blowup had come rolling at him like a huge ocean wave.

It slammed him into the snow and started his ears ringing like a cathedral tower on Sunday.

All the time he was thinking, “Geeze, poor Mac!”

Large drops of hot water rained down on him; the heat of the explosion had melted a wide circle of snow.

Things were rattling on the sidewalk all around.

Smitty ventured a look.

Clang!

A
metal rod clattered down next to his ear.

Slowly, brain still somewhat jiggled, Smitty pushed up to his hands and knees.

Silence had followed the explosion, but now sound was returning. People shouting, car horns honking.

“What the hell happened?”

“Call a cop!”

“Get an ambulance!”

“That big palooka’s hurt!”

Filling his enormous lungs with air, Smitty got to his feet. “What the heck,” he said as he looked around.

There were twists of metal, coils of wire, bits of fine glass all over the place. There were shreds and patches of cloth.

But nothing which could have been part of a flesh-and-blood man.

“I’ll swear Mac was standing right there when the bomb went off,” Smitty told himself. “Now there ain’t nothing but scrap metal and rags.”

“Oh, my lord! Oh . . . my . . . lord!” screamed a fat woman in a real mink coat. “Oh . . .” She sank to her knees in the snow, pointing a shaking finger.

She was pointing at MacMurdie’s head. Detached from the body, it lay on its side in a drift of snow. Spilling out of the throat were twisting wires and curls of plastic tubing.

The tiny man in the white lab coat picked up a handful of wires and said, “This shouldn’t be in my bailiwick, anyhow.”

A door at the end of the absolutely white room had opened, and two men had entered. One was the giant Smitty; the other was a lithe, dark-haired young man who radiated vitality. This was Richard Henry Benson, better known as the Avenger.

“Good evening, Dr. Bova,” he said.

The harsh white light brought out all the blemishes on the tiny man’s face and bald head. “Was expecting you, Benson,” he said. “This is a goofy one, right up your alley.”

“What have you found out?”

Dr. Bova gestured toward the autopsy table with the scalpel in his hand. “Why they brought it to me I don’t know.”

“I told ’em they ought to let us have him,” put in Smitty. “But they said it’s police procedure or something.”

Bova snorted. “This isn’t a body . . . as anyone can plainly see. In fact, I’m not sure
what
the hell it is.”

The remains of the exploded MacMurdie figure had been carefully gathered together in a rubber sack and brought to the city morgue.

The Avenger stepped to the edge of the table, eyes narrowing. “You must have guessed what this was, Bova.”

The tiny man shrugged. “A robot? I saw one at the World’s Fair in thirty-nine . . . but he was a big lumbering fellow, moved around like a drunken elephant. This thing, from what I hear, convinced everybody he was an ordinary everyday human.”

“It’s way ahead of any kind of robot I’ve ever seen,” said Benson.

“What about the bomb, doc?” asked the giant.

Bova said, “The bomb squad boys took all the hunks of that.”

“It was right inside this guy, though, wasn’t it?

“Sure was.”

The Avenger indicated various of the parts spread out before them. “Planted in the torso cavity, judging from the way the various components are damaged.”

“You’ve got fingers in a lot more pies than I have,” said tiny Dr. Bova. “Are you leveling with me, Benson, when you say you’ve never heard of anything like this?”

“As far as I know, this isn’t any runaway U.S. government robot, if that’s what you’re getting at,” said the Avenger. “Now . . . I’ve never seen a robot that was as sophisticated as this one apparently was. I have heard . . . nearly ten years age . . . when Hitler hadn’t the hold he later gained on Germany, there were rumors that a young scientist named Ulrich Blau-Montag had accomplished some incredible things in the field of robotics. But he was killed in a lab explosion soon after, and nothing more was ever heard. Those experimental robots of Blau-Montag’s were supposed to be this convincing.”

Smitty had begun, very deftly, to poke around among the parts of the ruined robot. “Another thing puzzles me,” he said. “A lot of the stuff used to build this bozo is top-priority stuff. I mean, you can’t stroll into your neighborhood radio shop and ask for it.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” said the Avenger. “Well make a note of each part and try to track their sources down.”

“Whoever made this thing used your associate MacMurdie as a model,” said Bova. “How’s Mac feel about that?”

Smitty said, gruffly, “We don’t know exactly where Mac is, Doc.”

“Ah?” He dropped his hands into the pockets of his stained white coat. “I have the notion, based on what I’ve been able the find out by sifting through this mess, that our robot friend probably malfunctioned. There was a timing device hooked to the bomb, so the bomb squad boys tell me. But I don’t think he was supposed to go bang out on the sidewalk like that.”

“No,” said the Avenger, “this robot was meant to explode while inside our offices and kill us all.”

“Brrr!” said Dr. Bova. “Doesn’t that make your flesh crawl?”

“No,” replied the Avenger, “it makes me mad.”

“And when he’s mad . . .” said Smitty.

Hunched behind his snowdrift, Cole fired again at the figure with the gun.

Ping!

“Yes, that was assuredly a ping,” he decided. “How do you explain that, Joshua?”

“Got me, unless they wearing some new kind of bulletproof vest.”

“Admittedly, the light’s not good at this time of night, but I’m certain I hit that chap in the wrist.”

The two figures were coming across the snow-covered factory grounds, stalking closer to them. The one Cole was positive he’d hit fired once more in their direction.

Rolling, Josh got off a shot at the second stalker.

Ping!

“Man, they both doing it!”

“Doesn’t appear ordinary firepower is going to faze this pair.” Holstering his weapon, Cole leaped to his feet and went weaving swiftly across the snow toward their antagonists.

One shot came his way, but he dodged it.

“Let’s have a go at hand-to-hand combat, shall we?” Cole tackled the nearest of the two.

Clang!

His head hit the figure’s leg and produced a resounding metallic noise.

The figure fell over, smashing into the snow.

“No touchdown for you this time, old boy,” said Cole, twisting to pin the figure down.

The man struggled and brought up his left hand.

“Wrong hand, old chap. Gun’s in your right.”

The figure touched Cole with the forefinger of his left hand.

“Ouch! What the dev—” That was all Cole had time to say before he found himself passing out.

The clean-cut young man got out of his snow-dappled raincoat. “Thought we’d better have a talk,” he said to the three people in the Justice, Inc., office.

“Gimme,” Smitty took the coat and hung it on a rack near the door.

Little blond Nellie Gray recrossed her slim legs and reached for her notebook. “Is this an official visit, Don?”

Don Early said, “Call it semi-official.”

From behind his desk Dick Benson said, “Washington knows you’ve come up here?”

“Sure,” replied the young government agent.

“About the robot, ain’t it?” asked the giant.

Seating himself, Early said, “Robots, plural.

“Not more MacMurdies?” said Nellie.

Early said, “Just been up in Connecticut. Saw a robot which had been doing a fair job of passing itself off as Edward Kessell. Know him?”

“Yes,” answered the Avenger. “And I also know a little about the government project he’s involved with.”

“Won’t go into that too much now,” said Early, glancing at the pencil Nellie held poised over a blank page in her steno book. “Top secret sort of operation.”

Smitty gave a grunt. “Did this Kessell robot blow up, too?”

“Nope, it broke down,” said Early. “For some reason the thing started to malfunction . . . scared the daylights out of Kessell’s wife. Her son called the cops; they got hold of the FBI. FBI hollered for me.”

“Where is the robot now?” asked the Avenger.

“Got it in a private lab in New Haven. Want to take a look?”

“Smitty,” said Benson, “you and Nellie can handle that. First thing tomorrow morning . . . if that’s okay, Don?”

“I can set up a viewing of the remains any time.”

“Double-check the components, Smitty,” said the Avenger.

“Sure, will do.”

Benson steepled his fingers under his chin. “Has anyone questioned Mrs. Kessell?”

“She’s under sedation. Hysterical she was . . . seems smoke started coming out the robot’s ears. Unsettle you . . . if you thought it was actually your husband.”

“How about the son? Any idea how long this simulacrum’s been around? Or hadn’t anyone noticed anything unusual until tonight?”

“The FBI asked a few questions in that direction,” said Early. “Kids, plus some of the servants, think Kessell’d been acting odd for the past four, five days.”

“That coincides,” said Nellie.

Early asked, “Is that how long MacMurdie’s been missing?”

“Roughly,” answered the Avenger. “I imagine, since you know about what happened with our Mac robot, you’ve had this other one checked out for explosives.”

“Before it was even carted off,” said Early “Nothing.”

“Sounds like this Kessell gizmo was meant to get info,” said Smitty, “and not blow anybody up.”

“If the robot has been impersonating Kessell for nearly a week,” said Benson, “he must have a good deal of information about the project.”

“Yeah, afraid so,” admitted Early. “They’ve been having some top-level discussions and briefings all week here in Manhattan. Kessell’s been sitting in on most of them.”

“The robot we saw,” said Smitty, “might have had some radio sending equipment stuffed inside him. Hard to tell for sure from what was left. How about your robot?”

The young agent nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Whatever this gadget heard . . . it was broadcast to somebody somewhere.”

“Looks like our robot maker,” put in Nellie, “has more than one goal in life. He wants to find out about this hush-hush project of yours, Don, and he also wants to get rid of us.”

“One reason why I’m here,” said Early.

“As of now,” said Benson, “you have no idea how and when the substitution was made . . . when the real Kessell was replaced with this automaton?”

“The police and the FBI are checking into that, questioning everybody. Could be when Mrs. Kessell is up and around we’ll get something. As of now . . . nothing.”

“That means we ain’t no closer to finding Mac, neither,” said Smitty.

“In a negative mood tonight,” said Early. “But I might as well mention that we can’t be sure either MacMurdie or Kessell is still alive. We don’t know if there was any plan to switch them back again. In Mac’s case, that’d be impossible, anyway, since his robot was meant to explode.”

Smitty hit his knee a few times. “Mac ain’t dead,” he told the clean-cut agent. “If he was . . . I’d know it.”

“Hope you’re right.”

Leaning forward, the Avenger said, “There’s something else we have to check out.”

“Which?” asked Early.

“There are five other key men working on the same project with Kessell,” the Avenger said. “We have to find out if any of them are robots.”

It was vast, this chill, shadowy room. You could feel its size, even though you couldn’t see the walls. Only a bright circle in the center of the stone-floored room was lighted, lit by three small spots dangling up above in the darkness.

In the exact center of the circle of glaring light was spread a rectangular scarlet and gold Persian carpet.

The three men standing just inside the circle, shifting uneasily from foot to foot, were all watching that carpet. Intently, as though they were trying to memorize its intricate pattern.