The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (17 page)

The sheriff got the answer to that, an instant later, with no word from The Avenger.

“Hey!” said one of the deputies. “I feel kinda funny—”

With the last word, he sagged toward the floor. And the other three men slumped floorward, too. While from a tiny vial dropped, uncorked, just inside the open window, came the last of almost colorless fumes.

Out there, a flashlight blinked twice. With the signal, from down the street, came the roar of that big motor as it stopped idling and went to work.

The cable behind the heavy hooks tightened and thrummed like a fishline with a tarpon on it. And the bars came out of the wall. So did the steel casement and some of the surrounding bricks.

In through the jagged opening stepped Fergus MacMurdie. He kept the lapel of his coat over his nostrils, as did The Avenger, to exclude the little vial’s fumes, a paralyzing gas.

“All right, Muster Benson?” said the Scot.

“All right, Mac,” said Benson.

His handcuffs dropped on the floor behind him. There were raw spots on his steely wrists, but that was all. Few handcuffs could hold The Avenger.

He went to the sheriff’s desk and retrieved the two weapons he had seen dropped in the top drawer. Mike and Ike. Then he and Mac went to the jagged hole where a window had been, leaving three deputies and a sheriff lying fast asleep on the floor beside them.

Down the street, Smitty waved cheerfully. The giant had “borrowed” a huge caterpillar tractor from a road outfit, which had been left standing at a new road on the town’s outskirts, ready for tomorrow’s work. With the tractor, he had borrowed the big hooks and a hundred yards of steel cable.

The tractor had been the truck-and-trailer outfit idly guessed at by the deputy.

The three men went to the car Mac had left three blocks away. Josh Newton grinned toothily from the wheel.

“Marville Caves, Josh,” said Benson.

They went past the cave entrance, to the south-hill slope where the creek gushed from the side of the range. But they never quite reached that entrance.

Walking noiselessly through the night from the distant spot where Josh had stopped the car, they halted abruptly as all four saw the same thing.

Two men were running along the dark skyline some yards to their left.

The four sprang toward them. The one in front was being hotly pursued by the one in the rear and was obviously in distress.

As they got closer, they could see them more plainly.

The one in front seemed like a living scarecrow, thin, weak, in rags. The one in the rear looked more like a gorilla than a man, and in his right hand was clutched a murderous club.

The figure in the rear saw the approaching four first.

“Nevlo!” Smitty’s voice cracked out.

In answer there was a hoarse yell of anger and defiance. And then the figure wasn’t there any more. It had disappeared as if by magic—disappeared downward, as though sinking into the solid earth.

The man who had been chased now stumbled and fell. He lay where he had fallen, panting hard.

Smitty gently helped the man to his feet.

At close range, he looked more than ever like a scarecrow. He was emaciated, and his rags covered his body even more scantily than at first realized. On the exposed areas of skin were the flat, terrible marks of recent burning.

“He looks scared out of his hide!” said Mac, sympathetically.

The man certainly did. His eyes were dazed with fear. They were blank, almost unseeing, too. He looked like a witless yokel who had been terrified by a ghost in a graveyard.

“Needles,” he croaked. He looked into first one and then another of the four faces close to him. Then his gaze centered on The Avenger, as if, even in his delirium, he recognized authority.

“Benson. Needles. Get to Benson with the needles with roots.”

“What in the worrrld—” burred Mac.

“Shut up!” snapped Smitty. “Listen. Don’t you get it? This is Burton, the engineer put in charge of Plant 4. He got those burns when his car blew up.”

“Needles,” mumbled Burton, his eyes wild but blank. “Some chemical. Can’t figure out what. Some chemical. Electrical vacuum.”

Benson looked hard into the dazed, staring eyes.

“He won’t be able to answer questions coherently tonight, at least,” he said. “Josh, take him back to Cleveland. Hide him out there.”

The last thing Benson and Mac and Smitty heard as Josh led Burton away was the murmur from the sick man’s slack lips:

“Some kind of chemical . . .”

The Avenger went forward into the night. He stared downward carefully as he advanced.

He was searching for the spot where the gorilla form had disappeared. Though he knew that “disappeared” was not the word for it. Material substances don’t do that very easily.

Smitty and Mac were close behind him. They exclaimed at the thing that finally stopped their chief.

There was a smooth, round hole in the ground at the point where the monster had disappeared. Their flashlights showed that it slanted a little; it did not go straight down. It was almost as smooth and symmetrical as a mail chute.

“A mail chute to hell, though,” said Mac dourly.

To one side of the hole was a wooden cover, like a manhole cover. On this was a foot of earth topped by sod, hiding the hole from prying eyes.

Benson lowered himself into the hole. Suspended by his elbows he looked up at Mac and Smitty.

“I’ll call out when I get to the bottom,” he said. “If I don’t call, go back and get the government men.”

He dropped.

Mac and Smitty waited on their haunches beside the grim-looking chute. And no sound came up out of the hole. Mac stared at Smitty, then put his face close to earth so that his voice wouldn’t be heard at a distance.

“Muster Benson!”

There was no answer. Mac moistened lips gone suddenly dry.

“Chief!”

There was no sound from the hole in the earth.

“I’m goin’ afterrr him,” said Mac determinedly.

Smitty clutched his arm. “He said to get Arnold and his men if he didn’t call—”

“That’d take too much time.”

Mac dropped out of sight, too. And Smitty waited anxiously in the night.

No call.

The giant looked over the fields. Then he eyed the hole. He decided promptly that for once The Avenger’s orders were to be disobeyed. By the time he could get in touch with Arnold, Dick and Mac would have been murdered a dozen times down there.

If, indeed, they weren’t both dead already!

Smitty squeezed his great body into the hole, then let go the sides.

He began to slide downward.

Faster and faster he went, slanting up a little, dropping a little more steeply, turning a bit. The thing was more than ever like a mail chute, in its smooth turnings and twistings.

Smitty couldn’t move his massive arms in the chute enough to brake his fall. But he could stare down past his own descending bulk, a little, enough to see light, which grew as he fell.

Then he was at the end of the thing so suddenly that a grunt was forced from his lips as he thudded onto the small of his back and sprawled like an overturned crab.

From that undignified and helpless angle, he stared up and saw the man who looked and walked like a gorilla. The man still had his club in his misshapen hands. The club was lifted high, and on the man’s lips was a humorless grin of anticipation.

Smitty managed to get one hamlike hand up a little, but that was the only move he could make in his own defense.

The club whistled down!

Smitty was sitting upright, in a most awkward and uncomfortable position. But he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. When he tried to twist arms or legs to attain a new position, legs and arms refused to work.

He opened his eyes. At first all he saw was a yellow glow that waxed and waned with his heartbeats and in time with pain throbs that also occurred with each beat of his heart.

Incidentally, his heart seemed to be beating in his head instead of his chest and seemed to be about the size of an accordion, which someone was opening and shutting.

He got his eyes to functioning again.

He was in a cave about thirty by thirty feet, with a roof dipping down to about eight feet from the rough-rock floor. The cave was lighted by a candle that was stuck in the neck of a bottle in one corner. The candle guttered and threw weird shadows around the place.

Then Smitty saw Mac and Dick.

The two of them sat on an oil drum apiece. At least, they looked like oil drums. They were the same size, of rolled steel, with reinforcing ridges around their centers.

Dick and Mac were bound like a couple of mummies and sat with their backs against the wall. That was his own position, Smitty realized. And he was bound, too, which was why he couldn’t shift out of his awkward posture.

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes were open. They were calmly surveying the cavern. Smitty saw them rest for an appreciable instant on the ceiling.

He looked that way, too.

Down the center of the rock roof ran a thick, bare copper wire or bar. It was about a half-inch in diameter and looked like a lightning conductor. At the end, it split into three. One length was attached to the drum on which Benson sat. Another went to Mac’s uncomfortable throne. The third passed out of Smitty’s sight under his knees, so he guessed that it was similarly connected with his drum.

The far end of the copper conduit couldn’t be seen. The thing went out the low entrance of the cave and off to some other point.

Mac moaned and opened his eyes. He snapped out of it a little faster than Smitty had. He stared at Benson, tried to move, and said, “
Uggh!”

“Exactly,” said Smitty.

The Avenger’s pale eyes rested on Smitty’s moonface, and the giant found it hard to meet that clear, colorless gaze.

“I believe you two were to have gone to get Arnold if I didn’t call out,” said Benson.

“I—” said Smitty. “We—”

Mac said thickly, “We didn’t want to take all that time when ye might be in the process of bein’ murrrdered, Muster Benson.”

“Besides,” said Smitty, “you’re always facing risks that you don’t want the rest of us to take. We thought maybe you were just trying to make us leave a tight spot.”

The pale, infallible eyes passed from then faces, much to the relief of both. An order had been given. Out of sheer loyalty, it had been disobeyed. There was no use discussing it further.

The Avenger stared again at the thick copper cable that came from somewhere outside the cavern and ended with the three steel drums.

“What is all this contraption, Muster Benson?” Mac asked, blinking his bleak blue eyes.

Smitty knew why he was blinking, because he was doing the same thing. The light from the candle, feeble as it was, exaggerated the ache left from the sock on the head he had received at the foot of the chute. It looked, however, as though the light wasn’t going to plague them much longer. The candle was a mere stub in the bottleneck. It would breathe its last any minute now, and then leave them in darkness.

Smitty vastly preferred the ache to the prospective darkness!

“This contraption,” Dick said quietly, echoing the Scot’s word for it, “contains the secret of the power blackout, Mac. A little thing discovered by Nevlo. It is probably the apparatus that keeps Plant 4 from generating power. And it was a similar arrangement, on a larger scale, that blanked out the power of a continent.”