The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (18 page)

“Whoosh!
” said the Scot. “Then we’ve finally tracked it down!” Which disregarded somewhat the fact that they had fallen into it, rather than done any tracking.

It was usually the part of MacMurdie to croak dismally of sure failure. Smitty took the role himself, this time.

“Sure,” he said, “we’ve tracked it down. So what? We can’t do anything about it.”

“Oh, we’ll get out of this mess,” said Mac. For it was another of his strange characteristics that when things seemed blackest he invariably shed his pessimism and became as optimistic as a bird with a couple of worms.

Smitty stared at the cable.

“The secret of the power failures, eh?” he mused. “I have a sort of idea on that, but not a very exact one. Have you worked it out yet, chief?”

The Avenger nodded.

“Yes. I formed a pretty conclusive idea some time ago of just what must have been done. This confirms it.”

The candle flared up, down, almost went out. Then the flame caught on the dregs of wax and steadied again.

“At the beginning, of course,” said The Avenger, “it was necessary to start with pure theory. Not only power plants, but
all
electrical generating systems, on cars and farms and boats, everything, went dead. What could conceivably cause such a universal stoppage of units having nothing whatever to do with each other? There was only one theoretical answer.

“It could be accomplished only by somehow short-circuiting, in given areas, the constant electrical power of the earth, itself.

“As you know, the earth is really a gigantic generating unit. Whirling in space, it creates power. When we turn a generator rapidly and generate power, we are in reality trapping part of this earth-generated electricity. Now, if that fundamental power could be diverted from a given area, in other words, if a section of earth could be short-circuited, within that area no electrical unit would work. Power could not be generated, no matter how fast our generators turned, because they’d be turning in a sort of electrical vacuum.”

“Mon, ’tis an impossibility ye’re talkin’ of,” protested MacMurdie.

“It would seem so,” Dick said. “Yet, it was done. Till now, I have been unable to figure out quite how. But these drums, and Burton’s mumble of some chemical, provide the answer. It would seem that fundamental chemistry has at last merged with fundamental physics in the shape of electricity.

“To stop Plant 4, Nevlo set up a spire, or discharge point, on either side of the building, bracketing it. I imagine these points were, and are, concealed in tall trees on the crest of each bank forming the gorge through which Marville River runs. These two poles
are both
positive,
which means that earth’s electrical current, gathered at the two points instead of bridging the gap, repels itself and cuts off that small section entirely. An electrical vacuum—”

“But what,” said Smitty, jaws open with amazement, “could bring earth’s current to a focal point at each of the two poles?”

“This chemical in the drums we’re sitting on,” said Benson evenly. “As I said, it seems that fundamental chemistry has merged with fundamental laws of electricity. Nevlo somehow found a chemical that brings to a focal point all the electricity in the vicinity. I should have known that before now. Needles—
with roots.
The needles, of course, are the poles set up for the short-circuiting. The roots are cables going down to this chemical buried in the earth—the earth being represented, in the diagram Janet Weems described, as a wavy line under the needle. The lines from the needle’s tip represented lines of force. Specifically, in the case of the last power blackout, one needle, or pole, was the radio tower at Portland. The other was the radio tower at Los Angeles, with a confederate doing the work out there. These two poles shorted earth’s power over a continent till the terrific current burned out the ground cable, the drum in the earth containing the chemical, and the tips of the towers themselves. The radio power tubes, of course, blew at the first touch.”

Smitty shook his head in something like awe.

“That’s the biggest achievement of the century,” he said. “Nevlo must have been a genius before his accident.”

“Yes, a genius. But a warped genius. For this thing, mighty as it is, is entirely destructive. It can be used for no constructive purpose whatever. It was of value only as a tremendous lever with which to pry blackmail out of the utilities corporations.”

“And we’re sittin’ on a similar arrangement, now?” demanded Mac, staring apprehensively at the drums.

“Yes,” said The Avenger, voice as calm as his icy, colorless eyes.

“It doesn’t seem to be working,” said Smitty.

“I imagine,” Dick said, “that the chemical, unaltered, is static and does not function. It would have to be that way, or it could not be handled at all; you can’t carry drums around with all earth’s lightning coursing through your body. To perform its task, the chemical must need the final addition of some other element. Perhaps another chemical, perhaps mere moisture.”

Smitty didn’t like his next question, because he really knew the answer in advance. But he asked it, anyway.

“Why are we roosting on drums of the stuff?”

Benson’s eyes and tone continued to be as calm as if he were discussing the weather.

“We have meddled in this blackmail plan. So we are to be liquidated. We are to be electrocuted, with Mother Earth, herself, providing the current. The copper cable overhead, no doubt, leads out to one of Nevlo’s power spires. At some moment in the near future, this chemical will be made to function. Earth will be short-circuited in this small area, through these drums.”

“Well,” said Smitty, “you can’t even guess at the millions of volts that’ll stream up and away from each other through Nevlo’s needles. But I know one thing. That copper cable, thick as it is, won’t begin to carry the load.”

The Avenger said nothing. Smitty went reluctantly on with his train of thought.

“So,” he said, “when the show commences, cable and drums and everything else will be almost instantly consumed by the gigantic electrical overload.”

“Hey,” said Mac, “and what becomes of
us?”

“We’ll be cinders, only you won’t be able to find us,” said Smitty. “Neat way of disposing of bodies, I’d say.”

“So this is what the workman who died on our threshold wanted to tell us,” said Mac, veering away from the personal angle. “He’d got a hint of the thing. And Burton, the new engineer, had caught a glimpse of the secret. He was blown up in his car. Janet Weems got through, but was shocked out of her mind—”

The sound of steps stopped him. A man came into the cave.

“Hi, pals,” he said to the bound three. “Havin’ a good time?”

“You’ll have a better one, ye skurlie, if we ever get loose,” grated Mac.

“You won’t get loose,” said the man. “Or your buddies, either. You’re goin’ to go up in smoke, in about three minutes. I don’t know how it’s done, but I do know it works!”

The man was carrying a can with a long spout on it.

“What’s in the can?” asked Benson, voice calm and cold and even.

The man stared curiously, and a little fearfully, at The Avenger. Then he shrugged.

“Water, if it’ll do you any good to know,” he said. “Just plain aqua that you wash your hands in.”

In each of the three steel drums there was a plug near the top. The man unscrewed these with a wrench. Into the holes he inserted the spout, pouring a third of his bucketful of water into each drum. He didn’t bother to put the plugs back.

He was just withdrawing the spout from the third drum, Smitty’s drum, when the candle gave a final flare, then went out.

His laugh sounded in the darkness.

“So long, pals. As soon as this stuff gets soaked clear to the bottom, and as soon as the big shot outside makes contact, all your troubles will be over.”

His steps, accelerated a little as if he were afraid the drums would explode or something, sounded to mouth of the small cave and out.

The three couldn’t hear anything at all in the dark.

Smitty was first to say something. The giant’s voice was measured and even. Smitty didn’t want to die. But he, and every one of The Avenger’s little band, knew that his number would have to be up eventually.

This was it!

Smitty could hear Mac thumping around on his drum, trying to get loose. Smitty wasn’t trying that any more. As he had found out in a dozen previous attempts, even his gigantic strength couldn’t break those bonds.

“I wonder,” said Mac sourly, “how long it takes all this stuff underneath us to get thoroughly soaked.”

“That guy said something about a contact to be made outside, too,” said Smitty. “A big master switch of some kind, I suppose.”

There was a sound of footsteps again. Then a solid thump.

“Chief!” yelled Smitty, in sudden fear.

There was no answer.

“Muster Benson—” quavered Mac.

“The rats!” raged Smitty. “That guy with the bucket must have come back and socked the chief. Even tied up and in the dark, they’re afraid of him. Hitting a guy when he can’t hit back! If I could get my hands on them—”

“ ’Tis just as well,” said Mac somberly. “The chief might as well be unconscious when all this happens. Not that it’d make dyin’ any easier for him. I’ve thought all along that he’d really like that, sort of. But it would make him so mad to think that for once he got licked by the human lice he hates so much—”

“Well!” said Smitty. “Seems to me you’re singing a different tune. Licked, huh? A minute ago you said you were sure we’d get out of this.”

“Well, I’m still sure,” mumbled Mac, without conviction.

They sat in silence, then, unable to see each other, unable to see Dick Benson’s unconscious form. They couldn’t even see the barrels of death on which they sat.

With their eyes accustomed to pitch darkness, they could now see, at the entrance to the cave, a faint little flicker of light from a candle a long way off. Out there, somewhere, near the spot where that thick upper cable led . . .

The other end of the cable was nearly a hundred yards from the prison cave.

The cable ran down the tunnel roof to this spot, then went up into a narrow fissure in the rock roof. Presumably, it went on up to the surface and there contacted the foot of the steel spire, which was necessary to form a discharge point for the electricity focused by the chemical in the drums.

But between floor and roof, in the thick cable, was a yard-long gap. Slanted out from one end of this was a copper bar of just the right length to bridge the gap. When the bar was placed across the gap, the circuit would be completed, just as a circuit is completed when a conventional switch is thrown. So that, in effect, this copper bar was a master switch.

The handle of the switch was ten feet long, insulated over all its length. The current to flow along the bar was obviously something to compel extreme respect.

Near the switch were nearly twenty men.

Any of the Avenger’s crew, had they been there, would have recognized one of them. It was the man who had come running to the power plant with the tale of Nevlo’s freak accident that had turned him into a gorilla-twisted madman. The rest were just a fine assortment of gangsters of the type you would instinctively turn to if you wanted a few orphans and widows machine-gunned.

There were two other men there. One was the gorilla himself, weaving around the rock floor in a sort of silly dance, with his arms in front of him like a wrestler. The second was evident only as a voice. The owner sat on a rock off to one side in the shadows, so that he looked almost like part of the rock himself.

“We’ll give it another few minutes,” this one said in incisive, authoritative tones. “We want to be sure the chemical is completely ready. Probably it’s ready, now, but I don’t know the exact time required after pouring in the water.”

The men looked with varying degrees of curiosity at the impromptu master switch to be thrown in a minute. But there was one expression on their faces that didn’t show any variation. It was the same with all.

That was a sort of supernatural fear.

Every one of them had dealt death to a fellow human. But it was the kind of death a gangster could understand—via gun, knife or bomb. Now, in a moment, one of their number would move the switch, and three men would go up in blue flame! The weirdness of it awed them.

Two candles gave light in this larger cave at the far end of the copper conduit. Evidently, the figure in shadow, with face and body unidentifiable, could see the luminous hands of his watch.

He said: “One minute more—”

The candles went out.