The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (6 page)

Smitty, noticing, took out his own handkerchief and tossed it to Daggit.

Gas was a much-used weapon in the fight of the underworld against The Avenger and his crew, so each of them went always prepared. Each kept a coat lapel saturated with a chemical of MacMurdie’s invention that would nullify the effects of gas and, in addition, carried at least one handkerchief similarly saturated.

But the chemical could only stall off the effects of a lethal gas for a short time before becoming useless, and it looked as if they would be in that room a very long time before breaking out.

“You can’t batter that steel down,” said Daggit to Smitty. “It was designed to withstand just such assaults.”

Smitty said nothing. He raised the chair. It was of metal and very strong.

“Big as you are—” began Daggit, pessimistically.

The chair fairly whistled through the air as Smitty’s vast arms swung it.

It hit against the metal shield like a steam hammer on a boiler plate.

And nothing seemed to happen.

“I told you,” said Daggit. “Good heavens! Who could have done such a thing? Right in the hospital! This is chlorine gas—deadly! And we can’t get out—”

“You had better,” said The Avenger calmly, “save your breath and inhale through the handkerchief.”

Bang!

The ponderous metal chair slammed against the steel curtain again. The chair, with the two blows, was beginning to take on the shape of a pretzel.

Smitty was gasping. He was unable to breathe through his lapel properly and still swing the chair. But he saw, if no one else did, that the steel curtain was giving a very little in the center.

Bang!

Dr. Daggit’s eyes were wide. Never before had he seen such a blow. And he didn’t think he ever would again. Under it, the two metal chair legs bent clear around on themselves.

And the steel shield bellied inward in the middle like the bottom of a dishpan with a hundred-pound rock dropped on it from a second-story window.

Bang!

“That does it,” said Smitty, tottering a little with the deadly effects of the gas.

He whipped his lapel over his nose with his left hand, and got his right into the crack, between steel and window frame, resulting from the bending of the metal.

He braced his feet against the wall, and with shoulders, legs, and enormous right hand, he pulled.

The shield bent back into the room like the top of a tin can bent over after it has been two-thirds cut with a can-opener.

Smitty smashed the glass of the window, and the gas began swirling out. Daggit stared at the big man with eyes that were still wide with wonder.

“It isn’t possible,” he said. “These metal sheets were designed against just such efforts by strong men. And you could do
that
to one of them! I sincerely hope you are never brought into this place as a patient, my friend.”

Smitty grinned. They waited till the head nurse, on her regular round, came to the door and rectified the “mistake” someone had made in shutting the steel door on a staff doctor and a couple of visitors.

By then it was much too late to get hold of the killer who had tried to murder them all in the room where Janet Weems lay. So Benson didn’t even try.

While waiting for the door to be opened—
that
panel was a bit too massive even for Smitty—Benson had gone over the girl’s clothing. And he had seen a dress label that instantly caught his attention.

The label proclaimed that the frock had been bought in a store in an Ohio town called Marville. And it had brought the diamond glitter instantly to The Avenger’s pale, icy eyes because this was the second time the name of that town had cropped up recently.

He had partially traced the man who had died at Bleek Street after getting out the strangled words: “Midnight, April 27—” Traced him to Cleveland, then to Marville, Ohio. And he had tentatively fixed the man’s occupation as that of electrician because of tiny fragments of rubber in the welt of his shoe sole, identifiable as the type used in electric-cable insulation, and because of microscopic bits of copper under his fingernails.

A man racing against death to Bleek Street from Marville, Ohio! Now, a girl coming from the same place, having skirted danger so terrible that it had temporarily deranged her mind, but who was still mumbling that she “must get through to Benson!”

“Get Mac, Smitty,” Dick said to the giant. “Meet me at the hangar. We’re taking a plane to Marville.”

By desperate efforts, Grant Utilities had managed to keep the light of publicity off the fantastic failure of their new Plant 4. The papers hadn’t printed the story. But you didn’t have to be in Marville long before you heard about it.

And a man like Dick Benson didn’t have to hear about such a bizarre thing twice before he was instantly on his way to investigate. About twenty-five minutes after landing in Marville’s small airport, Benson and Mac and Smitty drew up in a rented car before the entrance of the useless power plant.

They were about two miles from Marville, in a section that, with the shallow gorge in Marville River which made the rapids powering the turbines, was too craggy and wild for other structures. No one lived near the plant; the countryside was very quiet.

“Feels kind of creepy around here,” was Smitty’s reaction to the unusual silence and desolation.

They went in. Benson asked to see the engineer in charge.

The man he questioned was a big fellow in dungarees with a dark and sullen face.

“You mean Bill Burton? He ain’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know. He went to Cleveland, and I ain’t heard from him since.”

“Then,” said Benson, pale eyes fixed on the darkly sullen face, “I’ll ask my questions of you.”

“I’m not answerin’ any questions,” the man snapped. “So you can go roll your hoop some place else.”

When any person, great or humble, refused to answer The Avenger’s questions in that half-frightened, half-defiant tone, in spite of the glacial compulsion of the cold, pale eyes, there was something wrong.

Smitty got the retreating man in one leap. The giant held him off the floor with his great left hand clutching a fold of the denim jacket at the man’s neck. It was like holding up a kitten by the nape of the neck.

Smitty’s vast right, doubled into an unbelievable fist, gently touched the man’s jaw at the end of a two-inch stab. The fellow’s head rocked.

“You’ve been asked a civil question,” Smitty said silkily. “You’ll be asked a few more. We sincerely hope you’ll be good enough to answer them all.”

The man’s frightened eyes showed that he had decided to be very good indeed, and when he was released, he answered questions promptly.

The incredible tale came out.

A fine, modern power plant with generators, turned by the turbines, whining their swift song. The latest in plant design, all checked many times for errors.

And no power coming from it.

Smitty’s first doubled again.

“You’re lying,” he rumbled. “That isn’t possible.”

“It’s the truth,” said the man quickly. “I swear it! There was a dedication, see? The Marville mayor threw the main switch to start things things off. And nothing happened. No power, see? But everything seemed all right. And still does.”

The Avenger’s eyes were flaring bits of bright ice. And Smitty’s fist slowly uncoiled as he recalled that about the same story had lain in the recent brief power failure in New York.

Whirring generators, nothing perceptibly wrong, and no power being generated.

“All right,” he growled, “what’s the answer?”

“We don’t know,” said the man, looking at the giant’s great hands. “But I think it’s got something to do with Nevlo.”

“Nevlo?” said The Avenger, voice as icy as his eyes.

“He was chief engineer here before Burton. He laid out the joint, and then he got fired. Bad-tempered guy with black hair and eyes; held his head to the left all the time.”

“How could he keep the plant from functioning?”

“How do I know?” snarled the man. He changed tone and expression as the great fists began to double again. “I mean, nobody knows,” he said. “All we know is that Nevlo laughed when the dedication went sour, and he swore the plant would never be any good till he was back running it again.”

Smitty and The Avenger looked at each other. The thought behind the china-blue eyes of the giant, and the dread pale eyes of Benson was the same:

Possibly a man could do such a thing. If so, it would be only another step from stopping one power plant to stopping all power plants.

“But a mon would have to be a wizard—” began MacMurdie. Then he stopped, and all listened.

Outside, on the graveled road ending at the plant’s entrance, came the sound of a rapidly driven car. An old car, judging by the rattles. They looked out a lofty window and saw an ancient flivver shudder to a stop. A man in a cheap gray suit, with a cap on, raced from the car and into the plant.

“Pete!” he yelled to the man with the dark face. He paid no attention to the others. “Pete, I just saw Nevlo!”

“Nevlo?” barked the other man. “You sure? Everybody in the company’s been trying to find him. Are you
sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. You can’t mistake the guy—tall, black-haired, with his head held over to the left. Sure, it was Nevlo. But he won’t look like that any more!”

The Avenger caught the man’s shoulder. He didn’t mean to hurt him, but such was the power of his slim white hands that the man screamed a little with what Benson meant to be only a firm pressure.

It was the second man’s turn to get the full shock of staring into the pale clarity of Benson’s eyes. He shivered and stood still, even though the slim, steely fingers were compressing his flesh to the bone.

“What do you mean Nevlo won’t look like that any more?” Benson demanded.

“It’s like this,” whimpered the man. “I see Nevlo off on the top of a mound across the gorge from the plant. There’s a little bare spot on the mound, with trees around, and he’s in the bare spot. He’s standing beside something that sticks up from the ground like a radio antenna. I start to go closer to him because I want to tell him that Blake, president of the company, wants to see him. Any of us who find Nevlo are to do that. But before I get near enough there’s a hell of a big blue flash from the thing like an antenna, so big it blinds me and I don’t see anything but electric blue for a second. When I look again, I see Nevlo running from the place where the antenna was. But there’s nothing there any more. There’s just a blue hole in the ground. And Nevlo ain’t the same. He’s running like a gorilla, with half his clothes burned off, and he’s yelling like a crazy man.”

“You think the explosion, or whatever it was, did that to him?” said Benson.

“Yeah! I think the accident crippled him some way and drove him nuts. I think he was experimenting with something, and it went wrong.”

There was silence, in which the dark-faced Pete forgot to be sulky, and Benson’s face was calmly pensive, and Mac and Smitty stared in something like horror at each other.

A man capable, in some grimly miraculous way, of stopping a power plant—perhaps of stopping all power plants! And now—if this fellow’s story was true—a man warped in body and soul by some experimental slip! A madman!

Benson sped toward the exit, with Mac and Smitty after him.