The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (2 page)

The druggist vaulted a corner counter and ran to him, to help him.

“Whoosh, Smitty!” he said. “I heard the explosion. And I heard windows next door break with it. These two were in it?”

The giant nodded, and went to the back room with the two. They laid them on two couches there and worked over them.

“There must have been others, mon,” MacMurdie said. “Where are they?”

“Any others in there will go straight to the undertakers, Mac,” Smitty said. His voice, usually rather high for a man of his bulk, was gruff with sympathy.
“What
an explosion! You never saw the like. What would make one so violent? Dynamite? No. Even TNT wouldn’t go off like that.”

The woman stirred, and the man with his leg broken ceased moaning. The police ambulance came and got them. Then, with the store quiet and normal again, Smitty faced the druggist.

Fergus MacMurdie was about six feet tall, bony, with coarse red hair and bleak blue eyes. His skin was splotched with great, dim freckles. His hands were like bone mallets when he doubled them into fists. He had a pair of ears that stood out like sails, and the biggest feet Smitty had ever seen.

But there was nothing funny about Fergus MacMurdie when he looked as he was looking now.

“Crooked business, Smitty?” he asked. His eyes were like hard blue stones. Like Smitty, he didn’t care for men who resembled rats. But his hatred of all things criminal went deeper than the giant’s. For MacMurdie, years before, had had his wife and small son killed in one of his drugstores by a racketeer’s bomb.

Smitty slowly nodded.

“I think so, Mac. No honest, accidental explosion could have had the force that one had. There’s something very screwy about it.”

“Do we get in touch with the chief?”

“I don’t know, Mac. There doesn’t seem to be anything definite to report about—”

He stopped and grabbed the Scotsman’s bony arm with a force that made the homely freckled face draw up in pain.

“Ye big baboon, leave go my arm—”

“Mac! See that guy out the Sixth Avenue window?”

“What about him?” said Mac, rubbing his arm.

“He was just about to go into the building that blew up, when the explosion stopped him,” said Smitty rapidly. He studied the face of the man walking outside. Rodent chin and nose, beady eyes set too close together. And there was a cut on his cheek which he pressed now and then with a dirty handkerchief. That clinched it.

“That is the man, Mac! If we could get him back here, and see why he was going into that building, we might learn something!”

MacMurdie didn’t even wait to nod. He darted to the pharmaceutical counter, dipped thumb and finger into a wide-mouthed jar there, and went out to the sidewalk. The man was past the store by now. Mac hurried up to him, trouser legs flapping around his bony shins. He caught the man’s shoulder and turned him around.

“Mon,” he said, “ye’ve been hurt. In the explosion, was it? Let me help ye into my store.”

The sidewalk was crowded, as the Sixth Avenue sidewalks usually are. Several people stopped to stare at the two.

The man jerked at Mac’s friendly—but insistent—hand.

“Lemme loose, you Scotch ape!” he snarled.

“But ye’re hurt. Ye’re apt to fall over in a faint if ye don’t take care of yourself.”

“I’ll slug you if you don’t—”

Mac’s thumb and second finger snapped lightly under the man’s nose. With an odd, vacant expression in his beady eyes, the man tried to say something and couldn’t, tried to walk away and couldn’t.

Suddenly he fell, and would have hit the walk if the Scot’s arm hadn’t been ready to catch him.

“See?” Mac said, as if to the people around. “I knew he was on the point of collapse. I’ll take him into my store—”

He carried the man back, and the people moved on. No soul dreamed that when Mac had snapped his fingers so unobtrusively under the man’s nose he had released a volatile anaesthetic of his own manufacture so powerful that a whiff of it knocked a man out in less than three seconds.

In the store, Mac nodded to his helper, a boy of nineteen with intelligent brown eyes and a commendable habit of being absolutely incurious about all the queer things that went on in that store.

“Take over, Bob,” Mac said. “I may be in with this skurlie for an hour.”

He carried the man to the back room, with Smitty following. Smitty locked the door, and they began a strange procedure.

MacMurdie’s drugstore was like no other drugstore in New York City—or in any other city, for that matter.

The store part took up less than a third of the total floor space the venture covered. Two-thirds made up this room in the back. And big as the room was, it seemed overcrowded.

Along one wall was a bench cluttered with all the equipment of a fine chemist’s laboratory. Beakers and retorts and Bunsen burners jostled glass tubing and jars of mysterious compounds.

Along the other wall was a somewhat similar bench with all the paraphernalia that could have been dreamed of by an advanced electrical engineer. And that was Smitty’s side of the big room.

At the rear, taking up about equal spaces, were results of the work of the two. There was a cabinet full of vials containing drugs such as no chemist knew existed—because they were the product of MacMurdie’s genius and were known to no one but him. Beside this was another cabinet which did not open, but which had a curious screen making up its entire front.

This was a television set, designed by Smitty. In it, he had put the work of other men, changed and bettered by his own work, and principles and devices of his own invention. The result was television such as none of the big radio companies had as yet equaled.

Smitty went to the set and turned on the current. He started to warm up the sending apparatus, then said:

“Maybe we’d better see, first, if you can open this guy up, Mac.”

MacMurdie was insulted.

“Whoosh, mon! I can make a statue talk. You should know that by now.”

The man with the rat’s nose and chin and the beady eyes was beginning to move a little and mumble incoherently. Mac carried him to a deep chair in front of the monster television set, and propped him in it.

Before the man’s nose he hung an object that seemed to have come out of a strange dream. And then began a procedure that would have mystified most people—though not if those people had an advanced knowledge of psychiatry.

“You are asleep,” said Smitty, softly, to the man in the chair. “You are asleep, but you can hear and answer questions. You understand?”

The man made no sound or sign.

“You’d better give him another shot, Mac.”

MacMurdie stared at the giant.

“Ye know that’s not necessary.” He tapped a vial he had brought from the cabinet. Beside it was a hypodermic needle. “In here is my own refinement of the stuff that makes twilight sleep. It never fails. He’ll come around, slow, but willin’.”

Smitty twirled the object Mac had hung before the man’s face at eye level. This was a globe, about eighteen inches through, covered with small round mirrors. The mirrors overlapped, so that at no point in the sphere could anything but mirror be seen. As it turned, it shot little glints of light on walls and ceiling. The glints went around and around the room in a dreamy, dizzying march.

Smitty spoke to the man again.

“You are asleep, but you can hear me and answer me. You understand. You are asleep, but—”

“I am asleep,” the man said suddenly. His eyes were wide open. He sat rigidly upright.

“But you can hear me.”

“I can hear you.”

“And you can answer me.”

“I can answer you.”

Smitty twirled the ball again, to keep it moving and hold the man in his trance for a moment. He switched on the big television set.

“Chief, this is Smitty,” he said into the transmitter. “Are you there?”

There was a pause. The screen in the front of the cabinet suddenly took on a clouded look. The clouds faded, and a face stared into the back room of the drugstore.

It was a face to make any man stop and look.

It was as white as linen, as white as silver in a blue light. In it were set eyes of such pale, steely gray as to seem almost colorless. Over the face was a thick mane of snow-white hair, although the man owning it was obviously not elderly. Two things about the countenance set it apart from all others. One was the eyes, pale and deadly, like ice in a dawn at the pole. The other was the absolute immobility of feature. As though carved from white metal that face confronted you, changeless, moveless—dead.

“Chief,” said Smitty to the awesome face, “I think we may have something. There was an explosion a while ago—”

“At 25 Washington Square North,” said the face. The words came from lips that scarcely moved. “I know of it.”

Smitty didn’t ask how the man with the white, dead face knew. That man knew many things, with no person being able to discover how.

“This guy in the chair,” said Smitty, “was about to enter the building when it went up. Shall we see if he can tell us anything about it?”

“Yes,” said the man with the still, white face.

The screen faded. It was ready to transmit images, now, instead of receiving them. Smitty wheeled up a stand on which was his visualizing device.

Standard transmission of images by television is done by passing an electric eye swiftly back and forth across the object to be pictured. Smitty had worked out a multiple-eye device whereby hundreds of miniature photoelectric cells caught an entire scene at one time and instantly sent it whole to the receiver. This was functioning now, as he took up his stand beside the man in the chair. That man stared at the slowly revolving sphere of mirrors, eyes wide and blank.

“Your name,” said Smitty.

“Edward Carp,” said the man, in a voice as mechanical as a phonograph’s.

“You were going into the building that exploded.”

“Yes,” said the man.

“Why were you going in there?”

“To see the guy who hired me yesterday.”

“What did he hire you for?”

“I don’t know yet. He hadn’t told me.”

“What,” said Smitty, “made that explosion?”

“Peanuts,” said the man, voice dull and lifeless.

“Peanuts! What do you mean?”

“They look like peanuts, only a little bigger.”

“The explosion was caused by something looking like large peanuts?”

“Yes.”

“What was the name of the man you were to see?”

“They call him Red. That’s all I know.”

“Did he die in the explosion, or come out of the debris after I left?”

“Red must have died. He stayed in the basement. The explosion must have been an accident, and he must have died.”

“What was the explosive for?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t with Red long enough to be told anything much.”

“Was it for any definite purpose at all?”

“Sure. I don’t know what for. But it was going to be used.”

“Anytime anything like that is used, it will cause more death and destruction, won’t it?”

“Red said a few people might be bumped off, but it would be worth it.”

“What would be worth it?”

“Mexican bricks.”

“What about Mexican bricks?”