The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (3 page)

“Hate to have met him in a dark alley,” said the cop. “Maybe it’s just as well this baby
was
bumped off.”

The wagon clanged up. The officer looked at Smitty. “Guess they’ll take this to the morgue, unless you want to look around some more first.”

“Anything in his pockets, or any marks on him?” asked Smitty.

“Nope. No identification of any kind.”

“I guess there’s nothing else, then,” said Smitty.

The wagon halted at the edge of the crowd. Smitty pushed through and started toward Bleek Street.

And it was almost his last walk!

He got down the rather dark street a little distance, enough to be away from all the people morbidly staring at the scene of murder. He heard a whisper past his ear.

It was a tiny little whisper, such as a husky mosquito might have made. It sounded very innocent and meaningless. But right after it, there was a brittle click and then the sound of a light object falling to the sidewalk.

Smitty had the sixth sense of all who live perilously, which tells of danger near. This sense now warned him so violently that he could feel the hair prickle on his scalp.

The giant could move with the swiftness of a stripling boy when he had to. He moved that way now, ducking low, leaping to one side, leaping back for the object that had fallen to the walk, finally jumping so that a parked car was between him and the other side of the street.

There, bending over the thing, he looked at it with the aid of a tiny flashlight.

“Boy!” he breathed. His hunch had been hideously right.

The little obiect was a dart, a miniature arrow only four inches long, with a needle-sharp point and with two feathers at its tail.

The point was discolored in a way with which Smitty, who frequently assisted Mac in chemical experiments, was all too familiar.

It was poison! A poisoned dart, and it had come a half-inch from his cheek.

Smitty looked through the two windows of the parked car at the buildings across the street. He looked for a long time before he saw the one window that was open a few inches, and behind which there was dark movement.

He debated calling the police up the street, then decided not to. It would probably mean the death of one or two of them. They weren’t equipped to handle savage death from the jungle here in the middle of New York City. It was the function of Justice, Inc., not to expose others to death, but to bear the brunt of peril themselves.

Smitty ducked from behind the car and legged it across the street fast. He felt a light tap on his chest as another dart sang eerily from darkness! That was all right. Smitty, like the others of the band, wore at all times a bulletproof garment made of a flexible, fine stuff invented by The Avenger and called by him celluglass.

If that stuff would stop bullets, which it did, it would stop these little darts, which were sent with only enough force to prick a person lightly.

But Smitty had arms, legs, and head to consider.

He got to the opposite sidewalk. There was a slight whisper, and he felt his hat tug up a bit. A dart was stuck in it. He reached the doorway of the building and charged in.

The window was on the second floor. He dashed up dark stairs, rounded the newel post, ran for the front—and was suddenly covered with small human forms as a big dog can be suddenly covered by fleas!

Smitty hit out with hamlike fists. He could dimly see heads, so most of his blows hit home. He saw, with a lot of satisfaction, one little form after another go down. But there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them. As fast as one bounced to the floor, another sprang in from somewhere.

The only break Smitty got was that no one was trying to stick him with poisoned pins. There were so many swarming over him that they couldn’t use the darts for fear of pricking each other.

The giant took two forms and tossed them over the stair rail. They clattered down below and promptly ceased to make any noise.

He took two others and knocked their heads together. And all the time he felt a creepy sensation going up and down his spine.

Busy as his hands were, they couldn’t help, after a while, but feel a striking similarity among the forms he was mauling around. Also, they couldn’t help but feel the striking malformation of the forms.

They all felt like monkeys!

Was he fighting men—or giant apes?

He gathered three or four in his arms and squeezed. When he got through, at last, he could count his assailants. There were only six, now. And the battle between giant and pygmies lasted only another half-minute.

He smacked two clear back down the hall out of sight in shadows, and the other four ran. They ran silently, wholeheartedly, around the newel post and down the steps, leaving Smitty panting, the solitary figure on the field.

He didn’t stand there long; he went on to the front of the building, which was his goal. He opened the door leading into the room he’d decided on as belonging to the partly opened window.

At first, he didn’t see anything in the room. It seemed vacant even of furniture. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw a vague white figure on the floor, sitting with back to the end wall. He went toward it.

It was a girl, in a gray-white dress.

“Hello!” he said, in amazement. It looked as if he had the wrong room after all. But there was the window, partly open. “What are you doing here?”

The girl didn’t say anything.

“Are you in with that gang of baboons, or did they capture you and bring you here?”

The girl didn’t say anything.

Puzzled, Smitty bent over her. He could see her only faintly, but it was enough to show that she wasn’t tied up. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t get up off the floor. And there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t talk.

“Look here—” Smitty began. He broke it off to say,
“Ouch!”

Something like a needle had jabbed him lightly in the back of the hand.

For an instant the giant just rubbed at it absently. But then he heard light footsteps scamper down the hall outside, to the stairs, down them. And at the same time, the realization of just what that needle prick was exploded in his brain.

The little monkey men had been stupid to gang up on him when he came in, though they probably hadn’t dreamed that the man existed who could lick all of them as Smitty had. What they should have done, if they’d kept their heads, was let him come peacefully down the hall, then pop him with arrows from a safe distance.

One of the little men had just done precisely that, now.

He had crept to the open door of the room, calmly aimed, and calmly sent a poisoned dart into the giant’s hand.

Smitty whistled and began frantically sucking the back of his hand. This was curtains for him, unless—

“Come on!” he snapped to the girl. “We’ve got to get out of here fast!”

The girl didn’t say anything.

Smitty, too desperate to fool around any longer, stooped and picked her up. He held her under one arm like a roll of carpet and ran down the stairs, sucking his other hand as he did so.

He got to his car.

“Can you drive? Do you know where Bleek Street is?” he said swiftly.

The girl just looked at him, blank-eyed, like a broken doll. She didn’t say anything. She did, however, stand on her own feet, now that he had set her down.

He shoved her into the car.

Already, the giant was experiencing a not-unpleasant feeling of numbness. It made him step on the gas till the big car squealed on two wheels as it shot into Sixth Avenue against the red light. He had only a few minutes to live!

Curare!

He knew the symptoms. He also had read, not once, but several times, that there was no known antidote. But Dick Benson now and then upset what was known and what was unknown.

“Got to get to the chief!”

The giant reeled drunkenly in the driver’s seat. The car reeled, too, but miraculously avoided collisions. He whirled into Bleek Street. His eyes were getting dulled to light.

“Come on, you!”

This was to the girl, as he got out of the car. Overhead was the small sign, Justice, Inc. He could hardly see it.

If the girl had continued to be moveless as well as speechless, she’d have had to sit indefinitely down in the car, for Smitty hadn’t time to haul her out and hadn’t the strength left to carry her.

But this time, she seemed at least to hear him. She got out of the car in a brainless, docile way, like an automaton. She followed him to the door.

Smitty passed his hand three times, then once again, in front of a spot next to the inner door. The thick panel of bullet-proof glass opened in response to the action of an electric eye. Smitty went into the elevator. Like an inanimate object attached to him by a string, the girl followed.

Smitty was on hands and knees when the car reached the top floor. He opened the door of the vast headquarters room and fell in.

The girl followed and squatted on the floor like a child or a savage, but Smitty could no longer see her. He could no longer see anyone.

“Chief,” he whispered. “Chief!”

“Yes, Smitty.”

The Avenger had been at the big desk thirty feet from the door when the giant fell into the room. He’d covered the thirty feet so fast you could hardly follow his movements. Dick had one fear in an otherwise fearless nature. That was for the safety of his aides. Nothing called forth all the powers of genius he possessed as quickly as trouble to one of them.

“I’m here, Smitty.” The voice of the man with the pale, glacial eyes was vibrant, compelling.

Smitty moistened his unfeeling lips.

“Curare!”
he got out. And then the world went black for him.

Mac drew in his breath with a frightened hiss. A brilliant chemist, he knew the dread meaning of that word. Death within a few minutes. Sure death! No known antidote.

But then commenced a drama that held the breath of everyone—except of the girl Smitty had brought in. She continued to sit on the floor without movement or sound, like a broken mechanical thing, seeing nothing, interested in nothing.

The Avenger leaped for a ceiling-high cabinet in which were countless bottles. One of the bottles was in one hand and a hypodermic needle was in the other when he leaped back to the giant again.

Mac watched despairingly. He was too good a chemist to hope for Smitty’s life, even with Dick Benson administering to him. Curare, known also as woorarli, an extract derived from the
cocculus Amazonum,
containing picrotoxin! You couldn’t cheat death with that stuff!

Mac stared at Smitty. He was breathing with less difficulty. Then he was breathing normally, though his eyes were closed in a profound stupor. And color was coming back into his face!

The Scot gazed with awe at The Avenger. The mask of a face was as emotionless as ever. The eyes were as calm in their colorlessness. Mac looked at the little bottle The Avenger held. It was like pale milk; no telling what was in it.

But whatever it was, Smitty was incredibly going to be all right again. He had come to the chief in childlike faith that somehow he could cure him. And his faith was justified.

Dick nodded in answer to Mac’s look.

“It seems to work. It’s an antidote I perfected about four months ago, and I haven’t yet had time to prove it. Had to take a chance with Smitty, though. I’ll turn it over now to a laboratory for proving, and afterward it can be sent out to all hospitals.”

The girl on the floor looked vacantly up at The Avenger.

For the first time she spoke.

“Radium,” she said. “Radium. The green killer.”

That seemed to be her contribution for the day. She said no more, though they tried in every way possible to make her speak. Just those two incomprehensible things. Radium. Green killer.

The man’s name was Arthur Heber. He was from New York, originally, but had lived in South America for many years, not coming back to the States till now.

He told them about it, propped in a chair, looking more than ever like a trained ape instead of a human being. A very sick ape.

He’d lived for years in Manaos, Brazil, far up the Amazon River. He’d had a rubber plantation, which he’d lost. Then he had been in charge of an experimental station trying to grow tung trees. This had failed, and he had lived in poverty on what he could make as a guide.

“I was about to starve when Alden Stahl showed up,” he said.

To none of them but The Avenger did that name mean anything. But little Nellie noticed that the pale, cold eyes of The Avenger glinted suddenly, like icy jewels, at the mention of Alden Stahl.

“He’s part engineer and part prospector,” Heber began to explain.

“I know,” Dick interrupted. “Go on.”

Stahl had heard there was a spot far up the Negro River, a branch of the mighty Amazon, where pitchblende was found to be miraculously rich in radium. He wanted Heber to guide him there.

“I didn’t want to go,” said the man who looked like a red-haired ape. “I knew of the spot. Never had been there. I don’t think any white man has ever been there. Stahl heard of it from a dying native who had radium sores all over him just from being near the rich pitchblende deposits.”