The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (12 page)

It was impossible to do more than glance at the contraption during the lunch hour. And Benson wanted much more than a glance. So it gave him two reasons for going through with the program he’d had in mind when he came in here.

The other reason being to see if anything funny went on in the Marr plant at night, and the program being to stay all night and find out.

That was accomplished by the simple expedient of just not going out with the others when the afternoon’s work drew to a close.

The other men went out. And Benson sat on a pile of steel billets, behind a rack holding drill rods of various sizes. And then the plant was empty, save for several watchmen who would be as hard to find in the acres of floor as ants in a desert.

It was ghostly in the great building, with night lights glowing at intervals, and far in the distance the steps of a watchman going to one of his boxes. And it was particularly ghostly when you remembered that, usually at night, this place was humming with activity. Machinery in big plants is so costly that even if business scarcely justifies it, it must be run day and night in shifts to get back out of it in profits the huge sums the installation costs.

But it was certainly dead tonight; so Benson came out of his corner after a while and went again to the end of the third assembly line.

He crouched down behind a machine while a watchman came past with a slow, regular tread, like a military sentry. Then he went to the box.

He wheeled one of the tripods, which was on casters, to the aperture in the right-hand side of the box. The thick slab from which all the wires came, fitted the aperture exactly. The inner surface of the slab, Benson noted, was of quartz. It bore out his theory of a ray treatment of the steel. Through that quartz slab, as through a window, some force or other rayed over the finished cars that were slowly drawn through the great box—

There was the slightest imaginable sound, far down the line from where Dick Benson stood. Instantly he was behind the end of the box, where the assembly line stopped. He peered down toward where the sound had come from.

He had just a flash of a leg in striped cotton, such as he wore, himself—the clothes of a workman. Then the leg disappeared behind one of the hundreds of small, rubber-tired trucks in which parts were wheeled through the plant.

Dick Benson was not the only workman—or rather, intruder dressed in workman’s garments—to have allowed himself to be locked in the plant!

With the little gun, Mike, in his hand, The Avenger went toward that truck. And the truck started rolling slowly away from him, as if it were an animal with life of its own, retreating from him—and forming a perfect shield for the man behind it as it moved.

Benson had to flank the fellow, somehow; so he went for the shadow of the next assembly line. There, head down, he raced for the end of the shop, till he got ahead of the slowly moving truck.

And there he found that he was up against somebody who had plenty of brains. For—there was no one behind that truck.

It had been given a gentle shove, to keep it rolling for another half minute, and the shover had then disappeared in shadow himself.

Benson started to turn, and then found out where the man was.

He was right behind him!

Hands found Benson’s throat—hands that seemed made of metal instead of flesh! And a leg like a steel cable was curved around his own legs.

The Avenger had fought strong men in his life. In fact, he had once been forced to fight the giant Smitty, himself. But he had never felt such appalling force exerted against him as now!

It took all his skill and all his own almost superhuman power to break that grip and turn.

Even then, he didn’t get a good look at his assailant. The man kept his head down, so that the rather dim lighting in the vast plant didn’t show up his features.

Benson ducked a blow that would have broken his jaw and lashed out himself. And—his blow was ducked!

That sounds simple enough. A man hits at another, and the other twists out of the way. But not one man in a hundred thousand could move as fast as Dick Benson. Which meant that about that percentage could duck one of his fast punches.

The man butted with his head down, and he got The Avenger hard enough before Benson could roll to the charge. Then Benson caught the right shoulder of the fellow, in work clothes.

Never had he felt such slabs and sheaths of flexible steel as this man had for muscles! It was like grabbing hold of an iron beam. But he twisted and jerked in a deft jujitsu hold.

The man went up and over The Avenger’s shoulder. And that should have been the end. He should have smashed back down on the floor with a force to stun him. But he didn’t!

Like a great cat, the man turned a complete circle in the air, lit on his feet and lit running.

He ran for the great box at the end of Line 3.

Benson raced after him. And even here it seemed that he had almost met his match. Dick Benson could run a hundred yards in nine seconds flat. But this man lost less than a yard in a pursuit that must have covered close to a hundred before the box was reached.

At that point the man leaped like a tiger on the broad assembly belt and darted into the box.

Benson similarly leaped, and darted after him. He saw the man flash out the other door, the far opening at the end of the line.

Then at each end of the box-carlike chamber, a great steel door slid smoothly down. Benson halted in mid-flight and streaked for the side of the box.

He himself had plugged one of the windowlike apertures a few moments ago, when he experimentally wheeled the quartz-faced slab into place to see if that was where it fitted.

He raced for the other opening. And just before he got there, it was plugged by the other quartz window. The slabs didn’t yield backward an inch when he tried to push them. The tripods had been fastened some way outside.

The doors didn’t even quiver when he slammed against them.

He was trapped in here!

A low humming suddenly sounded, seeming to be inside his head rather than coming to his ears from outside. Whatever type of current it was that went through those wrist-thick cables, leading to the slabs, had been turned on.

The Avenger had guessed a great deal about the secret process that Phineas Jackson had invented for tempering steel.

Ray tempering.

And his profound knowledge of chemistry and physics had led him even nearer to the truth.

Some electronic ray had been discovered that tempered steel—possibly all metals—by rearranging the molecules. Perhaps it “combed” them straight, so that each rod and sheet was formed of myriad lines of molecules in orderly close array, instead of a jumble of them occurring in a promiscuous pattern.

That would make steel tough almost beyond imagining. And it was quite a logical and probable theory, because for some time laboratory scientists had succeeded in thus combining molecules, though not for commercial use.

Assume, then, a ray powerful enough to penetrate every atom of an entire assembled automobile, tempering every steel particle in it. Then put a human being—human flesh and blood—in the path of those rays, as The Avenger was!

What would happen to that flesh and blood?

Benson had no time to speculate on it. And he had no chance to think at all after that. Thought was impossible. Movement was impossible. He was simply an inert mass of torment!

He sagged to the floor of the great box. Rather, to the broad bed of the assembly line which normally moved slowly through here and formed the floor.

Every atom of his body was bursting like a tiny bomb! That was what his quivering nerves told him. He wasn’t a man, he was a ball of fire. He had no legs, arms, internal organs—he was just a lump of pain!

Red-hot needles drove through him. He was dimly aware that his muscles were leaping and jerking against each other, like the muscles of a dead frog on electrical contact.

Particularly did his face and hands seem to be bathed in the terrific, unseen flame. Perhaps the fabric of the clothing that covered the rest of him offered a very faint protection against rays designed to go through metal rather than through vegetable or animal substances such as wool and cotton.

He was in the heart of a volcano, sinking in red flame, sinking—

Benson seemed to be floating some place in faint gray light. There was a fiery sensation at hands and face, as if nettles were being pressed against raw flesh there.

Then he realized that he wasn’t floating, because something hard and sharp was sticking into his back. And it hurt.

He was lying some place, and lying on something that jabbed painfully. He opened his eyes.

“Oh, you’re comin’ out of it!” said a voice.

Benson saw one of the plant watchmen looking anxiously down at him. The man’s face was twisted with worry, and his eyes expressed agonized concern.

“Gosh! I thought sure you were dead when I found you lyin’ here on this pile of pipe a minute ago. I was just going to phone a doc in a hurry. Or the undertaker. Who are you, anyhow?”

The Avenger’s powerful body had been knocked haywire. But there was, it seemed, nothing wrong with his brain.

He thought he had better not give the name of the stock-room employee in whose likeness he had entered the plant that morning—no, yesterday morning. The gray light around him was that of dawn; he had been in the plant all night.

He did not know what had happened to his face. But something drastic had affected it! There was a queer, and as yet unidentifiable, sensation in it that he had not felt in years.

Quite probably he did not look like the man any more; so he had better not give that name.

But it didn’t take Benson as long to think this out as it takes to tell it. With scarcely a hesitation after the watchman’s question, he said:

“I’m Stanislau Calek, a new man in the stock room.”

“How is it you’re here?” demanded the watchman, face half solicitous and half suspicious.

“I have fainting spells,” said Benson evenly. “I must have keeled over here just before the plant was locked up last night.”

“That’s a long time for a faintin’ spell,” said the watchman, staring at Benson’s head. There was something wrong about The Avenger’s head, too; it felt curiously cold to him, over the fiery mass that was his face.

“Yes, I guess it must have been the worst spell I’ve ever had,” The Avenger replied.

He tried to get up, couldn’t quite make it, and then felt the man’s hand under his arm. With that to steady him, he stood on trembling legs which had hardly any feeling at all. All the sensation in his body seemed limited to head and hands.

The watchman was still staring hard at Benson’s head.

“Boy, you must have a hell of a time on a cold winter day,” he sniggered.

The Avenger didn’t say anything to that, because it didn’t seem to have any meaning.

“Want I should get a doc for you?”

“No, I’m all right,” said Benson. He took a few steps, just barely managing to keep from falling, but concealing his weakness as well as he could.

He must have been very close to death for the terrific aftermath to last this long. Very close to death! Yet, the man who had trapped him in the box had deliberately turned the current off to avoid killing him, and then had dragged him out here to recover.

That seemed very tender-hearted for a member of the gang that had stolen the mystery car, murdering freely to get and keep it.

“I’ll go with you to the gate,” said the man. “It’s a quarter after five. I’ll be punchin’ outta here, anyhow, in a little while.”

Benson only nodded, saving his strength for the long walk. He made it, on sheer will power, leaning heavily on the man’s arm.

“You gotta car?”

Again Benson nodded. He had come in the stock-room man’s car. It was down the line in the vast parking lot that was provided for employees. The owner must be pretty nervous by now—also Smitty and Mac and Nellie and Josh—at not having heard from their chief.

They were, all right!

Up in the hotel suite, they all surrounded him and stared literally with their mouths open. Exclamations of surprise burst from them. Nellie particularly was petrified with wide-eyed astonishment.

“Chief! Your face!” she whispered.

Benson rubbed his hands over his cheeks. There was still some the fiery feeling in his face, dying very slowly after that terrific ray bombardment.

“And ye’r head, mon!” gasped Mac.

So Benson went to a mirror and saw for the first time, himself, what had happened.

It was an unbelievable thing.

His face had expression!

Once Benson had had a normal countenance. A nervous shock, that would have killed many men, had completely paralyzed and deadened the facial muscles, and at the same time it had turned his hair snow-white.

He had been a long time in seeing that dead, white face as his own and not that of some stranger stuck on his shoulders. Then he had become used to it.

Now, after a second horrible shock to the nervous system, his face was as it had been nearly two years ago.

And, again, it looked like the face of somebody else put on his shoulders. A living instead of a dead face.*

* (
Medical science has recently reported success in the treatment of diffuse scleroderma, an uncommon though tragic condition characterized by the hardening and an expressionless rigidity of the skin. Results have been achieved by operation on the somewhat mysterious parathyroid gland, though such treatment is not inerrant. However, marked progress has been discovered in the practice of chemotherapy—the use of medicines of chemical compounds—and the prescription of scientific diet, and promising claims have been advanced in their meritable effect on this condition. It is also possible that an electrical shock to the nerves controlling the facile muscles would have a similar effect.
)

He stared at the countenance that had been his once before. And stared at his head, where the snow-white hair had been, so incongruous on a man so young—