The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (10 page)

He pointed to two small jars, full of blue-green stuff.

“That’s the stuff that will do the trick. Applied to a victim of the frosted death, it will eat out the mold in half an hour. There’s enough in those two jars to give a bit to every laboratory in the state. From that bit, each can cultivate his own supply.”

“Two
jars?” said Josh, eyes narrowing.

“Yes. You know why. One for each of us to carry to Bleek Street, to the chief, for distribution. Are the men still near the store?”

Josh nodded.

He had been sitting sleepily at the soda fountain devouring maplenut sundaes, not alone to be on hand if needed—but, also, to watch from the window.

He had been in the store for three hours. And all of that time there had been several foreign-looking men idly propping up building walls, nearby.

Somebody knew, somehow, that experiments with the white stuff were being conducted in the back of the store. And somebody had sent a guard to surround the place.

“A jar for each of us to carry,” Mac repeated to the tall, gangling Negro. “
One of us must get through!
No matter how many try to stop us.”

Josh nodded, eyes clear and alert. Then they clouded.

“You have worked a lot with this deadly stuff,” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right? Uncontaminated?”

“I’m all right,” Mac said. “The stuff’s funny. The spores will get to any meat within ten yards. But the developed mold won’t leave that meat, even for other meat, unless actually carried off by touch. And ye can be sure I’ve not touched the frosted death! I’ve even worn medicated felt pads up my nostrils so I won’t take a chance on inhaling any. No, I’m all right. And so will the city be—if one of us gets through with the antidote.”

“This is something well worth dying for,” Josh said.

“We can’t afford to die! We’ve got to get through, I tell ye!”

“I’ll go out the front way—”

“That’s the most dangerous,” Mac argued. “I’ll take that way.”

“It’s least dangerous,” said Josh, who could be as twisty as a Philadelphia lawyer when he wanted to gain a point. And he wanted badly to gain this—to take the most risk. Mac was more valuable than he was, he thought. “In broad daylight, on a crowded street—who would try anything?”

Mac wasn’t quite taken in, but there was no time for arguments.

“All right,” he said. “You go out the front way, and I’ll take the rear. But—
get through!”

Josh picked up his small jar as if it had contained gems. But even that was a poor simile. The contents of that jar were many times more priceless than a pint of diamonds.

He went out the laboratory door into the store. With the moment of his exit, he became sleepy-looking again. He shuffled, looking as if he were too lazy to lift his huge feet clear of-the floor. He ambled to the street door as if he had nothing on his rather empty mind but his black, kinky hair. He stepped out onto the sidewalk—

Josh Newton could fight like a black panther, and was as fearless and fast as one. But he was undone by his natural conviction that no group of men would try anything fantastic at the store entrance, right on crowded Sixth Avenue, in clear daylight. They’d follow him, of course, he reasoned, and try for him in a less conspicuous spot. And that was all right. If they followed him, Mac would have a better chance.

He hadn’t realized the caliber and fanaticism of the men they were up against. And so he didn’t have a chance at all!

The moment he stepped from the store, a man who had been standing flat against the wall clubbed him down with a gun barrel. Josh hadn’t even had time to see him out of the corners of his eyes.

There were dozens of people within a few yards. Most of them saw the act. Most of them yelled or screamed. The man didn’t seem to mind it a bit. As if he were alone on a desert island, he calmly gathered Josh up and carried him toward a sedan that swirled with machinelike precision to the curb.

Three other men, who had been the loungers noticed by Josh at the fountain, came at once to the car. They didn’t pay any attention to the crowd, either, till two men more daring than most in such emergencies, tried to hold them while yelling at a cop down the block. Then the men with the phlegmatic, foreign-featured faces coolly clubbed them down, then went on to the car.

The door slammed with a thump, and the sedan drove off. The patrolman, taking in the situation at a glance, knelt and sent shot after shot at the car. It didn’t even hasten its pace. It was as bulletproofed as a tank. It went around the corner and was gone—with Josh and one of the two jars that meant salvation for a great city.

Mac, mercifully, didn’t know of the swift tragedy in the front of the store. He was going through a tunnel from the rear.

The tunnel, a corridor in the basement of the building behind the store, opened onto Waverly Place, around the corner from Sixth Avenue. It was customarily used by The Avenger when he came to see Mac; so few knew of it.

The men loitering near its street door didn’t actually know of it. They were just part of a corps that was acting with all the military precision of an army in battle.

Yes, there were men near the door of the corridor. But there were also men clear around on Fifth Avenue, and more men were stationed on the street north of Waverly Place.

The entire block had been surrounded, coldly, methodically, to guard against just such an exit as Mac was trying to make from some unknown, secret areaway.

However, because the men nearest the exit didn’t know of its precise meaning, Mac got a little farther than Josh had. He stepped from the tunnel and got twenty feet toward a cab when the men saw him. Then, without a sound, they rushed him.

Mac had seen a lot of criminal activities. But he had never seen anything like this. For it exceeded the merely criminal. It entered the realm of war, of the military. These men weren’t just a gang, they were parts of a machine, with no thought for themselves at all if only their objective could be gained.

Two of the three reached him at the same time. Mac knocked one down with his bony fist that was like a mallet swung at the end of his long arm. He tripped the second—and staggered back to his knees under the impact of the third.

He was up again as if on springs. He managed to elude clutching, clawing hands, and raced toward the other side of the street, and down toward Fifth Avenue. He changed his course in the middle of the street and doubled back again.

One of the square-shouldered men with close-cropped hair was waiting for him on the opposite sidewalk. As Mac turned, the man whipped out a gun, and braced it on his left forearm, evidently deciding that bullets, would be the best remedy in the situation.

At this moment a plain-clothes man, who had seen the lawless attack with mouth open in incredulity at its utter boldness, hit the man in a flying tackle. The gunman went down with his gun flying from him.

Mac didn’t even see that. He was too busy trying to thread a way past two more men between him and Fifth Avenue, while behind him the original three closed in.

“ ’Tis an arrrmy,” he groaned to himself.

In the distance, clear at the corner of Fifth, a cop appeared and began running to help. A man down there stepped out, and with no expression on his face, clubbed the cop down.

Mac began to feel utter hopelessness. In the face of this kind of organization, he began to feel that a dozen cops, wading in shooting, couldn’t save him. And he was pretty close to right!

However, he couldn’t be downed, now. Not with the precious jar of antidote in his possession. He hit the two men ahead of him, running at full speed. One whirled to the curb and sprawled at full length. The other was knocked out of the way.

Still another man stepped from a building entrance; one Mac never did see. With the grim coolness of a military machine instead of a human being, he clubbed the Scotchman. Mac fell! Before he had hit, two of the robotlike men had him by ankles and shoulders and were carrying him toward a sedan. A car that sagged on its tires like an army tank.

The second jar of antidote was gone!

Far up in the Maine woods, miles from even the smallest villages, there was a cleared glade that, from the air, appeared to be just what it was: a landing field.

The landing field was about a quarter of a mile from the Maine coast. It was in the heart of over a thousand acres of almost impenetrable timberland which was privately owned and hence seldom trespassed upon.

On each corner of this field, tonight, there was a landing light that was strong, but so shielded, that it merely glowed without sending rays up into the sky. Like four huge glowworms, they bounded the space.

A plane coasted for this space. Motors were cut off so that, with its minimum landing speed, it made hardly more noise than a gigantic moth. It hadn’t made any noise for quite a while previously, either. The pilot had started down from twenty thousand feet, and from that altitude you can coast silently for many miles with your motors cut.

At the controls was a man who was tall and lean, but otherwise bore the same stamp as the foreign-looking fellows with the phlegmatic countenances. His face wasn’t exactly cruel. It was simply hard, humorless, unhuman. He wouldn’t inflict pain just to get pleasure from it; he would inflict it because it seemed necessary, and because it simply didn’t occur to him to get excited about the pain others might feel.

In the passenger seat was Carl Veshnir.

The man at the controls spoke, and his tone brought out another fact about him. Whoever he was, he was very highly placed in some sort of occupation other than business. For he treated Veshnir, who was rich and usually kowtowed to, as if he were some sort of inferior errand boy.

“I hope, for the comfort of all concerned, that this will be soon successfully concluded.”

His English was precise, but his accent was guttural.

“We ought to be done in a week,” Veshnir said.

The man’s eyes took on a fanatic look.

“Let us hope you are correct. For if you are, you will be rich beyond your dreams. As for us”—his harsh voice took on a biting edge—“we shall change the course of history in a month!”

Veshnir stared at him, eyes genuinely puzzled.

“I can’t understand you fellows,” he said. “And I can’t understand what you hope to gain. Say you capture all the area you wish. The people originally owning it are still there. You can’t execute twenty, thirty, fifty million people. All you can do is hold them in slavery. But you can only hold them while your power is at its peak. The minute a flaw appears—and every system shows a weak spot somewhere, in time—your slaves rise and overthrow you. Then the map is as it was before, and eventually all the blood and steel you’ve spent is forgotten as if it had never been.”

The man’s eyes flamed in a way that made Veshnir a little sorry he had spoken his thoughts aloud.

“What we capture we shall keep—forever.” He stared ominously at Veshnir. “It makes some difference to you, perhaps, what we choose to do?”

“Oh, no,” said Veshnir hastily. “Not at all. You fellows have fought each other for two thousand years. I suppose you’ll do it for another couple of thousand. But it’s no concern of
mine!
It’s a long way from
me.”

“I shall fly you back in say—three hours?”

“Right!” said Veshnir. “And there won’t be many more trips needed.”