Murder on Wheels

CHAPTER XIII The Deadly Ray!

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.[1]

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—

Where it had been.

It wasn’t there, now! There was no hair at all, any more.

In the invisible cyclonic bombardment of that big box, something had happened to the hair roots, so that all his hair had fallen out. That was why his head had felt cold, back at the plant. That was why the watchman had stared so hard, for it is unusual to see a man with no trace of hair at all on his head.

Experimentally, Benson smiled. And Nellie gasped aloud. Never once had she seen a movement of that dead, but now, somehow, revitalized face. And now it was smiling!

The rest were in Nellie’s state of mind. Of them all, only Mac had seen The Avenger in the beginning, with a normal man’s face and a normal man’s look in his eyes. And Mac had gotten just a glimpse of him.

That was at an airfield.

Mac called it to mind. The man with jet-black hair and flaming, colorless eyes in a lean, square face, striding along with a lithe swing of his body, talking warmly and contentedly to companions. No more like The Avenger, that cold machine for fighting crime, than if he had been an entirely different person.

Then that man had, in a sense, died, when his face had died, after the appalling injury a crime ring had done him because he happened to get in their way.

Here was a man with a vital, tense, live face again! Save for the fact that there was no hair — and that other man had had jet-black hair — this person was like that other—

No, not quite. For this man, while once more resembling that other in looks, still had the cold hatred in his pale eyes for anything criminal or murderous. So he was a kind of blend of the two—

All of which Mac could express in only one word — or Scottish gasp, if you like.

“Whoosh!”

“What on earth happened to you, chief?”

That was Smitty, who had never known Benson save as the man with the dead face, whose flesh could be prodded into any likeness and would stay that way like putty. As it had last night, when Dick Benson had adopted the likeness of the stockroom employee. But his features then had been artificial — independent of his facial muscles. So that, upon the revitalization of those muscles, that guise gave way to his natural, normal countenance.

“It seems I got tempered, like any bar of old iron, at the Marr plant,” said Benson with grim humor. “It also seems that I’ll have to wear one of the wigs from my make-up kit permanently.”

Nellie’s eyes reflected the thought that would have come to any woman, as they went over the altered appearance of The Avenger.

He was certainly good-looking. That was her opinion. In spite of the handicap of no hair, he was about the handsomest man she had ever seen.

She had always suspected that he must once have been a very handsome man, till the dead facial muscles took on that masklike appearance. Now the dead mask was gone, and with it had gone, apparently, about twenty years.

Dick Benson looked so young! Good heavens, Nellie thought, he is very young!

And then The Avenger proved that changes like this are only skin-deep. White haired and with a face like a death mask, or young and classically featured — he was still The Avenger. He was still the man of cold genius who was concentrated on just one thing:

The destruction of crime and of the men who made their livings from crime.

“Mac,” he said, and his voice was as cold and even as ice water. “A workman who stayed in the Marr plant all night is the one responsible for this — and was almost responsible for my death. I want you to check on every man who was in the plant yesterday; trace their movements after working hours till you find which did not come home. If you do locate him, be careful. He is unusually clever and incredibly strong. In fact, the most dangerous person I have ever encountered.”

All of them drew deep breaths. The face had altered, but this was still their chief — indomitable, centered on just one thing, brilliant, glacially cold.

“Josh, I want you to check on the man, Cole Wilson, who gave his address as the Shelton Arms, on Jefferson Avenue. Smitty—”

It was then that the phone rang.