River of Ice

CHAPTER XVI Master of Mastodons

Anyone outside the cavern system under the glacier would have seen no people, no activity, nothing at all. To the eye, it would appear that there was no one within hundreds of miles. Even the rock-slab door was shut. One would have to examine it closely, eyes within a yard of it, to realize that there was an entrance at all. But inside it was humming with industry.

The big cave which opened directly on the outer door was larger than the other seven combined. And it was now rapidly receiving the contents of the other seven. Or, rather, the first five of the seven. Men were busy carrying stuff from the other caves. Fur costumes, ancient records, examples of the machinery used by the old, old race that had perished with the ice age, gold statues and ornaments. One of the men carrying the latter set down his load and furtively stuck a hand in his pocket.

“All right, Danny, dig it up!” barked a red-haired fellow with weasel eyes.

The man addressed tightened his heavy shoulders, then relaxed. “Oh, all right,” he snarled. He pulled a small golden mask from his pocket and tossed it sullenly on the pile.

“Whatta we goin’ through these motions for, anyhow?” he demanded of the red-haired straw boss. “We lug stuff from the other caves into this outer cave. Then a little later we gotta lug from this cave onto the boat. Why don’t we just wait and lug it direct to the boat?”

“Because,” snapped the red-haired man, “by carrying stuff here and arranging it to be hauled methodically, we save a little time. And time’s somethin’ we ain’t got too much of. You saw the ice over the entrance?”

“I’ll say I saw it!” snarled the thick shouldered one. “That stuff’ll fall any minute—”

“Well, that’s why we gotta save time, dope. So you just go right on bringing the stuff out here to this cave.”

Like ants, the men went back and forth, back and forth. One of them suddenly yelled. “Hey, the dead guy in here, guardin’ this cave! The dead Indian, or whatever the hell he is! He moved!”

“Aw, you’ve gone cokey,” jeered another of the men. But most of them looked distinctly uneasy. Most of them were prepared to swear that they had seen one or another of those long-dead sentries move a little. And it had them jittery.

They did not monkey with two of the caves. One was the cave which contained nothing but the great cauldron, with its inner and outer tangle of coils on coils of fused quartz. The other was the cave of the mastodon.

The mastodon was a marvelous thing. Even the human rats working here dimly realized that. A giant thing preserved, to every last hair, from another age! What it wouldn’t bring in good, hard dough if they could get it out! But how could they get it out! How are you going to get a mastodon through an eight-foot door, and what are you going to do with it once you’ve brought it into the open?

“How’d they get the damn thing in there in the first place?” growled one of the men.[1]

(It was later conjectured that the ancient race forced the mastodon, still living, into the cave through a long, lofty tunnel, and later filled the tunnel in. But this is only a guess, for there was no sign of such a tunnel.)

The red-haired fellow shrugged. “Built the caves around it, maybe. What do you care? Get going.”

They stayed out of the mastodon cave — but there were occupants in it, just the same! There were three people in it, to be exact. Brent Waller, Fergus MacMurdie, and Josh Newton. They all sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, staring at the mastodon. They had nothing else to stare at but the overgrown thing. “Reminds me of Smitty,” said Mac sourly.

Waller said: “Smitty? Who’s he?”

“One of our crew,” said Mac. “He’s about seven feet tall, and four feet thick, and he uses crowbars for toothpicks.”

“I wish he was here now,” said Waller, earnestly.

Mac and Josh wished the same thing; but wishing didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

“Josh, do ye think maybe the chief or somebody may have heard that last squawk on the radio?” Mac demanded. He had demanded it a good many times before.

Josh replied, as he had replied before, “I don’t know, Mac. There was no answer of any kind. And then the radio was smashed.”

Waller sighed. “My sister heard my last yell, all right. I yelled, ‘The mast—’ and then was yanked from the radio. You see, I had heard a sound and turned — and there was a guy that I thought was the ancient master of mastodons who has his pictures on all these walls. But the guy turned out to be nothing but a yegg from New York who’d gotten cold and grabbed the first fur thing he saw. Which was the traditional costume of the old master preserved in here. But it sure gave me the creeps. I thought the guy really was immortal, like the pictures claim.”

“Maybe,” said Mac dourly, “he is.”

“Don’t be like that,” said Josh.

“No? Without doubt the mummy guarrrds in these caves move! We’ve all seen ’em! Where there’s movement there must be life. So maybe the master of mastodons really does live and—”

“And what?” snorted Josh.

“And stays around to guard the caves,” Mac finished weakly.

Waller laughed bitterly. “If so, he’s doing a bum job of it. Look at the way the men outside are stripping the caves.”

Josh suddenly came back to one point in Brent’s yarn. “Wait a minute! You said your last words were, ‘The mast—.’ But I heard you say others after that. You said, ‘There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now; good night.’ ”

Brent Waller swore feelingly. “I said no such thing. That wasn’t me. That was the man who clipped me. I heard him later, when I was sitting here bound. Smart guy! Thought if my sister had heard too much, he could kill her suspicions by giving her a phony O.K.”

Mac almost smiled a dour, bleak smile. “He outsmarted himself, Brent. Those few words were just enough for us to pick out this general location with a direction-finder. We might never have located the place without it. But I wonder how the skurlies outside got the location?”

Waller swore again. “There was a kind of a map on one of the first pages of a manuscript Lini took to New York. There’s the same map in every bundle of pages, just as there’s a language key in every bundle. I didn’t pay much attention; thought sure any map so old would be worthless. But I guess it was all too good! Because in a damn short time after Lini radioed me that she’d submitted the sample relic to the Foundation, these thugs descended on me.”

There was silence for a little while. The three men shifted in unconscious effort to ease their cramped bodies. They had been in these positions a long time. Waller said, “Who’s to blame for all this, anyhow? How many people did Lini show that bundle of old skins to?”

“Only the Wittwar Foundation — four directors,” said Josh. “Your sister was very cautious, Brent. She didn’t broadcast the discovery at all.”

“Why, say! Then one of the four eminently respectable Wittwar Foundation gents must be behind this!”

“One of three,” corrected Mac. “One of them is dead! He was murdered just before we left. A skurlie stuck a needle in his brain—”

Josh coughed suddenly in warning. They hadn’t told Brent what had been done to Lini. It was too hideous a thing to tell him at a time like this.

“Needle in his brain?” Waller repeated curiously. It was evident that he hadn’t studied that ancient manuscript his sister had taken east. “That’s an odd way to kill a man.”

“Isn’t it?” said Josh evasively. He and Mac looked at each other with deep sympathy in their eyes for Brent. They might as well have saved some for themselves. It didn’t look as if they were ever going to get out from under the glacier!

On the point where the fir trees hid them, Nellie and Lini looked at the descending plane of The Avenger as impersonally as if it were some alien thing having no connection with them. Beside them, the man whose face and body were concealed, chuckled harshly. Directly in line with the plane’s pontoons were those little things that looked like innocent small chunks of ice but were in reality miniature bombs. “He can’t miss them!” the man rasped. “He’ll hit them in sixty seconds or less now.”

The ship came lower, wind screaming through its struts, motors silent. Lower, lower. And the speed of the plane was at minimum. Scarcely ten feet separated pontoons and water! Then something happened!

The pilot of the plane cut the speed too low. The plane’s tail sagged, the nose reared up. And there was a hasty roar of motors again, with the props pulling the seaplane out of a bad landing. Up and away, for another try.

The man with the two girls clenched his fists in anger. “The clumsy fool! Doesn’t he know how to fly?”

“Oh!” said Nellie. Even the exclamation was without life. On her lovely face there was little more than indifferent curiosity. “Look! Look there! I believe he’s going to crash.”

The belief sharpened into certainty in about six seconds. The plane hadn’t been sent up sharply enough. It was wheeling to get out to sea, but it was plain that it would never make it. It was too near shore — and the tall fir trees there.

At the very last, the plane banked hard, and almost missed. Almost, but not quite. A wingtip fouled! The plane slewed around. It smashed among massive trunks and thick branches!

“Got him anyway!” snarled the man with the dark glasses. “Everybody! Surround that plane!” The shouted command was unnecessary. Already men were jumping from behind trees and rocks and racing for the wrecked plane. At a more leisurely pace, the man with the dark glasses followed, and with him dutifully went the two girls.

They reached the wreck just in time to see the men lifting four still, dark forms from the cabin. One body took three to handle; it was so big. That was Smitty. The second was the pretty Negress, Rosabel. Another was slight and rather undersized. That was the relief pilot. The fourth was of average size with thick white hair in which a crimson thread of blood trickled from a scalp wound.

And that was The Avenger. Trapped and unconscious in the hands of his enemies!