River of Ice

CHAPTER XVII End of the Line

The assorted crew of cutthroats had been busy enough in the caves before. Now with their dreaded opponent, The Avenger, out of the way, they became even busier. They swarmed from outer cave to boats with the priceless relics. Others rowed rapidly to the freighter, which had come obediently back within a stone’s throw of the glacier’s towering foot at the radioed command of the man with the dark glasses. The caverns would be emptied in about another hour at that rate.

Meanwhile, in the cave of the mastodon, there were nine people instead of three, leaning bound against the rock wall. Benson, Lini, Nellie, Rosabel, Smitty and the young relief pilot had joined Mac and Josh and Brent. There was a full load of tragic despair in that group.

Brent Waller was half out of his mind. A glance at Lini had told him that something terrible must have happened to her. In the first place, she had barely recognized him when she was led in. In the second, she had nothing whatever to say — because the man with the glasses who had made a robot out of her had left no instructions about what to say when he brought her in here. Her work was done.

Benson had told him quietly what was wrong. Brent had been too crazed to listen further for a moment. Then Benson had told him that he was sure he could repair the damage. He thought that if an electric current were run into that needle, to cauterize the brain injury as the metal was withdrawn, that Lini would be normal again in a few weeks. Nobody had to point out, however, how slim the chances looked of their ever getting free to try the delicate operation.

Nellie was almost as stricken as Brent. “It’s my fault, chief,” she said, almost weeping. “All my fault. It was a crazy stunt. I shouldn’t have tried it.”

“It was a good stunt,” said The Avenger, voice remarkably gentle. “It deserved success. Just one bit of bad luck ruined it.”

The giant, Smitty, had been struggling back to consciousness at last. He heard the latter remark, stared at Nellie, then looked bewildered.

“Hey, Nellie! You don’t look so much like a wooden Indian. Didn’t you get… Did I make a mistake?”

“Probably,” said Nellie. “You make a lot of mistakes. But which one in particular?”

“You know good and well which one. You got me to thinking you’d been stuck with one of those needles.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” said Nellie tartly. She was tense and taking it out on Smitty for the ghastly mistake she felt that she herself had made. “It was an act.”

“There wasn’t any needle at Conroy’s—”

“The man over me dropped it when you nailed him. It happened to fall on my left hand; so I managed to palm it, even with my hands bound. I had a flash then of what seemed a good stunt.”

“Stunt?” yelled Smitty. “What stunt? Going off and leaving us in that lake?”

“You don’t have to shout,” said Nellie. “I thought if I pretended to have been made into a robot, I could probably get straight to the side of the leader of this business, through Lini Waller. I thought I could then radio the chief and steer him straight to the place instead of his wasting hours trying to get the exact location. I thought that if I were in the crooks’ headquarters, unsuspected, I might— Oh, I don’t know what I thought! Capture them all single-handed, maybe, or something else equally silly. And all I did was lead the chief into a trap!”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Benson repeated quietly. “I got everything you radioed me.”

“Radio?” put in the young relief pilot, staring. “Were you receiving messages, sir? I didn’t hear the radio.”

“You noticed that it was on just before we landed, didn’t you?” said Benson.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear a sort of rustling coming from it?”

“Why, I believe I did,” admitted the pilot.

“That rustling was Miss Gray sending me messages,” said The Avenger. “She has a radio at her waist, though it isn’t big enough to be seen. She was rubbing her finger gently over the transmitter, sending me code messages. She directed me straight to these caves first. Then, as we were about to land, she warned me again.”

“And we crashed,” said Smitty, eyes blinking with the pain of a head that had come in contact with a seatback.

“We crashed,” nodded Benson, face a mask, eyes as cold and calm as if he were in an easy chair in Bleek Street, instead of sitting bound, under a glacier, with death near. “I, in my turn, put on an act. I pretended to rise from a bad landing, to crash in the trees. Then I had intended to crawl out with Smitty and gas the men as they ran to take us. But there was one lone tree-stub where I couldn’t see it till too late. Instead of stripping the wings from the plane and coming to a comparatively safe crash landing, the tree-stub caught the right pontoon and swerved us so the crash became a genuine one.”

MacMurdie’s optimism suddenly reared its head. When everything looked impossible, then the Scot was the most cheerful. “Well, we’ll get out of here all right,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” said Smitty, ironically. “Easy!” Then he looked accusingly at Benson. “Chief, you knew Nellie wasn’t hurt the way I thought she was, and you didn’t tell me?”

“I couldn’t, with Lini there,” said Benson. “I got an inkling of her plan when we freed her in Conroy’s library. Her manner was wooden and queer, as if the missing needle were in her brain. But her words, about your rush against the three men, were not those of a person without a will of her own. But if I had given the show away to you, Lini, a robot spy in our midst, might have found out and ruined whatever plan Nellie had in mind when she got to this end.”

Smitty thought it over and decided that he still felt pretty sore about it. “How’d you fool the big shot when you got here?” he demanded morosely of Nellie.

“I glued a little bead, from that steel-bead purse you gave me, to my scalp.” said Nellie. “The man felt it, and thought it was the end of the needle.”

“And I thought it was the end of you!” howled Smitty. “If only you’d have a little consideration for a guy with a weak heart—”

The rock-slab door of their cave swung open. In the opening stood the man with the dark glasses; coat collar up and hat brim down as concealingly as ever. The man stared at them for a moment, nine people trussed like fowl for slaughter, sitting on the rock floor and leaning back against the wall.

“So,” he said at last. “The great Richard Benson — who has the crust to call himself The Avenger — has finally put himself into a spot from which there is no escape.”

Never in his life had Benson called himself The Avenger. That grim title had been bestowed on him by others, principally members of the underworld. But the man with the white, death mask face and the colorless, deadly eyes did not bother to correct the statement. Benson’s hands were working behind his back, steely wrists straining to spread his bonds.

“At least,” said the man, “you are to have a fitting tomb, you and all your friends: these caves. And you will have a colossal headstone, the glacier above us.”

A voice came from outside. “Hurry it up, will you? The stuff’ll all be out to the ship in another ten or fifteen minutes. We’re about done here.”

The man with the glasses chuckled. And then he went to the nearest wall, reached up and took from its rock niche the glowing rod set there. He held it in his bare hands, and the effect was bizarre. The hexagonal rod looked like a giant crystal of some sort. It glowed in the man’s nut-brown hands like the lighted baton of an orchestra leader, only much, much brighter. It bathed him in cold, white light. He went around the cave, taking each rod as he came to it. In his hands they continued to glow, a bundle of sticks afire, but burning white and giving off no heat.

The last rod was in a niche directly over Benson’s white head. The man with the dark glasses relaxed from his tiptoed reach for the thing. And then he yelled suddenly and sat down on the rock floor with a thump, scattering the coldly glowing rods in all directions. One broke, and the two pieces continued to glow.

But the man wasn’t watching the pieces. He was fighting for his life, The Avenger’s one free hand tearing at his throat. Just one hand. But it looked as if it would be enough. Then the man got a chance for a shrill, terrified yell. That did it! Three men jumped into the cave, and one of the three leaped to where the two were struggling.

Only one hand free and legs still bound, and helpless. The Avenger couldn’t take on more than one assailant at a time. He ducked his head to the whistling blow that was aimed at it with a gun barrel, but got enough of the thing to send him reeling back to the floor. They bound his hands again, more tightly than before. Smitty was bellowing and straining cablelike muscles but couldn’t break loose to help Benson. The rest stared in helpless rage.

The scene was as it had been before. Only now the man with the dark glasses — unsteadily settling them back in place on his nose — was standing at a safe distance at the door.

“Damn you,” he raged. “I was going to put a bullet through your skull before I left. But for that attack on me, you’ll live to know your whole fate; live as long as thirst and starvation will let you; live to go mad in the darkness here.”

“Come on! Come on!” urged one of the pair who had rescued him. “The ice’ll be coming down without that blast in a minute.”

“You hear?” cried the man with the dark glasses, voice still insane with anger. “Blast! That’s your fate. When we leave here, we’ll set a bomb at the foot of the glacier, timed to go off in half an hour. When it does — you will be buried so deeply under ice that an army of engineers couldn’t get you out in a month. You will be buried for another fifty thousand years.”

He went out, and the rock-slab door turned into place. It was hardly to imprison them more securely; that was unnecessary. It was only to add to their tortures by putting them in total darkness. All the light rods had been taken from this cave; and closing the door had shut out light from the outer cavern.

The door slammed, and after a long moment a laugh rang out. It was Rosabel’s, and it was not a natural sounding laugh. Josh’s voice snapped out, more sternly than any of the little group could ever remember his having addressed his pretty wife. “Easy, Rosabel! No hysterics! That won’t help any!”

There was silence again. Silence for many moments. Each was probably thinking the same thing: maybe there wouldn’t be a blast after all. Maybe the man with the dark glasses had promised that fate only to torture them mentally. Maybe—

There was a cracking explosion somewhere outside. It sounded like a heavy sigh to the group deep inside the cavern. There was silence for perhaps a heartbeat, and then it commenced: the tremendous rumble of the ice as the foot of the glacier collapsed over the low cliff along an eight-hundred-foot front, burying the ancient entrance once more under countless tons of the enduring ice.

“So that’s that,” came Smitty’s heavy voice after a moment. He added flippantly, “It’s dark in here. Anybody got a match?”

“Will a flashlight do?” came the quiet voice of The Avenger.

Next instant, within the group whose hands had been bound so tightly that the ropes could not possibly be broken or slipped, shone the steady, powerful beam of one of Smitty’s flashlights.