River of Ice

CHAPTER XVIII Death For All

The Avenger had acted in a manner typical of him. Before the killers had left the caverns, he had not tried to free himself with the help of another because the act would almost certainly have been seen and the helper murdered promptly along with Benson.

He had acted alone in an attempt to free his own hands because if he had been caught he alone would have died for it. But the instant the little group was left alone, with no eyes to spy on attempts at freedom, Ike came into play.

Below Benson’s left knee, Ike, the little razor-sharp throwing knife, was holstered. And it’s seldom that a searching hand feels for weapons below the knee. So Ike had been left undisturbed. A moment after the light was taken and the cave door shut, MacMurdie felt bound feet touch his hands lightly and then felt the steel muscles of The Avenger’s legs under his fingers. He knew what to do.

The Scot’s hands were bound but his fingers were free. They fumbled Ike out of the sheath. And then with Benson rolling closer, he could reach the Avenger’s wrists and slash with the knife. So it was that when Smitty jokingly asked if anyone had a match, the flashlight had shone in Benson’s freed fingers. In a moment they were all standing and rubbing cramped muscles. Benson opened the door and they were in the light again — the light from the queer, quartz-like rods in the outer cave.

“That’s fine,” rumbled Smitty pessimistically. “We can now die in seven caves instead of one. With that mountain of ice between us and daylight—”

“As long as we’re not actually dead,” said Mac, with his lopsided optimism, “we’re all right.”

Nellie shook her head. “That’s bad, Mac. When you go Pollyanna on us, instead of croaking doom, we’re really in a bad way!”

The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes went to Mac’s face. Their colorless glitter indicated that he was not really looking at the Scot, but thinking out something that had not yet occurred to the rest. It was something he had dwelt on before. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “if they took everything from these caves?”

“They didn’t take the mastodon, anyhow,” shrugged Josh. “We saw that.”

“And I don’t suppose,” said Mac indifferently, “they took the big kettle…”

The pale eyes were instantly concentrated on his bleak blue ones like diamond drills. The Avenger’s paralyzed face was as dead, as expressionless as it must always be; but his eyes were terrible in their intensity. “Kettle, Mac?”

MacMurdie felt a tendency to stutter. He couldn’t keep from it, when the chief stared at him like that, even though the Scot knew the pallid gaze was not intentionally threatening. “A thing like a great big cauldron, in the sixth cave,” he faltered. “Big as a beer vat, it is. Full of coils and with coils outside. Coils like the stuff that light comes from; only no light comes from these.”

Benson nodded. “That must be it!”

“Must be what?” demanded Nellie, who had been looking first at one and then the other as the inexplicable interchange took place.

“The way out of here,” Benson said quietly. He went on with the thought that had been running through his mind before. “The race that left this ‘museum’ to be found by posterity was far advanced in science and inventiveness. The light rods show that. And we know that this race foresaw the coming of the ice age. Otherwise they would not have left the relics as they did.”

They stared at him breathless, waiting.

“Under the mile-thick crust of the ice-age sheet they would be helpless, of course,” The Avenger went on. “But before that, working under several hundred feet of this glacier, they must have developed a means of escape in case of a collapse over the cliff entrance. Just such a collapse as the one that just occurred. That there was a glacier all those thousands of years ago, just as there is now, we know: the things in here were so perfectly preserved that they must have been in glacial cold from the very beginning.”

“But how does that cauldron—” began Mac puzzled.

“That must have been their machine for getting out in case of an ice slide. Let’s go and look at it.”

There it was, in the sixth cave — like the mastodon, too huge to be carried away with the other stuff. A cauldron as big as a beer vat, dark coils within and without. The Avenger’s flaming eyes went rapidly over the dark, inert mass, then sped to the thing Mac and Josh had idly noted before: the gap in the outer coil near the cave’s door with the piece of coiled quartz, or whatever it was, lying next to the gap as if ready to be dropped into place.

The Avenger nodded again. “The cauldron is of fused rock, able to stand terrific heat. And heat, of course, to melt ice, would be the only method of leaving here — but wouldn’t we be drowned?”

“What,” marveled Nellie to Smitty, “is he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Smitty in a return whisper. “But I’ll bet it’s good.”

Benson had gone back to the outer cave. He stared hard at the door leading into that significant sixth cavern. “Watertight when closed. And the first flow, of course, would be molten rock from the cave top, which would plug it farther. Everybody out here, please.”

“But, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “What—”

“The race that could make this rocky stuff give off light,” said Benson calmly, “could also make it give off heat. Terrific heat, such as we can only produce now with the finest of electric furnaces. At least — we shall soon see.”

In his hand, he had the section of coil that was separate from the rest. He stood next to the door, with one hand on the rock slab. He put the piece in position so that the gap was closed and the coil now continuous. Then he slammed the massive door shut and leaped into the outer cave. Fast as he was, he did not quite escape the flashing, tremendous consequences of closing that ancient coil. His face and hands were seared so that the skin was almost cracked.

From then on things happened very fast. First there was a deep thrumming that shook the very rock under their feet. Then a white-hot, crawling tongue came from one spot under the rock door that was not quite airtight, plugged it, and slowly hardened — melted rock from the cave ceiling over the coils. After that there was a wild rushing of water within the sealed cave and finally a series of explosions that seemed endless.

Mac moistened his lips in awe at the mighty force that had been unleashed, a force harnessed by man before the last ice age. The rush of water he knew was the flow of melted glacier ice above the cauldron when the rock was melted away. That had instantly turned to steam on contact with those miraculous coils, and the steam had blown out again and again against the dripping, rotting ice helping the heat to break it clear.

The outer wall of the sixth cave was reddening; and in the big outer cavern, through feet of stone, the heat was creeping out unbearably. They went to the exit under the foot of the low rock cliff. Benson pushed at it. It gave a fraction of an inch, then stuck. “A few minutes more,” said Benson calmly. “The whole foot of the glacier, over this spot, will melt into the sea with a little more of that heat.”

“How in the world is it generated?” gasped Smitty.

The Avenger looked at the reddening walls of the sixth cave far behind them. “Some utilization of electricity that even we do not know,” he said. “And the glacier itself is the generator. Think of the tremendous friction caused by the slow grinding of these millions of tons of ice on its creeping advance to the sea! They learned to harness this friction-generated power, that ancient race of men. They got heat from it. They got the light that has burned ever since, and would go on burning as long as the glacier moved.” He tried the door, and it swung open with a strong push. Swung open through a knee-high torrent of water, and mushy ice that was rushing down to a boiling sea. They were free!

“Free,” said Smitty, stretching his mighty arms, “to go after that rotten gang and this time fix them right!”

There was a curious look in the pale eyes of The Avenger. He was staring out to sea, at half a dozen great ice chunks as big as small office buildings. They had cracked off with the melting behind them and splashed ponderously into the ocean. “We won’t have to pursue our enemies any more,” said Benson. “They’re dead! Their ship was sunk by that falling ice.” The sound of the still roaring water from the glacier was like the sound of rapids in the River Styx, accompanying his cold voice. “I got my hand on their leader for a moment. Not to try to kill him, but just long enough to place in his overcoat pocket all the little delayed-action gas capsules I had with me.”

Mac got it first. “Mon!” he gasped. “Mon — those would open and release the gas in about ten minutes! And if ye had four or five of them, they’d knock out everybody on the ship for at least four hours!”

“I put eight of them in his pocket,” said Benson. “I let them decide their own fate. That ship would be a ship of sleeping men, helpless at the glacier’s foot, before the anchor could be raised. Very well. If they left the glacier alone, they could eventually wake up and sail off. If they brought the front of the glacier down to annihilate us, they would annihilate themselves: the ship would be sunk like a floating match box under tons of ice.”

The quiet words, “I let them decide their own fate,” seemed to hang in the air. It was The Avenger’s way. Never take life; but if enemies tried to destroy him or his aides, manipulate them like pawns on a chessboard so that in attempting to kill, they killed only themselves. Nellie sighed deeply. “There’s only one thing to regret. Now, we’ll never know who the leader was.”

“The leader,” said Benson, awesome, death-mask face still turned toward the sea, “was Wittwar.”

“Wittwar!” exploded Mac. “But the mon had no reason! He didn’t need money; he’s rich. He didn’t have to steal the relics; his own Foundation was buying them easily.”

The pale eyes flicked to Mac’s. “Haven’t you caught the reason yet, Mac? It was the lighted rods, which he took from the cave he left us in. Light everlasting, with no visible source of power. Cold light. A thing science has been searching for ever since there has been science. That was what Wittwar was after.”

Benson’s brooding eyes still stared over the seething sea. “I thought it was Wittwar when he twice helped Lini get away from the Foundation office when I wanted to stay with her. I thought it was Wittwar when I found a corner torn from the ancient map in Mallory’s office. That hide was too tough to tear accidentally, which meant that a bit had been deliberately torn off and hidden to incriminate another man, along with a measuring compass and a chipping hammer. And who had such easy access to any building or office in the Wittwar Packing Co. as Wittwar himself? I knew it was Wittwar when I found a report in his desk on the financial position and earnings of every power company in the country. He was calculating the possibilities of the cold light, estimating the fabulous sums he could extort from the power industry to keep it off the market. From the first he was little interested in the ancient relics. It was the cold light Lini had told about that he wanted. That would tempt even a man as rich as he was.”

Smitty glared at the approximate spot where the tramp freighter had been anchored. A spot that now had three great ice fragments jostling each other, like great ghosts rubbing shoulders in glee above the sunken boat. “While he was at it,” said the giant, “he thought he’d pick up the relics too and shift the two-and-a-half-million-dollar purchase price, through Lini, from the Foundation’s account to his own. Right?”

The Avenger nodded, manner growing absent, inhumanly detached. “That thievery alone wouldn’t have tempted him. But as long as he was going after the secret of the cold light by violence, he figured he might as well take the money and the relics too. What irony! For the cold light could never have meant anything to him.”

“Eh?” said Mac, staring.

“That quartzlike substance was set to flowing,” The Avenger said, “by the enormous friction-power of the glacier. To reproduce the light you’d have to reproduce the glacier as well. Or some other power source equally vast. But Wittwar didn’t know that his supposedly priceless secret was commercially impossible.”

Brent Waller shook his head and tried to laugh. “When I saw that guy in the dark glasses and saw that he looked very old and yet seemed young, you know what I thought? I thought the ancient master of mastodons was after us. I thought the old guy really had everlasting life, like the pictures in the cave proclaimed.”

“The make-up of an amateur,” said Benson, in his detached, impersonal tone. “White hair, stain for the skin. It’s the first thing a layman thinks of.”

“There was more,” said Brent, now not even trying to laugh. “The everlasting-life stuff seemed to be borne out by the fact that some of those dead sentries moved. I’ll swear they moved. And the mastodon too. Just a little.”

They all looked at Benson. For all had the same impression. They felt a little silly at his patient words. “Of course they moved a little. For thousands of years they’d been preserved in the glacial cold. Then the cave doors were opened to the outer world. It got a bit warmer in the caverns. The bodies disintegrated a very little; and as they did so they moved a bit — the mastodon included.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Brent, his ears red. “Of course!” He turned anxiously to his sister, standing with them like a wooden image. “You said you could take that needle out of her brain, sir?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. Plainly, he didn’t even hear. He moved along the shore, alone.

“Sh-h-h,” said Nellie, taking Brent’s arm as he would have repeated his question. “Yes, he can cure your sister. He can see to it that the ship out there is raised; so you’ll get your money from the relics. He can do anything. But don’t bother him now.” Nellie knew the man with the white, awesome face and the terrible, colorless eyes a little better than the rest. Well enough to know what he was thinking, in the chill and lonely desolation of his soul.

Once more he had destroyed a supercriminal. Once more a band of human vermin had annihilated itself when it tried to kill Benson. Complete success! But in the success was no sweet taste for The Avenger. There was nothing but a longing for the next brush with streamlined crime. And in that one maybe he would die.

For it was becoming increasingly clear to his aides that Benson wasn’t trying to avoid death in his dangerous work. He was half courting it. He wanted to die. Fate, with proverbial perversity, was keeping him alive while again and again he battled murderers and thieves to avenge his own crime-caused personal loss.