River of Ice

CHAPTER VIII Icy Prison

Lini Waller was in deadly danger. Fantastic danger! The Avenger knew that. The nature of the danger was almost clear to him. But not quite. There was just one thing to be done now: trace the girl, who had gotten away for the simple reason that it had never occurred even to The Avenger that there might be a private, practically secret, door directly out of the conference room.

“Mon, how can ye trace her?” inquired MacMurdie gloomily. “Ye haven’t a thing to work on.”

“We have a few things to work on,” said Benson quietly.

“Such as?” said Smitty, almost as pessimistic as Mac.

“Lini has given us the key, I think.” Benson quoted her bemused words: “ ‘I was taken to the icy caves of the ancient race… A cave of ice, cold and bare, bright with the white light that has burned all these thousands of years.’ That was what she said.”

“How could a light burn thousands of years?” demanded Mac.

“That,” said The Avenger, softly, “is a highly interesting point. But it is not what we are concerned with at the moment. The thing that is more relevant right now is Lini Waller’s reference to ice caves.” The pale eyes were glittering with the flaming genius behind the paralyzed, white countenance. “She thought she had been taken to the caves discovered by her and her brother. Obviously that is impossible. So she must have thought that because of a similarity in the sites. Now, there are no ice caves in New York or vicinity. But there may be something like them. A refrigerating room. A cave of ice — ice walls.”

“A refrigerating room doesn’t have ice walls,” objected Smitty. “Unless it could mean white tile.”

“White tile doesn’t look like ice, ye overgrown lummox,” snorted Mac.

“Glass,” said Benson. “Glass blocks. They might be used.” He went on slowly with brilliant method. “One of the four Foundation directors… well, Wittwar’s business requires refrigerating rooms for meat packing. And Mallory is the head of that business under Wittwar.”

In an incredibly short time the three were zipping through the Holland Tunnel, under the Hudson River toward Jersey, where the newest and most modern of the Wittwar Packing Co. storage plants was located, in Newark. And in this plant, glass blocks had been used in walls between refrigerating rooms.

“If Lini Waller was kidnaped and taken to a Wittwar refrigerating warehouse,” said Smitty, as their car shot out of the New Jersey end of the tunnel, “then a Wittwar man would seem to be behind the crime. Wittwar himself, maybe.”

“I’d say ’twould be the man, Mallory,” Mac retorted. “But then it could be either of the others too. Just because the girl was held in a Wittwar building doesn’t mean that somebody else couldn’t have sneaked her in.”

They reached the new warehouse building. It was not quite noon. At that hour, trucks were pulling up to the loading platform empty, and rolling away from it loaded. Men in stained whites were as busy as ants. It was a common looking scene.

“Ye want to get in unseen, Muster Benson?” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded. “Yes. We’ll wait till noon.”

The twelve-o’clock whistle blew in a neighboring factory. At the warehouse, a last truck was loaded and pulled away. Then truck drivers got out their lunches and settled in their cabs to eat; or else they went to nearby restaurants. Warehouse workers did the same. In a little less than ten minutes Benson, Smitty and Mac slid in through the wide loading doorway with no one around to see.

Benson had talked with the architect’s office to confirm his guess about a glass-block wall in the Wittwar meat-storage building. He knew the layout of the warehouse. “Top floor,” he said. “The glass-block partitions are in a row of coldrooms designed for frozen meats. That row is on the third floor.”

They went up broad stairs, ducked off onto the second floor for a moment to avoid a man coming downstairs munching an apple, then went on up to the top story. There was no one up here; and at a glance they could see that only part of the top floor was used at all. The new warehouse still wasn’t needed in all its capacity.

“Now?” said Smitty, looking gigantic and gorillalike in the dimness of the top story. He had his coat collar up. It was cold up there.

“The row with the glass block walls is here on the side,” said Benson, leading the way to the right. There was a narrow corridor. On the right were many doors. They started looking for a refrigerating room that wasn’t being used. “Cold and bare,” the girl had said the “cave” was.

The fourth door they opened revealed an unused room. Mac looked sourly at the door. It was tremendous, as refrigerator doors tend to be. Thick with insulation, metal-paneled back and front, it was like the door of a bank vault. “I’d hate to have this door locked on me,” the Scot murmured dourly.

“Might be a good idea,” jeered Smitty. “You’re about as cheerful as a block of ice anyhow. A coldroom would be a swell spot for you to be locked in.”

As the door was swung open entirely, lights were automatically lit in the bare, icy chamber. The lights, white and cold, revealed only one thing in the place, a wide bench, or low table. And it revealed walls of glass block that did look remarkably like ice. The Avenger’s pale eyes went to that bench. And into them at last came a glitter of dawning knowledge. The presence of the bench tended to confirm that knowledge. He went to it, with the giant Smitty and the dour Scot beside him. He bent down, then nodded.

At one end of the bench were three long, silky dark hairs. They matched exactly the hair of Lini Waller; The Avenger knew it was an exact match because his rare eyes never failed to distinguish shades of color. Lini had been on that bench. This cold barren place had been her prison chamber…

There was a soft but heavy thud behind the three! They whirled. Richard Benson didn’t seem to move fast, even when he was in a hurry. That was because his movements were so perfectly coordinated. But he got to the ponderous refrigerator door almost before it had stopped closing. Almost, but not quite. There was a rasping sound outside as he tried to get his steel-strong fingers on some projection and swing the door open again. The rasping was the sound of the heavy lever being locked home.

And now there was hardly a crack showing where the massive door fit into the wall. On the inside of the door was no handle or projection at all. There was a place where there had been one, to comply with safety rules.

But it had been removed. The light had gone out with the door’s closing.

“Caught!” grated Mac, more in fury than in fear. “The skurlies! And we thought we were smart in sneakin’ in here without bein’ seen!”

“Ouch!” came Smitty’s voice in the next second. “I burned myself!”

“Burned yersel’, did ye say?” Mac snapped. “And how would ye burn yersel’ in a rrrefrigeratin’ room?” Only in moments of stress did the Scott roll his r’s.

“Anyhow, I burned myself,” Smitty insisted.

The Avenger’s flashlight went on. It was a powerful little thing, designed by Smitty in an off-hour, tossed off by a brilliant mind usually more engrossed with abstruse electrical problems than with things so humble as flashlights.

The thin but glaring beam flitted around the cold-room, came to rest at last on several cakes of ice. From the cakes a perceptible vapor was rising. The things had been slid silently into the room before the door was closed. “ ’Tis dry ice!” Mac said. “Of course! There’d be plenty of it in a place like this. That doesn’t look so good, chief.”

Benson nodded agreement that it did not look at all good. Smitty was puzzled. “Seems to me the rats who went to the trouble of locking us in here could do something more dangerous than just freeze us a little with dry ice.”

“It isn’t a question of freezin’, you brainless mountain of suet,” said Mac. “ ’Tis the fumes. The vapor from meltin’ dry ice can knock you off into eternity as slick as anything you’ve ever inhaled.”

Smitty coughed a little. “This would be scientifically airtight, of course,” he said quite calmly. “And that door couldn’t be broken down by an army.” He picked up the bench. The thing was very heavy, made of wood nearly three inches thick, with massive legs. But the giant whirled it around like a top. Whirled it around and smashed it against one of the glass block walls.

Smashed was right! Nothing could withstand the impact of that tremendous blow. Either wall or bench had to go. And, unfortunately, it was the bench. Smitty was left with two legs of the bench in his hands, looking kind of surprised and sheepish. And the wall wasn’t damaged in the least. Glass in thick blocks is not fragile like it is in thin panes or sheets.

“Ye’ll be gettin’ out that way about the time ye sprout a long white beard,” coughed Mac. The fumes were getting very noticeable indeed, by now.

“Looks like we’re hooked,” said Smitty. He said it resignedly, regretfully, but with little fear in his voice. The Avenger and his aides knew that some day their number would be up. They lived with death, literally, in their constant war against the underworld. And they knew that no man could go on risking death, forever, without sometime catching it in the neck.

Thus, they were half ready for death in any serious trap. And that this was serious was apparent enough. By the simple process of getting themselves locked in a refrigerating room, they were in a worse spot, really, than they had been the night before, with six stories of masonry and mortar falling toward their sedan. In this spot, both men looked toward The Avenger. He was the type of leader to whom men instinctively look when their own minds are baffled.

Benson was staring at one of the glass-block walls, with the glass seeming no paler, no colder than his eyes. At length, he nodded. “Keep your coat lapels over your mouths and nostrils,” he said.

As regular precaution against gas, the aides of The Avenger kept the lapels of their coats saturated with a gas resisting chemical of Benson’s invention. They held their collars tighter to their faces now.

“I’m afraid we’re going to disappoint our captors,” said The Avenger, steel-white fingers dipping into two of the many pockets of his specially made vest. He drew out two pieces of glass and fit them together. The result looked like an atomizer. But it was not an atomizer; it was the world’s smallest blow torch. Into the body of the tiny torch, Benson dropped two grayish pellets. These were the work of MacMurdie, chemist extraordinary. Moistened, they gave off a concentrate of acetylene gas.

Benson wet the pellets, and touched a match to the glass tip of the protruding tube. Tiny, but intensely hot flame lanced out. “Some of that dry ice, Smitty,” said Benson, pale eyes intent on a section of the glass-block wall between this and the next cold-room. He was playing the thin lance of fire over a large section. Smitty came with a cake of the dry ice, protecting his hands from burning by his folded coat.

“Against the heated part of the wall,” said Benson. Smitty pressed the intensely cold cake against the heated glass. There was a thin shriek, and a crack appeared. The thick glass could hardly be broken with a sledge hammer, and the three had no sledge hammer. But it could crack with quick alternates of heat and cold, like an ordinary milk bottle.

Benson was continuing to play the torch over the glass. “Again.” First the torch, and then the ice. The partition began to look like a sheet of rotten, cracking ice. And when Benson finally pushed against it, a large section fell to the floor in bits, revealing the next room. They stepped into it, holding aside quarters of hung beef as they might have brushed aside jungle undergrowth to make a path. The door of this room had an inside handle, for the very precaution of keeping someone from being accidentally trapped. Smitty pushed up the lock-lever, and they jumped out into the narrow corridor.

There were men out there, six of them. They were clustered around the next door, the one with no inner handle, the one that had been shut to trap Benson and Mac and Smitty. They were watching that door as terriers watch a rat hole, to be sure the three inside didn’t pull a fast one and escape.

When the three intended victims suddenly came out of the next door, the six men gaped at them in a bewilderment that would have been funny if it hadn’t been instantly succeeded by such furious deadliness. The six leaped toward the three!

These men were in the whites worn by the workers around here. But the whites were too clean. They weren’t spotted with the labor of handling sides of meat. And the faces of the six were not the faces of honest workers. Corny, mob leader, would have known those faces; the manager of the warehouse would not.

“Come and get it!” rumbled Smitty. This was something the giant liked — a good, open fight. Much better than a furtive door-closing which was supposed to lock them in a death chamber of dry-ice fumes. Two of the men jumped at Smitty, one from each side. The giant struck twice! He got one of the charging men with a blow to the side of the head that must certainly have dislocated his neck. Perhaps it broke it: the man fell, singularly still.

The second man was fortunate. He managed to duck a bit so that Smitty’s hamlike left hand only glanced from the top of his head. He received just a little blow. Only enough to whirl him around twice, slam him against the side of the narrow corridor and leave him shaking as he clawed at the smooth wall for support.

Mac had a man who was becoming very sorry he had attacked. The Scot was working the fellow over with fists that were like bone mallets at the end of his stringy but amazingly strong arms. Mac was having fun where it showed the most — on the man’s face. MacMurdie had suffered from crime as much as Benson himself. So he was having a good time now — first smashing a nose flat, then splitting a mouth into a bloody ruin, then blackening an eye.

Benson had already accounted for one man and was turning to another. The Avenger’s fist flicked out with the delicate skill of a surgeon’s scalpel and struck a jaw just hard enough to send the owner into sleep for a half-hour.

The sixth man, discreetly hanging around just outside the range of ruinous fists, drew a revolver. “Gun ’em down!” he yelled. “The hell with the noise. They’re gettin’ away!”

Benson was way ahead of the man. He had been expecting some such move, even sooner than this. His right hand drove into his coat pocket. Through the fabric of the pocket thrust a needle point. But this needle was hollow, like the needle of a hypodermic syringe. From it came a tiny stream of greenish liquid. The thin stream instantly expanded into a thick one, and kept on expanding into a black and nauseous cloud. Before the man could fire, or the others fumble for their guns, half the corridor was enveloped in a thick, dense pall. You couldn’t see your hand before your eyes.

Mac and Smitty said nothing. There was no need to call orders. They went for the staircase, getting to it so close together that their bodies touched. Six steps down and they were out of the black pall vaporized from MacMurdie’s chemical discovery which had been shot out through the hypolike needle.

Leisurely the three walked down the stairs and out of the building.