The Frosted Death

CHAPTER XIX Death Plant

Fergus MacMurdie was not only brave in the face of death, but also he was resigned to it as a man would naturally be who has no human ties to make him want to live. The Scot had always known he’d die with his boots on if he fought crime under The Avenger. But he hadn’t cared. The loss of his wife and the little boy in the racket explosion some time before had made him indifferent to fate.

Now, when he slowly came to in the tarpaper building, and looked down to see his bound hands taking on the appearance of powdered sugar, he wasn’t too frantic. He was somberly desperate at the thought that he, alone, had in his head the secret of an antidote that would save New York — and that he was going to die with that knowledge unused. But there was little personal emotion involved.

Josh, next to him, had more to live for. He had his pretty wife, Rosabel, who adored him and whom he adored. He had a good life under Benson, whom he looked on as superhuman.

Josh wasn’t nearly as resigned as Mac. But the Negro was a brave man, too. There was no complaining.

“Whoosh!” said Mac. “I itch all over. And I feel like a cold blanket was slowly pressin’ tighter and tighter around me.”

“It feels more like a warm blanket to me,” said Josh quite calmly.

“That’s right — argue me to death, at a time like this!”

The pessimistic Scot was a curious person. When things were going smoothly, he was the gloomiest soul alive. When everything was against him, and he couldn’t conceive of a possible way out, he was the soul of optimism.

“You’ve experimented with this stuff,” said Josh. “You know something about it. How long will it be before we sink into a coma — and don’t come out again?”

Mac craned to see his hands. They were the only part of him he could see, so tightly was he bound. He estimated the stage of advancement.

“About half an hour, maybe three quarters,” he said.

“It looks for once as though the chief were licked, doesn’t it?” reflected Josh.

“Mon,” said Mac, shocked even at such a moment, “how can ye burble such a thing? No livin’ mon will ever lick the chief!”

“But a whole military corps, from a warlike, military nation?” said Josh. “What can even the chief do against a force like that?”

“Ye’ll see,” said Mac. “Though,” he added “ye may have to see it from a pearly cloud, instead of from on earth. Unless it happens awful fast—”

The door of the plant was thrust open.

The submarine crew, with the bleak efficiency of their tribe, had combed the woods around the shack for miles in every direction. They had searched till it would seem no rabbit could escape their dragnet. In the search, they had come upon the log cabin belonging to Veshnir. Naturally, they had searched that, too. And in it had been Sangaman.

The sub captain was puzzled. Veshnir had mentioned the existence of the cabin, but he had said nothing about a tenant. The captain didn’t know whether Sangaman was dangerous or not. But he took no chances.

He tied the old man’s hands behind him, lashed his arms to his sides, and marched him at pistol point to the shack in the woods.

In the process, he noticed a little too late that Sangaman’s right arm, to an unguessable point up under his sleeve, was whitened with the deadly mold. But he was pretty sure he hadn’t touched the stuff in binding Sangaman.

It was to shove the old man roughly into the building that the door had been opened, as Mac and Josh had observed. They bound Sangaman’s legs, then, and propped him against the wall in a sitting position, next to the other two.

Sangaman stared at the whitening features of Mac and Josh.

“Good heavens!”

“Ye’re right with us, in more ways than one, it seems,” said Mac, who had seen the frosted hand.

“Yes. I— Oh, my heavens!”

Sangaman had taken in his surroundings, then. The rack on rack of deadly glass capsules. The ten automatons, back at their work, filling the tiny containers while, slowly, they died on their feet.

“So this is the final answer to all Veshnir’s doings,” Sangaman said hoarsely. “We’ll pray that he can do something.”

“He?” repeated Josh sharply.

“Richard Benson,” said Sangaman.

Mac writhed convulsively in his bonds, though the smothering white blanket had weakened him a lot.

“The chief!” he grated. “Here! What did I tell you, Josh?”

“Nothing he can do to save us,” sighed Josh.

“Maybe he can’t do anything for us. But he’ll beat this frosted death before he’s done. We’ll see—”

There was the tramp of feet outside. The door opened. The commanding officer of the submarine came in.

The man was a maniac. His face was white with fury. His eyes had a glaze to them, like the eyes of a mad lynx. He tried twice before he could speak. Then, it was in his own tongue. English was utterly beyond him at the moment.

“My boat has been scuttled!” he raved. “Sunk in the harbor! My fine boat! Do you know anything about that, any of the three of you? Do you?”

Mac didn’t know the language used. But Josh, honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, had a working knowledge of it.

He translated to Mac, voice vibrant with triumph.

“The sub’s sunk, Mac. This gang’s marooned here. Now, who do you suppose would have done such a thing?”

“I wonder,” said the Scot, frosted lips grinning.

The sub captain screamed in rage. He kicked Josh.

“Speak up! Answer! Do you know anything about this? Are more of your men around here? Was it the man who said he was Brocker? Tell me! I want that man. I’ll cut him to pieces with my own hands.”

Josh said nothing. In the first place, he had nothing to say, since he knew no more about it than the frenzied captain. In the second place, he wouldn’t have talked if he had known.

The officer pulled out a knife. His voice sank to cold calmness which was more menacing than shouts.

“Speak,” he said, “or I’ll cut you to bits first!”

Josh stared up at him, calmly, a man as good as dead anyhow.

The knife went down toward his ear.

“I wouldn’t!” came a quiet but compelling voice.

It had the effect of a bomb explosion.

The voice had come from above. Everyone stared up at the ceiling.

Up there, a hole about the size of a silver dollar showed where the tarpaper had been punched out above a knothole.

Through this could be seen an eye. It was pale, inhuman, as cold as ice under moonlight. It seemed to transfix the sub captain like a bayonet, and hold him motionless for a moment. But only for a moment.

He yelled out a curse, and dove for his gun!

The icily flaring eye was suddenly staring at the man over a small, blued barrel. The captain, to whom no gun smaller than a battleship’s cannon had much meaning, pulled out his gun. A little thing like that might give him a flesh wound in the shoulder, or a small hole in the arm, but that would be all—

Mike lisped out a silenced bullet, and the captain went down. Slanting down the back and top of his skull, was a gash where the slug had creased him.

He fell just as two men came in with trays of the capsules in their arms. They had taken them to the shore, found no boat to put them in and had brought them back, not knowing what else to do with the things.

They had barely presence of mind enough to set them on a table instead of just dropping them, before they charged out again and began climbing to the roof, through which had come the shot.

That was all right with Benson. One or two at a time, he could handle this mob of foreign fanatics. He waited till a head showed over the roof edge, and fired again. The man clumped to the ground.

The second man didn’t make the same mistake. He put his gun hand alone over the-roof edge, and began firing blindly but methodically, slowly fanning the roof with bullets.

Mike equally methodically spat a neat, small bullet that shattered the wrist that barely showed. The man yelled and dropped back beside his unconscious companion.

However, that was the end of that kind of fighting. The whole crew came, drawn by the commotion and the sound of the second man’s shots.

At all times, The Avenger carried around his taut waist the thin but marvelously strong silk cable, attached to the little collapsible grappling hook, which enabled him to climb things you wouldn’t dream anything but a fly could ascend.

The hook was embedded in the fork of a great tree, thirty feet from the ground. The cable trailed from it to the roof.

With the approach of the other men, Benson grasped the thin cord, shoved powerfully out from the roof, and sailed off in a great arc in which he almost touched the ground at the center, and landed in another tree many yards away at the end of the swing. The men streamed after him. This time they would get this wilderness will-o’-the-wisp!

Benson had carefully swung to the north. This was because the secret landing field was to the south of the death factory.

He crashed north through the tree-tops for three or four minutes, with the men following him easily because of the noise he made. They were insane with rage. Several tried to swing up into the branches and follow in the same manner in which Benson fled.

The results were rather unfortunate. No man there could travel that way. So they picked themselves up off the ground and trailed along on foot again.

But then, abruptly, there wasn’t any more crashing noise to follow. The woods were as still as the tomb.

“Here! He stopped here, in this big fir!” one of the men called. He had been nearest the sounds when they stopped.

They ringed the tree. There was enough of a clear space around it to see if anyone swung to the next tree. And they saw that no one did. They shot up into it for a while, and then several started cautiously to climb it.

Benson watched them for a few seconds from two hundred yards to the south, then swung silently on. Toward the landing field. He had left the big fir well before the first of his pursuers had got there.

The Avenger’s amazingly keen ears had caught something that wouldn’t be audible to the rest for another minute or two. That was the sound of an airplane motor.

Whatever plane was propelled was being catapulted at top speed. The motor in the far distance sounded like the buzz of an enraged wasp. Benson’s eyes glinted. He increased the pace of his aerial journey, passing swiftly through trees bare of leaves, catching his poise again in the shelter of evergreens.

By now the noise of the plane was quite loud. Over it Benson could hear the men yelling far in the distance as they heard it also. At least half of them would race to investigate it too. But, Benson thought, at the speed at which the ship was settling, he would get to the pilot before any of them did.

He increased his pace, swinging onto the edge of the field just as the plane’s wheels touched.

It made a bumpy, inexpert landing. It had scarcely stopped rolling when a man jumped out. And the man was Veshnir.

Benson had slipped over his colorless eyes the eye-lenses with the gray-brown pupils on them. He hadn’t Molan Brocker’s overcoat any more; he had tossed it into the hollow tree. Brocker’s derby had long since gone. But over his thick white hair The Avenger still had the wig simulating Brocker’s closely-cropped hair, and the lifts were still in his shoes. Once more he would take the place of the man who was held prisoner at the moment at Bleek Street.

He marched up to Veshnir, shoulders rigidly erect, walking in a heavy-footed, military fashion.

Veshnir grabbed him by the shoulder, coughing.

“You—” he sputtered, with the promised loss of millions of dollars in his mind. “You— Where is your superior officer?”

Benson’s “superior officer” wasn’t in circulation. But a lot of his men were going to be here in about two minutes.

He said swiftly, in guttural, accented English:

“There has been a plot. Some of our organization wanted to keep half the payment due you, for themselves, and pretended that our government was responsible. The rest of us feared our whole glorious military plan might suffer, and we refused to agree with them. There was a fight. They won. I, alone, got away, without hat or coat. Come with me. Hide before they catch us. There! You hear? They are nearing the field even now! Hurry!”

“I’ll cable your government,” raved Veshnir. “I’ll tell the whole thing. They’ll behead your fine friends who try to cheat an honest man out of his money.”

He was running as he spat this out, however. Running toward the coast, and then veering north and toward the tarpaper shack, in a wide circle around the men.

The submarine crew were split two ways. About a third of them were still ringing the great fir tree in which the sounds of Benson’s retreat had last been heard. It was a big tree and took a lot of searching if you wanted to be methodical about it. And it was a characteristic of these men’s training that they were extremely methodical.

All the others were investigating the unexpected arrival of the fast plane, fanning out around the field to try to locate whoever had come in it.

Around the little factory there was no one at all.

Benson urged Veshnir in. The first thing Veshnir saw was the sub captain, unconscious on the floor.

“He was one who fought against the plot?” he began. Then he stopped. A fit of coughing racked him.

Mac and Josh and Sangaman, bound, were glaring up at him — with Mac and Josh hardly conscious any more. And the marks of fire scarred the wall near the refrigerator, while the racked, completed capsules were all disarranged.

“What’s been going on here?” demanded Veshnir. “Why is Sangaman here? What—”

He stopped. A knifepoint like a needle had touched his throat. Then the edge of the blade, razor-sharp, settled with steady menace against his jugular.

“The antidote, please, Veshnir,” Benson said, abandoning Brocker’s guttural accent.

“Why— What in the world — I don’t know what you’re talking about. What antidote?”

Benson’s hands were going over Veshnir, however; and they paused at a lower vest pocket. The Avenger drew out a slim glass vial, tightly stoppered, filled with a bluish-green substance.

He stared at Mac. The Scotchman could hardly see, and he couldn’t talk at all; but he made out the color of the vial; and his lips moved.

“Yes,” was the word they formed.

There were tremendous stakes involved in this great game of the frosted death. But Benson’s first allegiance was to his aides. That was the way The Avenger always worked.

“Untie Sangaman,” he said to Veshnir.

Veshnir fumbled with the knots.

“Faster!”

Veshnir completed his task in a hurry. Meanwhile, Benson reached behind him and fastened the door. There was an inner, as well as an outer, bolt.

“Mac, does this antidote go through clothing the same as the mold it attacks?”

Again Mac managed to form the word: “Yes,” with his numbing lips.

“Sangaman, take this vial. Shake some of the stuff in it over these two men. Save some for yourself and put it on your arm. I don’t know whether it will act fast enough—”

But the profound relief in Mac’s dimming eyes answered Benson. The Scot knew that it would act fast enough to save them, and his eyes showed it. The tensity of The Avenger’s flaming, terrible orbs ceased somewhat.

Veshnir was coughing again. And Josh was staring at him with a very curious look in his eyes. A look that was calm, grim, knowing, inexorable — the way a judge might look at a prisoner being led to the gallows.

“Cut them loose, please, Sangaman,” Benson said.

Sangaman slashed Mac’s and Josh’s bonds. Benson nodded and then suddenly whirled.

The sub commander had regained consciousness, and cunningly concealed it till he had a little strength back. Then he had leaped from the floor, like a crouching cat, at The Avenger’s back. But The Avenger had heard the light rasp of his shoe just in time.

He braced to the charge of the man, and battered him down with one lightning blow to the throat. But the action took just long enough for Veshnir to escape.

Moving faster, under the stimulus of fear and greed, than anyone ever would have thought he could move, he got to the door, and tore the bolt back.

“Everybody! Here!” Benson heard him shouting, as he leaped outside.

The Avenger raced after him, but he was too late!

The sub’s crew had returned from the big fir tree where, to the last, they’d thought Benson was hiding; and from the landing field where Veshnir had just set his plane down.

They swarmed around Veshnir and Benson. The Avenger’s hand darted out to close the door again and bolt it from the inside, but a crashing boot was fast enough to prevent that.

The commander of the sub came unsteadily up behind Benson, shoved him savagely aside and strode out among his men.

“Well? Well?” he snapped. “Reports! What has happened?”

One of them spoke up. One who had just come from the landing field.

“We found two planes on the field. One has been here for some time. It is the plane that has been here before. At the controls is divisional commander Buehlow, unconscious. The motor is cool; so that plane has been here for some time. The other plane is empty. The hot motor shows that it has just landed a few—”

“I came in that,” said Veshnir. He was glaring at The Avenger in grim triumph. “I got here just in time, it seems.”

“How it is that you came at all?” the sub captain growled at him.

“There was a phone message to me in New York leading me to believe that your nation was thinking of trying to cut the final payment to me for the frosted death—”

“What?” howled the officer, glaring at Veshnir. “You dare to think my nation would do such a thing? It is an insult!”

His voice was all the louder for the very fact that he, personally, had had just those thoughts in mind when he gave orders to load on the sub whatever capsules were already completed.

Veshnir cringed.

“It was a plot, of course. I should have known.”

The captain was pacing back and forth in front of the tarpaper shack. The men ringed Benson and Veshnir stolidly but watchfully.

“So!” the captain said. “These men up here know of our plans! At least one man in New York — the one who alarmed you into coming here — knows of them. We must act fast.”

“I would suggest,” ventured Veshnir, “that you load the submarine—”

“We have no submarine,” cut in the captain, looking murderously at Benson. “But — there are two planes on the landing field. Buehlow’s is the largest?”

“Yes,” said Veshnir. “It’s a twelve-passenger job.” His body suddenly shook with coughs.

The captain looked a little puzzled by the violence of the attack. So did Veshnir — a little worried. However, the captain had plans more important than the fact that Veshnir seemed suddenly to be catching a hard cold.

“You!” he snapped to one of the men. “Go with ten of the men to the large plane. You are a good pilot. Refuel with whatever petrol there is in the smaller ship—”

“No, no!” bleated Veshnir. “That will leave me stranded here!”

“Not for long,” the captain reassured him. He turned back to the man. “Go to New York. Report at headquarters there. Get a big transport plane and return. The rest of us will leave here in that, taking the glass capsules with us. We can carry them to whatever ship of ours is closest on the Atlantic.”

The eleven men started off.

“Wait,” said the captain. “One more thing. While you are draining the tanks of the small plane into the larger, one of you return with five gallons of the petrol — here.”

Veshnir stared quickly at the man.

“We leave no tracks,” the captain explained. “We shall burn this shed where the capsules have been filled.”

Veshnir nodded swiftly.

“Of course! Just the thing to do. And we’ll lock this man, Benson, and all the others, in it when we set fire—”

“No,” contradicted the captain, “we will not. See, now: the fire may be reported, and people come to investigate. If nothing is found but charred embers, they think only a trapper’s shack or some empty storage shed has burned. They think nothing of it, and go away. But if they find the skeletons of a dozen men — immediately there is much commotion, much search. And searchers might pick up our trail in time to stop us before we can get offshore.”

Two of his men went into the shed. They began roughly bundling the occupants out — Mac and Josh having to be carried.

A man came from the landing field with a can of gasoline. On order, he poured it over the shed floor, and the walls and worktables. The volatile, high-test stuff soaked into the dry wood.

All this time The Avenger was standing quietly, acting like a defeated man. Which, had his enemies known it, was the time when he was most dangerous of all.

Benson was watching with hawk eyes everything that went on.

“But the capsules!” said Veshnir.

“We shall take those to the cabin,” said the captain. “Or, better yet, direct to the landing field. There we will await the transport—”

From the field came the sudden roar of a motor. The plane which Buehlow had piloted down here, was taking off. They watched it soar up over the trees, and head south to the big city.

“They will be back soon,” said the captain. “It is well. Success is ours, after all.”

“And these men?” said Veshnir, nodding toward Mac and Josh, Sangaman and Benson and the ten robot workmen.

“We shall take them to the plane, bound. And one by one we shall drop them in the sea, far out.” The commander turned to the crew left with him.

“Into the shed. Get the racks of capsules and bear them to the landing f— Stop that man!”

Studying each event as it came up! Turning it over in his mind! Never admitting defeat! Always there was a possibility of twisting situations to an enemy’s ruin, even if no other man might have discerned it—

And The Avenger had found the right combination of circumstances here. Had found it — and acted on it.

Without a ripple of warning, or the difference of an eye blink, he had leaped straight backward toward the shed. He was through the door, had it slammed, and was bolting it when the first vicious shots began to rip through the panel.

He threw himself to the floor while the slugs sang over him.

The pale eye glittered with that light which so many master crooks had seen with terror. He was alone in this building, with potential death for unknown thousands of human beings neatly racked along one wall.

And the building had been made into an almost explosive fire trap by the aviation gasoline.

Once flame had roared and crackled here, almost to ruin plans of empire. They should do so again, and this time they should not fail.

The Avenger’s friends often insisted that the gray-steel man was a walking laboratory. From special pockets all over his garments, they said, he could haul enough chemicals and apparatus to start a government lab. This was a little exaggerated. But Benson did always have with him a few shells of commoner chemicals which, he had found by experience, often came in handy.

One of these was thermite, the fire-producing chemical.

His steel-strong fingers dipped into a special inner pocket of his vest, worn under Molan Brocker’s clothes. They came out with all the little thermite shells he had. Five. He threw them with all his strength at five different parts of the room!

The place actually seemed to explode, with such violence did the five fires start. And in the center of the swift volcano was The Avenger. Shots told him he couldn’t get out through the door. But in his icily flaring eyes was no agitation. It was well worth the death of any man, to destroy the brew in this dread place.

Outside, the sub commander had got over his first maniacal fury. His rage was colossal, but now a little under control. Veshnir, however, wasn’t controlled.

“Stop the fire!” he screamed. “Stop it, I tell you! Stop it! Stop it!—”

He doubled over in a convulsion of coughing. And Mac, lying on the ground but rapidly getting better as his parasite antidote swiftly devoured the white mold on his body, stared with wide eyes at Josh — who nodded.

Mac had seen something that Veshnir was just beginning to see. Something on Veshnir’s hand, held to his lips as he coughed and strangled.

Something from his throat, like particles of wet snow, or white moss.

“Another defeat!” snarled the sub commander, voice thick. “But we are still not beaten. You, Veshnir, have the secret of the white death in your brain. We shall simply make more—”

Veshnir hadn’t even heard. He was staring at his hand. His lips were moving, but no sound came out.

“I see,” Mac said softly to Josh, “what ye meant when ye said a glass tube works both ways.”

Josh nodded again.

“He put that glass tube up our nostrils, and blew, to make us like the other robot workmen. But he didn’t seem to think of the very simple fact that it could work both ways. When he got to me, before he could blow, I breathed down myself, a little. And what I was hoping for, has happened. A very little of the frosted death got either in his throat or lungs. And now—”

Veshnir’s wild scream cut off all other sounds. It ripped at last from his palsied lips.

“I’ve got it too!” he screamed. “The white death! Antidote! I must get some of the antidote! This plane — New York — My laboratory safe—”

But there was no plane. The larger of the two had taken off minutes ago — leaving the smaller with a dry tank. Veshnir was marooned here for hours; and he would not last that long. The terrible knowledge gleamed insanely in his eyes — along with a last, impossible hope.

“The vial!” he screamed. “The vial that devil robbed me of and used on these three! There may be a little in the bottom! There may be—”

Richard Henry Benson, the Avenger, followed an inflexible practice with super-criminals. He did not want to turn them over to the regular courts, where with smart lawyers they might delay justice endlessly or even evade it in the end. And he did not want to kill them with his own hand.

Therefore, out of the flaming genius of his mind, it was his habit to maneuver them into situations where they should destroy themselves by acting on their own greedy, murderous instincts.

This time, The Avenger was directly responsible. Fate, and the quick wits of one of Veshnir’s victims, had done the maneuvering. But the result was just as implacable.

Screaming, Veshnir dashed toward the flaming building. He began to batter at the door, heedless of searing hands and face.

The door went down, weakened by the fire. Veshnir, no longer a rational being, still screaming, leaped over it into a furnace. He went down on hands and knees, and scrabbled in the flame for the one thing on earth that might possibly save him. The vial in which there still might be a little of the antidote—

The roof came down! He was seen and heard no more!

Outside the inferno, the sub commander stared at Mac and Josh and Sangaman. His hand went for his gun. But only rested on the butt. He was drained — crushed — as any fanatic is when the thing he lives for has been taken away. He only stood there, shoulders drooping, legs wide apart as if barely able to support his sagging weight.

And then his hand left his gun.

“Of what use to kill these three?” he mumbled thickly. “The thing is done, now. It means nothing. Nothing at all has meaning.”

He stood that way, staring emptily at the three men who were recovering from the white death, for a long time. For so long a time that one of the crew coughed diffidently, to remind him that there were orders to be given.

The foreign naval officer straightened a little.

“We shall not stay here needlessly. The fire may draw someone. March south, down the coast, to the first town. We shall radio New York from there, and have the transport pick us up— Though I think that suicide may be the better move for me in the end.”

They filed off through the woods without a backward glance, each pair of shoulders bowed as though with a crushing load. Though their only burden was shattered dreams of swift, vast conquest.

And The Avenger came from behind a nearby tree, in his swift, noiseless glide. As he came, he sheathed Mike. Had the captain gone ahead and drawn that gun, Benson would have been forced to break his rule and kill.

“Chief!” whispered Mac, sitting up a little. “We thought— How on earth did ye—”

The Avenger’s dead face turned toward the blazing embers which was all that was left of the shed.

“There was a refrigerator in there,” he said. “It was big enough, with the trays out, to hold my body. Refrigerators, of course, are insulated. Fronted against the rear wall with the open door, it protected me like an insulated white shell till I could cut through with Ike.”

He patted the special-steel throwing knife at his left calf. But words and move were absent, empty.

The fire lit up his wax-dead face and white hair. Fire that was saving nations from immediate war. The Avenger had succeeded in the greatest venture yet. But as always, success brought no content to his pale and awful eyes. He did not work for content. He knew that was impossible. He worked only to avenge the memory of his wife and daughter, killed by such scum as these — and for whose deaths all other scum should pay.