The Frosted Death

CHAPTER VII Pig In Pants

The Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory and top-floor offices had hummed with police and reporters all day. The man who had been murdered in there was not so important; but the man who had done the murdering was. Thomas Sangaman! That was a big name; so the police were appropriately busy.

At eleven o’clock the night after the murder, however, the activities had simmered down. Examinations and visits by news correspondents were completed. The place was officially sealed and was empty. So was the building, save for the night watchman and an assistant engineer — just as it had been the night before, when the head chemist was killed.

At a little after eleven o’clock there was movement on the roof of the building adjoining the Sangaman-Veshnir place. That building was seventeen stories high, just two lower than the Sangaman-Veshnir Building.

Two men crept through the night from the fire escape to the opposite edge of the roof. One loomed noiselessly along like a great ship sliding through a black harbor; that was Smitty. The other trod like a soundless gray fox; that was The Avenger.

At the edge of the roof, The Avenger drew a length of fine cable, made of specially treated silk, from under his coat, fixed a small, tool-steel grappling hook to it, and threw the hook up twenty feet so that it caught over the cornice of the Sangaman-Veshnir Building.

The two men drew themselves up hand over hand, then unhooked the special little grapple. At the front edge of the nineteen-story roof, Benson fastened the grapple again, and without turning a white hair at the thought of the two-hundred-foot drop to the sidewalk below, he lowered himself to one of the Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory windows.

The window opened under his slight tug. You don’t lock windows nineteen floors up. Next moment both men were in the laboratory where Targill had been murdered.

The mode of entrance was typical of The Avenger. He had a magic name. He could have entered any place, police-sealed or not, by the mere mention of wanting to. But if he entered a place with police permission, he had quickly learned, the fact he was working on that case instantly got out to the papers. Every police reporter has a friend at headquarters.

So The Avenger worked habitually without police knowledge.

Inside the laboratory, behind the sealed door, Benson snapped on a powerful little flashlight.

The laboratory didn’t look as it had when Targill died the night before. Then, there had been several flat trays, carefully glass-covered, with the stuff in them that looked like snow. Now, there were no such trays. Last night there had been a small rack of the snow in glass capsules near the bench at the front window. Now, there was no such rack.

There was, as The Avenger swiftly found out, nothing whatever to indicate that the stuff which turned corpses into snow men came from this laboratory. He had hardly expected to find open traces of the white stuff. Yet there should be some key to it.

There was a huge refrigerator in one corner. He went to it. Half a hundred little vials and jars were in there — stuff that had to be kept cold to be preserved. And there was also a large piece of fresh liver.

The colorless, awe-inspiring eyes examined the bit of meat intently. The presence of the liver might mean a mere experiment with the pancreas in an effort to perfect a diabetes cure.

Or it might have something to do with the meat-attacking white stuff.

One thing The Avenger always searched thoroughly when he went through a suspected place was wastebaskets. People, even cautious ones, are prone to throw the most damaging scraps into them either absent-mindedly or because they may be pressed for time.

The equivalent of a wastebasket in a laboratory is the white, metal-covered waste can. So Benson went to that. He opened the lid.

The can was empty.

Near it was an enameled door in the inside wall of the lab. On this were the large, raised letters: Incinerator. The laboratory, being very modern, had a special chute direct to the basement, and the fire. It looked like the end of that trail. But The Avenger was methodical.

Just on the chance, he opened the chute door and played his flashlight down.

“Smitty,” his quiet, vibrant voice sounded in the dimness.

The giant came to him, wondering why an empty incinerator chute could be interesting. But the chute was not empty.

Following the beam of the light down a few feet, Smitty saw what seemed to be a lump of fine white snow as big as a small child. Something had been thrown into the chute that was a bit too large for it, and had stuck in the first bend.

“Those tongs, over there,” Benson said, nodding his virile white shock of hair toward a tool rack.

The giant stepped to it, came back with the tongs. They were like fire tongs, only not quite so big.

Very carefully Benson drew out the thing that had stuck in the chute and deposited it on the floor. And Smitty checked a sudden exclamation of surprise.

The thing was a small pig, covered with the terrible whitish mold he had seen in the Mason jar on MacMurdie’s workbench. But there was more than that to make the little animal remarkable.

It wore pants.

Over porcine middle, and covering the small hams, was a garment made roughly of bath-toweling that was unmistakably a pair of trousers.

“Why in the world,” breathed the giant, “would anybody put a pig in pants?”

“To be methodical,” answered The Avenger. “Terribly, murderously thorough and methodical.”

“But—”

With the tongs, careful not to touch the whitish stuff with his hands, The Avenger took the pants off the pig.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s the answer. The pants were put on before the animal was exposed to the mold.”

He pointed with the tongs. Where the toweling had been taken from the dead pig, the white stuff was tightly molded to the constriction of the fabric.

“The experimenters in this laboratory,” Benson said, face as emotionless as ice, “presumably Targill and Sangaman, wanted to find out whether the mold spores would penetrate normal clothing. They put the garment on the pig to experiment. And the spores do sift through fabric. They are dust-fine, as Mac reported. You see what that means? Whether a person is naked or clothed, all his body will be reached by the fine spores if any of this stuff is around. Clothes are no protection at all.”

Smitty whistled softly.

“In that case,” he began, “a pinch of it in a crowd of—”

He never finished the sentence. Suddenly the light flicked out in The Avenger’s hand, and his steely, slim fingers compresed on the giant’s forearm.

There was a sound at the door!

Both faced that way. The sound was unmistakable: some one was fooling with the lock.

“The window—” Smitty breathed into Benson’s ear.

But The Avenger’s hand tightened in a negative gesture on Smitty’s arm. If the police had been entering, Benson would have slid out to avoid being discovered. But the furtiveness with which the lock was being manipulated convinced him that someone besides the police was at the sealed laboratory door.

Some one stealing secretly in here to get something. If that person could be caught—

Instead of heading for the window and the slim cable still trailing up to the grappling hook on the cornice, he headed for the door. There the two took up their stand, with the giant on one side and The Avenger on the other. Whoever came in here was going to have a surprise.

It developed, however, that the surprise was, for once, going to be the other way around!

The door finally opened, a hand slid along the wall past Smitty’s shoulder till it found a switch, and light flared in the laboratory.

Smitty grabbed the hand, and then yelled: “Watch out, chief!”

The most capable of men are sometimes caught off-base by an unpredictable event. It was so in this case. Benson had prepared to capture the one or two or three men who were sneaking into the laboratory for some furtive reason. What neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen was that, not just a couple of men, but a young army of them, was coming into the room!

Smitty held in his vise-like grip the one who had turned on the lights. Benson held another man as helpless as a child. But more came on!

Men boiled in through the doorway till the lab seemed to be half full of them. At least twenty. And all converged on Smitty and The Avenger.

They were all about the same type — stocky, heavy-shouldered fellows with fleshy, foreign-looking faces and close-cropped hair.

The Avenger threw the man he held at the approaching squad and stooped in a lightning-swift movement. His hands jerked from holsters at the calves of his legs two of the world’s most curious weapons.

One, from the right leg below the knee, was a little .22 revolver that looked like a slim length of pipe with a small bend for the butt. It had a silencer on it. Benson, with bleak fondness, called the deadly little gun Mike.

The other, from a sheath strapped to his left calf, was a specially designed throwing-knife with a needle point and a razor edge. The handle was a hollow tube, which gave it an arrow flight when it left The Avenger’s grim hand. And this weapon, he called Ike.

One of the foreign-looking men had an automatic out. Ike flashed forward like a silver bullet from The Avenger’s left hand. The blade deftly sliced the man’s knuckles so that he dropped the gun with a yell.

Mike, the special little .22, spat out a small slug. The shot could hardly be heard, but the man next to the one who was nursing a dripping hand went down as if he had been slugged. Which, in effect, he had been. The .22 bullet with marvelous accuracy, “creased” him — hit the exact top of his skull so that he was knocked out instead of killed. The Avenger, even in moments of stress, followed his iron-clad resolution not to take life himself.

But the two out of the running were only two drops in a very large and active bucket. There were nearly a score left. And they were on the two before Mike could do more than spit out one more leaden pea and send a third man to the sidelines.

There was no more appearance of guns. Evidently the one Benson had silenced had been a hotheaded error. These fellows didn’t want any sound of gunshots to bring people around. Silently but furiously they swarmed at Smitty and The Avenger.

The giant knocked down two, with two blows that came so fast they seemed like one motion. He got a third by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him at a fourth. The Avenger, meanwhile was clubbing with Mike.

The little gun, even as a club, was deadlier than you’d imagine. It was a slim steel length, with silencer and all, of about ten inches. In swift, scientific taps, it cracked down; and with every venomous, deft crack, a man sagged to the floor.

But two men, even such as these, couldn’t overcome twenty. A concerted rush by the attackers, who were skilled fighters themselves, took the giant off his feet. And Benson swayed and went to his knees, too. A blackjack glanced off Smitty’s skull, bringing a gasp to his lips.

Benson’s hand dipped into his pocket and came out with something like a small handful of glass marbles. He dropped one on the floor at his knees, and threw the rest with a scattering motion.

There was a succession of tinkling sounds as they broke. And the light in the laboratory began to fade out.

The men fighting the two broke their silence, then. One of them cried out in the surprise of seeing an electric cluster of lights slowly dimming, for no discernible reason. A couple of the others swore in a guttural foreign language.

The lights kept on dimming.

With a movement that was really no more than a blur in quickly gathering gloom, The Avenger retrieved Ike, the throwing-knife that had pierced the wrist of the first gunman.

No words needed to be exchanged between Benson and Smitty. The two always worked in perfect unison. Smitty knew all about what had happened: The Avenger had broken half a dozen of the “darkness” pellets he always carried with him. The pellets released a black pall so impenetrable that even electric lights were quickly blotted out by them.

These were blotted out now, less than thirty seconds after the release of the ink-black liquid within; liquid which had such an affinity for oxygen that it volatilized instantly and spread as an odorless, tasteless black gas.

The air was as black as the water is around a squid after it has discharged its concealed ink. In the blackness, Smitty and Benson got to the window. Benson went up the silk cable to the roof; while Smitty, helped by darkness, held the groping enemy at bay. Then Smitty kicked over the workbench under the window with such force that it knocked his attackers down like ninepins, and joined his chief on the roof.

They drew up the silk cable. But they did not go. One of The Avenger’s most often-used tactics was to apparently flee — but actually stay near and return to the scene. He did so now.

They heard the laboratory door slam. The men who had so unexpectedly overwhelmed them were getting away, fast, carrying their wounded with them. Then Benson silently slid down to the laboratory again.

A little of the black pall was settling. It did not last long. It was light enough for him to see what he wanted to. And that was a thing he’d been pretty sure he’d see.

The mold-covered pig was gone!

The men had come in here to look around and make sure that no incriminating trace had been left in the laboratory by the person who had killed Targill last night. They might not have found the pig in the incinerator chute. But they had gotten it, now, through Benson’s having lifted it out to the lab floor.

It was logical that further examination of the laboratory would not reveal the secret of the frosted death. Benson swung out of the window and back up the cable to join Smitty on the roof.