The Hate Master

CHAPTER V Winged Madness

There are always throngs of people in front of the New York Public Library’s main branch. Not that the city is so starved for book learning; but the building happens to be in almost the exact center of town.

The broad walk in front of the library was in an uproar, now, crowded densely, with more crowds coming all the time to see what was up. Some people were laughing and ducking around. Others looked stupefied with amazement. All were staring upward.

Through the crowd and around the fringes, were traffic cops, sweating with a fruitless effort to get people to break it up and move along.

Dick Benson got to the curb, with Wilson beside him. And then the two got a taste of what it was all about.

A pigeon charged them!

That sounds funny, but it wasn’t.

The bird came at Wilson like a mad-winged javelin, its little red eyes gleaming like jewels. Like a thrown projectile, it struck almost before Cole could get his hands up; and on Cole’s cheek a long shallow gash appeared where the bird’s beak had ripped past.

The Avenger could move so fast it baffled the eye.

He moved that way now, one hand going out like light. The hand caught the bird as deftly as a hawk snares a chick.

Regretfully, Benson flipped his hand and broke the bird’s neck. He had to have it for experimentation. He slipped the dead pigeon into a big inner pocket, then went to the nearest cop.

Every police officer in the country either knew The Avenger or knew of him, by now. The man nodded respectfully.

“Move along now, will you?” he yelled at the milling people. “Haven’t the lot of you ever seen pigeons before? There have been pigeons at the library as long as the joint’s been standing.”

“But not like these,” he confessed in a lower tone to Dick Benson. “Do you know what’s causing this?”

The Avenger shook his head, and all three men ducked as a crazy bird lanced at them out of the blue. Once more Dick’s hand darted out, fast as the dart of a hummingbird. Another pigeon was caught; but this one he got alive. It went into the inner pocket, where it struggled but could do no harm.

“Not all of the birds are like that, I see,” said Dick, gazing up at the building ledges.

“No, sir,” said the cop. “Just some of them. The devil’s in ’em, all right.” A couple of normal pigeons fell from the ledges, pecked to death by their maddened fellows. The cop looked as if he might cross his fingers any minute. “Move on, all you guys— Oh, I beg your pardon; I didn’t mean you.”

The last person addressed was a man who had suddenly turned up at the cop’s elbow, and whom the cop treated almost as deferentially as he had The Avenger. He was a tall man, unusually handsome, with graying hair and fine features and an orator’s mobile mouth.

“Hello, Ritter,” said Benson.

Wilson blinked. This man seemed to know everyone of prominence.

Edwin Ritter, well-known politician, stared at The Avenger, then nodded affably.

“How are you, Benson? Quite a curious thing, all this, isn’t it?” He waved a hand at the gyrating birds around the ledges, then ducked as one winged at his head.

“Quite curious,” Dick agreed, voice even. “Did you come here expressly to see it?”

“No,” said Ritter. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the crowd. Like most of the rest here, I came out of curiosity, to see what was attracting all the attention.”

Benson’s coat writhed and pulsed with the struggles of the live pigeon. Ritter stared.

“What in the world—” he gasped.

“I’m taking one of these abnormal birds to my laboratory for experimentation,” said Dick.

“I wouldn’t think,” smiled Ritter, “that a man as prominent scientifically as you are would be turned to so small a task.”

“It might not be small,” The Avenger said.

Ritter was borne off on a wave of movement, then.

Benson and Cole went back to the Bleek Street laboratory with the one live pigeon and the one dead one.

Funny to some in the crowd, frightening to others, the scene seemed ominous in the extreme to Benson.

Pigeons attacking everything in sight! It was as mad as it was for rabbits to attack a dog.

And The Avenger had an idea that the two madnesses might possibly have some connection.

In a small plane, Smitty and Lila Morel neared the Maine laboratory of Lila’s father.

Dick, before going to the library to have a look at the incredible pigeons, had sent the giant, with Lila, to look around that laboratory a bit.

“You say there’s no landing place near the laboratory?” Smitty asked the girl.

“There’re only thick woods all around,” said Lila. “Thick woods and wolves and black flies.”

“I take it you didn’t enjoy your trips there.”

“I didn’t,” confessed Lila. “I’m a city gal, I guess. No wilderness for me. But Dad needed me to take care of him — away from a test tube he was as helpless as a child — so I always went.”

“Would the clearing around the lab be big enough to land in?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lila. “We’ll have to walk it from the nearest village.”

“Or hire a car,” said Smitty hopefully.

“There’s no road to the lab,” said Lila. “Dad let it grow up with young trees as soon as the place was built and equipped and there was no more need for trucking. The only way through the woods is on foot.”

Smitty sighed. The big fellow was a Samson by nature and not by exercise. He didn’t like exercise, except the kind requiring huge fists to batter against the faces of crooks. Just out of college, Smitty had been framed into prison by a smooth crook. His main pleasure in life would always be taking that out on all other crooks within reach and making them sorry they’d been born.

The two didn’t get to the clearing around the lab till dusk. They’d heard Lila’s wolves plenty by then. She stayed very close to the big fellow and looked very thankful for his gigantic size. Smitty swelled his biceps a little under her clutching hand. There was only one girl in the world for him. That was petite Nellie Gray. But that didn’t keep him from admiring other beauty once in awhile.

Lila went up to the gate.

“I thought you said the gate could only be opened from inside the laboratory,” Smitty said rather dumbly.

“You can’t open it from the inside when everybody’s on the outside,” Lila pointed out. “When we leave, we set the inner mechanism so that a secret latch out here will open the gate for us to get back in.”

Smitty looked at the fence. A full two stories high, of heavy mesh, with barbed wire slanting outward on the top. It was as impossible to negotiate as the fence around a munitions factory. The big fellow didn’t see how anyone could ever disappear from within that barrier!

Lila twisted something near the ground beside the gate. There was a small flash as the current was shut off. Then her hand moved again.

“Pull,” she said.

Smitty tugged at the great gate, and it swung open. It was just getting fully dark as they stepped inside the clearing. Lila methodically fastened the gate again and turned on the current.

The laboratory door opened when she passed her hand four times in front of a spot in the wall which Smitty judged contained a photo-electric cell.

“You sure protect this place,” he said. “Your father must have been working on something very important.”

“I believe he was,” said Lila.

“But you don’t know what it was?”

“I have no idea,” said Lila.

Smitty frowned. It seemed odd that Morel’s servant, Packer, should have an idea what Morel’s work was about, though Morel’s own daughter did not know.

The two stepped into the laboratory. They only went far enough to find the light switch controlling the floodlights in the compound, however. Smitty had said he wanted to look over the clearing first.

The lights blazed out, and he went back outside.

There was little to observe in the clearing. It was just that — a clearing. Morel, in his anxiety to have an area around his laboratory that couldn’t harbor any trespassers, had cut down every tree and shrub. There was only grass, close-cropped. And in this, the giant could find no trace of visitors who might have taken Morel away with them or, indeed, of Morel’s walk out there itself.

The thing grew more impossible by the minute, as Smitty walked slowly around the high, unscalable fence and examined the gate, set now so that only from inside the building could it be opened.

Morel couldn’t have gotten out of here—

A scream from the laboratory sent the giant jumping back toward the building door. He moved fast. It had been a scream of pure horror, and it had come from Lila Morel.

Smitty charged through the doorway.

There was a sort of small anteroom inside the door, and the giant jumped into this and started toward the next door leading into the laboratory proper. He had left Lila in the tiny vestibule. It was in there that the floodlights could be turned on.

Neither had thought to look back in the lab before Smitty left Lila to look around the yard. Why should they think of it? Nobody could get in.

And now this scream of horror from the girl. What was after her in there?

Smitty got through the inner door and into the lab itself. A vast room with a high ceiling and many windows, blazing now with light from the switch Lila had clicked on a moment ago.

Smitty’s china-blue eyes bulged.

Lila was doing a kind of fantastic dance near the center of the room on the cement floor, stamping, swaying, starting to run, stopping again to stamp some more.

She had gone crazy from the strain of grief, Smitty decided sympathetically. Coming up here among her father’s things had revived the memories of him before fate overtook him, and she’d been unable to stand it. He ran toward her, to put a calming hand on her shoulder.

And then he began to dance, himself!

If the girl’s dance was fantastic, Smitty’s was like something out of a circus book. The trained elephant, dancing to fast music. It seemed as if even the solid-concrete floor was shaking under his weight, though this was, no doubt, imagination.

The reason for the dancing was fanged terror at their feet!

A dozen little tailless forms raged around them, darting in whenever possible, using sharp little teeth on shrinking flesh.

Lila’s stockings were ripped in several places, and crimson showed on the whiteness of her ankles. In a moment Smitty was in worse shape because he couldn’t move his three hundred pounds as agilely as Lila could move.

And the damnedest thing was the species of attacking animals. They were guinea pigs!

Common, ordinary guinea pigs, pets of laboratories, as mild an animal as ever lived. Usually a guinea pig is no match even for a determined wren; they aren’t built for fighting anything. And here were a dozen or more of the ordinarily harmless things doing real damage to two humans. Smitty felt like yelling, himself.

It was high time something was done before their ankles got slashed to cat’s meat. And it would take too long to stamp on them one by one, the way they were flashing around.

“Hold your breath!” Smitty yelled to the girl.

Then he hastily dropped a flashing little thing, like a glass marble, which he had taken from a lower vest pocket.

But the thing wasn’t a marble. It was a thin-shelled glass capsule. In it was a volatile, colorless gas invented by MacMurdie in his drugstore laboratory. The gas could knock any living thing cold in less than three seconds.

It knocked the guinea pigs cold in about one second. They fell in midmotion, sliding along the floor, still in the direction of the two humans they had been insane enough to attack.

“Whew!” Lila gasped.

Which was an indiscretion. She got a whiff of gas.

“Hang it, I told you to hold your breath!” said the giant, after he had carried her out to the little vestibule.

Lila only looked at him and gasped for breath. The one little whiff was going to make it imperative for her to lie down somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes. Smitty pulled out a little nose clip, then went back into the laboratory and opened the windows. The air cleared.

“What in the world kind of guinea pigs does your father raise?” he said, when Lila had recuperated.

She shook her head wonderingly.

“Just the ordinary kind,” she said. “They weren’t like that the last time I saw them.”

Smitty thought a moment.

“Didn’t Packer, your servant, say he thought your father had injected something into those pigs just before he vanished?” he asked.

Lila nodded, equally thoughtful.

“It must be,” Smitty said slowly, “that the behavior of those crazy little things has something to do with what your father was working on when he left here.” He sighed. “I’ll bet we never see a crazier thing than that.”

The giant was wrong. They were to see a crazier thing in a very short time.