The Hate Master

CHAPTER VI The Red Pool

The gas had gone out the opened windows when the two went back into the laboratory. But it hadn’t cleared in time for the luckless guinea pigs. They were dead. Mac’s gas was powerful stuff.

Smitty shoved the little bodies under a table with his toe as unobtrusively as he could. But he needn’t have worried about sparing Lila’s feelings. She wasn’t looking at him at all. She was staring around the great room in dismay. And in a moment Smitty joined her.

The dismay was well warranted.

Everything in that fine shop had been smashed. Delicate instruments lay in shards on the floor. There were iridescent patches of glass, the remains of test tubes and beakers. The lab had had the finest of everything, tens of thousainds of dollars’ worth of instruments. And all was damaged beyond repair. Smitty, a scientist himself, groaned when he saw the havoc.

“Poor Dad,” murmured Lila forlornly. “I’m glad he isn’t here to see this.”

There was movement in a far corner. Instantly, Smitty crouched, ready to leap. Then the maker of the movement walked out on satin paws, and Smitty grinned sheepishly at himself.

It was a cat, gray and white, purring loudly.

“Mathilda!” exclaimed Lila. “Didn’t Packer put you out when he left?”

She turned to Smitty. “She’s a tramp tabby; came to us out of the woods one day. We feed her when we’re here, then turn her loose to hunt field mice for herself when we’re away. Packer should have loosed her in the woods when he—”

She stopped and stared. So did Smitty.

Mathilda had stopped her purring and her satiny advance toward them. She was crouched like a tiny panther, suddenly, and her slitted eyes glared toward a corner. Then she stalked slowly toward the corner.

Smitty saw, then, why the cat was in such good shape in spite of being shut up in this building. She was stalking a mouse. The little creature was under a work table that had less fragments of broken equipment around it than most. It stared warily at the advancing cat. But here was something eerie — it didn’t run! It just stayed there.

It was only later that Smitty remembered the little details. It was only later that he repictured the mouse and the thing beside which the mouse was crouching.

This was a small red puddle on the floor. It was a slowly drying puddle, coagulated around the edges so that it looked startingly like blood. Smitty thought he had seen flecks of red on the mouse’s muzzle; but he couldn’t be sure of this. It was pretty hard to see that at twenty feet by electric light.

However, at the moment, he wasn’t thinking these things. He wasn’t thinking anything. He was too stupefied by what was happening.

The cat got right up to within springing distance. And the mouse hadn’t moved. Beady eyes fearless, it was looking at the cat, symbol of death to mousedom.

The cat’s tail twitched preliminary to a leap. And Lila cried out in wonder and fear. And it wasn’t the cat that leaped; it was the mouse — right at its comparatively colossal enemy.

The cat backed a step, hissed, and reared up in a feline astonishment that must have been intense. And then the mouse got there. Sharp teeth caught the cat’s stubby nose, and there was the doggonedest snarling and hissing you ever heard. There was a flurry of fur, and then the cat was streaking toward the door on an obvious and frantic hunt for some sane corner of a world where mice were mice and not mad acrobats.

“I didn’t see it!” breathed Smitty.

Lila’s hand was at her throat and she was staring at the door.

“I’m not crazy!” said Smitty.

And then he remembered the details and looked back to verify them.

Where the mouse had been, was the drying red pool on the floor. And he was now prepared to believe that he had seen flecks on the mouse’s muzzle.

“I’ll be a son of a pigmy,” he said. “It’s the answer!”

“What’s the answer?” said Lila, voice queer.

“Rabbits chasing dogs, pigeons attacking humans, mice going after cats!” said Smitty. “That little red pool! It must have been spilled when this joint was wrecked. And the mouse must have consumed some of the stuff, and that must be what gave it the insane courage to tackle a cat. That red stuff must be the answer—”

Click!

The lights in the laboratory went out.

There was a sound of padding feet, seeming to come from all directions at once. Then the giant found himself in the midst of a hailstorm. But the hailstones were blackjacks, clubbed guns and other extremely hard objects.

When the lights suddenly go out, you are left with an after-image, a kind of photograph, that persists for half a second or so. Smitty’s after-image showed an overturned bench, hardly higher than a footstool, a little to his right.

He stooped, head sunk to avoid the blows, gathered six or eight or ten legs in his vast embrace, and straightened up suddenly.

The owners of the legs yelled as they were dumped on their heads. Smitty felt the bench, lay down and put the bench over him. Then he just felt around for extremities.

When he found an ankle, he squeezed.

That doesn’t sound very drastic. But the giant could have crushed a beer bottle in his bare fingers, if he’d been foolish enough to risk cutting his hands. When he exerted that pressure on an ankle, that owner of the ankle hopped off on one foot and sat down somewhere.

He got several ankles, with the bench over him absorbing the wild flailings of the unseen attackers. And in the meantime a corner of his mind was concerned with amazement at the presence of this gang at all.

That fence was supposed to keep everybody out. Hadn’t he seen its impregnability for himself? Yet, here was a band of yeggs enthusiastically trying to kill him and Lila and only kept from shooting them down by the fact that in the darkness they might miss and kill each other. How had they gotten in?

A shriek from Lila galvanized Smitty into offensive instead of defensive warfare. The shriek was cut off, and he knew it was by a hand over Lila’s lips.

The giant heaved up from the floor, bench held like a shield. Then he caught the end of it and whirled it around like a monstrous club.

Yells and smacks delighted him. He jumped for the spot where Lila had cried out. He heard another beginning of a scream, this time near the inner door, and bounded there, barking his shins on things in the blackness. He cursed the method of this gang. They’d turned the yard lights off when they turned the others off. There wasn’t even light from outside shining in to relieve the blackness.

Smitty heard the rustle of Lila’s dress, moved faster and brought up smack against a wall. But also, he brought up against the light switch.

He snapped it on, turned in relief to go on with the fight against men he could see, and then he sagged to his knees!

He wasn’t the only one near that light switch. One of the gang, perhaps the one who had snapped it off in the first place, was there, too. And this one had struck before Smitty could see him.

A bad clip on the head with a gun barrel.

Smitty instinctively rolled as he sagged so that the giant was spared the next blow. But he was too dazed to go on. He braced himself for the blow or the shot that should put him out of this world—

“All right!” yelled a man near the table under which the mouse had been. “I’ve got it.”

Smitty got one confused glimpse of this man, and then an abrupt change came over the picture.

The men left.

Just like that! They poured out of the building. Two men who had been holding Lila, loosed her and beat it so abruptly that she almost fell. The man with the gun on Smitty turned and ran.

Before the big fellow could get strength back to rise from knees to unsteady feet, the place was empty, save for Lila and himself.

Lila had nerve. She started toward the door.

“We can catch them in the woods. I know the country around here better than they can possibly know it. Well, why don’t you come on?”

Smitty didn’t make a move; he didn’t even answer her. He stood with his head cocked to one side, as if listening intently. Which, as a matter of fact, he was.

“Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”

“Of course I’d know one — a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”

“See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.

They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.

He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.

“U-huh. Going in and out of this clearing at will, in spite of the fence! I get it.”

“Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.

“The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.

“No motor could be within a mile or two. I told you there wasn’t a road for cars or trucks through the woods. And no plane could land with the men, and, besides, we’d have heard a plane motor.”

But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.

“You described your father, at Bleek Street, when you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.

Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.

“You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.

Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.

“The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”

Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.

“That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”

“He… he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.

“Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”

“No! He… I never saw that man before!”

Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.

The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.

And there was no sign of that pool, now!

The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.

“That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”

“He wasn’t my father! He wasn’t!” cried Lila. And then she burst into tears, leaving a perplexed and dismayed giant with the prospect of getting a hysterical damsel ten miles through woods, at night, on foot.