The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (14 page)

Cole saw, then, that the opened bottle of liquor was half gone; and he saw it pass from hand to hand again, this time to be set down empty. Celebration? Or were the men getting Dutch courage to shoot down three helpless humans in cold blood? It didn’t matter.

What did matter, it seemed to Cole, was The Avenger’s utter calm in the face of what seemed sure death.

Wilson knew that Dick, far from fearing death, seemed at times almost to court it. Though he knew that those colorless, inhuman eyes never expressed much emotion, it did seem to him that they’d express at least a
little
agitation—unless the crime battler had some ace up his sleeve.

It seemed that the men were made uneasy by this inhuman calm, too. It wasn’t the first time that killers with the drop on The Avenger had been disconcerted by his air of being protected by an unseen army.

“Aw, take him!” snapped the owner of the rotgut whiskey.

“Take him yourself!” snarled the man he had spoken to.

“Why you—” howled the first one. “Who gives orders around here? Me or you?”

“Not you, you ape!” another man broke in. “You’re just a damned straw boss.
I’ve
got more right than you have to give orders.”

Cole looked on in wonder. And instantly the men were in a milling bedlam, concerned only with themselves, paying no attention to their prisoners.

It was fantastic and horrible. It ended with one of the gunmen clubbing another down with the barrel of his gun. And that one would never move again. A pal turned his gun on the clubber and blasted him through the chest.

“Out of here, fast!” said The Avenger, tone low.

Cole got the terrified, dazed Lila, and rushed her to the side door. The Avenger came after. There was a sound of shots in the room behind them like a miniature battle of the Marne.

“That liquor bottle!” exclaimed Cole suddenly, staring hard at The Avenger as the three ran across the fields back toward the autogyro, after Dick had retrieved Mike.

“Yes,” said Dick. “I had some of Morel’s drug with me. I had just synthesized it in the lab. Before I started using Mike through the open window, I poured the lot of it into the bottle. I thought they might drink from it. If they hadn’t we might have been in trouble.”

Cole felt wonder, and something like awe, fill him. He knew well enough The Avenger’s code now. Don’t take life, but place opponents in such a position that if they try to slaughter you, they are themselves annihilated.

But along with this wonder, Cole suddenly felt red rage creeping through him.

“You and your plots!” he yelled suddenly, stopping at the fringe of the woods. “This one happened to turn out all right, and there probably won’t be a man left alive back there in the farmhouse. But suppose it hadn’t come out right? We’d have paid with our lives for your silly scheme!”

Lila looked at him with wide eyes. The Avenger stared with eyes like cold fire opals.

“You ought to be beaten up within an inch of your life,” snarled Cole. “You ought to be—”

And then he leaped, murderously, treacherously, with hate-filled eyes. But Dick was more than ready.

The Avenger took a short step to the side, about the movement a bullfighter makes when he sways six inches to right or left so that the bull’s horn grazes him. Thus did Cole’s maddened fist miss Dick’s head by a half inch. And then Benson’s fist got Cole in the jaw, almost gently, with just enough scientifically applied force to knock him cold.

Dick picked up Cole as if he had weighed nothing at all and went on through the woods. But he looked hard at Lila, with a question in his eyes. And the girl nodded, suddenly, biting her lips.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember, now. One of the men—I think he was half drunk to start with—forced some of the liquor from that bottle down Cole’s throat while he was unconscious. He said Cole ought to be awake to know what was going to happen to him, and then he laughed.”

She shivered. “The poor boy got some of Dad’s drug. Mr. Benson! My father! What has happened to
him
in all of this?”

They were at the little field where Cole had landed the plane. Lila saw another plane, now. A larger one, with unique wind flaps allowing such a low landing speed that Benson could set it down in almost as small a space as the gyro. From this plane, Mac grinned at Lila, but with sympathy in his bleak blue eyes. She saw why.

Her father lay, in bonds, on the floor, eyes filled with the lust to kill.

“I had an idea you and Cole might be followed,” said The Avenger to Lila. “So Mac and I came after you, just in time to see the gang sneak into the farmhouse. I got your father, and Mac brought him to this plane; then I went back. The rest you know.”

The pale, icily calm eyes went to Mac.

“Better take the gyro, with Wilson. It’s easier to take out of this small field than the plane.”

They tied Wilson hand and foot. Before they were finished he was conscious. And he was a hideous example of what Morel’s drug could do to a man. He raved and writhed to get free; to get at Mac and Dick and Lila; to kill them.

“Mon, mon!” said Mac. “Muster Benson—”

“Watch him carefully, Mac,” was all Dick said. “He’ll strike like a cobra if he gets a chance. Now—back to Bleek Street and the lab.”

There were more headlines in the newspapers—bigger ones than had been in before, with the same name:

Edwin C. Ritter.

The man was becoming an American idol overnight. For this time, it seemed, he had settled a squabble in the ranks of the great financial institution at the Palmer Building on Wall Street.

There had been no previous hint of a fight here, as there had been in the motor business. The implications of a financial civil war were so vast that the papers hadn’t dared print it.

The story would have precipitated a panic that would have lowered the combined values of stocks and bonds by billions of dollars overnight.

Only now, when the fight was settled, did it come out, with the name of Edwin Ritter as the pacifier.

Ritter had smoothed down a nasty situation in the automotive industry. He had done the same thing, with even more benefit to the United States, in the financial circles of the country. The papers unanimously came out, this morning, with what they had only hinted at the other time.

“We must have Ritter for our next president!”

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now. Ritter for president.

With sinking hearts, Smitty and Mac and John and Nellie read those editorials.

The Avenger and his little crew knew precisely how the man had gotten into those glowing headlines. They knew that, to patch up the sinister trouble in industry and finance, he had first made that trouble.

Deliberately, ruthlessly, devilishly he had set man against man, so that he could step in with a bow to the gallery and make them friends again.

“Which means, of course,” said Nellie, “that there is an antidote to this drug of Morel’s. Otherwise, Ritter couldn’t undo so easily what he had done. He gave them the hate serum first, then later gave them this other stuff to make them normal again.”

“I grilled Packer, and he swears as far as he knows there is no antidote,” sighed Mac. “But there’d better be an antidote! If there isn’t—what about Wilson?”

Cole was in a specially fitted room downstairs. With heavy hearts the rest had fixed it. A similar one had been arranged for Arthur Morel.

They had fixed the rooms by padding them and putting bars over the windows. In one of those, Morel now paced. In the other was Wilson.

The Avenger came into the vast top-floor room. He came from the laboratory, still in a white coat. Even Dick Benson looked a little tired after his Herculean work. But his voice was even and his eyes icily calm as he said:

“I think I have something. We’ll try it anyway.”

“An antidote!” gasped Mac. “Ye’re sure?”

“I’m not at all sure,” said Benson. “It seems to work with rabbits. Whether it will work with humans is another matter.”

His pale eyes were somber.

“To try again, on another angle, would take me days. And I’m afraid, in that time, the mania possessing Morel and Wilson might become permanent. No one knows the results that prolonged effects of the drug produces. We’ll give some of the antidote to them, in spite of the risk. Better to have them dead than permanently insane—if the antidote fails to work.”

Lila cried out, then pressed her hand to her lips. The Avenger’s colorless eyes seemed as icy as ever as they turned on her; but she appeared to find some sympathy in them, for her hand slowly came down.

“I won’t give it to your father if you’d rather I did not,” Dick said to the girl.

She shook her head.

“I feel as you do about it. Better to have him dead than a homicidal maniac for the rest of his life.”

“Very well,” said Dick. “We’ll inject them with some of the antidote.”

They went down to the second floor, to those two rooms. For a moment The Avenger looked through the small opening in each door at the two men.

Morel was sitting on the bed in his room. His eyes were dull, slightly bloodshot. But they were still savage. He half rose to his feet as he saw Dick watching him, then sank back. But he was ready to spring, like a watchful panther, if he got a chance.

Wilson wasn’t quite like Morel; after all, Wilson had gotten only one dose while it seemed that Morel must have been injected repeatedly, over a long period of time. Cole waved to Dick when he saw him.

“When are you going to let me out, chief?” he said cheerfully. “I’m O K, now. Entirely normal.”

“Don’t believe it, Muster Benson,” whispered Mac.

But Dick had no intention of letting Wilson out. Instead, he got out one of Mac’s milder gas pills. This was one that induced deep sleep.

He tossed it into Wilson’s room.

Wilson saw it, knew instantly what it was and turned into a snarling demon. Also, a sly demon.

The lapel of his coat was saturated with the chemical of Mac’s devising which counteracted for a little while the effects of the gas. He promptly held this to his mouth and nostrils.

It took four of the pills, spaced at five-minute intervals, to send him off to sleep. Even then, Mac moved warily when The Avenger told him to get him and bring him into Morel’s room.

Morel succumbed to the first pill, of course. Lila, ashen, trembling, saw him lie down on the bed and go off into a profound sleep.

The two men were laid side by side, and Benson got out the small vial in which was the stuff he thought was an antidote for Morel’s hate serum. Thought only!
He did not know.

This stuff was absolutely colorless. The hate serum was bloodred, but this antidote was as white and clear as distilled water. It looked pretty ineffective to Mac, even though, as a chemist, he knew that color had nothing to do with the potency of any liquid. After all, TNT is practically colorless.

The Avenger plunged a hypodermic needle through the cork of the vial and drew it full. Then he turned to Cole Wilson.

It was a somber moment. If Dick were wrong, he would be a murderer. And instead of watching a man slowly come back to sanity and life, he would watch him slowly die.

Lila and the others literally held their breaths while Dick injected the stuff into Wilson and then into Morel.

They were ready for anything. What they were not ready for was what happened. Which was nothing at all.

The two had been in a deep sleep. After the injection they remained just the same, eyes closed, breathing deeply and slowly. But The Avenger was physician enough to know that there had been a slight change, after all.

He nodded, eyes as icily calm as if he were not taking sole responsibility for the continuance of two human lives.

“They are in a coma,” he said. “They’ll probably remain in it for some hours, unless—” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Unless they passed from the coma straight into death.

That was what the “unless” meant.

They went up to the top-floor room again. The Avenger paced slowly near his big desk, his pale eyes seeing none of them, and seeing none of the immediate surroundings. Lila didn’t know what the brilliant far look in his eyes meant. But the others did.

Now and then in the course of a case The Avenger thought aloud, pinning down more clearly the points he had listed up to that moment. It was a rare and wonderful thing to hear him. They were hopping he would do this now.

He did.

“I think I have the rough outline of this now,” he said slowly, absently, talking to no one of them there. “Morel invented this drug. It is, as my laboratory work has shown, mainly a refinement of adrenalin.

“With all the war there is on earth at the moment, it is easy to see why Morel tried for such a drug. He was after something that would turn men into heroes. Something that would make them entirely courageous, utterly without fear. That explains the heavy amount of adrenalin in his formula. Adrenalin, shot into the blood stream, makes a human, or animal, warlike and fearless and gives him more than normal strength. Just the thing for an army.

“Morel found his drug, all right. A serum that turned anything that felt it into a thing without fear. But the serum had something wrong with it. There was another effect that Morel hadn’t planned on, and emphatically didn’t want.

“It filled its victims with a murderous hate, as well as a complete fearlessness.

“The drug, instead of being a courage serum, was a hate serum. Instead of making heroes of men, it made murdering maniacs of them; made them want to kill everything in reach.

“In working to correct this, Morel stumbled onto an antidote. That was how I got what I think is an antidote by an extension of the same experiments that gave me a duplicate of his drug. That much, at least, he had done. But until he could get the hate part out of his courage serum, the whole thing was a failure. You couldn’t give an army the stuff to make it unbeatable in battle. If you gave it to an army, the army would begin killing each other, hating each other, instead of the enemy.

“Morel’s close friend was Edwin C. Ritter, the politician. Ritter happened to hear about Morel’s unsuccessful experiment. But to Ritter it seemed quite successful. He could use that drug, as it stood.