The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (8 page)

“Yes, wouldn’t they?” said Smitty. And the two left.

But with them went the vision of Ritter’s face just before he knew there was anyone watching. The face of a fiend, inflicting torment on a helpless animal for torment’s own sake. “I wonder how many times that faithful little servant of his, the one he called Knarlie, has kept people from seeing Ritter in one of those moods?” mused Josh.

“Always, till now, I guess,” growled Smitty. “It would have come out in print if he’d been caught like that very often.”

“And he wants to be president!” Josh’s jaw set. “How would you like a man like that in the White House?”

Smitty felt like shivering.

“I could believe anything about him,” he said. “Watch him is right! We’ll take day and night shifts and never let him out of our sight. Flip you for the night watch.”

The coin came heads, so Smitty won. The giant got out of the car to take over the daylight vigil, with the politician still in the Weyland place. Josh went back to town to get some rest for the night watch over Ritter.

And both kept seeing him at his diabolical work with the wire whip.

This time the meeting of the automotive heads was not held in any hotel. There was too much chance of publicity.

It was held at the home of one of the magnates, and everyone was there save Ainslee and Fox. Ritter was there, too.

The meeting was to discuss that price war between the two absent ones—a war that was going to mean chaos for hundreds of thousands of people. When any main industry in a nation is crippled, that nation is also put seriously out of order.

So they met to see what could be done about it, and it was lucky they weren’t in a public place. For this time not just two men fought. They all did!

Twenty-five men, dignified, reserved, representative of several billion dollars, became raving males who wanted only to hit each other as hard as possible with the first weapon at hand.

Josh, on the outside of the house with a tiny stethoscope arrangement attached to the windowpane of the room in which the men had gathered, felt that he couldn’t be hearing correctly. Middle-aged and elderly millionaires behaving like gutter urchins! Bursting with hate for each other! Blacking each other’s eyes and throwing things around!

Josh ventured to raise his head a very little, so he could see into the room. The thing he saw was the exit of Edwin Ritter.

The handsome politician was slipping from the room with a small, enigmatic smile on his face. The rest were too busy screaming and fighting to notice. Josh went to the door, hiding behind shrubbery. He got there just in time to see Ritter step out, now with a broad grin on his face.

The fight back there apparently was precisely what he wanted. And that confirmed Smitty’s hunch of earlier in the day:

Somehow, Ritter was deliberately sowing hate and discord in the vital automotive industry, so that later he could step in and make peace and be hailed as a great man for stopping the trouble. Trouble he himself had started.

Ritter stepped into a town car, probably Weyland’s, which had been turned over to the politician along with Weyland’s home for his use while in Detroit. Josh had a car out along the curb, but a glance at the town car decided him against using that.

The rear bumper of the town car was too inviting. He got on it, dusky face blending with the night so that only teeth—when he grinned—and white eyeballs revealed his presence.

And he was not grinning, now.

The car started toward open country, and Josh took out the transmitter of his tiny radio with his right hand, while he clung to the bumper with his left.

The Avenger’s aides all knew Morse code. When they were in a position where it would have been dangerous to talk aloud, as it might have been for Josh now, they transmitted messages to each other by tapping on the transmitter instead of talking into it.

Josh tapped till he got Smitty’s attention.

“Yes?” the giant said.

“I’m on the tail of Ritter’s town car,”
Josh tapped.
“Going west on Route 39. Seems odd Ritter is heading that way. May be a rendezvous. Better come after us.”

Smitty, who
could
talk, cursed a little because, he told Josh, he was ready for bed. But he ended, of course, by saying he’d take the trail at once.

Josh put away the radio and clung to the bumper while the town car rolled sleekly over the highway. Several people in other cars saw the Negro hanging to the rear and turned to look. Josh didn’t like that because it might warn the man in the town car; but there was nothing Josh could do about it.

Finally, the car turned off the highway, down a small road. Josh promptly dropped his hat at the turn, hoping fervently that there wouldn’t be more turn-offs. He only had one hat.

The town car went about four miles, slowly, as if ahead of time for some appointment and killing minutes to come out right. Josh was beginning to get ridged like a washboard from the sharp bumper edge; this back road was rough.

He was glad when the car stopped. Glad for about twenty seconds.

In that time, he dropped from the bumper and scuttled for the side of the road where underbrush grew heavily. And there he felt as if an octopus had attacked him.

The octopus resolved itself into the clinging arms of about four men. One of them growled:

“Uh-huh! Company!”

Then Josh got loose.

The gangling, bony Negro didn’t look very strong, but appearances were deceptive. Josh could fight like a panther when he had the chance. And he had the chance now, for about three minutes!

His fist lashed out in the direction of the voice, and knuckles smacked home against cartilage and flesh. He swung at another head, showing only as a blotch against the night sky. The shock to his hand told of another first-rate sock.

Something hit him on the head, then, and he went to his knees. But he was still far from out. He grabbed legs, pulled them and tumbled a third man. He got this one most enthusiastically in the midriff as he was struggling to get up.

The man let out an
ooof
which was sweet music to Josh, but it was the last sweet music he was to hear for a while, because then he heard the smooth purr of a motor, not on the adjacent road, but, strangely, in the sky. And after that, a gun barrel or something got him on the skull and he lay without movement.

He recovered soon enough to feel himself being lifted high and caught from above. He knew vaguely that he had been hoisted in through a sort of trapdoor, and then he felt movement.

It was the strangest movement! It was without sound, without effort, as if he were on a raft floating downstream.

In a minute he got it.

This was an airship, a small blimp, possessing engines so beautifully muffled that they could be heard only a short distance. It was now not using even them. It was drifting slowly away from the road, and Ritter’s car, with the wind.

Josh opened his eyes. For a moment he saw nothing at all. Then he dimly perceived that he was on the floor of a small cabin. Three men were in the cabin with him. The three at the moment were staring downward.

“Another car coming down that road,” said one of the three in a low tone.

“So what?” said another. “It’s a public highway.”

“Not very public,” protested the first. “We picked it because not three cars a night usually use it. This could be one of those three, but I don’t like it.”

“Aw, dry up! Nobody can see us a couple hundred feet up on a starless night without lights—”

“Hey, our friend is awake,” said the third suddenly.

One of the men kicked Josh.

“So you’re out of it, huh? Thought I slugged you harder than that. Who are you, black boy?”

Josh said nothing. The kick was repeated.

“Talk! Who are you? Who’re you working for? Where do you fit in this?”

A lie would be quite justified, under the circumstances, but Josh couldn’t think of any.

“Open up, or I’ll—”

Josh opened up, all right. He let out a howl that from the ground must have sounded like the cry of some weird sort of night bird.

So they hit him on the head again, and the next time he opened his eyes it was over a gag that almost kept him from breathing, let alone making a noise.

They tried no more to get him to talk. Josh had a hunch that this was ominous. The hunch was confirmed a minute later.

“There’s the lake,” said one of the three. “We’re drifting right toward it. We’ll float along till we get a couple miles out, then heave this guy over the side and start our motors.”

“Yeah,” began another. Then, voice sharp, he said: “Hey! Ain’t we losing altitude?”

“Don’t know why we would,” said the first. He stared downward for a minute; stared hard because it was too dark to see anything well. Then an oath crackled from his lips.

“We
are
down! Heave out some of the sand.”

“Wouldn’t that be a smart thing to do,” jeered the third man. “Heave out some sand and keep on drifting out over the lake. So ten miles out we ain’t got any more sand to heave, and we sink down into the drink. You sap, lower away and we’ll have a look at the bag before we go farther.”

Josh couldn’t see the lake because he was lying on the floor, but he could smell the expanse of water, and he uttered some heartfelt sighs of relief when the blimp began nosing downward. It was a short reprieve anyway.

It seemed it was to be a long one.

The cabin bumped, dragged, and the blimp hauled on the grappling hook. Two of the three men got out, leaving the third to keep an eye on Josh.

The two men seemed to have stepped into a basketful of snakes, the way they thrashed around.

Josh heard yells and muffled noises.

“Who
is
he? Where’d he jump from?”

“Whadda you care?
Ouch!
Grab that—”

There were no more coherent words, just a lot of grunts and then two blows in quick succession. Josh blinked at the heavy smacking sound of those blows. He would have thought that only one man on earth could hit that hard. But it was impossible for that man to turn up here, of course.

The precise nature of what was happening outside, however, was of less importance to Josh than the fact that something
was
happening. It gave him a chance to do something about the fellow left to guard him, while that person’s attention was distracted.

The man was leaning out the cabin window when Josh got him.

The gangling Negro’s hands had been bound together when he had been gagged. But the job had been hasty, and no one had bothered to tie his arms to his sides at the same time.

Josh got a double handful of the slack in the seat of the man’s pants with his two bound hands. He heaved up hard.

The man yelled, and pitched forward out of the cabin on his face. There was one more resounding blow outside, then the sound of panting as loud and heavy as that of a locomotive that has stopped to take on water.

When Josh had gotten out of the window, after loosening his bonds, a man’s body blocked out the night sky to his right. Only one body that Josh knew anything about was that big.

“Smitty! What— How’d you get here?”

“Just . . . puff . . . a minute . . .
puff, puff,”
gasped Smitty. “I . . . uh—”

He drew great breaths into his bellowlike lungs for a couple of minutes, and then was in better shape. Meanwhile, the three men who had been downed by the big fellow’s blows, lay right where they had fallen. When Smitty hit ’em, they stayed hit.

The giant had his wind back and was shaking his head reproachfully at Josh.

“Couldn’t you have gotten tossed into something a little easier to follow than a blimp?” he demanded.
“Phew!
Try following one, drifting with an eight-or nine-mile wind, straight across country, over fences and up and down hills. I got in about four miles on somebody’s bicycle I commandeered from in front of a farm house, when the bag drifted along a road. But the rest was on foot.”

Josh said just one word.

“Thanks.”

They didn’t make much fuss about saving each other’s lives, these members of The Avenger’s indomitable band. In their perilous business, somebody was always getting into deadly danger and needing a helping hand.

Josh was curious, though.

“How’d you do it?” he demanded. “Bring the blimp down, I mean. Or did it just happen?”

“Mac would explode over that,” chuckled Smitty. “Saying it ‘just happened,’ I mean. Mac’s responsible. I had one of his acid bullets in a compressed-air gun in the car. I got out, after turning where you dropped your hat, just as the blimp was taking off, and I had a chance to send that bullet at the bag. It took all this time for the acid to eat a big enough hole.”

“Ritter?” said Josh.

“I couldn’t follow his town car and the blimp, too; so I went after the blimp, because you were in it. There’s one thing, though. We know Ritter’s up to his ears in this business—whatever it is. He either got some message from these three in the blimp or gave them one. Then he hit back for town.”

“It begins to clear up a little,” said Josh thoughtfully. “We can make some close guesses. Morel invented some kind of drug up in his Maine laboratory that makes creatures fight. Men, too. Ritter got hold of it and of Morel. Now Ritter is using that serum—kind of a hate serum you’d call it—to make trouble which he later can smooth down.”

“Looks like it,” nodded Smitty.

“The blimp tells how Morel was taken from his Maine place, too. It just drifted over the clearing, with no noise; then men went down a rope ladder, knocked Morel cold and hauled him back up.”

Smitty didn’t say anything to that. He had known it before. He had guessed, when he and Lila were at the Maine place, that exit and entrance must have been by air. That was why he had asked for the thermocouple. And the thermocouple had revealed the heat presence of motors nearby. The motors couldn’t have been plane motors or car motors; hence there must be a silent, lighter-than-air ship around.

There was a road not far away. Smitty picked up two of the unconscious men, Josh took the other, and they went to the road.