The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (5 page)

“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.

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.