The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (12 page)

“Huh?” said the giant.

“You may not find one, of course. But search for a recently murdered man, anyhow. I’d suggest that you start with the plant itself, and then widen your field of investigation gradually from that point. It will be safer if you don’t let anyone see you looking around.”

Benson went out. Down on the second floor was a huge wardrobe containing hundreds of suits, good and bad, fine and ragged. Smitty and Josh knew that he was going to select the type of thing Nevlo had worn—rather cheap clothing that didn’t fit too well.

Smitty and Josh stared at each other.

“What’s in the wind?” said Smitty, perplexed.

Josh shrugged. “He’s taking Nevlo’s place somewhere. That’s plain enough. But I don’t know what it’s all about.”

“Didn’t he say anything to you when he told you to go phoning around the country about utilities magnates?”

Josh rubbed his jaw.

“He said something about this power-failure business being destructive only, that it could not be used constructively in any way. That’s all.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” worried Smitty. “And this job of mine! I’m to go to Marville and hunt for a dead man. What dead man? And what made him dead? And when was he killed and by whom?”

“Probably,” said Josh, “those are the things you are to find out. Good hunting!”

The coast of Maine, along the Bar Harbor sector, is as uneven and ragged as a fringe of ancient lace.

There are sheer cliffs rising smooth from the water to their crest. There are fields of house-sized boulders breaking the surf into fragments in other spots. There are shallow pools in which water is left when the tide retreats. There are deep potholes, formed over the centuries by whirlpool action of the tides.

At the foot of the cliff on which Hooley’s home was built, the ragged-lace appearance was pronounced. Staring down, you saw white foam interspersed with irregular black spots. Some of the black spots were rounded rocks; some were pools, either shallow or deep.

That was the picture that presented itself to Nellie Gray as she hurtled down toward death like a plummet, thrown over the cliff’s top by the gorilla arms that had held her.

There was a solid line of white where the last ramparts of the surf were shattered against the solid foot of the cliff itself, then the black spots. And right under her was one of the larger dark patches.

They say you can see your whole life in retrospect in a second when death faces you. That may or may not be true. But it is a fact that thought is so accelerated that a whole chain of life can be encompassed in a wink of an eye.

It was so in Nellie’s case.

Most of her brain was shocked with the paralyzing fear of death which even the bravest person carries. The instinct to live is strong; the fear of death is correspondingly strong.

But in another small corner of her mind, she was thinking fast—and staring down at the larger black spot.

That might be an extra big, extra-flat-topped rock. Or it might be a pool beyond the first fringe of surf. If it happened to be a pool, it might be six inches deep . . . or it might be twenty feet deep.

In any event, Nellie was turning lithely in air like a cat and straightening out like the expert diver she was; she was heading for the black patch. Literally, she was heading for it, diving down like a comet with her arms out in a swan-dive spread.

There was a breathless half-second when she was going to hit. Then the blackness reflected a single glint of starlight, showing that it was a pool, all right.

And then she struck!

Luck helps those who are strong and competent and can help themselves. Not one woman in thousands could have turned a fall into a perfect dive and hit so small a bull’s-eye. And, as if in recompense, the bull’s-eye turned out to be a pool with just enough depth to do the trick.

It’s rock, after all, Nellie thought wildly, as she struck. But she had forgotten the terrific impact that ordinary water presents at a height of a hundred feet. Then she was slanting briefly down and up again in the shallowest possible of dives, and her head bobbed above the ebony surface.

It took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t dead, another to feel that she hadn’t escaped free, after all, because her left leg was numb from dragging briefly on the bottom. Then she lay on the rim of the pool, oblivious of the cold spray that occasionally broke over her. Her lips were moving a little, prayerfully. It was the closest call she had ever had.

In a very short time, though, she eyed the cliff with her firm chin determined. She was going to go back up that cliff and confront Nevlo again—

Some faint sound from offshore caught her ear. She stared out and saw a dark bulk.

A lot of looking, and twisting around so that the stars could silhouette bits of it at a time, showed her that the bulk was a seaplane.

It was without lights. But there was somebody aboard. Because, now that her attention was on it, she could hear low voices for a moment. Then silence.

And now there was a noise from the side toward the cliff. She stared in that direction and instantly crawled behind a boulder where the white of the surf helped to hide the light gray of her torn dress.

Somebody was coming down the cliff!

She heard rocks rattle as the descent was completed, heard a splash as somebody stepped into water. Then she saw a figure coming toward her.

It was the crouching, misshapen Nevlo!

“Hurry up!” came a voice from near where Nellie had heard the rocks rattle. Nevlo had a companion, it seemed. Probably the man who had driven the coupé.

“I can’t find her,” said Nevlo, almost at Nellie’s elbow. She was taut, ready for the man, now, if he should see her.

“Let her alone. She’s dead—smashed in a hundred pieces.”

“I can’t find her body—”

“It probably bounced out into the surf. She had a light dress on; you wouldn’t be able to see it in the foam. Come
on!”

The gorilla form turned, one foot almost stepping on Nellie’s left hand, and went away. Nellie heard the sound of a boat. There was a short interval; then she heard the subdued take-off of the seaplane. The motor was evidently muffled. Nevlo, or the other, had boarded the plane from the boat.

From the spot where the plane had been, she heard the boat again. But it did not return to shore at this point. It went on down the coast, till its soft purring faded into the distance.

Nellie found the cliff path and climbed up. The big dog met her almost the minute she scrambled up over the edge. He was still uncertain about her, but it would not have mattered now whether he barked or not. If he had, the sound would have been lost in the uproar coming from the house.

Screams, yells of men, and one high shriek: “The police! Get the police!”

She hurried to the gray stone structure. As she neared it, through a long French window, she could see the forms of people gathered in one room on her side. She went to the window and stared in.

He lay on the floor of that room—Hooley, utilities baron and owner of the estate. He had been murdered, but not just neatly put out of the world of the living.

The man lay in a red lake, looking as if a cageful of lions had been at him. He was literally torn to pieces. It seemed impossible that a human could have done that. It must have been an animal—or a man who crouched and moved like a gorilla and whose long arms, as Nellie knew from first-hand information, had a gorilla’s strength.

In any industry, if you trace origins and control closely enough, you find the channels leading more and more indirectly to fewer and fewer hands. Eventually, it becomes clear that a very small handful of men are the rulers of that industry.

It was so with electric power.

The seven men who were meeting in Blake’s Cleveland home, along with Blake himself, who was no pygmy in the business, could have caused almost as complete a power blackout as the strange failures that had already come to pass, if they had cared to. For they controlled almost all the power companies in North America.

Almost all—not quite. One empire was not represented here, because the emperor happened to be dead—that one being Hooley, of Bar Harbor.

There was a man named Jerand Jarvis, and another named Robert Vance; there were James J. Guest, Marvin Masters, Hall Singer, Pierpont Ryan and, of course, John Blake, their host.

They were the utilities masters of North America, powerful, wealthy, the final authority on electric power for a continent. But they didn’t look like masters at the moment. They looked like very bewildered, frightened men.

Some of them looked scared into a blue funk. Some seemed snarlingly angry at their own fear and the thing that had caused it. But all, no matter what their outward reactions, were obviously terrified.

“When’s he coming, anyway?” snapped Jerand Jarvis, a stout gentleman who looked as if he had to guard against gout and apoplexy.

Pierpont Ryan, a red-headed man with gray beginning to lighten his hair, but with advancing age not doing a thing to ameliorate his quick temper, glared at Blake.

“You’re responsible for this, Blake. You hired Nevlo in the first place. And then you fired him. Why didn’t you take him back when he threatened you with a power shutoff of Plant 4—and then went ahead and proved he could cause it?”

“I simply didn’t believe he was able to do such a thing,” said Blake. “Think a minute of the impossibility of it! Never in the history of electricity has a man been able to do the things that Nevlo claims he can do.”

“Claims?” snorted Ryan. “He
can
do it. He did it, didn’t he? He made your damned Plant 4 useless. And then, twice recently, he went far beyond that and cut off
all
power. Claim be damned!”

“Why didn’t you get in touch with Nevlo and do something before things reached such a state?” added James Guest, a lanky Westerner, whose empire took in eight states.

“I couldn’t find him,” protested Blake. “I tried to do just that, but Nevlo wouldn’t get in touch with me. Then, when he did, just recently—”

“Then it was too late,” Ryan finished for him. “Then he got in touch with you only to demand that you call us together here and allow him to make some preposterous blackmail claim against us. Well, I’m warning you now that I won’t pay any blackmail.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” urged Marvin Masters. “Please! This isn’t getting us anywhere. Blake may or may not be responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. Nevlo may or may not be preposterous in his claim against us. The thing for us to discuss is causes, not results.”

Blake nodded.

“Also,” he said heavily, “we’d better resign ourselves to the fact that he’s got us just where he wants us. I don’t have to tell you how many millions of dollars just one day’s shutdown of all our plants would cost us, or describe the catastrophes that would result from such a shutdown in hospitals and factories and subways. It is pretty evident that the most colossal sum he can try to extort must be carefully considered by us.”

Ryan’s choleric face expressed an insanity of fury. It was evident that he was driven almost out of his mind by the fact that some outside power had, momentarily, complete control over him. Obviously, he wasn’t used to being controlled by anything but his own dictates.

However, it was no good being enraged. Blake’s logic was sound, if comfortless.

“What do you suppose he’ll ask?”

Blake moistened his lips in the anguish that comes to any money man commanded to part with a large sum.

“He intimated to me, when he ordered me to get in touch with you gentlemen, that he would ask forty or fifty million dollars.”

“Fif—” gasped Guest. “The man’s mad!”

Blake nodded unhappily. “Mad, of course. Which makes our situation all the more hopeless. No sane man would shut off all power and allow the human suffering bound to result, for money. It takes a madman to do such a thing. If Nevlo were sane, we might be able to reason with him. Mad, he is beyond reason. There is left for us only to do as he says—or take the consequences.”

The door opened, and Blake’s butler poked his head in. The man’s face was pale, and his eyes bulged with fear.