The nerve shock that had paralyzed Benson’s face had made the flesh completely lifeless. Dick Benson worked and manipulated the flesh of his cheeks downward into heavy jowls, and the dead flesh stayed that way. Then The Avenger worked with his own temples till there were heavy ridges over his eyes.
His countenance was a plastic mask that could be shaped any way at all. And he was thus shaping it till he was a close twin of the stock-room employee.
But, though The Avenger did not know it, this was the last time he was going to be able to do that!
“Now, the clothes,” said Benson.
The man took off his shop clothes. He was a shade taller than Benson; so The Avenger put three-quarter-inch lifts in his shoes. When he put on the shop clothes, it would have taken a long inspection by trained eyes under bright lights to show that he was not the person he was supposed to be.
“You have just about time to get to the plant,” said the stock-room employee. “It’s seven ten. It’ll take you about forty-five minutes to get out there from here, and you’re supposed to report at eight o’clock.”
Benson nodded, and went out a Marr workman reporting to his job.
In the great plant there was unaccustomed quiet. For the place was almost entirely shut down. There were only several score men in the various stock rooms checking over the stored parts, for no machines were running after old Marr’s orders had been received.
All made-up parts had to be taken from storage bins and scrapped lest they further break the costly machinery! But among the parts were many that had been completely finished and were ready only for assembly. These could be saved, while the parts waiting for a last finishing touch would have to go.
That was why Benson had gone as a stock-room man. These men were kept busy sorting.
For about half an hour Benson went slowly, till he found his way around. Then he worked along with the rest, and talked when he could.
“Certainly a shame to discard all this stuff,” he said. “Can’t they test it for hardness?”
“Seems not,” said the man next to him at the moment. They were dumping wrist pins — complete save for the tiny oil holes — into a truck, to be wheeled to the scrap-iron heap. “Analysis doesn’t show anything wrong. Carbon’s all right — everything. But it’s just too tough. That is, a few pieces are too tough.”
“Couldn’t they find out by touching each piece with a file or something?”
“I guess not, or they’d be doing it. Wonder where old Jackson is?”
“Yeah,” said Benson. “We could sure use him.”
“I guess they’ll be taking the box off the trial assembly line, if he doesn’t show up,” said the man.
Benson didn’t say anything to that. Obviously, he was supposed to know what “the box” was. And he didn’t. So at lunch time he went to look for it.
It wasn’t hard to find.
In the finishing plant there were three assembly lines. In normal times, from the end of each line was rolled, every few minutes, a completed Marr automobile, ready to run when oiled and gassed.
At the end one of these three lines was — the box.
In fact, at first glance, that was all it looked like. Just a great big chamber, or case, almost as big as a box car, through which the assembly belt ran.
The thing was big enough to let a completed car on the line slide right through it; and at each end was a great door designed to permit just that.
At each side of the big oblong case was a sort of window. At least, it was an aperture about four feet square going right into the interior.
Resting on a tripod a yard or so from each aperture, was what might have been called the window, itself, which just fitted into these apertures: four-foot slabs about two feet thick. Only, there were wrist-thick cables trailing from the slabs, which indicated that they were not solid, but had some sort of mechanism within them.
So the steel-processing business began to make sense!
Phineas Jackson, this arrangement hinted, had not discovered a new version of the old methods of tempering steel. The Marr process of tempering had nothing to do with oil or heat or acid. It was a brand-new process. Ray tempering, in some form or other. It was immensely superior to standard tempering. For this could be done when the car was all assembled, processing every bit of steel in relation to every other bit, instead of part by part in the older manner.
It was impossible to do more than glance at the contraption during the lunch hour. And Benson wanted much more than a glance. So it gave him two reasons for going through with the program he’d had in mind when he came in here.
The other reason being to see if anything funny went on in the Marr plant at night, and the program being to stay all night and find out.
That was accomplished by the simple expedient of just not going out with the others when the afternoon’s work drew to a close.
The other men went out. And Benson sat on a pile of steel billets, behind a rack holding drill rods of various sizes. And then the plant was empty, save for several watchmen who would be as hard to find in the acres of floor as ants in a desert.
It was ghostly in the great building, with night lights glowing at intervals, and far in the distance the steps of a watchman going to one of his boxes. And it was particularly ghostly when you remembered that, usually at night, this place was humming with activity. Machinery in big plants is so costly that even if business scarcely justifies it, it must be run day and night in shifts to get back out of it in profits the huge sums the installation costs.
But it was certainly dead tonight; so Benson came out of his corner after a while and went again to the end of the third assembly line.
He crouched down behind a machine while a watchman came past with a slow, regular tread, like a military sentry. Then he went to the box.
He wheeled one of the tripods, which was on casters, to the aperture in the right-hand side of the box. The thick slab from which all the wires came, fitted the aperture exactly. The inner surface of the slab, Benson noted, was of quartz. It bore out his theory of a ray treatment of the steel. Through that quartz slab, as through a window, some force or other rayed over the finished cars that were slowly drawn through the great box—
There was the slightest imaginable sound, far down the line from where Dick Benson stood. Instantly he was behind the end of the box, where the assembly line stopped. He peered down toward where the sound had come from.
He had just a flash of a leg in striped cotton, such as he wore, himself — the clothes of a workman. Then the leg disappeared behind one of the hundreds of small, rubber-tired trucks in which parts were wheeled through the plant.
Dick Benson was not the only workman — or rather, intruder dressed in workman’s garments — to have allowed himself to be locked in the plant!
With the little gun, Mike, in his hand, The Avenger went toward that truck. And the truck started rolling slowly away from him, as if it were an animal with life of its own, retreating from him — and forming a perfect shield for the man behind it as it moved.
Benson had to flank the fellow, somehow; so he went for the shadow of the next assembly line. There, head down, he raced for the end of the shop, till he got ahead of the slowly moving truck.
And there he found that he was up against somebody who had plenty of brains. For — there was no one behind that truck.
It had been given a gentle shove, to keep it rolling for another half minute, and the shover had then disappeared in shadow himself.
Benson started to turn, and then found out where the man was.
He was right behind him!
Hands found Benson’s throat — hands that seemed made of metal instead of flesh! And a leg like a steel cable was curved around his own legs.
The Avenger had fought strong men in his life. In fact, he had once been forced to fight the giant Smitty, himself. But he had never felt such appalling force exerted against him as now!