It took all his skill and all his own almost superhuman power to break that grip and turn.
Even then, he didn’t get a good look at his assailant. The man kept his head down, so that the rather dim lighting in the vast plant didn’t show up his features.
Benson ducked a blow that would have broken his jaw and lashed out himself. And — his blow was ducked!
That sounds simple enough. A man hits at another, and the other twists out of the way. But not one man in a hundred thousand could move as fast as Dick Benson. Which meant that about that percentage could duck one of his fast punches.
The man butted with his head down, and he got The Avenger hard enough before Benson could roll to the charge. Then Benson caught the right shoulder of the fellow, in work clothes.
Never had he felt such slabs and sheaths of flexible steel as this man had for muscles! It was like grabbing hold of an iron beam. But he twisted and jerked in a deft jujitsu hold.
The man went up and over The Avenger’s shoulder. And that should have been the end. He should have smashed back down on the floor with a force to stun him. But he didn’t!
Like a great cat, the man turned a complete circle in the air, lit on his feet and lit running.
He ran for the great box at the end of Line 3.
Benson raced after him. And even here it seemed that he had almost met his match. Dick Benson could run a hundred yards in nine seconds flat. But this man lost less than a yard in a pursuit that must have covered close to a hundred before the box was reached.
At that point the man leaped like a tiger on the broad assembly belt and darted into the box.
Benson similarly leaped, and darted after him. He saw the man flash out the other door, the far opening at the end of the line.
Then at each end of the box-carlike chamber, a great steel door slid smoothly down. Benson halted in mid-flight and streaked for the side of the box.
He himself had plugged one of the windowlike apertures a few moments ago, when he experimentally wheeled the quartz-faced slab into place to see if that was where it fitted.
He raced for the other opening. And just before he got there, it was plugged by the other quartz window. The slabs didn’t yield backward an inch when he tried to push them. The tripods had been fastened some way outside.
The doors didn’t even quiver when he slammed against them.
He was trapped in here!
A low humming suddenly sounded, seeming to be inside his head rather than coming to his ears from outside. Whatever type of current it was that went through those wrist-thick cables, leading to the slabs, had been turned on.
CHAPTER XIII
The Deadly Ray!
The Avenger had guessed a great deal about the secret process that Phineas Jackson had invented for tempering steel.
Ray tempering.
And his profound knowledge of chemistry and physics had led him even nearer to the truth.
Some electronic ray had been discovered that tempered steel — possibly all metals — by rearranging the molecules. Perhaps it “combed” them straight, so that each rod and sheet was formed of myriad lines of molecules in orderly close array, instead of a jumble of them occurring in a promiscuous pattern.
That would make steel tough almost beyond imagining. And it was quite a logical and probable theory, because for some time laboratory scientists had succeeded in thus combining molecules, though not for commercial use.
Assume, then, a ray powerful enough to penetrate every atom of an entire assembled automobile, tempering every steel particle in it. Then put a human being — human flesh and blood — in the path of those rays, as The Avenger was!
What would happen to that flesh and blood?
Benson had no time to speculate on it. And he had no chance to think at all after that. Thought was impossible. Movement was impossible. He was simply an inert mass of torment!
He sagged to the floor of the great box. Rather, to the broad bed of the assembly line which normally moved slowly through here and formed the floor.
Every atom of his body was bursting like a tiny bomb! That was what his quivering nerves told him. He wasn’t a man, he was a ball of fire. He had no legs, arms, internal organs — he was just a lump of pain!
Red-hot needles drove through him. He was dimly aware that his muscles were leaping and jerking against each other, like the muscles of a dead frog on electrical contact.
Particularly did his face and hands seem to be bathed in the terrific, unseen flame. Perhaps the fabric of the clothing that covered the rest of him offered a very faint protection against rays designed to go through metal rather than through vegetable or animal substances such as wool and cotton.
He was in the heart of a volcano, sinking in red flame, sinking—
Benson seemed to be floating some place in faint gray light. There was a fiery sensation at hands and face, as if nettles were being pressed against raw flesh there.
Then he realized that he wasn’t floating, because something hard and sharp was sticking into his back. And it hurt.
He was lying some place, and lying on something that jabbed painfully. He opened his eyes.
“Oh, you’re comin’ out of it!” said a voice.
Benson saw one of the plant watchmen looking anxiously down at him. The man’s face was twisted with worry, and his eyes expressed agonized concern.
“Gosh! I thought sure you were dead when I found you lyin’ here on this pile of pipe a minute ago. I was just going to phone a doc in a hurry. Or the undertaker. Who are you, anyhow?”
The Avenger’s powerful body had been knocked haywire. But there was, it seemed, nothing wrong with his brain.
He thought he had better not give the name of the stock-room employee in whose likeness he had entered the plant that morning — no, yesterday morning. The gray light around him was that of dawn; he had been in the plant all night.
He did not know what had happened to his face. But something drastic had affected it! There was a queer, and as yet unidentifiable, sensation in it that he had not felt in years.
Quite probably he did not look like the man any more; so he had better not give that name.
But it didn’t take Benson as long to think this out as it takes to tell it. With scarcely a hesitation after the watchman’s question, he said:
“I’m Stanislau Calek, a new man in the stock room.”
“How is it you’re here?” demanded the watchman, face half solicitous and half suspicious.
“I have fainting spells,” said Benson evenly. “I must have keeled over here just before the plant was locked up last night.”
“That’s a long time for a faintin’ spell,” said the watchman, staring at Benson’s head. There was something wrong about The Avenger’s head, too; it felt curiously cold to him, over the fiery mass that was his face.
“Yes, I guess it must have been the worst spell I’ve ever had,” The Avenger replied.
He tried to get up, couldn’t quite make it, and then felt the man’s hand under his arm. With that to steady him, he stood on trembling legs which had hardly any feeling at all. All the sensation in his body seemed limited to head and hands.
The watchman was still staring hard at Benson’s head.
“Boy, you must have a hell of a time on a cold winter day,” he sniggered.
The Avenger didn’t say anything to that, because it didn’t seem to have any meaning.
“Want I should get a doc for you?”
“No, I’m all right,” said Benson. He took a few steps, just barely managing to keep from falling, but concealing his weakness as well as he could.
He must have been very close to death for the terrific aftermath to last this long. Very close to death! Yet, the man who had trapped him in the box had deliberately turned the current off to avoid killing him, and then had dragged him out here to recover.