“I don’t know you, sir,” Solodow snapped. And he shut the door.
Benson had the slim, slit length of steel in the lock. The Pole turned the key, and there was a clicking sound. But the bolt did not slide into place. It was caught by the steel. The click was caused by the sliding of one half of the slim steel against the other. It perfectly imitated the sound of a thrown bolt and would have fooled anybody.
Benson opened the supposedly locked door and stepped into a shabby room.
The man inside screamed and whirled. The Avenger’s hand flashed out and wrested the gun from Sodolow before the frightened man could pull the trigger.
Sodolow glared at the white, dead face and the pale, deathly eyes.
“All right,” he said. “You’ve got me helpless. Go ahead and kill me.”
Benson snapped the cartridges out of the revolver and handed it back.
“I’ve told you we were friends,” he said quietly.
Sodolow sneered. He was a chubby man with a face ordinarily cast in cheerful lines. But it was bitter, frightened, cynical now.
“Fine friends, who force their way into a man’s room!”
“Only because there was no other way to see you,” Benson said. And such was his tone, and the look in the colorless, glacial eyes, that Sodolow relaxed a little.
“What do you want with me?” said Sodolow resignedly.
“We want some information, if you will give it. And we want to help guard against a certain danger that hangs over you. A most peculiar danger.”
The effect on Sodolow was remarkable. His face paled, then purpled. He raised quivering hands.
“You know… the nature of… that danger?” he panted.
“Poison — that later shows no trace of itself in laboratory tests,” said Benson evenly. “Or — the white flame, coming from a man’s lips and nostrils. Of course I know the nature of the threat.”
Sodolow drew a deep breath.
“Who are you, anyway?”
“The name is Benson. Richard Henry Benson.”
Into the Polish scientist’s eyes came profound respect.
“The inventor of the alpha lamp, which produces light without heat!” he breathed. “I am honored, Mr. Benson. I have studied many of your formulas.”
Sodolow reached for a small tin on a nearby table. There was a well-known brand of headache tablets in the tin. He took one up, started to put in his mouth…
Benson’s hand flashed out and knocked the tablet from his fingers.
Sodolow exclaimed at the suddenness of it, then shrugged and smiled bitterly.
“Of course. It may be the death of me, Mr. Benson. But I have taken three of those tablets already today, with no ill effects. And, after all, a man must swallow food and wine or water. That is my vulnerability to the fiends—”
He stopped. Benson said,
“It is a very great thing you have discovered, isn’t it?”
“So great,” said Sodolow, in a hushed tone, “that I dare not tell even you. Though it sounds as if you have guessed a little—”
“You brought it to this country some time ago?” said Benson. “And then you left the country hurriedly?”
“That’s right. Veck and Shewski and Wencilau and I. A tremendous discovery. We brought it to America for financial backing. Poland is poor and the United States has great wealth. But we intended to use our brain child to benefit mankind. And, instead, we found that mankind was to be exploited. Shewski and Veck and Wencilau have died, though they hid at the ends of the earth. So I came back to see the cold-blooded fiend who ordained their deaths and plead with him—”
Sodolow stopped. His mouth suddenly twisted with pain.
“To plead with him—” he repeated, almost stupidly, as if not knowing that he was speaking aloud.
He screamed.
Smitty felt like putting his hands over his ears to shut out the sound. It was the shriek of a man who suddenly discovers that, beyond all hope, he is doomed! It was the cry of a man already dead, and terribly aware of it.
“Smitty! The pump!” Benson snapped.
Sodolow had taken nothing into his mouth since the two had been there. Hence, unless the poison had been swallowed previously and was just beginning to work, he could not have been poisoned.
Yet he was acting like a man who had been.
He doubled in the middle, and fell to the floor where he writhed in agony! Foam flecked his lips. His teeth were so ground together that even The Avenger’s iron fingers were put to task to get them apart so the pump could be used.
Benson drained the stomach contents and put them into one of two vials he took from his pocket. The vial was tightly stoppered, was absolutely airtight.
Not half a minute had elasped between the time when Sodolow fell to the floor and the time when his stomach was emptied. But even The Avenger’s foresight and swiftness had not been enough in this case.
Sodolow was dead, struck down as if by lightning!
“Good heavens,” breathed Smitty.
Benson looked down at the dead man, the fourth to go in so short a time. His paralyzed, emotionless face was like a mask. His eyes were like polar ice. Yet Smitty knew there was plenty of emotion under the surface.
The death of this man, whom Benson had come to try to save, was a major defeat. It was all the more of a defeat since Benson had had no time to get real information from him. But the white, still face, of course, showed none of that.
Benson put the bottle with the stomach contents in his pocket. The other, identical vial, he filled with wine from a bottle on the table. He put this into his pocket, too, and beside it the little tin box of headache tablets. There were two left in the tin.
“Police?” said Smitty, glancing from the dead man to his chief.
“We can notify them later,” said Benson. “We had better get away from here as soon as we can—”
The door smashed open!
“You had that idea a little late, buddy,” grated a man at the door.
His scarred, crafty face snarled at them over the sights of a .44. He shot twice at Benson and twice at the giant Smitty.
Both fell without sound!
The man took the aspirin tin and the vial from Benson’s pocket, and left.
Smitty was the first to get up. He rubbed his vast chest. Over his torso, and Benson’s, was a special type of bulletproof vest, recently perfected by The Avenger. Made of interwoven strands of a marvelous substance which Benson called celluglass, and the formula of which was known to him alone, it could turn anything up to a .50-caliber machine gun bullet.
But a .44 slug at close range kicks like a mule, even if it doesn’t penetrate. And both Benson and Smitty had been struck twice from less than five feet away.
“I think a rib’s gone,” complained the giant. “Why didn’t you let me take him, chief? I played dead because you did. But I didn’t want to.”
“If he had shot at our heads, the bullets would have hit no friendly shield,” Benson pointed out. “And head shots would have been next if we hadn’t let him think the first were successful. Besides, he got only what I wanted taken — in case we were attacked on leaving here — which was to be expected.”
“He got the tin of headache tablets,” said Smitty.
“I know what that would have yielded under analysis,” Benson said unemotionally. “Traces of the same thing we will find in the stomach contents of Sodolow. So the loss of the tin box means nothing.”
“But they got that vial, too!”
“They got the vial with ordinary wine in it,” said The Avenger. “The other, from the dead man’s stomach, is safe in my pocket. If he had started to take that, there would have been action! But he didn’t. So we now have it for laboratory analysis — though I doubt if any man alive can accurately analyze, part for part, the chemicals in it.”