“They will never work for you,” stated the captain. “You have but to look into their eyes to see that.”
“They will,” said Veshnir complacently, “when I am through with them. And that reminds me. You have a powerful weapon in the white death. But how are you going to control it? The mold is deadly to all life — not just the inhabitants of some one country.”
“We shall cross that bridge when we come to it,” said the-sub captain. “In my homeland are many scientists. We can develop an antidote to the frosted death before taking over our new slave states in person.”
“Your scientists,”’ said Veshnir, “can work on other things. I have an antidote.”
“Then,” said the captain, “your fortune will be doubly large! We shall pay you for that as well as for the white death when the time comes to use the antidote.”
He went on. Veshnir, eyes glittering at all the money he was going to collect in the next few months, came back, after locking the door, and stood over Mac and Josh.
“Ye skurlie,” said Mac, through set teeth. “Ye not only let a terrible epidemic spread in ye’r own city, to gain a few measly millions; but ye now have the antidote to it — my antidote — which ye’ll hold in the face of spreading death for a few more million!”
It is probable that Veshnir could not have watched a rabbit killed without wincing at the blood. But he could think of many human beings dying, with no wince at all, as long as they died out of his sight. There are many men like that, and probably all have the philosophy Veshnir expressed.
“Look,” he said, as if arguing with himself rather than his prisoner, “there’ll be war soon. There have always been wars, and there always will be. In the war, millions will be killed. But nobody gets excited about that, do they? Then why get excited if a few hundreds, or maybe thousands, have to die in New York over a war weapon? There are a hundred and thirty million people in this country. Do you really think a few thousand more or less will make any difference?”
“Skurrrlie!” burred Mac, writhing in his bonds.
“Suppose I made cannons,” Veshnir went on. “They would kill as many as this new weapon. But I would be respected and looked up to just the same. I don’t see that I’m doing anything so wrong.”
“A few minutes ago I’d have called ye a gangster,” grated Mac. “But ye’re worse.”
Veshnir shrugged, then turned to the table nearest the men. There was a tray on the table. And rubber gloves, elbow length. Veshnir began working the gloves up over his forearms.
“A little damage will be done,” he said, “till the nation buying the mold has captured what territory they please. Then they will spread the antidote over there, and I will see that it is passed around over here. After that, everything will be all right. My customer wins a war, and I live out my life in a vast fortune.”
“A fortune built on the foundation of thousands of your own countrymen’s bodies!”
“Think what you like,” said Veshnir. “You’ll help in my plans just the same.”
Josh spoke up, holding his eyes open as if by a great effort from the claims of peaceful slumber.
“How’s that, boss? We goin’ to wuhk fo’ you-all?”
“That’s right,” said Veshnir. He stared curiously at the Negro.
“The report is that you are a trusted aide of this man, Benson,” he said perplexedly. “And you were trusted with one of the two jars of the antidote. That seems odd to me. You don’t look very bright.”
“Oh, I’se smaht ’nuff,” said Josh smugly.
Veshnir shrugged.
“It must be that Benson thought you were so inconspicuous that you’d be a good messenger boy. But thanks to the method and efficiency of my foreign friends, it didn’t work. If that jar of antidote had gotten to State hands, all our plans would have failed.”
“What you-all pay fo’ wuhkin’ here?” said Josh.
Veshnir smiled coldly.
“That’s rather humorous, if you had intelligence enough to realize it,” he said. “You won’t be in condition to appreciate wages while you’re with me.”
Mac stared with new eyes at the ten men working in the low building. Their automaton actions. The lack of intelligence in their eyes. Their clay-colored faces and lead-colored lips.
“The white mold,” Veshnir said, “is primarily a war weapon. The little glass capsules of it, rained down from planes, will capture a nation in short order. But Targill and I discovered a curious little incidental use for it.”
The gloves were in place. Veshnir took up a long, slim glass tube, about the size of a soda-fountain straw. He dipped it into the mold on the meat tray.
“Targill and I,” he went on, “discovered, by experimenting with animals, that if a small bit of the mold is lodged at the base of the nasal cavity, the spores work up into the brain. There, they devour the surface cells. In the process, the person’s power of conscious thought is taken away from him, as in certain types of brain illnesses. The spores work much more slowly on the nerve cells than on muscle fibers. The person will live four days to a week, after lodgement of the spores in the nasal cavity, where he would die in a few hours if the spores started on the body surfaces.”
“But during the four days to a week,” Mac said steadily, “the victim is a kind of robot? Like these men in here?”
“That’s right,” said Veshnir.
“And ye intend to make automatons out of Josh and me? And worrrk us at those two vacant tables?”
“Right again,” said Veshnir, looking kindly and benevolent. There was whitish mold in the end of the glass tube now.
He stepped to Mac’s side, with the glass tube in his hand directed toward Mac’s face.
Mac promptly seemed to explode into writhing limbs and bucking body. The bonds held him powerless, but they didn’t keep him from wriggling around like a cat on a hot stove.
“Everybody. Here,” called Veshnir, raising his voice as if for the benefit of slightly deaf ears.
The ten dull-eyed human machines in the place left their tables and came to the dour Scot. With ten pairs of hands on him, Mac was held as moveless as a rock.
Veshnir inserted the tube, and blew into Mac’s nostrils. Just once. Very lightly.
He turned to Josh with what was left of the stuff that looked like fine snow in the little glass tube.
Josh was still. There was no need for the ten to hold him. Veshnir repeated the process.
“There,” he said, pleasant-voiced, straightening and stepping back. “In about four hours you will be ready to obey orders, without a thought of your own to interfere.”
He went to one of the dull-eyed men, already back to their worktables and filling little glass capsules with the frosted death.
“When the clock strikes three in the morning,” he said, “release those two and put them to work at the two empty tables.”
He went out. Mac glared at him with raw murder in his bitter blue eyes.
But Josh seemed strangely still, and resigned.
CHAPTER XIII
Roof-Top Trail
The many windows in the enormous room on the top floor at Benson’s Bleek Street headquarters seemed to have Venetian blinds over them. But they were not Venetian blinds.
The slats were not wooden strips and could not be tilted. They were strips of nickel-steel, set at a forty-five degree angle; so no bullet could penetrate the windows. Their ends were embedded in the masonry of the building.
Through the slits, the flaring colorless eyes of The Avenger stared down from a rear window. The view back there was over the low roof of a one-story garage, fronting on the next street.