It developed that his caution had been unnecessary.
“Why do we go to the submarine?” snapped the man.
Some explanations were necessary, here. This man was an officer. He would telephone to confirm any order that seemed implausible.
“The man with the white hair, Benson, is heading north, it is thought. We go to warn the submarine to stay submerged, save at night, and to make sure there are no other things to give us away.”
“There is the radio,” said the man impatiently. “That is faster than flying.”
“It is feared that Benson knows the code, and the wave length. He may overhear. That would be worse than if our submarine commander were not warned at all.”
Benson looked at ease, but actually was ready to leap like the gray fox he resembled, if necessary. It was an even chance whether the man would take this in — or become suspicious.
The Avenger won, as resourceful people who seldom leave anything to chance usually do.
“Come!”
He followed the man into the hangar, to a small cabin ship whose motor roared powerfully when started. The man climbed into pilot’s togs, and was revealed as the fellow who had piloted Veshnir northward.
“In!” he commanded contemptuously.
The plane took off.
Benson had been a little concerned about keeping up the pretense of being Brocker during the hours that would elapse in their flight. He needn’t have been. The man at the controls was evidently so far above Molan Brocker in the military caste both belonged to, that he said not one word all the way up.
Benson reflected on the difference between these people and Americans. No two men of the United States, no matter what the gulf between them, would have maintained such a silence — stiff and arrogant on one hand, servile and slavelike on the other.
But The Avenger was using his eyes, through the makeup lenses, as well as his brain. He used them more in the advanced morning sunlight as the plane’s motors cut off at twenty thousand feet.
He saw a tiny open space in thick woods as the ship glided down to land. He saw a little doll house that must be a very large log cabin. He saw a dark sliver in the water of a tiny bay nearby.
That sliver would be a submarine, submerged. From water level, all you’d see would be the top of the conning tower, open for the fresh air that is such a luxury for subs on duty. But up here you could see the entire submerged bulk.
The ship slipped into the secret landing field. It bumped to a stop. The pilot turned from the controls, and then sagged suddenly like a rag doll.
Benson sheathed Mike, the tiny .22, and stepped from the plane.
CHAPTER XVI
Flame That Failed
In the tarpaper shack where a new world war was being born, there was a huge refrigerator. It was electric, run from the log cabin’s efficient electric plant. It was necessary for preserving the chopped meat with which the trays on the worktables, in which the mold was reproducing constantly, were periodically refilled.
Mac and Josh had gone regularly to the refrigerator to get more meat. Mac had hatched a plan from this.
The big white box had its motor in the bottom, and the motor was exposed by opening the bottom door, like a cupboard door. The motor was not of the newest type; it was not in a sealed case. Wiring was exposed.
About every half hour it was necessary to go to the refrigerator. That made quite a few trips. And on every trip, Mac left some of the collodion, used for sealing the little glass capsules, near the terminal of the refrigerator motor where the wires were fastened.
Collodion is pyroxilin, or guncotton, dissolved in ether.
Mac had quite a bit of the stuff in the lower compartment of the enameled white box. Even Josh hadn’t noticed what he was doing, so furtively had the Scot opened the lower door a little at the times when he opened the upper, regular one, a lot.
So Mac asked him, in a slightly roundabout way:
“How would you like to burn to death?”
Josh smiled a little, lead-colored lips losing a bit of their grim straightness. The unhealthy color of his lips was produced by wiping on them dust from the floor, from time to time. This was to convince any person coming in to look things over, that Josh and Mac had indeed been made into the robots they resembled by Veshnir’s manipulations with the glass tube.
“Naturally,” Josh retorted, “I don’t want to burn to death.”
“If you could send this death factory and all the frosted death in it up in flames with you, would you risk it?”
“Certainly!” said Josh, without a moment’s hesitation.
“Then rrrisk it ye shall,” said the Scot, burring the r as he did when strong emotion seized him.
Josh looked puzzled.
“Next trip I make to the refrigerator,” said Mac, “will start the fireworks. And I mean fireworks! We have one chance. Perhaps a section of the wood wall will burn enough, before we’re roasted alive, to let us break on through to the open air.”
Some of Josh’s unnautral color became natural. But he nodded steadily.
Mac looked around. The ten automatons were busy at their deadly task. None paid any attention to him. Indeed, none would — unless he tried one of the two things they’d been ordered to prevent: try to get out the shack door, or try to stop working.
The Scot went to the refrigerator, opened the regular door for more chopped meat, and at the same time stealthily opened the bottom door. He slid his bony right hand in, grasped the electric cables going to the refrigerator motor.
He yanked hard.
There was blue flame as the wires pulled free and short-circuited. Following that so instantly as to seem simultaneous, there was a soft roar as the collodion ignited.
It spurted flame in a solid sheet around the motor and out the open door. Mac had leaped back, but no man could be fast enough. He gasped with the pain of singed face and hands.
The floor or rough planks was a solid sheet of fire almost before Mac could get back to Josh. And then a curious and terrible thing occurred. That was — the actions of the ten robots with the tragically deadened brains.
They couldn’t think any more. Only their involuntary nervous systems were spared by the ravages of the mold. They couldn’t grasp situations and act on them any more. They simply stared uneasily at the flames.
Deep instinct stirred in them. The dread of fire goes back a million years. They were vaguely afraid. But they didn’t know what to do about this. There had been nothing told them, when Veshnir left, about what to do in the event of a fire.
So they stared at the rapidly growing flames, coughed in the smoke, and milled uncertainly around the tables. A few fumbled with their routine tasks. A few more went a step or two toward the door, but came obediently back. And none tried to stamp out the flames.
“Poor devils,” said Mac. “They’ll die like horses in a burning stable, without sense enough to try to get out into the open air.”
“They’re doomed anyway,” said Josh gently. “And it is better like this, even if we go, too, than that these scores of thousands of little death bombs be released on European cities.”
They couldn’t take the heat standing up any more. They lay down — and watched the wall near the refrigerator. That section was blazing hardest. It was there that they might have the greatest chance of bursting through flame-weakened timbers.
But they were never to know whether the chance would have brought failure or success.
On the submarine, the captain had had a quite natural thought. Or, rather, a sequence of thoughts.
One was that, safe as the whole plan seemed, there was always a slight chance of something going wrong. The sub might be spotted and investigated. Something might go wrong at the building where the frosted death was being cultivated and stored in thin glass. Above all, something might go wrong in negotiations with that man, Veshnir.