The eleven men started off.
“Wait,” said the captain. “One more thing. While you are draining the tanks of the small plane into the larger, one of you return with five gallons of the petrol — here.”
Veshnir stared quickly at the man.
“We leave no tracks,” the captain explained. “We shall burn this shed where the capsules have been filled.”
Veshnir nodded swiftly.
“Of course! Just the thing to do. And we’ll lock this man, Benson, and all the others, in it when we set fire—”
“No,” contradicted the captain, “we will not. See, now: the fire may be reported, and people come to investigate. If nothing is found but charred embers, they think only a trapper’s shack or some empty storage shed has burned. They think nothing of it, and go away. But if they find the skeletons of a dozen men — immediately there is much commotion, much search. And searchers might pick up our trail in time to stop us before we can get offshore.”
Two of his men went into the shed. They began roughly bundling the occupants out — Mac and Josh having to be carried.
A man came from the landing field with a can of gasoline. On order, he poured it over the shed floor, and the walls and worktables. The volatile, high-test stuff soaked into the dry wood.
All this time The Avenger was standing quietly, acting like a defeated man. Which, had his enemies known it, was the time when he was most dangerous of all.
Benson was watching with hawk eyes everything that went on.
“But the capsules!” said Veshnir.
“We shall take those to the cabin,” said the captain. “Or, better yet, direct to the landing field. There we will await the transport—”
From the field came the sudden roar of a motor. The plane which Buehlow had piloted down here, was taking off. They watched it soar up over the trees, and head south to the big city.
“They will be back soon,” said the captain. “It is well. Success is ours, after all.”
“And these men?” said Veshnir, nodding toward Mac and Josh, Sangaman and Benson and the ten robot workmen.
“We shall take them to the plane, bound. And one by one we shall drop them in the sea, far out.” The commander turned to the crew left with him.
“Into the shed. Get the racks of capsules and bear them to the landing f— Stop that man!”
Studying each event as it came up! Turning it over in his mind! Never admitting defeat! Always there was a possibility of twisting situations to an enemy’s ruin, even if no other man might have discerned it—
And The Avenger had found the right combination of circumstances here. Had found it — and acted on it.
Without a ripple of warning, or the difference of an eye blink, he had leaped straight backward toward the shed. He was through the door, had it slammed, and was bolting it when the first vicious shots began to rip through the panel.
He threw himself to the floor while the slugs sang over him.
The pale eye glittered with that light which so many master crooks had seen with terror. He was alone in this building, with potential death for unknown thousands of human beings neatly racked along one wall.
And the building had been made into an almost explosive fire trap by the aviation gasoline.
Once flame had roared and crackled here, almost to ruin plans of empire. They should do so again, and this time they should not fail.
The Avenger’s friends often insisted that the gray-steel man was a walking laboratory. From special pockets all over his garments, they said, he could haul enough chemicals and apparatus to start a government lab. This was a little exaggerated. But Benson did always have with him a few shells of commoner chemicals which, he had found by experience, often came in handy.
One of these was thermite, the fire-producing chemical.
His steel-strong fingers dipped into a special inner pocket of his vest, worn under Molan Brocker’s clothes. They came out with all the little thermite shells he had. Five. He threw them with all his strength at five different parts of the room!
The place actually seemed to explode, with such violence did the five fires start. And in the center of the swift volcano was The Avenger. Shots told him he couldn’t get out through the door. But in his icily flaring eyes was no agitation. It was well worth the death of any man, to destroy the brew in this dread place.
Outside, the sub commander had got over his first maniacal fury. His rage was colossal, but now a little under control. Veshnir, however, wasn’t controlled.
“Stop the fire!” he screamed. “Stop it, I tell you! Stop it! Stop it!—”
He doubled over in a convulsion of coughing. And Mac, lying on the ground but rapidly getting better as his parasite antidote swiftly devoured the white mold on his body, stared with wide eyes at Josh — who nodded.
Mac had seen something that Veshnir was just beginning to see. Something on Veshnir’s hand, held to his lips as he coughed and strangled.
Something from his throat, like particles of wet snow, or white moss.
“Another defeat!” snarled the sub commander, voice thick. “But we are still not beaten. You, Veshnir, have the secret of the white death in your brain. We shall simply make more—”
Veshnir hadn’t even heard. He was staring at his hand. His lips were moving, but no sound came out.
“I see,” Mac said softly to Josh, “what ye meant when ye said a glass tube works both ways.”
Josh nodded again.
“He put that glass tube up our nostrils, and blew, to make us like the other robot workmen. But he didn’t seem to think of the very simple fact that it could work both ways. When he got to me, before he could blow, I breathed down myself, a little. And what I was hoping for, has happened. A very little of the frosted death got either in his throat or lungs. And now—”
Veshnir’s wild scream cut off all other sounds. It ripped at last from his palsied lips.
“I’ve got it too!” he screamed. “The white death! Antidote! I must get some of the antidote! This plane — New York — My laboratory safe—”
But there was no plane. The larger of the two had taken off minutes ago — leaving the smaller with a dry tank. Veshnir was marooned here for hours; and he would not last that long. The terrible knowledge gleamed insanely in his eyes — along with a last, impossible hope.
“The vial!” he screamed. “The vial that devil robbed me of and used on these three! There may be a little in the bottom! There may be—”
Richard Henry Benson, the Avenger, followed an inflexible practice with super-criminals. He did not want to turn them over to the regular courts, where with smart lawyers they might delay justice endlessly or even evade it in the end. And he did not want to kill them with his own hand.
Therefore, out of the flaming genius of his mind, it was his habit to maneuver them into situations where they should destroy themselves by acting on their own greedy, murderous instincts.
This time, The Avenger was directly responsible. Fate, and the quick wits of one of Veshnir’s victims, had done the maneuvering. But the result was just as implacable.
Screaming, Veshnir dashed toward the flaming building. He began to batter at the door, heedless of searing hands and face.
The door went down, weakened by the fire. Veshnir, no longer a rational being, still screaming, leaped over it into a furnace. He went down on hands and knees, and scrabbled in the flame for the one thing on earth that might possibly save him. The vial in which there still might be a little of the antidote—