The homicide man retraced his steps down Eighth Avenue. On his way up he had listed the firms along it. He looked once more for evidence of anything peculiar on the sidewalk, itself, as he went back down.
He did not see the glass fragments beside the Sangaman-Veshnir Building, and he couldn’t be blamed for that. The capsule had literally smashed to dust when it hit. The tiny fragments were thinly scattered. Braun had seen them because he’d been looking for something specific in one restricted area.
Completely puzzled, and with shivers chasing themselves up and down his spine as he thought of the snow man, he went to headquarters to report.
As he went, he unconsciously scratched at the back of his hand.
CHAPTER V
The Powdered Menace
The drugstore was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place. From the outside it looked all right, except that the store part seemed a little small for the space the total business appeared to occupy. But inside, it was very unusual indeed.
The store part took up less than a third of the total floor space. All the rest was occupied by a large rear room.
Along one wall of the room was a workbench on which was as much paraphernalia as could have been seen in the big laboratory of the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp., itself. Beakers and retorts and Bunsen burners were side by side, with glass tubing and jars of mysterious compounds.
Along the other wall was a similar bench. But the first long table had chemical apparatus laid out on it, while this second one was cluttered with all the things an electrical engineer might need for the most advanced experiments.
At the back of the room, taking up about equal spaces, were finished results from the two long tables. There was a cabinet full of vials containing drugs and chemicals such as no ordinary chemist dreamed existed. Beside this was another cabinet which did not open but which had a screen for a front. This was a television set more perfect than any commercial laboratory would be able to put out for years to come.
At the chemist’s side of the strange room was working the proprietor of the freak drugstore, Fergus MacMurdie.
Mac was about six feet tall but looked taller because he was so angular and bony. Knees and elbows were knobbed and protruding. Protruding, too, were his ears, which were like sails. His skin was reddish and coarse, with big, dim freckles just under the surface. His eyes, though, took away any humor of appearance.
MacMurdie’s bleak, hard blue eyes, set like stones in his homely Scotch face, reflected the tragedy of his life; loss of his family when a racket bomb exploded in one of his drugstores. Since then, he had worked for The Avenger against crime, having been set up in this drugstore by the immensely wealthy Benson.
Mac had the glass Mason jar, brought by Benson from Braun’s apartment, on the workbench. Beside it were ranged a super-mircroscope, weighing half a ton, various gelatins used for bacterial culture, and an ordinary piece of beefsteak covered, it seemed, with fine snow crystals: the same stuff that had made a snow man out of Braun.
He turned.
“Whoosh, mon!” he exclaimed. “ ’Tis altogether the most dreadful stuff I’ve ever seen under a lens.”
The man he addressed, lounging in a chair in front of the big cabinet that had a screen over the front, was named Algernon Heathcote Smith. But if you wanted to stay in one piece, you never called him that. You called him Smitty.
Smitty was a Hercules. He stood just three inches short of seven feet tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds. He had a fifty-three-inch chest and reduced haberdashers to despair by calling for size nineteen collars. He looked as dumb and good-natured as he was big; but the looks didn’t mean anything.
The underworld could have testified as to how good-natured he was! As to looking dumb — Smitty was an outstanding electrical engineer. It was for his genius, indeed, that the bench across from MacMurdie’s had been outfitted; and it was his genius that had devised the marvelous television set at the rear of the room.
“It fairrr gives me the shiverrrs,” the Scotchman burred, scowling at the snowy stuff.
“Looks like ordinary confectioner’s sugar to me,” said the giant, Smitty. “Or dandruff,” he added.
“Heaven grant ye never have dandruff,” Mac said.
“Got a report on it yet?” said Smitty, glancing at a high window in one wall of the lab. The things that went on in here were not for public view; therefore the windows were set more than head high. It was dawn outside.
Mac nodded his sandy-reddish head.
“Yes, I have a report. Will ye get the chief for me?”
Smitty switched on the television set. He waited a moment for it to warm up. Then he said, at the screen:
“Smitty and Mac reporting, chief.”
There was a minute in which nothing happened. Then the screen seemed to fog over. The fog gathered into form and became a face.
The face of The Avenger.
White as linen, dead as wax, terrible as a poised sword, the paralyzed face stared from the screen. In it, steady and emotionless, the eyes burned forth.
“Yes, Smitty, Mac.”
“I’ve analyzed the stuff ye sent me, chief,” Mac said. “Leastwise, I’ve got a sort of preliminary report as to its nature.”
“Well?”
“It’s impossible, chief. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d not have believed it. The stuff’s a kind of mold. It grows like lightning. The spores are dust-fine; they hang in the air for minutes before settling to the ground. They seem to be a kind of bridge between the animal and the mineral kingdoms.”
“Artificially cultivated, Mac?”
“Yes! I’m sure of it.”
“Go on!”
“It doesn’t act like other molds. It doesn’t fasten on jellies or decayed substances. It attacks only one thing. That is, meat. And only fresh meat, too. When disintegration has set in, it refuses to germinate on it. Oh, ’tis a very snooty kind of stuff, this mold.”
“Any more?”
“On meat, it reproduces fastest, like I said. It has hair-fine feelers. No — finer than any hair. Ye have to use the big microscope to see them. The feelers go down into any tiny irregularities—”
“On a human body, then,” Benson cut in, “I suppose the pores and hair follicles would be attacked?”
“That’s right, Muster Benson. If the stuff got on a person’s body, it would kill him in a hurry. It would clog all the pores, which is enough for death. But more, it would of course sift into the lungs and coat them, too. So ye’d have a phenomenon like pneumonia, only faster than any pneumonia could ever worrrk.”
“One more thing, Mac. I have my own opinion on this point, but I want yours, too. Is the stuff deadly to the public at large, do you think?”
“Muster Benson,” said Mac urgently, “it’s the deadliest thing I’ve ever had the bad fortune to look at! I’m sure it’s contagious. I’d say that any mon gettin’ some of it on him — even a bit as small as a pinhead, would die. He’d die fast or slow, dependin’ how little of it stuck. ’Twould take a longer time to cover him. But — die he would!”
“Then?”
Mac said the thing that had burned in his bitter blue eyes since first examining the snowlike substance:
“If any of this mold gets out, Muster Benson, we may have an epidemic that would make the Black Plague, in the Middle Ages, look silly. Because, d’ye see, some people escaped from that. And from this — no escape. One touch is death!”
Mac chewed his lip, then asked the question he scarcely dared put into words.
“Has… has anybody been exposed to this?”