“I still don’t quite comprehend—”
“Vibratory hypnosis,” said The Avenger. He stopped the little thing. While the sound was audible, it hurt the eardrums.
“Vibration may not destroy bacteria as you had hoped it would,” he said. “But it appears that the right kind of vibration, up beyond the range of hearing, numbs the voluntary nerve centers and makes a man a machine to obey the orders of a ruthless master. The rheostat, for subtly changing the pitch, indicates that every individual has a slightly different vibration point at which hypnosis is reached. Whoever holds the vibrator would slowly increase the pitch till the reaction of his victim told him the proper point had been reached. Then he would hold it there; as long as that vibration played on the man’s brain, he was that man’s master.”
“And you divined that,” said Cranlowe, “and pretended to be hypnotized before the exact pitch had been reached?”
“Yes.”
“Thank heaven you had the wit for it. For if Jenner had turned one of those things loose on me, he’d certainly have the formula by now, to sell to whatever greedy nation offered the most money—”
“I don’t think Jenner would have sold it to anyone,” said Benson. He bent over the prostrate form of the plant manager, began going through his pockets. “The formula would have meant nothing to Jenner, personally—”
His fingers felt a disk in Jenner’s vest pocket. He drew it out.
“I think we’ll find, when Jenner comes to, that he hasn’t the faintest idea how he got out here, or what he did after he arrived. More, I think we’ll find that Jenner doesn’t know anything he has done for weeks.”
“You mean—”
“I mean Jenner is the tool and not the master. I think he was probably the first person one of these diabolically clever little disks was used on. Since then he has been playing an unknown master’s game, seeming to be the head of the conspiracy, but actually only acting that part.”
“A hypnotized man hypnotizing still others?”
“Exactly!” said The Avenger.
Cranlowe shook his head. “Someone is as smart as the devil himself — I think we’d better see what those shots were awhile ago. Evidently my men repelled an attack of some kind—”
“That’s what you think,” came a snarling voice from the door.
Kopell stepped into the room, submachine gun leveled. And behind him came nine men comprising the cream of Garfield City’s underworld.
The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes drilled into Kopell’s dull, black ones. Benson stood with his hands raised a little, and death pointing at him from half a dozen sources. But even at that there was something about his gray steel, limber body that filled the men with uneasiness.
“Well,” Benson said, voice as emotionless as his dead face, “I’ve seen carefully planned criminal actions, but never one more methodically plotted out than this one. If none of the many previous thrusts were successful, you were to come in here and complete the thing by brute force. Is that it?”
“Something like that,” said Kopell. He grinned at the jolly-looking fat man who was one of his most murderous lieutenants. “Looks like you owe me five grand, Fats. The dough I paid you to put this white-headed guy and his pals out of the way. You may have pushed their sedan into the lake, but they didn’t stay in the sedan! So you’ll just kick back with the money. See?”
Fats was swearing in a half-awed tone.
“They must be wizards or something to have gotten out of that jam.”
“Well, we won’t go into it, now. We’ll do what we came here to do. Get that formula—”
A sort of scream from Cranlowe interrupted him. The inventor’s self-control had shattered to bits with this last of a day full of intolerable surprises.
“You won’t get it! You hear? You’ll never get it! You drove mad, and then murdered, my financial backer to get me out of my protected home. You injured my driver so that a spy of yours could take his place. You made my secretary kill herself, to try and get another spy in here. You sent Dr. Markham out to try to mesmerize my secret from me. You sent my wife out, hypnotized — as I can see now, thank heaven — for the same purpose. You hold my son’s life in your hands. Now you burst in here with guns. But you will not get the formula! Never, never, never!”
Self-control gone. But not his indomitable will. That would not crack, no matter what was done.
Kopell stared at the inventor with something like grudging admiration in his eyes.
“You’re kind of a tough customer,” he said. “But you’re licked before you start. As you’ll find out soon—”
“You can kill me, but I won’t tell you what you want to know,” screamed Cranlowe hysterically — but unchangeably.
“Maybe we’ll do that, too,” shrugged Kopell. He looked at Fats. “Tie him up, again.”
The fat man and the big fellow who should have been named Gargantua, retired Cranlowe in the heavy drapes.
“Now go out the back way and round up whatever guards the guy Pete didn’t get,” Kopell snapped. “And get rid of any dogs that might be left alive.”
Three of the men went out. In a moment there were four quick shots, then the tramp of returning feet. Five pairs of feet coming back, where only three had gone. And the owner of one of the pairs moaned as he was forced along.
“Lock the monkeys upstairs,” said Kopell. “Then we’ll have the whole joint, all to ourselves, to play around in.”
Benson’s eyes were like chips of ice under a polar moon. But he could only watch, for the moment, while this crew of murderers went from one triumph to another.
There was another who could only watch, fruitlessly, for the moment. That was a diminutive blonde who could see out a crack in the hall-closet door and into the library, by the aid of a mirror hanging on the library wall just inside the portal.
Nellie Gray had crept in here, in the back of Mrs. Cranlowe’s coupé, and couldn’t get out again past the dogs and guards. Now she was glad she’d had to flit from hiding place to hiding place like a ghost for these past few hours. For now she felt that right here was precisely where she should be, to help the chief, if possible.
She bit her short, pretty upper lip as she saw the previous rescue work of The Avenger, when he knocked out Jenner and untied Cranlowe, being all undone again. Then she pressed her hand against her lips to keep back a cry as she saw something else.
The big head of a man who must be a giant, so far was that head from the floor, poked into the hall from the garage corridor for an instant. Smitty! He was here!
Smitty and Mac and Josh were all in that narrow corridor. They had slipped into the house after Kopell and his men without much trouble, because Kopell was so utterly without suspicion that anyone but his gang was within miles of the Heights. Now the three were just hanging around waiting to edge into the game at some effective moment.
But this was not that moment. Not with nine heavily armed men — some with submachine guns in their hands — present and alert. They had almost taken a chance on it when the three went out back to get the surviving guards. But they had let the moment slide.
“And we won’t be gettin’ another chance as good,” whispered Mac, pessimistically. “That cooked us when we didn’t take advantage of it.”
“Will you stop your croaking?” Smitty snapped back, in an answering whisper.
“Croakin’, is it?” retorted Mac. “When ye’re six feet under, lookin’ like a sieve from tommy bullets, ye’ll wisht ye’d had sense enough—”
“We’d better not even whisper,” said Josh. “We aren’t any too well hidden in this hall.”
Black of skin and wearing dark clothes, the colored man could scarcely be seen at all. Only white eyeballs and a flash of ivory teeth showed where he was.