Benson passed the odd lens up and down a hundred times or so. Then he repeated the process, but moved the vibrant cylinder from side to side, as if to comb the unseen molecules of glass forming the tumbler from a series of lines into a sort of screen.
The snapping and crackling stopped. The weird light from the upper end of the cylinder, that turned the normal room into a chamber that was like a look into the far future, died out.
Benson snapped on the ordinary lights. Then he went two rooms away and got his belt radio.
He warmed it up, and spoke into it.
“Hello!”
His aides looked at each other, puzzled.
Benson’s voice had seemed blurred. There had seemed to be an echo contained within it. It was as if, precisely as he said hello, someone else in the room had said something like “ayo.”
“How did you make your voice sound like that?” Mac asked, looking perplexed.
The Avenger did not answer. With the tiny radio in his hand, he left the room. They heard him go far down the hall, heard a door open and close in the far end of the house.
They looked at each other again.
“What on earth—” began Nellie.
A tinny, hardly recognizable voice sounded in the room. It said:
“Ayo.”
Smitty whirled on Mac.
“You Scotch joker,” he said. “What’s the idea of playing tricks on us?”
“Tricks?” said Mac. “Arrre ye daft? What tricks would I be playin’?”
“You said ‘Ayo,’ or something like that. You said it when the chief said hello a minute ago, and again now.”
“Whoosh, ye’re soft in the belfry—”
“Ayo!”
This time the sound had come even as the dour Scot — who was about as far from a joker as it is possible for a man to be — had been talking. So, he was ruled out.
Both Mac and Smitty whirled on Josh.
“Not guilty,” said the Negro.
He said it abstractedly, however, and he wasn’t looking at his astounded colleagues. He was looking at the now lifeless cylinder with the quartz lens, and at the water glass.
Mainly at the water glass.
“Ayo.”
The tinny sound came from the tumbler. Everyone in the room suddenly knew that. All five of them drew near it, fascinated.
And once more sound came from the commonplace thing that could be picked up in any dime store.
“Ayo.”
The door opened, and Benson came back in.
“Chief,” stuttered the giant Smitty, “th-that tumbler. How could it—”
He didn’t finish the question. And none of the others spoke.
The Avenger’s face was a frozen, cold waste of menace — toward someone. His eyes were like small ice disks with pale light behind them. When he looked like that, even his trusted aides dared not speak to him unless spoken to first. And it was when he looked like this that you forgot his normal size and build, and were convinced that he was a colossus who towered even over the tremendous Smitty.
Benson turned to Josh. There was no word about the tumbler.
“Josh, you say you saw the mummy, Taros’ son, walking last night?”
“Yes, sir,” nodded Josh emphatically. “I certainly did. It may sound impossible. But I’d swear to it before any jury—”
“You say the face was exposed,” mused Benson, eyes pale flares in his dead, white face. “From the description, it closely resembled the face of Gunther Caine’s son, Harold. But that’s not the important part. The significant thing is the exposure itself.”
“The linen bands were off the face,” nodded Josh.
Benson took up the phone, and called the curator, Gunther Caine.
“Please meet me at the museum as soon as you can,” he said crisply. “Yes, I know you told me there was no more to be done about the Taros relics. But I am going on with the investigation, just the same.”
There was a sound of Caine’s agitated voice. Then The Avenger spoke again. From his tone, this time, there was no appeal.
“You will meet me, Mr. Caine”—the words were like drops of ice water—“at the museum as soon as possible.”
The museum was peopled with its usual day-time crowd of information seekers. There were designers, busily stealing dress and industrial designs from the masterpieces of ancient peoples. There were students. There were the usual casual sightseers who didn’t know a broadax from a tibia but enjoyed roaming through the wonders of the past just the same.
The Avenger threaded his way among these, with Caine at his side.
Gunther Caine had repeated his insistence that the investigation be dropped, till the icy, deadly eyes swung on him. Just once! Now he walked silently beside Benson, glancing up at the death-mask face now and then, moistening dry lips, but making no more protests.
The Egyptian wing was closed, of course. Behind the barricaded door, workmen were repairing the collapse of the flooring that had occurred when four great pillars and two equally ponderous stone slabs fell on it.
Everyone agreed that the collapse of the pillars was most unusual. They had stood for six thousand years in their native Egypt, and had seemed as solid here in Washington, D. C.
Another odd thing was that this morning the museum’s prized ark of Typhon had been found in here, instead of in its accustomed place, two rooms away, where the history of religions was traced.
“Open the door,” said Benson to Caine, “and tell the workmen to leave for a few moments.”
Caine’s lips parted for a last request that nothing more be done about the lost amulets, but closed again meekly without a word. The Avenger’s pale, infallible eyes were on his like diamond drills. He couldn’t say what he wanted so badly to repeat.
He opened the door. The foreman of the crew knew him by sight, knew his position as head of authority at the museum.
“Good morning, sir,” the foreman said. “We’ll have this done by late afternoon, I think. Them columns made a mess when they fell, all right. The stone flags of this floor are four inches thick, and the columns smacked through ’em like they’d been paper—”
“Call your men out of the room for a moment, will you, please?” commanded Caine, after a nervous pause.
“Out of the—” muttered the foreman, looking surprised.
“Yes! Just for a little while. You can go in the next wing. I’ll call you when my friend and I are through in here.”
The men went out. Benson closed the door. Then he walked, with Caine trailing uncertainly behind him, to the cabinet containing the mummy and mummy-case of Taros’ son.
This was at quite a distance from the collapsed bit of stone floor. It hadn’t been disturbed in any way.
The Avenger stood before the cabinet which was the focal point, it seemed, of all the deadly, mysterious activity that had recently gone on in here. His eyes, like stainless steel chips in his death-mask countenance, were on the thing, staring through the glass lid at the withered shape, which had been human, in its gilded, form-fitting case.
Josh had said that the mummy walked, and Josh was too fearless to imagine such a thing, and had excellent eyesight. But the mummy had bands, innumerable yards of them, swathed around both legs, making them into a solid pillar. The thing couldn’t have walked that way.
Benson took out a screwdriver. He began unscrewing the lid of the cabinet, noting once more that the slight dust in the screw-slots proved conclusively that they had not been tampered with in recent hours.