Then he went in.
“Here is your money,” he said reproachfully to Mickelson. “Though you seem to have forgotten that money ill-gained will bring you to a bad end.”
“I’ll take a chance on that,” smirked Mickelson, counting the sheaf, and putting it in his inside pocket.
Veshnir turned to Sangaman in a stanch-and-true friendly way. He held out his right hand.
Sangaman took it in a thankful grasp.
“Keep your chin up,” Veshnir said. “Soon your troubles will be over. Come along, Mickelson.”
At the plane, the lean, scarred-faced man at the controls flashed a coldly surprised, deadly look at Mickelson when he clambered into the cabin after Veshnir.
“I did not know we were to have a passenger,” he said irritatedly.
“Neither did I,” Veshnir said. “But a friend of mine unexpectedly turned up.”
The foreign-looking pilot moved his hand ever so little toward his gun. Veshnir shook his head. He gave the man a long, reassuring look. The unexpected friend, that look said, doesn’t need bullets. He has been well taken care of.
Mickelson didn’t catch the side glance. He had his hand in his pocket, feeling those crisp bills. He was thinking of all the other bills his shrewdness would bring him in the morning.
In New York, with early morning breakfast, he went to his apartment from the plane. He didn’t watch behind him very carefully; so he did not notice that here and there men with square, erect shoulders and phlegmatically unmoved faces, gathered and followed him.
When his apartment door closed, the men, at least ten of them, took up stations all around the one building entrance. They stood there like guards.
Mickelson would not be allowed to leave the building. These watchmen were to see to that. But they had been told, in a furtive radio message from the plane that bore Mickelson, that their guard duty wouldn’t last long.
Mickelson opened his apartment door with his key, and stepped in. It spoke volumes of his ignorance of the magnitude of the game he’d unwittingly mixed in, that he reached for the light switch and clicked it on with never a thought of trouble.
Then he froze, where he was, with his arm still outstretched near the switch.
Sitting in an easy-chair, facing the door, was a man. The man had a curious little knife in his right hand.
Mickelson, with startled eyes, saw that the man’s face was heavy-featured and florid. Foreign-looking. In that face were incongruously set the iciest, most deadly, most colorless eyes he had ever seen in a human countenance. They chilled his spine. They made his voice come as a sort of broken squeak when he said:
“Who… who are you? What are you doing here?”
Then he turned to leap back out into the hall.
The hand of the man in the chair made a light, flicking motion. The little knife he’d held glittered in flight, and embedded itself with a soft swish in the door behind Mickelson.
Embedded itself an inch from Mickelson’s nose.
The chemist didn’t try to run any more.
“What do you… want?” he whispered, after licking lips that had gone too dry to utter words without being moistened again.
“Some information,” said the man with the icy, terrible eyes.
“About… what?”
“Where have you been since noon of yesterday?”
“Out with a fr-friend,” stammered Mickelson. “I — that’s all. Just out with a friend.”
He felt as if his legs had turned to rubber. Felt as if all will power were draining slowly from him — drawn by the awful, colorless eyes, and the florid, absolutely immobile face.
The Avenger, still with the florid tint of Molan Brocker’s face coloring his own dead-white skin, and in Molan Brocker’s clothes, stared with eyes like diamond drills. There was a shred of cotton still in Mickelson’s left ear. It wouldn’t have been seen by any other than Benson.
“You have just come from a plane,” The Avenger said. “Evidently it was a plane built more for speed than for refined passenger service. You stuffed cotton plugs in your ears to muffle the sound of the motor. Where have you come from in that plane?”
“I… I wasn’t in a plane!” stumbled Mickelson. “My ears are sensitive. I wear cotton plugs a lot, to keep out the roar of the city—”
“At five in the morning? There is very little roar, even in New York, at five in the morning. You came from up the coast, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
But The Avenger knew he had struck home. The phrase he’d heard in the office of the Klammer Importing Co. fitted in here precisely.
“You came from up the coast. Where?”
Mickelson moistened his lips again. He couldn’t get any words at all out, now. Nothing in life had ever frightened him as much as the colorless, icily flaring eyes.
The Avenger started to repeat the question, then stopped. Mickelson’s right hand had gone up to loosen his collar, as if it were suddenly choking him. Benson’s gaze riveted itself on the hand.
The thumb and the base of the forefinger—
His voice was a little different, as he said:
“Tell me all you know about the frosted death.”
“I… I don’t know anything about it,” stammered Mickelson. “Just what I’ve read in the papers. I have no firsthand knowledge of it.”
“I believe,” The Avenger said softly, almost gently, “you have.”
“No, no! I don’t know a thing about it!”
Benson hesitated a moment, then made his play. It would either kill the craven thing before him with pure terror, or break him so utterly that he would tell without further stalling, whatever he knew.
He bet on the latter — and he lost.
“Oh, yes, you do,” he said, in that gentle, almost sympathetic voice. “You know about the frosted death at first hand. The evidence is all too clear — on you!”
“What do you mean?” jerked out Mickelson.
“Look at your right thumb,” The Avenger said.
Mickelson raised his right hand, stared, then glared at it with eyes so widened that you could see a ring clear around each pupil.
“Why—” he panted. “Why—”
That was his last coherent word.
On the thumb was a small patch of something that looked like powdered sugar. There was a similar, smaller patch on the first joint of his forefinger.
Mickelson glared from the white stuff, to the man before him. But his eyes didn’t see that man. They saw death!
Choking, gagging, he tore the bills from his pocket, glared at them, then screaming he threw them from him. Still screaming, with white flecks on his lips, he began to batter his right hand against the wall, and to try to scrape the white stuff off.
The shock had been too much. There was stark madness in his eyes. And it was a madness that would endure the few short hours till death released him!
CHAPTER XV
Terror Walks
In a little tarpaper barn of a place, deep in the Maine woods, the tool of empire was being fashioned. Dreams of empire. One of money, to be gained by the man who was responsible for the most baffling and deadly enemy known to medical history.
The other — visions of an entire continent belonging to a nation that, at that moment, could and did raise a specter of alarm and fear in its endeavor for other lands and greater slave populations.
In that low shack, there had been twelve worktables, with only ten workers. Now there were twelve workers on the twelve tables.
The last two to be added to the robot corps were MacMurdie and Josh Newton.
They looked like the others, now. They were dull-eyed, pallid of lip. Josh’s blackness had taken on a sort of leaden-gray look. They worked like automatons, filling little glass capsules with the white stuff that looked like snow, sealing each capsule, putting it aside, and starting on another.