The Avenger and his little crew knew precisely how the man had gotten into those glowing headlines. They knew that, to patch up the sinister trouble in industry and finance, he had first made that trouble.
Deliberately, ruthlessly, devilishly he had set man against man, so that he could step in with a bow to the gallery and make them friends again.
“Which means, of course,” said Nellie, “that there is an antidote to this drug of Morel’s. Otherwise, Ritter couldn’t undo so easily what he had done. He gave them the hate serum first, then later gave them this other stuff to make them normal again.”
“I grilled Packer, and he swears as far as he knows there is no antidote,” sighed Mac. “But there’d better be an antidote! If there isn’t — what about Wilson?”
Cole was in a specially fitted room downstairs. With heavy hearts the rest had fixed it. A similar one had been arranged for Arthur Morel.
They had fixed the rooms by padding them and putting bars over the windows. In one of those, Morel now paced. In the other was Wilson.
The Avenger came into the vast top-floor room. He came from the laboratory, still in a white coat. Even Dick Benson looked a little tired after his Herculean work. But his voice was even and his eyes icily calm as he said:
“I think I have something. We’ll try it anyway.”
“An antidote!” gasped Mac. “Ye’re sure?”
“I’m not at all sure,” said Benson. “It seems to work with rabbits. Whether it will work with humans is another matter.”
His pale eyes were somber.
“To try again, on another angle, would take me days. And I’m afraid, in that time, the mania possessing Morel and Wilson might become permanent. No one knows the results that prolonged effects of the drug produces. We’ll give some of the antidote to them, in spite of the risk. Better to have them dead than permanently insane — if the antidote fails to work.”
Lila cried out, then pressed her hand to her lips. The Avenger’s colorless eyes seemed as icy as ever as they turned on her; but she appeared to find some sympathy in them, for her hand slowly came down.
“I won’t give it to your father if you’d rather I did not,” Dick said to the girl.
She shook her head.
“I feel as you do about it. Better to have him dead than a homicidal maniac for the rest of his life.”
“Very well,” said Dick. “We’ll inject them with some of the antidote.”
They went down to the second floor, to those two rooms. For a moment The Avenger looked through the small opening in each door at the two men.
Morel was sitting on the bed in his room. His eyes were dull, slightly bloodshot. But they were still savage. He half rose to his feet as he saw Dick watching him, then sank back. But he was ready to spring, like a watchful panther, if he got a chance.
Wilson wasn’t quite like Morel; after all, Wilson had gotten only one dose while it seemed that Morel must have been injected repeatedly, over a long period of time. Cole waved to Dick when he saw him.
“When are you going to let me out, chief?” he said cheerfully. “I’m O K, now. Entirely normal.”
“Don’t believe it, Muster Benson,” whispered Mac.
But Dick had no intention of letting Wilson out. Instead, he got out one of Mac’s milder gas pills. This was one that induced deep sleep.
He tossed it into Wilson’s room.
Wilson saw it, knew instantly what it was and turned into a snarling demon. Also, a sly demon.
The lapel of his coat was saturated with the chemical of Mac’s devising which counteracted for a little while the effects of the gas. He promptly held this to his mouth and nostrils.
It took four of the pills, spaced at five-minute intervals, to send him off to sleep. Even then, Mac moved warily when The Avenger told him to get him and bring him into Morel’s room.
Morel succumbed to the first pill, of course. Lila, ashen, trembling, saw him lie down on the bed and go off into a profound sleep.
The two men were laid side by side, and Benson got out the small vial in which was the stuff he thought was an antidote for Morel’s hate serum. Thought only! He did not know.
This stuff was absolutely colorless. The hate serum was bloodred, but this antidote was as white and clear as distilled water. It looked pretty ineffective to Mac, even though, as a chemist, he knew that color had nothing to do with the potency of any liquid. After all, TNT is practically colorless.
The Avenger plunged a hypodermic needle through the cork of the vial and drew it full. Then he turned to Cole Wilson.
It was a somber moment. If Dick were wrong, he would be a murderer. And instead of watching a man slowly come back to sanity and life, he would watch him slowly die.
Lila and the others literally held their breaths while Dick injected the stuff into Wilson and then into Morel.
They were ready for anything. What they were not ready for was what happened. Which was nothing at all.
The two had been in a deep sleep. After the injection they remained just the same, eyes closed, breathing deeply and slowly. But The Avenger was physician enough to know that there had been a slight change, after all.
He nodded, eyes as icily calm as if he were not taking sole responsibility for the continuance of two human lives.
“They are in a coma,” he said. “They’ll probably remain in it for some hours, unless—” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Unless they passed from the coma straight into death.
That was what the “unless” meant.
They went up to the top-floor room again. The Avenger paced slowly near his big desk, his pale eyes seeing none of them, and seeing none of the immediate surroundings. Lila didn’t know what the brilliant far look in his eyes meant. But the others did.
Now and then in the course of a case The Avenger thought aloud, pinning down more clearly the points he had listed up to that moment. It was a rare and wonderful thing to hear him. They were hopping he would do this now.
He did.
“I think I have the rough outline of this now,” he said slowly, absently, talking to no one of them there. “Morel invented this drug. It is, as my laboratory work has shown, mainly a refinement of adrenalin.
“With all the war there is on earth at the moment, it is easy to see why Morel tried for such a drug. He was after something that would turn men into heroes. Something that would make them entirely courageous, utterly without fear. That explains the heavy amount of adrenalin in his formula. Adrenalin, shot into the blood stream, makes a human, or animal, warlike and fearless and gives him more than normal strength. Just the thing for an army.
“Morel found his drug, all right. A serum that turned anything that felt it into a thing without fear. But the serum had something wrong with it. There was another effect that Morel hadn’t planned on, and emphatically didn’t want.
“It filled its victims with a murderous hate, as well as a complete fearlessness.
“The drug, instead of being a courage serum, was a hate serum. Instead of making heroes of men, it made murdering maniacs of them; made them want to kill everything in reach.
“In working to correct this, Morel stumbled onto an antidote. That was how I got what I think is an antidote by an extension of the same experiments that gave me a duplicate of his drug. That much, at least, he had done. But until he could get the hate part out of his courage serum, the whole thing was a failure. You couldn’t give an army the stuff to make it unbeatable in battle. If you gave it to an army, the army would begin killing each other, hating each other, instead of the enemy.
“Morel’s close friend was Edwin C. Ritter, the politician. Ritter happened to hear about Morel’s unsuccessful experiment. But to Ritter it seemed quite successful. He could use that drug, as it stood.