He wasn’t the only one near that light switch. One of the gang, perhaps the one who had snapped it off in the first place, was there, too. And this one had struck before Smitty could see him.
A bad clip on the head with a gun barrel.
Smitty instinctively rolled as he sagged so that the giant was spared the next blow. But he was too dazed to go on. He braced himself for the blow or the shot that should put him out of this world—
“All right!” yelled a man near the table under which the mouse had been. “I’ve got it.”
Smitty got one confused glimpse of this man, and then an abrupt change came over the picture.
The men left.
Just like that! They poured out of the building. Two men who had been holding Lila, loosed her and beat it so abruptly that she almost fell. The man with the gun on Smitty turned and ran.
Before the big fellow could get strength back to rise from knees to unsteady feet, the place was empty, save for Lila and himself.
Lila had nerve. She started toward the door.
“We can catch them in the woods. I know the country around here better than they can possibly know it. Well, why don’t you come on?”
Smitty didn’t make a move; he didn’t even answer her. He stood with his head cocked to one side, as if listening intently. Which, as a matter of fact, he was.
“Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”
“Of course I’d know one — a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”
“See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.
They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.
He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.
“U-huh. Going in and out of this clearing at will, in spite of the fence! I get it.”
“Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.
“The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.
“No motor could be within a mile or two. I told you there wasn’t a road for cars or trucks through the woods. And no plane could land with the men, and, besides, we’d have heard a plane motor.”
But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.
“You described your father, at Bleek Street, when you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.
Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.
“You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.
Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.
“The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”
Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.
“That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”
“He… he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.
“Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”
“No! He… I never saw that man before!”
Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.
The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.
And there was no sign of that pool, now!
The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.
“That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”
“He wasn’t my father! He wasn’t!” cried Lila. And then she burst into tears, leaving a perplexed and dismayed giant with the prospect of getting a hysterical damsel ten miles through woods, at night, on foot.
CHAPTER VII
Motor Meeting
The Avenger had a laboratory that could not have been beaten even by the great commercial laboratories. And he could use that lab as few men ever born could use scientific equipment. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, pick any branch you please.
But Dick Benson was being baffled, now.
He had a pigeon that thought it was an eagle and tried to attack everything moving, and he couldn’t find what had made it savage.
He had taken one live and one dead pigeon from the public library. He had tested and vivisected the dead bird in every way known to man, and he could find no variance from normal in it. So he was now concentrating on the live one.
And this one was certainly something to write home about.
The bird was in large cage. It kept to the side of the cage nearest to anything moving. Then it flew at the bars — most of the feathers were out of its head from beating against the wires — and tried to get at what made the movement, regardless of the size of the thing.
“ ’Tis strrrange,” burred MacMurdie, who was working with The Avenger. Of course, Mac, though an outstanding scientist himself, was only a capable helper when his knowledge was compared to the knowledge of Dick Benson.
“You bird’s mad,” said Mac dourly. “Yet, ’tis a consistent kind of madness. It acts as if it would like to destroy every livin’ thing except itself.”
The Avenger’s head, with its virile, heavy black shock of hair, nodded slowly.
“It almost seems,” Dick said, “as though the pigeon has a fiendish hate for everything alive; as if the brain or nervous system were subtly deranged. But there was no sign of injury in the other bird.”
Mac shrugged.
“ ’Tis sick in the head — but only the head, Muster Benson. Ye’ll obserrrve that the pigeon is healthy enough. It eats when ye feed it — after ye’ve drawn back so it doesn’t try to fly at you.”
“Yes, it’s healthy enough,” conceded Dick, colorless eyes like wells of ice in his impassive face.
The Avenger paced slowly up and down the laboratory. Mac stared. It was the first time he had ever seen Dick baffled by anything of laboratory nature. But, he had to admit, it was the first time he had ever seen a problem of so unique a nature brought home to anyone.
“Ritter,” said The Avenger, stopping his pacing.
“Eh?” said Mac.
“Ritter was at the library,” Dick explained. “He’s no scientist, as far as I know. But he is an intelligent man. I’d like to ask him what he observed about the behavior of the birds. Besides—”
The Avenger didn’t go on with that last sentence.
Mac said: “Ritter’s gotten to be a big figure, politically, hasn’t he?”
“The biggest,” said Benson. “He’s quite apt to be a presidential candidate in the coming election, and there is a good chance that he’ll be our next president.”
“D’ye think it’s possible that Ritter knows something about this?” said Mac.
But Dick made no reply to that. He summoned Cole Wilson from the vast, top-floor room. Wilson came barging in, dark hair back on his forehead, black eyes blazing, eager for a job.