The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (16 page)

Smitty thought it over and decided that he still felt pretty sore about it. “How’d you fool the big shot when you got here?” he demanded morosely of Nellie.

“I glued a little bead, from that steel-bead purse you gave me, to my scalp.” said Nellie. “The man felt it, and thought it was the end of the needle.”

“And I thought it was the end of you!” howled Smitty. “If only you’d have a little consideration for a guy with a weak heart—”

The rock-slab door of their cave swung open. In the opening stood the man with the dark glasses; coat collar up and hat brim down as concealingly as ever. The man stared at them for a moment, nine people trussed like fowl for slaughter, sitting on the rock floor and leaning back against the wall.

“So,” he said at last. “The great Richard Benson—who has the crust to call himself The Avenger—has finally put himself into a spot from which there is no escape.”

Never in his life had Benson called himself The Avenger. That grim title had been bestowed on him by others, principally members of the underworld. But the man with the white, death mask face and the colorless, deadly eyes did not bother to correct the statement. Benson’s hands were working behind his back, steely wrists straining to spread his bonds.

“At least,” said the man, “you are to have a fitting tomb, you and all your friends: these caves. And you will have a colossal headstone, the glacier above us.”

A voice came from outside. “Hurry it up, will you? The stuff’ll all be out to the ship in another ten or fifteen minutes. We’re about done here.”

The man with the glasses chuckled. And then he went to the nearest wall, reached up and took from its rock niche the glowing rod set there. He held it in his bare hands, and the effect was bizarre. The hexagonal rod looked like a giant crystal of some sort. It glowed in the man’s nut-brown hands like the lighted baton of an orchestra leader, only much, much brighter. It bathed him in cold, white light. He went around the cave, taking each rod as he came to it. In his hands they continued to glow, a bundle of sticks afire, but burning white and giving off no heat.

The last rod was in a niche directly over Benson’s white head. The man with the dark glasses relaxed from his tiptoed reach for the thing. And then he yelled suddenly and sat down on the rock floor with a thump, scattering the coldly glowing rods in all directions. One broke, and the two pieces continued to glow.

But the man wasn’t watching the pieces. He was fighting for his life, The Avenger’s one free hand tearing at his throat. Just one hand. But it looked as if it would be enough. Then the man got a chance for a shrill, terrified yell. That did it! Three men jumped into the cave, and one of the three leaped to where the two were struggling.

Only one hand free and legs still bound, and helpless. The Avenger couldn’t take on more than one assailant at a time. He ducked his head to the whistling blow that was aimed at it with a gun barrel, but got enough of the thing to send him reeling back to the floor. They bound his hands again, more tightly than before. Smitty was bellowing and straining cablelike muscles but couldn’t break loose to help Benson. The rest stared in helpless rage.

The scene was as it had been before. Only now the man with the dark glasses—unsteadily settling them back in place on his nose—was standing at a safe distance at the door.

“Damn you,” he raged. “I was going to put a bullet through your skull before I left. But for that attack on me, you’ll live to know your whole fate; live as long as thirst and starvation will let you; live to go mad in the darkness here.”

“Come on! Come on!” urged one of the pair who had rescued him. “The ice’ll be coming down without that blast in a minute.”

“You hear?” cried the man with the dark glasses, voice still insane with anger. “Blast! That’s your fate. When we leave here, we’ll set a bomb at the foot of the glacier, timed to go off in half an hour. When it does—you will be buried so deeply under ice that an army of engineers couldn’t get you out in a month. You will be buried for another fifty thousand years.”

He went out, and the rock-slab door turned into place. It was hardly to imprison them more securely; that was unnecessary. It was only to add to their tortures by putting them in total darkness. All the light rods had been taken from this cave; and closing the door had shut out light from the outer cavern.

The door slammed, and after a long moment a laugh rang out. It was Rosabel’s, and it was not a natural sounding laugh. Josh’s voice snapped out, more sternly than any of the little group could ever remember his having addressed his pretty wife. “Easy, Rosabel! No hysterics! That won’t help any!”

There was silence again. Silence for many moments. Each was probably thinking the same thing: maybe there wouldn’t be a blast after all. Maybe the man with the dark glasses had promised that fate only to torture them mentally. Maybe—

There was a cracking explosion somewhere outside. It sounded like a heavy sigh to the group deep inside the cavern. There was silence for perhaps a heartbeat, and then it commenced: the tremendous rumble of the ice as the foot of the glacier collapsed over the low cliff along an eight-hundred-foot front, burying the ancient entrance once more under countless tons of the enduring ice.

“So that’s that,” came Smitty’s heavy voice after a moment. He added flippantly, “It’s dark in here. Anybody got a match?”

“Will a flashlight do?” came the quiet voice of The Avenger.

Next instant, within the group whose hands had been bound so tightly that the ropes could not possibly be broken or slipped, shone the steady, powerful beam of one of Smitty’s flashlights.

The Avenger had acted in a manner typical of him. Before the killers had left the caverns, he had not tried to free himself with the help of another because the act would almost certainly have been seen and the helper murdered promptly along with Benson.

He had acted alone in an attempt to free his own hands because if he had been caught he alone would have died for it. But the instant the little group was left alone, with no eyes to spy on attempts at freedom, Ike came into play.

Below Benson’s left knee, Ike, the little razor-sharp throwing knife, was holstered. And it’s seldom that a searching hand feels for weapons below the knee. So Ike had been left undisturbed. A moment after the light was taken and the cave door shut, MacMurdie felt bound feet touch his hands lightly and then felt the steel muscles of The Avenger’s legs under his fingers. He knew what to do.

The Scot’s hands were bound but his fingers were free. They fumbled Ike out of the sheath. And then with Benson rolling closer, he could reach the Avenger’s wrists and slash with the knife. So it was that when Smitty jokingly asked if anyone had a match, the flashlight had shone in Benson’s freed fingers. In a moment they were all standing and rubbing cramped muscles. Benson opened the door and they were in the light again—the light from the queer, quartz-like rods in the outer cave.

“That’s fine,” rumbled Smitty pessimistically. “We can now die in seven caves instead of one. With that mountain of ice between us and daylight—”

“As long as we’re not actually dead,” said Mac, with his lopsided optimism, “we’re all right.”

Nellie shook her head. “That’s bad, Mac. When
you
go Pollyanna on us, instead of croaking doom, we’re really in a bad way!”

The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes went to Mac’s face. Their colorless glitter indicated that he was not really looking at the Scot, but thinking out something that had not yet occurred to the rest. It was something he had dwelt on before. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “if they took
everything
from these caves?”

“They didn’t take the mastodon, anyhow,” shrugged Josh. “We saw that.”

“And I don’t suppose,” said Mac indifferently, “they took the big kettle . . .”

The pale eyes were instantly concentrated on his bleak blue ones like diamond drills. The Avenger’s paralyzed face was as dead, as expressionless as it must always be; but his eyes were terrible in their intensity. “Kettle, Mac?”

MacMurdie felt a tendency to stutter. He couldn’t keep from it, when the chief stared at him like that, even though the Scot knew the pallid gaze was not intentionally threatening. “A thing like a great big cauldron, in the sixth cave,” he faltered. “Big as a beer vat, it is. Full of coils and with coils outside. Coils like the stuff that light comes from; only no light comes from these.”

Benson nodded. “That must be it!”

“Must be what?” demanded Nellie, who had been looking first at one and then the other as the inexplicable interchange took place.

“The way out of here,” Benson said quietly. He went on with the thought that had been running through his mind before. “The race that left this ‘museum’ to be found by posterity was far advanced in science and inventiveness. The light rods show that. And we know that this race foresaw the coming of the ice age. Otherwise they would not have left the relics as they did.”

They stared at him breathless, waiting.

“Under the mile-thick crust of the ice-age sheet they would be helpless, of course,” The Avenger went on. “But before that, working under several hundred feet of this glacier, they must have developed a means of escape in case of a collapse over the cliff entrance. Just such a collapse as the one that just occurred. That there was a glacier all those thousands of years ago, just as there is now, we know: the things in here were so perfectly preserved that they must have been in glacial cold from the very beginning.”

“But how does that cauldron—” began Mac puzzled.

“That must have been their machine for getting out in case of an ice slide. Let’s go and look at it.”

There it was, in the sixth cave—like the mastodon, too huge to be carried away with the other stuff. A cauldron as big as a beer vat, dark coils within and without. The Avenger’s flaming eyes went rapidly over the dark, inert mass, then sped to the thing Mac and Josh had idly noted before: the gap in the outer coil near the cave’s door with the piece of coiled quartz, or whatever it was, lying next to the gap as if ready to be dropped into place.

The Avenger nodded again. “The cauldron is of fused rock, able to stand terrific heat. And heat, of course, to melt ice, would be the only method of leaving here—but wouldn’t we be drowned?”

“What,” marveled Nellie to Smitty, “is he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Smitty in a return whisper. “But I’ll bet it’s good.”

Benson had gone back to the outer cave. He stared hard at the door leading into that significant sixth cavern. “Watertight when closed. And the first flow, of course, would be molten rock from the cave top, which would plug it farther. Everybody out here, please.”

“But, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “What—”

“The race that could make this rocky stuff give off light,” said Benson calmly, “could also make it give off heat. Terrific heat, such as we can only produce now with the finest of electric furnaces. At least—we shall soon see.”

In his hand, he had the section of coil that was separate from the rest. He stood next to the door, with one hand on the rock slab. He put the piece in position so that the gap was closed and the coil now continuous. Then he slammed the massive door shut and leaped into the outer cave. Fast as he was, he did not quite escape the flashing, tremendous consequences of closing that ancient coil. His face and hands were seared so that the skin was almost cracked.

From then on things happened very fast. First there was a deep thrumming that shook the very rock under their feet. Then a white-hot, crawling tongue came from one spot under the rock door that was not quite airtight, plugged it, and slowly hardened—melted rock from the cave ceiling over the coils. After that there was a wild rushing of water within the sealed cave and finally a series of explosions that seemed endless.

Mac moistened his lips in awe at the mighty force that had been unleashed, a force harnessed by man before the last ice age. The rush of water he knew was the flow of melted glacier ice above the cauldron when the rock was melted away. That had instantly turned to steam on contact with those miraculous coils, and the steam had blown out again and again against the dripping, rotting ice helping the heat to break it clear.

The outer wall of the sixth cave was reddening; and in the big outer cavern, through feet of stone, the heat was creeping out unbearably. They went to the exit under the foot of the low rock cliff. Benson pushed at it. It gave a fraction of an inch, then stuck. “A few minutes more,” said Benson calmly. “The whole foot of the glacier, over this spot, will melt into the sea with a little more of that heat.”

“How in the world is it generated?” gasped Smitty.

The Avenger looked at the reddening walls of the sixth cave far behind them. “Some utilization of electricity that even we do not know,” he said. “And the glacier itself is the generator. Think of the tremendous friction caused by the slow grinding of these millions of tons of ice on its creeping advance to the sea! They learned to harness this friction-generated power, that ancient race of men. They got heat from it. They got the light that has burned ever since, and would go on burning as long as the glacier moved.” He tried the door, and it swung open with a strong push. Swung open through a knee-high torrent of water, and mushy ice that was rushing down to a boiling sea. They were free!

“Free,” said Smitty, stretching his mighty arms, “to go after that rotten gang and this time fix them right!”

There was a curious look in the pale eyes of The Avenger. He was staring out to sea, at half a dozen great ice chunks as big as small office buildings. They had cracked off with the melting behind them and splashed ponderously into the ocean. “We won’t have to pursue our enemies any more,” said Benson. “They’re dead! Their ship was sunk by that falling ice.” The sound of the still roaring water from the glacier was like the sound of rapids in the River Styx, accompanying his cold voice. “I got my hand on their leader for a moment. Not to try to kill him, but just long enough to place in his overcoat pocket all the little delayed-action gas capsules I had with me.”