The Avenger 32 - The Death Machine (14 page)

“There he is!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, the old guy who looks like an unmade bed.”

“Hey, Dr. Heathcote!”

“Dr. Heathcote, I’m Stanley from the
Chronicle.”

“Over this way, doctor. I’m with radio station KPQ.”

Uncle Algernon had been bicycling across the sunny afternoon campus of Palo Alto University. His disreputable black satchel reposed in his bike basket. Hopping off the cycle, he set the kick stand and smiled around at the reporters and photographers who were converging on him. “Ah, the members of the Fourth Estate.”

“Dr. Heathcote, could you speak up?” said a man clutching a KFRC microphone.

“I am speaking up. Perhaps those halfwit headphones of yours are acting as earmuffs.”

“Is it true,” asked Stanley of the
Chronicle,
“that you singlehandedly averted a nationwide calamity, doctor?”

“Not singlehandedly, no. I had some assistance from my nephew and his chums.”

“You mean Justice, Inc.?” asked the KPO man.

“Exactly.” The doctor lifted his satchel free of the wire basket. “Why don’t you fellows all come in and catch my lecture?”

“They won’t let us in without tickets.”

“It is well worth the price,” Uncle Algernon told the crowd. “My topic today, rather than the one announced in the printed program, will be the Heathcote Ultrasonic Brain Control Box and why I have destroyed it.”

“That’s the gizmo known as the death machine?”

“Some call it that.”

“You mean,” asked the KFRC man, “that we don’t have to worry about the death machine anymore?”

“It is no more,” said Dr. Heathcote. “And, since mine is the only mind capable of inventing it, the box will stay no more.”

“Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, there’s plenty to worry about,” the doctor assured him. “But in this specific matter you can relax.”

Leaving the bicycle where it stood, Dr. Heathcote began walking toward the lecture hall. “The box was much too bulky anyway. What’s needed is a much more compact one. There ought to be a way to build a much smaller one . . .” As he passed out of sight, he suddenly exclaimed, “Excelsior!”