The Avenger 17 - Nevlo by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

company’s been trying to find him. Are you sure?”
    “Yeah, I’m sure. You can’t mistake the guy—tall, black-haired, with his head held over to the left. Sure, it was Nevlo. But he won’t look like that any more!”
    The Avenger caught the man’s shoulder. He didn’t mean to hurt him, but such was the power of his slim white hands that the man screamed a little with what Benson meant to be only a firm pressure.
    It was the second man’s turn to get the full shock of staring into the pale clarity of Benson’s eyes. He shivered and stood still, even though the slim, steely fingers were compressing his flesh to the bone.
    “What do you mean Nevlo won’t look like that any more?” Benson demanded.
    “It’s like this,” whimpered the man. “I see Nevlo off on the top of a mound across the gorge from the plant. There’s a little bare spot on the mound, with trees around, and he’s in the bare spot. He’s standing beside something that sticks up from the ground like a radio antenna. I start to go closer to him because I want to tell him that Blake, president of the company, wants to see him. Any of us who find Nevlo are to do that. But before I get near enough there’s a hell of a big blue flash from the thing like an antenna, so big it blinds me and I don’t see anything but electric blue for a second. When I look again, I see Nevlo running from the place where the antenna was. But there’s nothing there any more. There’s just a blue hole in the ground. And Nevlo ain’t the same. He’s running like a gorilla, with half his clothes burned off, and he’s yelling like a crazy man.”
    “You think the explosion, or whatever it was, did that to him?” said Benson.
    “Yeah! I think the accident crippled him some way and drove him nuts. I think he was experimenting with something, and it went wrong.”
    There was silence, in which the dark-faced Pete forgot to be sulky, and Benson’s face was calmly pensive, and Mac and Smitty stared in something like horror at each other.
    A man capable, in some grimly miraculous way, of stopping a power plant—perhaps of stopping all power plants! And now—if this fellow’s story was true—a man warped in body and soul by some experimental slip! A madman!
    Benson sped toward the exit, with Mac and Smitty after him.

    Blake, president of Grant Utilities Corp., was in Cleveland most of the time at the general office. But he had been in the smaller Marville offices a great deal lately, while the best electrical brains in the country tried to straighten out Plant 4.
    He was there now, and in residence at his Marville estate. And he saw Benson in a hurry when that rather mythical name was sent in to his private office.
    “I have heard of you as a great electrical engineer,” he said. It was a common greeting. Doctors had heard of Richard Benson as a great physician; financiers as a wizard promoter; lawyers as a master of law. For The Avenger was profoundly skilled in more professions and activities, perhaps, than any other man on earth.
    “More recently,” said Blake, “I’ve heard of you as an investigator. And now you are in Marville.” He gnawed at his lower lip a moment, making no effort to mask the fact that he was agitated by the visit. “You have been out to Plant 4?”
    “Yes,” nodded Dick, his pale eyes taking the measure of the big, sleek man who headed Grant Utilities Corp. A worried man. A harassed man. A frightened man! Fear rode in his eyes and underlay his outwardly composed manner.
    Blake wasted no time in stalling.
    “If you’ve been out to the plant, I suppose you know of the trouble there.”
    Benson nodded.
    “The men have strict orders not to talk—” began Blake.
    “It was necessary that they do so,” said Benson, “so they did. I understand your present chief engineer is a man named William Burton. Is that right?”
    “Yes, that’s correct.”
    “Where is he now?”
    The fear showed more plainly.
    “I . . . I don’t