The Avenger 34 - The Glass Man by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

pueblos.

CHAPTER XI

Next on the List
    The sun was dropping toward the desert when Alan Lamont came out of the Quonset hut which masked the entrance to his section of the underground Perseus Project lab.
    The guard on the sidewalk outside nodded at him. “First time I’ve seen you come up before sundown.”
    “Feeling a little under the weather,” Lamont told him. “May be coming down with a cold.”
    “That’s what you ought to be working on down there, a cure for the common cold.”
    Sniffling once, Lamont said, “Not in my line.” He strolled away from the hut, passed the facility PX, where a military truck was unloading supplies, and turned onto the road which led to the technical staff’s living area.
    A minimal job of landscaping had been done. The road was paved and a strip of narrow sidewalk bordered one side of it. No trees had been attempted.
    The cottages were all alike, the same kind defense workers were living in all across the country. Quickly built, quickly in need of repairs. At least he hadn’t paid anything for this one.
    Letting himself in, Lamont sat down on the sofa in the small living room. The sofas were, at least in the dozen or so cottages he’d been in, all alike.
    He sat for a while, listening. There was no sound of activity anywhere around.
    “Let’s get going,” he said to himself.
    Rising, he went into the bedroom. After pulling down the shades he knelt and shoved the bed aside. One board in the dusty floor was free of dust. With a penknife he pried it up and took a metal box from the hollow space beneath.
    Inside the box was a hypodermic and three small vials of a bluish liquid. Removing the hypo and one of the vials, he closed the box, put it back, and slid the board back into place, then pushed the bed back.
    From a plastic box in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom Lamont extracted a sterile needle. He attached it to the syringe and thrust the needle into the rubber lid of the vial. When the hypo was filled Lamont, after squirting a drop into the air, injected the bluish fluid into the upper part of his arm.
    He then detached the needle, dropped it down the drain, and washed out the syringe. That and the vial he took back to the bedroom. He shoved aside the bed, pried up the board again, and returned the vial and hypo to the box.
    When everything was back in place Lamont undressed and carefully hung up his clothes.
    The bones of his fingers were showing now.
    “A reminder of my own mortality,” he told himself.
    He waited on the edge of the bed. His hands and arms were only ghosts of themselves now.
    In three more minutes his torso was invisible.
    The feet always went last. When the little toe of his left foot vanished, the young physicist stood up. He crossed to the wall mirror to inspect himself.
    “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” he said, chuckling.
    He was completely invisible now.

    He didn’t know about the dog.
    Lamont climbed quietly over the adobe wall which surrounded Edwin Montez’s estate. He’d been by here twice before in the past week, casing everything.
    Montez’s wife was away in California; they had no children. There was a butler and a housemaid, but the butler was old and doddering and the maid was a frail girl of no more than eighteen.
    He didn’t know about the dog.
    There’d been no dog before.
    On the acre of lawn Lamont stopped, watching the large white rancho-style house. It was more like a movie set than anything real.
    Montez was the only one of them who’d done well. It was surprising, in a way, since he’d been the dullest one in the group. At least it had seemed that way to Lamont when he was twelve and his brother’s college buddies dropped in at the house.
    He could still see Montez as he’d looked then. Small, shy, with those rimless glasses and that apologetic smile. And the college sweater he wore even though he wasn’t on any team.
    Montez was a highly successful broker, married to a rich wife, and living better than any of