The Nemesis of Evil Read online

  The next to reach the roof was Elvira Higgins. The plucky girl occultist, the joyous glint of battle sparkling in her eyes, clenched in one little fist the huge horse pistol that was a relic of her grandfather. She crouched low and moved across the roof to join Zarkon behind the metal shelter. Close behind her came Scorchy Muldoon and Nick Naldini. Even when under attack, as now, the scrappy pair were arguing, both vying for the honor of “protecting” the attractive red-headed girl.

  “Stop shovin’, you long drink o’ water, or I’ll be after gittin’ me Irish up!” growled the peppery son of the Emerald Isle.

  “You do that, boy,” sneered the lanky magician venomously, “and I’ll pull a rabbit out of my hat and shove him down your fat throat until you choke on him!”

  “Oh, yeah? You vaudeville phony! Sure an’ the loikes o’ you couldn’t be after pullin’ anythin’ out o’ yer hat outside of a handful o’ cooties!”

  “For the love of gosh, will you two clowns lay off the jokes!” protested Ace Harrigan in a hoarse whisper from behind the skylight where he lay sprawled with the skinny, bad-tempered scientist, Menlo Parker. Growling and snapping, the two let the argument fizzle out.

  “Miss Higgins, you shouldn’t be here,” admonished Zarkon sternly, but keeping his voice low. “This is no place for a woman; in a minute more, bullets are going to be buzzing around here like a swarm of bees.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Prince Zarkon,” the girl said firmly. “I’ll send a few buzzing on my own!” And, so speaking, she showed him the six-shooter. He grinned.

  “Well, even armed with a bit of field artillery of such prodigious caliber, it’s unwise,” he said. “Still, you’re here now, and you might as well stay; but keep your head down, and keep hidden!”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” she said meekly. The light of hero worship gleamed in her bright green eyes. The lithe, tanned, and handsome young man beside her was something new and unique in the young lady’s experience with men. Earlier in the day he had tackled with his bare hands three armed and desperate criminals, disposing of them in seconds with a touch of his fingers. She had just watched him conduct a skillful and delicate operation on a dead man’s brain, identifying in just minutes a rare and subtle untraceable poison unknown in the Western world, which had defied a team of expert specialists from one of the nation’s leading medical schools. Now he was about to fight off a ‘copterful of desperadoes in a daring night raid on the headquarters of the state police. Was it any wonder this amazing superman kindled a worshipful admiration in her eyes!

  Observing the dazed, fascinated expression on the girl’s face, Scorchy scowled blackly and punched Nick Naldini in the shoulder to draw his attention to her disgusting exhibition of worship.

  “Sure and I’d be after bein’ grateful to ye, me bucko, if ye could explain why it is that ivver time a handsome colleen gets mixed up in a fracas o’ ours, she goes ga-ga over the chief there, and divvil a glance or a thought for the loikes o’ us?” he glowered, his brogue thickening his tongue.

  Nick sighed, shoulders slumping. “And she was mighty nice on the eyes, that one! Ah, hell, the chief’s as bad as Menlo, when it comes to girls — never looks at ‘em twice. Now shut up, will you? They’re about to land. And knock off that disgusting brogue; you sound like Barry Fitzgerald trying out for a part in a road company production of Abie’s Irish Rose!”

  The huge helicopter touched down on the tarpaper rooftop of the building and the ‘copter’s vanes slowed, their blurry disc separating into slim blades. Red-robed men swarmed out of the capacious craft, gas masks concealing their faces, carbines and automatics clutched in their hands. Because the night was dark and overcast and, thus far at any rate, moonless, the red-robed hoodlums had not spied the Omega men and the state cops as they came scuttling out of the stairwell to find hiding places about the roof. The red-robed men seemed to have no suspicions that the gas bomb planted by their leader had been discovered and thrown out of a window before it could strike down and immobilize the occupants of the building.

  Crouched behind the skylight, Ace Harrigan peered wonderingly at the mysterious craft. In the dimness of night, its curiously eye-twisting color made it almost invisible. But the teardrop curve of the fuselage could be seen where it eclipsed the lighted windows of the tall building beyond the state police headquarters.

  “Cripes, Menlo, look at that,” marveled the aviator with awe and speculation in his tones. “Damned if I ever saw a chopper with the lines of that one!”

  Menlo Parker grunted. “Doubtless Lucifer has introduced some design modifications of his own,” he snapped in his bad-tempered way.

  “I’ll say he has,” Ace whistled. “Look at those tanks along the fuselage — those vents arranged evenly around the whole body of the craft; wonder what they’re for?”

  “Shush, you gibbering chatterbox, they’re corning this way!” hissed Menlo. “Wait for the chief’s signal, now ...”

  The red-robed hoodlums — Lucifer’s Group 2, in all likelihood — threaded their path among chimneys and skylights and air vents, heading for the stairwell, unaware that a dozen men shared the roof with them, crouched in hiding. The Omega men unlimbered their flat, curiously designed pistols and waited tensely for the signal from Zarkon.

  When it came — a low, piercing whistle, sweet as a bird call, they simultaneously opened fire from all sides. Red-clothed men stumbled, lurched, staggered, fell down. But curiously, there was no roaring gunfire, no smacking of steel-jacketed slugs ripping through flesh, no eye-stinging clouds of cordite. Nothing but a chorus of sharp, short hissing sounds.

  Chief Patterson blinked, cursed, and blinked again. Switching on the portable searchlight he had snatched up on his way to the roof, the portly officer bathed the clumps of fallen in a dazzling pool of white light.

  There wasn’t even any blood!

  It was not until later that this small mystery was solved to the relief of Orville Patterson. After it was all over, Nick Naldini explained briefly that the Man of Mysteries they served had scruples about indiscriminate slayings, even of hardened criminals, and so had equipped his men with handguns of a peculiar design that was his own invention. They were powered by tanks of compressed air, and shot bullets made of hard rubber, rather than lead sheathed in tough steel. Zarkon, moreover, had trained his lieutenants in the use of these “mercy guns,” as they were called.

  Fired with skill, so that the hard rubber bullets struck the nape of the neck or the temple, they were as effective as ordinary bullets, but rarely took a life, knocking men unconscious. Fired in such a way as to take their man in the pit of the stomach, kneecap, or elbow joint, or Adam’s apple, they incapacitated men through blinding, excruciating pain, causing lapse of consciousness but rarely death or even serious injury. It was Zarkon’s opinion, evidently, that a dead man could not reveal valuable information or testify in court; neither could he be rehabilitated. There was something to be said for Zarkon’s notion.

  “Douse that light —” boomed Doc Jenkins, yelling across the roof to Chief Patterson. But there were still men aboard the helicopter, it quickly became evident, and one of them obligingly relieved Orville Patterson of the task. A carbine barked; glass tinkled; the fat officer squeaked, cursed, dropped the shattered lamp, and shook numb, tingling fingers. Blackness closed down on the scene as the searchlight was shattered by the well-aimed burst of rifle fire.

  The droning hum of the idling vanes screeched into high pitch. The fat-bodied vessel swung about, detaching itself from the roof.

  “Holy Jehosaphat, they’re gettin’ away!” Nick Naldini yelled angrily. Pouring a sizzling swarm of bullets into the hovering craft, the Omega men sprang from their various places of concealment and ran for the ‘copter.

  It was a couple of yards above them now, floating for the edge of the roof. As it happened, Menlo Parker and Ace Harrigan were nearest at that moment. As the weird craft floated over them, both men sprang into the air, catching hold of the undercarriage a
nd pouring the concentrated fire of their mercy guns into the whirling blades.

  But without visible result.

  Picking up speed, the craft began to soar skyward, picking up speed.

  “Menlo, Ace! Let go — you’ll be carried away! Drop!” shouted Zarkon. Even over the whine of the vanes, the drone of the engines, and the hissing of the mercy guns, his voice could be heard with crystalline clarity, due to its perfect enunciation and startling resonance and timbre.

  Ace let go, fell seventeen feet, and lit the tarpaper roof. He hit with his knees bent, to absorb the shock that could have broken his ankles had his legs been stiffly extended, rolled in a somersault, and came up dazed, jolted, and groggy, but unhurt.

  The huge chopper whirred away, climbing steeply; then it leveled off and faded away into the moonless dark.

  Scorchy whooshed, letting out a long-pent breath.

  “Well, what the heck, we got a jailful o’ prisoners out of it, anyway,” he grinned cheerfully. “Live ones, too, this time!” Then he sobered, grin fading. “Hey,” he barked. “Where’s ... Menlo?”

  “Huh?” grunted Doc Jenkins, peering around blankly. “Menlo? Why, he’s — uh —”

  They searched the roof swiftly. Menlo Parker was nowhere to be found.

  The shriveled, peevish little scientist must still be clinging to the undercarriage of Lucifer’s helicopter!

  Chapter 13 — “N-S-D-M-T”

  State police headquarters was a scene of turmoil and confusion. Zarkon and the Omega men, together with a pale, perspiring Robert Russell Ryan and a tense but bright-eyed Miss Elvira Higgins, descended to Chief Patterson’s office on the fourth floor of the building.

  They found the police chief’s assistant, whom Zarkon had earlier rescued from the gas-filled room, mostly recovered from the effects of the insidious vapor. The young patrolman was pale and weak and shaky, complaining of nausea and a splitting headache, but seemed otherwise to have all but fully recovered from the gas. Zarkon directed Ace Harrigan to help the patrolman down to the infirmary floor for medical treatment.

  A few moments later, Chief Orville Patterson joined them in his office, red-faced as ever, mopping his streaming brow with a bandanna handkerchief of violent hue.

  “My boys got them birds locked up all nice and comfy,” the fat man said with satisfaction. “That oughta teach them crooks better’n to try to raid my headquarters again! Dad-blast it all, I never heard o’ such nerve, tryin’ to land a chopper on the roof o’ police headquarters! This here Lucifer must think he’s the biggest thing come along since Al Capone!”

  Zarkon nodded seriously.

  “Lucifer is a megalomaniac with ambitious dreams beyond the criminous scope of the ordinary gangland crime lord,” he affirmed. “Unfortunately, he is a scientific genius — one of the greatest inventors since Thomas Alva Edison, and has therefore the power to fulfill those mad schemes, unless we are able to stop them.”

  “Well, we’ll do everythin’ we can to put him under lock an’ key,” Chief Patterson swore. The fat, red-faced man looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Lissen here, Prince, I sure am sorry about that man o’ yours! Imagine, carryin’ him off like that, an’ from the roof of police headquarters, too! Anything we can do to help you get him back, just say the word, dang it all!”

  Zarkon had been thinking about contingencies.

  “That is kind of you, Chief Patterson. We will accept your offer gratefully. I imagine the highway patrol division of your force maintains a fleet of helicopters to monitor traffic?”

  “We shore do!”

  “And to catch vehicles breaking the laws against speeding on the state highways?”

  “Yep!”

  “Then your ‘copters will be equipped with radar apparatus, I assume?”

  “Right again,” said Chief Patterson, with a shrewd light glinting in his eyes. He grinned a ferocious grin. “I git it! You think we can folly thet ‘copter by radar to Lucifer’s secret hideout?”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Zarkon grimly.

  “It shore is!” swore the fat officer, the joyous glint of battle gleaming in his eye. “Golly Moses, let me git to th’ radio room! I’ll have ever’ chopper in th’ county on they trail before they land!”

  The red-faced man bustled from the room. Zarkon turned to Doc Jenkins, who stood sheepishly, shuffling his weight from one big foot to another, alternately clenching and unclenching his huge hands into fists. The man with the tape-recorder brain was closest of them all to the waspish, short-tempered little savant and suffered acutely from the danger his little comrade was in.

  “Doc, you unloaded the equipment cases from the car when we arrived, didn’t you?”

  “Yep! Out there in the foyer, chief.”

  “Bring the radio set in here, will you? If Menlo is still alive and conscious, he may use the telegraph-key modification on the Squealer to send us a message.”

  Hope flared in the pale, watery eyes of the hulking man. He left the room, returning with the portable transceiver, and set it up on one of the desks. The location finder reported that Menlo was traveling northwest of Palma Laguna. Zarkon dispatched Nick Naldini to find Chief Patterson and deliver that clue to the direction in which Lucifer’s helicopter was flying.

  “My boys got the blip spotted, Prince,” reported the fat officer over the loudspeaker system to the Omega men. “Northwest in a straight line, gol-ding it, and going at a pretty fair clip, too!”

  There was a big state map on the wall behind Chief Patterson’s desk. Zarkon went over to it and traced a line on the transparent plastic overlay sheet with red crayon.

  “Headin’ into the mountains,” said Ace Harrigan thoughtfully. “Good place for a hideout among all those cliffs and canyons ...”

  “Doc, any message via the Squealer yet?” asked Zarkon. The huge, oafish man reluctantly admitted there was none.

  Robert Russell Ryan looked puzzled. The millionaire publisher leaned over to question Scorchy Muldoon in a hoarse whisper.

  “What’s this ‘telegraph-key modification’ on the Squealer Prince Zarkon has referred to?” he asked Scorchy.

  The Irishman grinned, showing Ryan the coat buttons sewn on the cuff of his sleeve. “This here is after bein’ the Squealer,” he explained. “S’got a buttonhole in the middle of it, see? O: what looks like one, anyway! Really just a miniature cutoff stud; we guys carry an ordinary sewin’ needle pinned inside the lining of our cuffs, see? You poke it in the buttonhole an’ it cuts off the Squealer’s carrier wave for a moment; you can send a signal by Morse that way, easy as pie. We’re hopin’ Menlo will use it. If he does, it’ll not only be after assurin’ us he’s still alive an’ all, but he can transmit valuable information about how Lucifer’s hideout is concealed or guarded —”

  “Lost ‘em, dad-rat it!” roared Chief Patterson’s voice over the loudspeaker system in an anguished howl.

  Zarkon snatched up the phone. “How did your people lose the blip?” he asked sharply.

  “Just flickered outa the scope! Just plain vanished!”

  “But how?” Zarkon’s question probed keenly. “Did Lucifer’s aircraft descend to a landing below-the level of your traffic radar, or did it go behind a mountain?”

  “Neither, dad-blame it all!” roared the officer lustily. “My boys say it was in midair, clearly visible on the radarscope, an’ the next instant it just wasn’t there!”

  “Give me the co-ordinates of the last sightings,” Zarkon said. He listened intently, then crossed to the wall map and extended his crayon line to the exact position of Lucifer’s air vessel at the last moment it had been seen on the state police radar.

  “Very near the northern end of the Sierra Nevadas,” he mused. “But still a good mile or more from any of the mountains. Curious! Very curious —”

  Scorchy Muldoon scratched his fiery thatch furiously.

  “How the heck does a big fat ‘copter like that one just disappear?” he complained loudly. “Even if the blamed
thing blew up, radar’d be able to see the pieces scatter!”

  “I cannot say,” replied Zarkon thoughtfully. “Lucifer may have invented some means of making his airship radar-proof, or invisible to radar ...”

  “Argon vapor might do it,” said Doc Jenkins heavily. “A sudden discharge of argon vapor, mixed with aluminum particles in suspension, would spread the radar blip out suddenly, diffusing it so broadly that the radarscope would not be able to register its presence.”

  “Yes, that’s a thought, chief!” crowed Nick Naldini excitedly. “Remember the metal tanks and tubes, and all those funny vents around the fuselage? If they all blew out argon mixed with aluminum powder, the darn thing’d be invisible on radar ...”

  “And even to ordinary eyesight, in a way,” Doc Jenkins added. “It would hide the helicopter inside a sort of gasball that would look just like an ordinary white cloud floatin’ along.”

  “I think you’ve hit it, Doc,” said Prince Zarkon, nodding his gray head in satisfaction. “That’s just the sort of trick Sinestro — or Lucifer, as he calls himself these days — would come up with. Well, we know about where the vehicle disappeared from the radarscopes; the only thing to do now is to comb that area in person, hoping to find the concealed entrance to Lucifer’s hidden headquarters.”

  “It would have to be within a two-mile radius of where it disappeared from the scopes,” said Doc positively. “The tanks we saw on the fuselage couldn’t possibly hold enough vapor, even in concentrated form, to maintain the cloud in one piece for a greater distance.”

  “That narrows it down effectively,” said Zarkon. “I wish Menlo would —”

  “Wow!” boomed Doc Jenkins at the top of his voice, making the others jump nervously. “Good ol’ Menlo! The carrier wave just broke this second!”

  Zarkon glided lithely across the room to the radio set. The visual signal was flickering off and on.