The Nemesis of Evil Read online

Menlo nodded thoughtfully. “Thought that’s where you might be, somehow. Lucifer ducked out that way, didn’t he? Musta bolted the blame thing from underneath; we couldn’t budge it. Doc’s gone to fetch a crowbar right now, so’s we could pry the blamed thing open. Lucifer didn’t get away, did he?”

  Zarkon shook his head somberly. Menlo seemed satisfied with that, and asked no further questions. He finished bandaging the wounded Eurasian and climbed to his feet wearily.

  “What a night this has been! Feel so tired I could sleep for a week.”

  “How is Ching?” asked Zarkon. Menlo shrugged carelessly.

  “He’ll live to go to prison, I guess,” he said. “You sure fooled us all with that change of clothes bit. How’d you work it so fast?”

  “My garments are not held together with zippers or buttons,” Zarkon explained, “but with adhesive strips. I have practiced the trick before, to perfect my timing. I can effect a complete transition in a remarkably short time. Such things sometimes can come in handy.”

  Menlo opened his mouth to make some reply, but just then the other Omega men came in, Doc Jenkins lugging the no-longer-needed crowbar. They greeted their leader jubilantly, crowding around to welcome him happily.

  “Boyoboyoboy! Chief, you oughta see it. Never seen anythin’ like it, begorra!” Scorchy burbled joyously. “We got inta the central control room and let down all them steel grilles. Seems like just about ever’ dad-gone doorway in th’ place is tricked out with ‘em. We got ever’ single last one o’ Lucifer’s gang locked up — and right here in they own secret hidey hole, too!”

  The sun was well up into the sky before they emerged at length from the caverns into the open air and the light of day. It was midmorning before Chief Patterson’s state troopers had gotten the last of Lucifer’s gang members down the steep stair step-like slope of the mountainside and into the paddy wagons that were drawn up at the foot of Mount Shasta to receive them. There was a miniature fleet of the security vehicles, for Lucifer’s thugs numbered two score.

  Eventually the last gang member had been rounded up, handcuffed, escorted into the last paddy wagon, and been driven away, siren clamoring victoriously. Of course, there was still much to be done. It would probably take the state police the better part of a week to comb through the caverns to their last nook and cranny, examine and itemize the last morsel of evidence, and cart it away. The cleaning up, they knew, usually takes more time in such cases than does the process of busting the case wide open.

  “By golly, that dad-ratted mountain!” swore the fat, red-faced officer, mopping his streaming brow with his fiery-hued bandanna and fanning himself vigorously with the bit of damp cloth. “If I gotta go up an’ down that dang heap o’ rocks one more time, I swear to gosh I’m gonna turn in my badge! Always thought them mountain climber fellows was nuts; now I know blamed well they are. Enough to give a fellow the conniption-fits, all this climbin’ up and down!”

  “Did you find the .helicopter?” inquired Zarkon.

  “That we did! Dad-blastid thing was hid in a sort of hangar with big doors, way up above the rest o’ these goldurned tunnels,” snorted the state cop. “Coupla wiseguys we caught tryin’ to make a sneaky takeoff, but we nailed ‘em. Guess we got about all th’ crooks rounded up by now. Gotta hand it to you and yer boys, Prince; you sure done a swell job. Gol-ding it, just wait’ll the newspapers get ahold of this one! It’ll sure be a real feather in yer cap, by golly!”

  Zarkon looked acutely uncomfortable. He cleared his throat apologetically.

  “Chief Patterson,” he said solemnly, “I would be greatly obliged to you if our role in this affair was played down. I would really be much happier if you and your officers were to take the lion’s share of the, credit for breaking this gang.”

  The fat man looked astonished. Zarkon assured him that he and his lieutenants would be more than willing to give full details on the operation, but preferred to keep their part in the adventure as secret as possible.

  “Publicity is the last thing we desire,” he informed the state cop. “The less that is publicly known about us, the better we can fight crime now and in the future. I am more than willing that you should take all the credit in this instance.”

  For once the red-faced officer was too flabbergasted to loose his usual torrent of amusingly inoffensive epithets.

  Just a moment later, Chief Patterson’s red face grew solemn, and he removed his sweat-stained old Stetson and held it over his heart. The stretcher bearers were bringing down the corpse of Robert Russell Ryan.

  “That’s a ding-blastid shame,” the state cop muttered. “A good man like him; shore makes a feller wish that dod-rotted crook, Lucifer, weren’t dead, too. Shore would like to send the feller up fer life, killin’ Mr. Ryan that way. He were a mighty good man!”

  Zarkon said nothing. He had told Chief Patterson only that the millionaire publisher had died in the scuffle, but he had kept silent on the matter of Ryan’s complicity in Lucifer’s plot, and his part in the conspiracy. After all, the man was dead. He could not be punished for his role in the mystery murders — why, then, should his name and reputation be blasted?

  Zarkon intended to say nothing to the authorities about the Judas role of Robert Russell Ryan. Let him go to his grave remembered for the good and constructive things he had done with his life. Let his secret die with him.

  They left the foot of Mount Shasta and drove back to the Ryan estate in Seagrove. Later on that day, or perhaps on the day following, they would have to make their statements for the police records. Then they would be free to return to Knickerbocker City. Chief Patterson had told Prince Zarkon that simultaneous raids on the lodges of the Brotherhood had netted the missing members of Lucifer’s Circle of Disciples, who were indeed wanted men with long criminal records. The lodges had been closed after the raid and would not reopen. The whole gang was under lock and key, including the Eurasian chemist, Ching, and Mongo, the giant black. After a simple inquest, the case would be closed.

  “I shore will see to it that that dad-ratted Chinaman gits locked up fer life,” swore Chief Patterson feelingly, as they drove away. “Just in case he gits any ideas of settin’ himse’f up in business as ‘Lucifer, Jr.’ You boys finished thar?”

  “Yep, that’s it, Chief,” said one of his officers. The man was staring after Zarkon’s car as it drove away.

  “What’s the story on that Prince guy?” inquired the officer. “You really going to keep his name out of all this, Chief?”

  Orville Patterson fixed the younger man with a hard glare.

  “Yew take yer hat off, sonny, when yew talk about Prince Zarkon!” he said heavily. “He’s the bes’ natural-born cop I ever set eyes on! Ding-bust it all, if I had five like him on th’ force, the sovereign state o’ Californy’d be mos’ law-abidin’ state this side o’ Shangri-la. You hear me talkin’?”

  “Yessir, Chief!”

  “Then git.”

  The young officer saluted smartly, and “got.” And never thereafter did Chief Orville Patterson of the state police cease reminiscing about his friendship with the mysterious Novenian nobleman, and how they had once worked hand-in-glove together on the dangdest crime in state history.

  Chapter 23 — The Man from Tomorrow

  It was noon before Zarkon and the Omega men and Elvira Higgins got back to the estate of the late Robert Russell Ryan in the fashionable Seagrove suburb of Palma Laguna. They were hungry, dirty, disheveled, and bone weary after the long night of adventure, imprisonment, and battle.

  Anxious as to the outcome of their mysterious venture, the managing editor of Ryan’s newspaper, the Los Angeles Illustrated Press, had driven over from that city and awaited them on the front steps of the mansion.

  They had not seen Gordon Halleck, he of the nervous and prodigious eyebrows, since their first arrival here in the Shooting Star. The editor was sobered by the news of the untimely demise of his employer. In a solemn voice he asked for details, and listened in a subdued
manner while Zarkon quietly told him a spurious account of his employer’s heroism in their battle against the criminal Brotherhood and a few sketchy and unobtrusively inaccurate details surrounding the moment of his death.

  After shaking hands all around and tendering his awkward thanks, the editor drove back to Los Angeles to write the story. Zarkon had managed to persuade him to avoid any mention of the Omega organization in his newspaper account of the case, suggesting that all of the credit be given to the dead reporter, for digging up the facts in the first place, and to Chief Orville Patterson of the state police for raiding the local branches of the gang and grabbing the rest of the crooks right in their very stronghold.

  Then he and his lieutenants and their guest, Miss Elvira Higgins, sat down to an enormous hot meal, which they devoured with gusto, while the servants of the late Robert Russell Ryan prepared hot baths in which to soak their weary limbs after the completion of their repast.

  After bathing, a good long nap, and a change into clean clothes, they had to write out their statements for Chief Patterson, who sent an officer around in a squad car to pick up the documents needed as court evidence. The chief informed them by telephone that afternoon that they would not be required to attend the inquest nor to give their testimony in open court at the trial of the gangsters. This was certainly good news, because Zarkon and the Omega men wished to keep their names out of the case as completely as could possibly be done.

  After an early dinner, they began to pack up for their return flight to Knickerbocker City.

  While his lieutenants gathered their gear together and began to repack the big equipment cases they had brought with them, Zarkon went off by himself for a stroll in the garden. There were times when the Lord of the Unknown preferred to be alone with his thoughts. And this was one of them.

  Sunset flamed in the west, painting the clouds with gold and crimson, and lighting a clear and luminous evening sky with gorgeous rays. From the garden you could just make out the snowy peak of Mount Shasta, which was barely visible in the distance.

  Zarkon strolled the garden paths, his hands clasped behind him, his inscrutable face and brooding eyes reflecting nothing of the tenor of his thoughts.

  The Ultimate Man always felt a certain depression of his spirits when he had been forced to destroy an enemy. Foolish as it perhaps may seem, he bitterly regretted the necessity for taking a single human life — even the life of a criminal mastermind such as Dr. Zandor Sinestro, or Lucifer, the aptly named genius of crime whom civilization was much better off for being rid of.

  True, Zarkon was not personally responsible for the fiery death of Lucifer — that is, he had not killed the crime lord with his own hands. Nevertheless, he felt himself morally culpable and did not enjoy the feeling.

  However, it was to bring down such Napoleons of the Underworld as Lucifer, and to wreck their plots and schemes against the security of the world, that he had been sent here years ago, and he knew that his moody depression and vague sensations of guilt were silly.

  The secret origin of Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, was known to very few. You could, in fact, count upon the fingers of both hands the number of living men who shared the secret of who and what he really was, where he had come from, and for what mysterious purpose.

  That tremendous secret must ever be closely guarded. It must forever be the jealously-hidden possession of a few.

  From no nation on our Earth today did Zarkon come.

  By no year in the calendar of our history could his birth be reckoned.

  He was a man from a far-off time, come from the distant future of another age to help us in combating the criminal masterminds who threaten and imperil the peace of the world and the security of all nations.

  Zarkon had been born a million years from now, in a strange and mysterious future world.

  He represented the ultimate result of a program of genetic engineering conducted by the rulers of his weird world of tomorrow to protect against the extinction of the human race.

  Superhuman, rather than human, he was the end result of an experiment in selective breeding conducted over thousands of generations to produce a perfect superman.

  In that remote era, life was almost extinct on the Earth. Unbridled pollution of air and water, uncontrolled wastage of natural resources, endless millennia of warfare and ecological depletion had left the Earth exhausted, sterile, very nearly uninhabitable.

  Only in the artificial domed city of Polarion in the Arctic regions did a haven of enlightened scientific civilization still exist. Save for that domed paradise, the rest of the world was barren wilderness where roved ever-dwindling hordes of savage barbarians.

  The Great Brains of Polarion had searched backward in their history for the roots of the disaster that had all but destroyed the world. These supercomputers, in whose memory banks the totality of human knowledge was preserved, had discovered the cause of the collapse of human civilization. It lay in the closing decades of the Twentieth Century. In that long-forgotten age there had arisen to power in the interval between two global conflicts, criminal masterminds who had exploited the superstitious fears of the people through the use of advanced scientific secrets.

  When urban civilization disintegrated after the nuclear holocaust of the third such worldwide conflict, it was these sinister supermen of organized crime who had seized the reins of power and who divided the world among them in the ensuing Dark Ages of plague and famine and lawlessness that followed in the wake of the collapse of legitimate governments.

  The Great Brains resolved upon a daring scheme to change the present, and save the future, by undoing the past. For a quarter of a million years they had selectively bred a race of supermen, called “Arkons,” to rule the dwindling remnants of mankind. But this program had reached its fruition too late, as the planet was nearly dead. Therefore, the last of these experimental supermen, Arkon Z-1000, was projected backward in time to the Twentieth Century. It was his mighty mission to prevent the rise to power of the scientific super-criminals, so that the feudal dark ages would not attend the destruction of civilization.

  It had been a conspiracy of such men that had triggered the third and final holocaust, the Great Brains knew. A gigantic conspiracy of these secret crime lords had wrecked the world’s governments. To change the future, Zarkon — Arkon Z-1000 — must change the past. To prevent the destruction of the world, he must prevent the nuclear war.

  Calling himself “Zarkon,” the Man from Tomorrow had materialized first in the small Balkan country of Novenia, a tiny but strategic state that controlled the world’s only known source of the rare heavy metal rhombium, vital to the generation of atomic power and the construction of nuclear weapons. The processes by which rhombium was refined were slow, expensive, and crude; using his knowledge of future science, Zarkon swiftly introduced a process for the refinement of the rare metal that was cheap, easy, and fast.

  Virtually overnight, Novenia became wealthy and powerful and influential on a global scale because of her control of the rhombium mines and refinement process. Named a national hero by the grateful Novenian people, the scientist Zarkon was elevated to power by them. The extinct monarchy, long supplanted by a shaky succession of military regimes, was revived, with Zarkon crowned by unanimous popular consent.

  Zarkon remained on the throne of Novenia for only a few years, long enough to reform the economy, subdue the military party, equalize the taxation, and engineer a number of international treaties that insured the future of Novenia as an independent sovereign state, neither under the domination of the East nor a client of the West. Then the Man of Mysteries had abdicated the throne, establishing a perfect model democracy to succeed his reign and authoring a constitution that was enlightened and permanent.

  His work in Novenia done, Prince Zarkon had come to the United States to set up his Omega organization and begin the great work that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

  These memories passed through the mind of the Lord of t
he Unknown as he paced the dark gardens under the blazing stars.

  The loneliness that he knew, this exile of time, was not to be measured by comparison to that of any man. Of all men who have ever lived on this Earth, he alone was a stranger from the future — a future to which he could never return, for by his own actions he was destroying that future by changing its past. With every adventure such as this case of the Mount Shasta murders, he was destroying the future world he had known and building a new future that he would never see. Happily, it would be a world whose resources had not been exhausted by interminable feudal wars, whose population had not been degraded and brutalized by thralldom to generations of tyrants and despots. He dreamed sometimes of the idyllic, crime-free garden world his labors were constructing — a world where crime was unknown, dictatorship a forgotten trait, war an ancient horror long since outlawed.

  A voice hailed him from the big house. Breaking off his thoughts, the Lord of the Unknown retraced his steps and entered the mansion.

  “Everything’s packed up, chief; we’re ready to go. The lady wants to say goodbye,” said Doc Jenkins. Zarkon nodded without speaking. Miss Elvira Higgins was ready to return home to Palma Laguna and was making her farewells to the Omega men.

  Menlo Parker, that old woman-hater, sniffed frostily and inclined his head in the barest semblance of a nod as the young woman said goodbye. Scorchy Muldoon and Nick Naldini, however, were more voluble in their farewells. Both men had tried without success to get a date with the attractive redhead; she had demurely declined the invitation of either man. As soon as Zarkon entered the room, anyone could have seen why, from the long, lingering, starry-eyed look she gave him as they shook hands.

  Doc Jenkins and Ace Harrigan exchanged secret grins. It was always like this — Nick and Scorchy vied for the attentions of whatever pretty girl shared an adventure with them, but the girl, once she set eyes on the tall and handsome man in gun-metal gray, fell for Zarkon and ignored the peppery little Irishman and the lanky stage magician.