The Hate Master полностью

And The Avenger had an idea that the two madnesses might possibly have some connection.

In a small plane, Smitty and Lila Morel neared the Maine laboratory of Lila’s father.

Dick, before going to the library to have a look at the incredible pigeons, had sent the giant, with Lila, to look around that laboratory a bit.

“You say there’s no landing place near the laboratory?” Smitty asked the girl.

“There’re only thick woods all around,” said Lila. “Thick woods and wolves and black flies.”

“I take it you didn’t enjoy your trips there.”

“I didn’t,” confessed Lila. “I’m a city gal, I guess. No wilderness for me. But Dad needed me to take care of him — away from a test tube he was as helpless as a child — so I always went.”

“Would the clearing around the lab be big enough to land in?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lila. “We’ll have to walk it from the nearest village.”

“Or hire a car,” said Smitty hopefully.

“There’s no road to the lab,” said Lila. “Dad let it grow up with young trees as soon as the place was built and equipped and there was no more need for trucking. The only way through the woods is on foot.”

Smitty sighed. The big fellow was a Samson by nature and not by exercise. He didn’t like exercise, except the kind requiring huge fists to batter against the faces of crooks. Just out of college, Smitty had been framed into prison by a smooth crook. His main pleasure in life would always be taking that out on all other crooks within reach and making them sorry they’d been born.

The two didn’t get to the clearing around the lab till dusk. They’d heard Lila’s wolves plenty by then. She stayed very close to the big fellow and looked very thankful for his gigantic size. Smitty swelled his biceps a little under her clutching hand. There was only one girl in the world for him. That was petite Nellie Gray. But that didn’t keep him from admiring other beauty once in awhile.

Lila went up to the gate.

“I thought you said the gate could only be opened from inside the laboratory,” Smitty said rather dumbly.

“You can’t open it from the inside when everybody’s on the outside,” Lila pointed out. “When we leave, we set the inner mechanism so that a secret latch out here will open the gate for us to get back in.”

Smitty looked at the fence. A full two stories high, of heavy mesh, with barbed wire slanting outward on the top. It was as impossible to negotiate as the fence around a munitions factory. The big fellow didn’t see how anyone could ever disappear from within that barrier!

Lila twisted something near the ground beside the gate. There was a small flash as the current was shut off. Then her hand moved again.

“Pull,” she said.

Smitty tugged at the great gate, and it swung open. It was just getting fully dark as they stepped inside the clearing. Lila methodically fastened the gate again and turned on the current.

The laboratory door opened when she passed her hand four times in front of a spot in the wall which Smitty judged contained a photo-electric cell.

“You sure protect this place,” he said. “Your father must have been working on something very important.”

“I believe he was,” said Lila.

“But you don’t know what it was?”

“I have no idea,” said Lila.

Smitty frowned. It seemed odd that Morel’s servant, Packer, should have an idea what Morel’s work was about, though Morel’s own daughter did not know.

The two stepped into the laboratory. They only went far enough to find the light switch controlling the floodlights in the compound, however. Smitty had said he wanted to look over the clearing first.

The lights blazed out, and he went back outside.

There was little to observe in the clearing. It was just that — a clearing. Morel, in his anxiety to have an area around his laboratory that couldn’t harbor any trespassers, had cut down every tree and shrub. There was only grass, close-cropped. And in this, the giant could find no trace of visitors who might have taken Morel away with them or, indeed, of Morel’s walk out there itself.

The thing grew more impossible by the minute, as Smitty walked slowly around the high, unscalable fence and examined the gate, set now so that only from inside the building could it be opened.

Morel couldn’t have gotten out of here—

A scream from the laboratory sent the giant jumping back toward the building door. He moved fast. It had been a scream of pure horror, and it had come from Lila Morel.

Smitty charged through the doorway.

There was a sort of small anteroom inside the door, and the giant jumped into this and started toward the next door leading into the laboratory proper. He had left Lila in the tiny vestibule. It was in there that the floodlights could be turned on.

Neither had thought to look back in the lab before Smitty left Lila to look around the yard. Why should they think of it? Nobody could get in.

And now this scream of horror from the girl. What was after her in there?