It was a somber moment. If Dick were wrong, he would be a murderer. And instead of watching a man slowly come back to sanity and life, he would watch him slowly die.
Lila and the others literally held their breaths while Dick injected the stuff into Wilson and then into Morel.
They were ready for anything. What they were not ready for was what happened. Which was nothing at all.
The two had been in a deep sleep. After the injection they remained just the same, eyes closed, breathing deeply and slowly. But The Avenger was physician enough to know that there had been a slight change, after all.
He nodded, eyes as icily calm as if he were not taking sole responsibility for the continuance of two human lives.
“They are in a coma,” he said. “They’ll probably remain in it for some hours, unless—” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Unless they passed from the coma straight into death.
That was what the “unless” meant.
They went up to the top-floor room again. The Avenger paced slowly near his big desk, his pale eyes seeing none of them, and seeing none of the immediate surroundings. Lila didn’t know what the brilliant far look in his eyes meant. But the others did.
Now and then in the course of a case The Avenger thought aloud, pinning down more clearly the points he had listed up to that moment. It was a rare and wonderful thing to hear him. They were hopping he would do this now.
He did.
“I think I have the rough outline of this now,” he said slowly, absently, talking to no one of them there. “Morel invented this drug. It is, as my laboratory work has shown, mainly a refinement of adrenalin.
“With all the war there is on earth at the moment, it is easy to see why Morel tried for such a drug. He was after something that would turn men into heroes. Something that would make them entirely courageous, utterly without fear. That explains the heavy amount of adrenalin in his formula. Adrenalin, shot into the blood stream, makes a human, or animal, warlike and fearless and gives him more than normal strength. Just the thing for an army.
“Morel found his drug, all right. A serum that turned anything that felt it into a thing without fear. But the serum had something wrong with it. There was another effect that Morel hadn’t planned on, and emphatically didn’t want.
“It filled its victims with a murderous hate, as well as a complete fearlessness.
“The drug, instead of being a courage serum, was a hate serum. Instead of making heroes of men, it made murdering maniacs of them; made them want to kill everything in reach.
“In working to correct this, Morel stumbled onto an antidote. That was how I got what I think is an antidote by an extension of the same experiments that gave me a duplicate of his drug. That much, at least, he had done. But until he could get the hate part out of his courage serum, the whole thing was a failure. You couldn’t give an army the stuff to make it unbeatable in battle. If you gave it to an army, the army would begin killing each other, hating each other, instead of the enemy.
“Morel’s close friend was Edwin C. Ritter, the politician. Ritter happened to hear about Morel’s unsuccessful experiment. But to Ritter it seemed quite successful. He could use that drug, as it stood.
“Ritter could, with the drug, turn leaders of industry and finance against each other. He could start a hate campaign that would fill the country with dread. The man who had that drug in his possession would become a sort of hate master.
“Ritter could start fights in important circles of the United States, then step in with the antidote and make peace by injecting the fighters with it. This would bring him national acclaim and, since election time was at hand, the presidency of the United States. It is needless to comment on what kind of a president he’d be, after getting into office by such methods.
“Ritter had Morel and his drug taken from the Maine laboratory. But before using it, he wanted to see for himself how it worked.
“He tried it on rabbits in that Scarsdale house. The result was that when Lila went near there later with her dog, the rabbits attacked the dog and actually tore the life from it.
“He tried it on pigeons at the library. That was why he was present at the time — to watch the effects. They were perfect, from his point of view. You all saw how the pigeon I brought from the library acted in the laboratory.
“Just before he was taken, Morel had injected guinea pigs at the Maine laboratory, which explains the attack on you, Lila, and you, Smitty.
“There were other times he used it, aside from the use in his presidential plans. He fed it to the rats in Kinnisten, and to the townspeople, probably in the water supply. The result almost took the lives of Mac and Nellie. And, of course, several captains of industry and finance have felt the effects of the drug — and the antidote — though they still don’t know it.”
