Read The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master for Free Online Page A

he—”
    She stopped and stared. So did Smitty.
    Mathilda had stopped her purring and her satiny advance toward them. She was crouched like a tiny panther, suddenly, and her slitted eyes glared toward a corner. Then she stalked slowly toward the corner.
    Smitty saw, then, why the cat was in such good shape in spite of being shut up in this building. She was stalking a mouse. The little creature was under a work table that had less fragments of broken equipment around it than most. It stared warily at the advancing cat. But here was something eerie—it didn’t run! It just stayed there.
    It was only later that Smitty remembered the little details. It was only later that he repictured the mouse and the thing beside which the mouse was crouching.
    This was a small red puddle on the floor. It was a slowly drying puddle, coagulated around the edges so that it looked startingly like blood. Smitty thought he had seen flecks of red on the mouse’s muzzle; but he couldn’t be sure of this. It was pretty hard to see that at twenty feet by electric light.
    However, at the moment, he wasn’t thinking these things. He wasn’t thinking anything. He was too stupefied by what was happening.
    The cat got right up to within springing distance. And the mouse hadn’t moved. Beady eyes fearless, it was looking at the cat, symbol of death to mousedom.
    The cat’s tail twitched preliminary to a leap. And Lila cried out in wonder and fear. And it wasn’t the cat that leaped; it was the mouse—right at its comparatively colossal enemy.
    The cat backed a step, hissed, and reared up in a feline astonishment that must have been intense. And then the mouse got there. Sharp teeth caught the cat’s stubby nose, and there was the doggonedest snarling and hissing you ever heard. There was a flurry of fur, and then the cat was streaking toward the door on an obvious and frantic hunt for some sane corner of a world where mice were mice and not mad acrobats.
    “I didn’t see it!” breathed Smitty.
    Lila’s hand was at her throat and she was staring at the door.
    “I’m not crazy!” said Smitty.
    And then he remembered the details and looked back to verify them.
    Where the mouse had been, was the drying red pool on the floor. And he was now prepared to believe that he had seen flecks on the mouse’s muzzle.
    “I’ll be a son of a pigmy,” he said. “It’s the answer!”
    “What’s the answer?” said Lila, voice queer.
    “Rabbits chasing dogs, pigeons attacking humans, mice going after cats!” said Smitty. “That little red pool! It must have been spilled when this joint was wrecked. And the mouse must have consumed some of the stuff, and that must be what gave it the insane courage to tackle a cat. That red stuff must be the answer—”
    Click!
    The lights in the laboratory went out.
    There was a sound of padding feet, seeming to come from all directions at once. Then the giant found himself in the midst of a hailstorm. But the hailstones were blackjacks, clubbed guns and other extremely hard objects.
    When the lights suddenly go out, you are left with an after-image, a kind of photograph, that persists for half a second or so. Smitty’s after-image showed an overturned bench, hardly higher than a footstool, a little to his right.
    He stooped, head sunk to avoid the blows, gathered six or eight or ten legs in his vast embrace, and straightened up suddenly.
    The owners of the legs yelled as they were dumped on their heads. Smitty felt the bench, lay down and put the bench over him. Then he just felt around for extremities.
    When he found an ankle, he squeezed.
    That doesn’t sound very drastic. But the giant could have crushed a beer bottle in his bare fingers, if he’d been foolish enough to risk cutting his hands. When he exerted that pressure on an ankle, that owner of the ankle hopped off on one foot and sat down somewhere.
    He got several ankles, with the bench over him absorbing the wild flailings of the unseen attackers.