Free The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion by Kenneth Robeson

workmen were still slowly dying, half a dozen or so a day; and the combined medical skill of the country seemed unable to diagnose their malady, let alone cure it.
    Sure, slow death. And now Smitty had it!
    “Mac, we’ve got to do something!” cried Nellie.
    Mac was as worried as the fragile-looking little blond. But he shook his sandy-thatched head in despair.
    “What can we do? If even the chief can’t find out what’s wrong—”

    And that incredible thing had happened. Dick Benson was probably the finest physician and diagnostician alive. And even he had been unable to tell just what was wrong with the giant.
    Anaemia of some new, rare sort.
    That was a certainty. Dick had been robbed of that bottle of blood which he had taken from the veins of the dying man just before the fire had been started at the rooming house. However, since he had taken the precaution to draw a little blood also into a small rubber bladder, worn next to his armpit for just such emergencies, the loss of the bottle hadn’t amounted to much.
    He had analyzed that blood sample in every way known to the scientific world at large and also a few known only to himself.
    Anaemia. Destruction of the red corpuscles. Very well. But how could anaemia, usually a gradual process, be induced with such lightning speed?
    Smitty was not in bed. He was up and around. At the moment he was in the big top-floor room at Bleek Street with the others.
    Dick Benson sat at his desk, eyes pale holes in his face as the brain behind them sought to wrest an answer out of this mystery. Smitty walked toward the desk, moving so slowly that Nellie almost cried. His moonface was drawn, and his eyes were dull.
    “You ought to be off your feet,” said The Avenger. And few had ever heard such gentleness in his voice as there was now.
    “No sense in that till it’s necessary,” said Smitty, words coming slowly and laboriously. “Any ideas, chief?”
    “A few,” said Benson. His flaming, colorless eyes were fixed on the distance. “You were at the Manhattan Gasket factory. You might have gotten this there. But Mac and I were there, too, exposed in just the same way, and nothing has happened to us. Also, there have been watchmen there since the thing happened, and they have been all right. So I don’t think that’s the scene of the trouble.”
    “That rear-house—” said Mac.
    Benson’s black-cropped head nodded.
    “You two called on Old Mitch. He was ill again, as you said he was the first time you saw him, when Josh tried to help him. Quite possibly, the unfortunate old fellow was stricken at that factory with a touch of the trouble. So perhaps you got it from Old Mitch, Smitty. But Mac was there, too, and he’s all right.”
    For just an instant, so fleetingly that not even The Avenger caught it, there was a grim look in Mac’s eyes. But he only said:
    “I wasn’t as near the old man as Smitty.”
    Benson nodded absently, flaming brain so intent on problems that he was scarcely aware of his immediate surroundings.
    “Again and again, threads lead back to that squalid rear-house,” he mused. “Twice the old fellow living there has been ill of the same malady as these workmen—”
    He paused suddenly, then slowly went on.
    “The old man’s son seems to be centrally involved in the mystery. And now, in his room, Smitty gets the same ailment.”
    Josh Newton said quietly: “It looks as if the source of that disease, or whatever it is, is so close to Old Mitch that he has become a victim of it himself.”
    “In any event,” nodded The Avenger, “the place warrants closer investigation.” He looked at Smitty. “Go to bed, now. That is an order. And, Rosabel, you be his nurse.”
    Rosabel Newton, Josh’s pretty wife, who was as smart and well-educated as Josh himself, nodded.
    “Awww—” said Smitty.
    But the pale eyes did not relent; so he went meekly out, moving like a thing in a slow-motion picture, with Rosabel beside him.
    The Avenger turned to