THE AVENGER
By STUART FLEMING
Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird
super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was
forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been.
There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again.
I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter.
It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking.