Читать книгу The Yellow Cloud: A Doc Savage Adventure - Evelyn Coulson - Страница 5
ОглавлениеPROOF OF IMPOSSIBLE
It must have been five minutes before those on the beach sand realized it was going to be all. At least, it took them that long to come to life. Then Monk reared up howling.
“Blazes!” he yelled. “Why didn’t we think?”
Monk meant the plane in which they had come. He legged for the craft. The plane was larger than the X-ship, and a different type; but it could climb to twenty thousand feet.
Ham dived into the plane after Monk. Although they squabbled at all other times, they seemed to coördinate perfectly, once they had something urgent to do. Up went the plane, moaning hungrily for the stars.
An hour later, the plane bumped on the beach again, and Monk and Ham stepped out, trailed by their two strange pets, the pig and the chimp.
“Nothing.”
The army men stared. “But—”
“I know,” Monk said. “You ain’t telling us how nuts it is. Cloud strata extends to thirteen thousand feet. Over that, it’s as clear as crystal all the way to the moon. But no Renny, no plane.”
“And no yellow cloud?” a captain asked.
Monk glared at him.
“Listen!” Monk snarled. “Renny isn’t crazy, but just the same there ain’t yellow clouds—and if they were yellow, they would chase planes.”
The captain said, “Come over here.”
“Eh?”
“I want you to hear something,” the captain explained.
The captain led Monk and Ham to one of the electrical “listeners” for locating air raiders. The device sat on a truck, resembled a magnified, old-time phonograph with ten-foot horns sticking out in every direction. The operators rode saddles and had telephone headsets strapped to their ears.
The captain said to one of the operators, “You were listening to the X-ship?”
“Yes,” the operator said. “That is, we listened until—”
“Until what?” the captain prompted.
“Well, there was a kind of shriek, as if something huge had rushed through the air up there,” the listener-operator said. “Then there was a crash.”
“What kind of a crash?”
“A crunchy one. Kind of tinny.”
“Exactly what was that crash like?” the captain asked.
The operator thought for a moment.
“Like a plane would sound if it were being smashed into a lump by something big,” he said.
Monk got a bluish pale.
“Was that all?” he asked.
“I should think it was enough,” the operator said.
Monk and Ham went over and leaned against the wing of their plane. They did not say anything, because there did not seem to be much they could say.
The wind was mounting, pushing the big white waves up higher on the beach, and the waves were sighing like bigger hogs as they broke.
“It’s impossible,” Ham said.
“Sure,” Monk agreed.
They walked over to the army man in command of the whole project of test-flying the X-ship.
Monk said, “Look here, sir; it is probable that gas from the motor made Renny delirious, then unconscious, in which case he probably crashed the ship. I suggest a search for the wrecked plane.”
“Excellent idea.”
An intensive search began for wreckage of the X-ship.
Monk and Ham joined the search. They had little to say, and there was grim tightness around their mouths. For once, there was none of their perpetual squabbling.
They had been closely associated with the missing Renny Renwick for a long time. On several occasions they had saved his life, and there had been instances when he had saved theirs. In fact, they were bound together about as closely as it is possible for men to be cemented, for they were all members of one of the most unusual little groups—only six men belonged—that ever had been assembled. A group, incidentally, which had no name, except that they were known as Doc Savage and his men. The group did not need a name to be feared in the far corners of the earth.
The group had no name, but mere whispered rumor of its presence in a neighborhood brought terror to wrongdoers, men outside the law.
For Doc Savage and his little group were engaged in one of the most unusual of careers, that of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers, frequently in the far ends of the world. It was not an occupation—often they did not profit financially. But money was a minor motivation, Doc Savage having a secret source of fabulous wealth somewhere in the Central American mountains.
Furthermore, each of Doc Savage’s five assistants was master of a profession, and capable of making an excellent income from it.
Excitement—that was what bound them together. A love of excitement and action. That, and the thrill that continually came from association with an individual as unusual as Doc Savage, amazing man of mystery, sometimes called the “Man of Bronze.”
Monk and Ham, liking Renny as they did, were terribly concerned over his fate.
“He might have got out of the plane with the parachute,” Monk muttered.
“Sure,” Ham said hopefully.
The sun came up and the wind went down, and the waves did not roll up on the beach as violently; and Negro fishermen rowed out through the island channels, chanting as they strained their backs over the long oars.
Now that it was light, Monk and Ham took off in their plane and looked for X-ship wreckage or a parachute.
They found the parachute, a small one, not a man-sized parachute. It was dangling from a tree, and on the end of the shrouds was a little canvas bag. It was the kind of parachute used to drop things from planes.
In the little canvas bag attached to the parachute were the photographic films that Renny’s voice had mentioned while the impossible was happening the night before. It did not take long to rush the films to a dark room and develop them. But it did take a long time for Monk and Ham to get over the shock of what the photographs showed.
They had not, really, believed there was a yellow cloud.
“Uh!” Monk said, rather as if he had been hit hard in the stomach with a fist. He sat down. He looked at Ham, and after a minute Ham backed away from the picture as if it might have fangs.
They had been brought up in this logical-minded world which is growing more scientific each year, and which has an explanation for almost everything except what causes colds and seasickness and what makes people live. This was impossible. A yellow cloud chasing an airplane—there wasn’t such a thing.
The picture showed evidence to the contrary. It appeared that Renny had rolled the plane over and pointed the airplane camera upward to get the picture.
There were stars visible behind the cloud.
There was every indication that the cloud was what Renny’s voice had described—length a quarter of a mile, width half that, depth two hundred feet in places, more or less in others. They could not tell about the yellow hue, for this was not color film. But it was unusual. It was a solid cloud. It seemed to have body to it.
“Whew!” Monk said. The homely chemist got up and examined the cloud, then bit his lips as if trying to get stiffness out of them.
“The cloud,” he added, “does not seem to have eyes, mouth, arms, or wings. It’s just a cloud.”
Ham gripped his sword cane and looked up.
“Listen,” he said. “You don’t believe there was a yellow cloud?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Monk said.
They still did not know what to believe late that afternoon when they climbed wearily into their plane, gunned the motor, and vaulted off for the north. Both men were silent, almost stupefied. It was hard to accept that no trace had been found of Renny or the X-ship. Land ships had scanned half the State of North Carolina, and the navy had done the same with the adjacent ocean. No success at all.
Monk and Ham landed at the airport across the Potomac from Washington. They needed fuel. Monk got back into the plane scowling.
“Look at these newspapers,” he growled.
The headlines said:
DOC SAVAGE AID MISSING
IN ARMY PLANE TEST
“Let me see that!” Ham said. He snatched the paper and read. “Well, they didn’t mention the yellow cloud business,” he said.
“The army wants the cloud business kept quiet,” Monk explained.
“It’s all right with me,” Ham said. “I don’t want people thinking we’re nuts.”
The evening sun was red in the west, and filled the high-flying plane with a gory glow. The shadows of hills and houses lengthened swiftly on the ground. “We should make New York in an hour and a half,” Monk said.
The plane radio—it was tuned in on an army station—began to talk, saying, “Calling Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks; calling—”
“You got us,” Monk said into the microphone.
The radio said, “We have a report for you. Two planes were flying over Pennsylvania. One of them was attacked by a yellow cloud, seized and carried away. The second plane managed to escape.”
Monk chewed a fingernail and stared at the radio as if he doubted his ears. He said, “Say that again.”
The radio said it again, and added, “The pilot of the plane that escaped is at Central Airport, Philadelphia.”
Monk and Ham looked at each other.
“What’s the pilot’s name?” Monk asked.
“Brick Palmer,” the radio said.
“Thanks,” Monk said.
Ham, who was flying the plane, gave the ship enough left rudder to send it toward Philadelphia. The two men were silent for a long time. They had been trying not to accept the existence of a yellow cloud, because it was fantastic; and now that they were confronted with the specter of the thing again, they were without words.
They did think, though, that they might be able to learn something of the fate of Renny by questioning this flier, Brick Palmer, who had actually seen a yellow cloud grab a plane.
“I wonder what kind of a man this Brick Palmer is?” Monk muttered.
