Читать книгу The Living Fire Menace: A Doc Savage Adventure - Harold A. Davis - Страница 6
ОглавлениеA GIRL CALLS
But Doc Savage was far from the water-front battle scene.
His bronze skin gleaming in the reflected glow from an instrument board, his flake gold eyes intent on the story those instruments told, he was far even from civilization.
Seated in the inclosed cockpit of a speedy plane that was the type pilots call a “flying motor,” Doc Savage did not appear big. But that was due to the remarkable symmetry of his body. His hair was straight, and bronze like his skin. Corded muscles showed on the backs of the hands that held the controls. His features were classic and calm. Seldom did he smile or show emotion.
The roar of the powerful motor came but faintly inside the cockpit. For that cockpit was heavily insulated. It had to be. The plane was flying thousands of feet up in the air, far up in the substratosphere. It was winging forward at nearly five hundred miles an hour.
The sound of Doc’s strange, impelling voice had shocked the thugs in New York. They would have been more shocked if they had known just how far away he was when he had spoken. They would have thought it magic.
There was no magic about it. On the panel directly before the bronze man was a small television set. Above it was the speaker of a short-wave radio. A mike was near at hand.
The car Long Tom and Johnny had used was similarly equipped. Doc had seen part of the fight in New York; he had heard Johnny’s cry for help. The bronze man’s reply had merely come from the loudspeaker in the car his aids had occupied.
Now the bronze man was speeding toward New York. He had missed Long Tom’s earlier calls. At that time he had not been in his plane.
Casual acquaintances had often wondered where Doc Savage ever found time to maintain his amazing grasp on every development of science, to study and keep ahead of a majority of those developments.
The secret was quite simple. Far in the north he had a hidden retreat—his “Fortress of Solitude.” Here, when things were quiet, the bronze man would seek solitude for the tremendous concentration of which he was capable, would try new experiments, perfect new advances in medicine that would save thousands of lives, would solve some problem that had long puzzled chemists.
He was returning from such a trip now. For six months he had been apart from the world. And it was plain that he was returning just in time.
In a surprisingly short time Doc’s plane dived down from the heavens to circle the lights of Manhattan. Minutes more, and it was dropping gently to the waters of the Hudson River, gliding smoothly toward the dingy warehouse that bore the sign, “Hidalgo Trading Co.” Doc was the Hidalgo Trading Co. He owned the pier and warehouse.
From an adjoining pier, a small man slipped away unobtrusively. His close-set eyes gleamed wickedly in the darkness. At a corner cigar store he slipped into a phone booth, dialed a number.
“He’s here, chief,” he said curtly. “The bronze boy himself ... OK ... Yeah, I’ll keep him covered.”
Doc Savage had no way of knowing that his movements were being watched. Yet he moved inconspicuously as he made his way to the skyscraper where he had his offices. His private elevator shot him to the eighty-sixth floor.
In the hallway, he moved soundlessly. Just outside the door he paused, his flake gold eyes narrowing slightly.
A faint whisper of sound came through the hallway. It was so low that the normal ear would have missed it.
Seeming almost to float, so swiftly, yet so silently did he move, the bronze man drifted down the hallway. He stopped before an apparently solid section of wall.
A low-pitched whisper came from his lips—a whisper that could not have been heard two feet away.
Instantly a section of the wall melted away and an opening appeared. Doc vanished within. The opening closed.
The bronze man was standing in one of the rear rooms of his suite of offices. It was dark, but he moved without hesitation, opened a small panel, flicked a switch.
Light glowed on a tiny screen. A desk and several chairs came into view. On the screen appeared a picture of the front office.
And in one corner, barely visible, was a crouching figure!
For several moments the bronze man studied the scene intently. Then he flicked off the small television set.
A second later, Doc opened another panel. A queer set of assorted switches came into view. Above them were two huge, oval, mercury tubes. A dull light glowed in the tubes as the bronze man pushed the switches home. A faint hum sounded for an instant, rose to a high pitch, then died out.
Doc walked over, opened the door, and entered calmly into the room where the crouching figure lurked.
A girl glanced up. In her hand she held a small, deadly automatic. Long black curls framed an almost flawless face.
She saw the opening door. She shrieked, raised her gun and fired. In the same instant she hurled two black cylinders she had in her other hand to the floor. The cylinders shattered into many pieces.
“To what am I indebted for your call?” came the low, peculiarly carrying voice of Doc Savage.
For an instant it appeared the girl was going to faint. The gun dropped from her nerveless fingers. Her dark eyes were strained wide, terror showing in their depths.
Frantically, those eyes probed every hidden recess of the room, every dark corner.
They could see nothing.
“A—a trick!” she breathed.
Strong hands caught her wrists, lifted her easily from her feet.
And if the girl had been frightened before, now she was panic-stricken. She could feel the grip of those hands, knew there must be some one there before her, some one who had grabbed her.
Her tongue stuck to the top of her mouth. She tried to scream, but emitted only a faint moan. Her eyes dropped down—and her heart seemed to stop.
She could not see her own body either. She, also, had become invisible.
She slumped, inert.
Had the girl retained consciousness, she would have understood much. She was carried to a small sofa, laid there gently. Then a click sounded from the adjoining room as Doc released the switches he had pressed a few moments before.
Almost immediately he became visible again.
There was nothing supernatural about any of it. The faint sound the bronze man had heard in the hallway had told him some one had broken into his office. The low whisper he had given had merely been the proper tone to operate a familiar robot, a mechanical device that opened a sliding panel in a wall that looked solid.
And while becoming invisible was not commonplace, it was something that had been done before.
The switches he had operated had released a series of short high-powered light waves, known as invisible rays. As those rays struck a human being, that human gradually vanished simply because the eye could not distinguish it when penetrated by the speeding beams. Doc had not invented the process; that had been done by Stephan Pribil, a Hungarian scientist. But the bronze man had improved it, so that invisibility came almost immediately.
The bronze man knelt beside the girl, held smelling salts under her nose. She stirred restlessly, half opened her eyes, only to close them.
“Who sent you here?”
Doc’s voice dropped even lower than usual. It held a queer, hypnotic quality.
“I—I came because I wished to.”
The words came from the girl’s lips dully, the voice that of a person speaking in his sleep.
“What did you wish?”
“I came to destroy a record I knew you must have. I came to keep—”
With startling suddenness the girl pulled erect on the sofa. Fear, tinged with horror, flamed in her dark eyes. One hand pressed against her lips.
“You are in no danger,” Doc Savage said quietly.
The girl’s eyes sought the bronze man’s face.
“Doc Savage,” she breathed.
The bronze man nodded. “Now if you will explain who you are, and what you desired here?” he suggested.
Fear returned to her eyes. “I—I can’t! I can’t!”
“But you must. It is necessary that I know. Some one has seized two of my men. I must know—”
Doc broke off suddenly. A hideous uproar had burst loose in the hallway just outside the door.
The sounds were almost indescribable. First came the lordly roar of a bull ape, a fearsome sound. It was followed instantly by the shrill grunt of an angered pig.
As the girl’s lips parted and her hands clenched, there was a furious burst of fighting. The pig seemed to be going wild as it squealed in rage. The bull ape’s roars increased in violence.
There was a sudden, desperate squeal from the ape, then a ripping sound, as if that ape had been torn in two.
The door burst open. A gangling figure with long, apelike arms appeared. It had a titanic chest, with practically no hips, and the small eyes were almost lost in pits of gristle. Coarse, reddish hair covered the skin.
Behind that figure came a lean, dapper man who could have passed as a fashion plate at any time, so well was he dressed. He was waving a cane furiously, his face red with anger.
“That blasted pig can’t win all the time!” he roared.
“Meet Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, known as Monk for quite obvious reasons,” Doc said, with just a suspicion of a smile. “Pursuing him, dressed in the latest mode as usual, is Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, more often called Ham.”
There was sudden silence. The girl’s glance went from one to the other of the newcomers with quick comprehension.
“Monk” stopped as if he had run into a ten-ton truck. A slow flush crept over his homely face.
“Ham” grinned openly, his anger disappearing as quickly as it had come. It always amused him to see Monk get flustered in the presence of a pretty girl.
“It was this ape here making all the noise,” he explained maliciously. “Somewhere he found an out-of-work radio imitator who taught him to make those hideous sounds. He’s been making them ever since, always pretending he’s a pig licking an ape.”
“At least he hasn’t been able to figure out any way for the ape to lick the pig,” Monk put in. His thin, childlike voice always came as a shock to those who first heard it. It sounded so out of place compared with his hulking frame.
Doc said nothing for the moment. Monk and Ham were always fighting each other when there was no one else to fight. Their quarreling dated far back to War days.
Yet despite the fact that they never seemed to work, Ham was known as Harvard’s gift to the legal profession, an outstanding attorney; and Monk was a gifted chemist.
“What happened to Johnny and Long Tom?” Doc asked quietly.
Levity faded from the faces of the other two.
“That’s what we really came up here to see if we could learn,” Ham said seriously. “For some reason, they seem to have been kidnaped. I don’t think it’s anything serious, although I don’t know.
“We were to meet them for dinner at Reefer’s. We got there just after they’d been seized. Was quite a fight, from what witnesses told us. They were taken off toward the piers at the lower end of South Street, and probably put in a boat. We searched without finding a clue.”
“Unless one remark we heard means something,” Monk piped up. “I talked to a kid who was close to the car that carried Long Tom and Johnny away. He told me something that he said he’d overheard that sounded as if he was having a pipe dream.”
“What was that?” Doc asked swiftly.
“He said he heard one of the crew say: ‘I wouldn’t want to be these guys. They’re gonna see the menace of the living fire.’ ”
A gasp came from the girl. The three whirled toward her.
Her eyes were wide and staring. Her lips moved, but no sound came. Once again she fainted.
