Читать книгу The Dagger in the Sky: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5
ОглавлениеSID HAS A STORY
The blade, at a conservative estimate, was two hundred feet long. The hilt was less, perhaps fifty feet, while the cross guard was twenty feet or so in length. It was black, intensely black, even in moonlight, which tends to make all things seem gray.
The resemblance the thing bore to a dagger was instantly noticeable. The long blade came to a needle point; the whole thing lying, roughly, in a north-and-south direction across the sky, the tip pointing to the south.
Sid, his body full of tense muscles, stared at the phenomenon. His long face was jammed against the plane window.
The dagger remained in the sky—it was a few hundred feet directly above the spot where Doc Savage’s plane had crashed—for a long time. The interval during which the black dagger was in existence seemed an age. Probably it was at least a minute.
Then the thing faded, vanishing rather quickly and appearing to turn into a dark haze, then into nothing, so that the ugly black aspect was evident to the last.
Sid made a rattling noise when he tried to speak, cleared his throat.
“We bub-better go down and look,” he said, stuttering a little.
Doc Savage’s plane had hit in a field which had been fall-plowed and harrowed, which accounted for the dust when the craft struck. The soft ground was a poor spot for a landing, but a level meadow lay adjacent, and Sid’s pilot landed there.
“You go look,” the pilot directed.
“But ...”
“I’ll stay here,” the pilot said, “and watch our plane.” His voice was harsh, determined.
Sid cursed him, said, “Damn you! You’re not taking any chances!”
“The hell with you! I was hired to fly, and that’s all.”
Sid approached the plane warily. He carried a flashlight, used it. The fuselage of the Doc Savage ship had shed wings, undercarriage, part of the tail, and was almost a ball of metal. He worked for a while before he got the door open; it came off entirely, and he fell sprawling with it.
He got up, looked inside the cabin, said, “Ugh!” in a sick voice, and backed away.
The cabin interior was charred, blackened. Paint had curled, hung to the metal in scabs; leather of the seats was darkly scorched. There could have been no living thing in the cabin, for it was if a tongue of white-hot flame had licked the place.
Sid tried to force himself to crawl into the plane. He wedged half in, put his hand on a seat; the metal was still hot to touch, and the leather crumpled and broke and springs and stuffing jumped out, making a slight chugging sound. The seat stuffing struck Sid in the face, and he cried out and staggered backward.
Suddenly his nerve collapsed.
He snarled, “I didn’t like this in the first place,” and whirled and ran for his own plane.
He had covered about half the distance back to his plane—he was climbing through the brush-tangled fence which separated the meadow from the plowed field—when Doc Savage tripped him, fell upon him and clapped his hand over his mouth to prevent an outcry.
Unfortunately Sid had made noise in falling.
The plane pilot yelled, “Hey, Sid! What the devil’s wrong?”
Doc Savage called, “Nothing. I just stumbled.” In a much lower tone, a whisper, Doc said, “Monk! Get that man at the plane.”
“Boy, watch me get ’im!” replied a voice that might have belonged to a child.
The owner of the small voice—he was nearly as wide as he was tall—jumped out of the brush and ran toward the plane. He traveled with a gangling lope that was something like the gait of an ape in a hurry.
The pilot took alarm, jumped back in his plane, and batted the throttle with a palm. The engine was turning over. It whooped; slipstream scooped up a cloud of dry grass. The plane rolled. The apish fellow, Monk, chased it. Once he almost closed large, hairy hands over the rudder edge, but didn’t quite make it. The plane picked up its tail and fled aloft into the night.
Monk stopped and went through a remarkable performance of jumping up and down and squalling.
He went back to Doc Savage and reported, “He got away.”
Sid had been staring with both his mouth and his eyes open as wide as they could possibly get. Now he came around to believing the fact that Doc Savage was still alive.
“But you—you died in that plane!” he muttered.
Monk snorted, asked, “Should we disillusion him, Doc?”
“It would do no harm,” the bronze man said.
Monk got a great deal of pleasure out of enlightening their prisoner.
“Whoever you are, you ain’t as wise as you figured. Doc saw that a plane was following him as soon as he left New York, and when he landed in Baltimore for dinner he saw you were watching him. So he went to a telephone and called me and Ham, and we came down in our fastest plane and staged a little circus for you.”
“Circus?”
“Well, it’ll be a circus before we’re done with you. Did you ever hear of radio-controlled aerial torpedoes? You should have. They were invented as far back as the World War.”
“But you took off in the plane from Baltimore,” Sid mumbled.
“There’s where you’re wrong. I’m explaining it. Doc just taxied down to the end of the bay where it was dark, connected the radio-control robot on his plane to the controls—all of our planes are equipped with the robots, incidentally, because we’ve used this stunt before—and then Doc jumped overboard and swam to my plane. We simply sent the other plane off the water, controlled it by radio, like you control an aerial torpedo, waited until we saw you take off in pursuit, and followed along to see what would happen.”
Sid shuddered, remembering some of the things he had heard about Doc Savage, and realizing that more of it was true than he had supposed.
“Where is your plane now?” he asked.
Monk stuck a thumb at the sky. “Up there.”
“But how did you get down?”
“Parachutes,” said Monk, “while you two were landing your plane. You were too busy to notice.” Monk got down and took hold of Sid’s neck. “There’s just one thing,” he added, “that will keep you from losing your ears.”
Sid took a deep breath.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” he insisted. “I’m perfectly willing to tell you everything I know about this fantastic affair.”
“You can start off,” Monk said, “with what happened to Doc’s plane.”
Sid groaned. “I don’t know.”
“What was that white flash of light inside the plane? What burned the interior of the cabin like it is?”
“I haven’t a vestige of an idea,” Sid said. “I wish I did have.”
Monk opened and closed his hands—the hands were sprinkled with hairs resembling rusty shingle nails—and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
“You are Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, better known as Monk,” Sid answered. “You’re a famous chemist, and you’re also one of Doc Savage’s five assistants.”
“You’re just half-right,” Monk advised him. “I’m also the guy who is gonna tie a knot in your neck if you don’t tell a better story.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“What was that black thing in the sky that looked like a dagger? What made it?”
“I wish I knew,” Sid said. “I was following you in hopes of finding out.”
The homely Monk was not a patient soul.
“That dagger-shaped thing was crazy, and I want it explained!” he shouted.
Sid spread his hands helplessly. “I’m trying to tell you that the thing is also going to kill me.”
Monk stared at him. “Kill you?”
“It’s a long story,” Sid explained. He looked at Doc Savage forlornly. “I’ll tell you how you became involved in this. You probably don’t know. When I first found out that my life was in danger—when I first realized that, fantastic as it was, the peril was very real—I decided at once to go to you for help. You help people who are in strange trouble, I’ve heard. Almost immediately I was told that you would be killed, and the exact time was set.” Sid held his wrist close to his eyes and squinted at a watch in the moonlight. “The time set was exactly the moment your plane crashed.”
Monk said, “You haven’t explained how you happened to be following Doc.”
“I can clear that up easily. I wanted to see this fantastic thing if I could. I wasn’t sure—well, it was hard for me to believe such an unbelievable thing could exist.”
“Who was the pilot who got away?”
“Merely a man I hired. There was another man I hired in New York to help me trail Doc Savage—a taxi driver.”
Monk snorted.
“Now suppose you tell us,” he suggested skeptically, “what this black dagger is.”
Sid’s long face grew longer. “Do you believe what I have already told you?”
“Oh, sure!”
“That’s what I was afraid—you’re skeptical. So there’s practically no need of me telling you the rest.”
“Why not?”
“You certainly won’t believe the rest.”
There was silence for a while. Doc Savage listened. Noise of the plane in which the long-faced man had come was gone from the moon-whitened sky. Nor was there any sound of his own ship, the one in which Monk and Ham, his two associates, had picked him up in Baltimore.
Ham was supposed to be following Sid’s plane.
Monk said, “What’s your name?”
“Sid. Sid Morrison.”
“All right, Sid Morrison—let’s have the part of your story you think we won’t believe.”
Sid tugged at his long jaw and squirmed.
“The black stone was probably in existence hundreds of years ago,” he said. “At least, it is mentioned in the legend history of the ancient Incas of Peru. It is variously referred to, one mention designating it as the black soul of Kukulkan, the part that was evil and cast out by Kukulkan, who was the supreme deity of the Mayans and some of the Incas. Another legend is that Kukulkan had an evil rival, who was defeated and turned into a stone that was as black as the evil one’s sins. It was an accursed stone, then. It has been accursed all down through history. All who touched the stone, or had anything to do with it, met a violent demise. And always their death was signaled by the appearance of a black dagger.”
Sid frowned and stared at them. His voice was low, his manner intense.
“Legend accounts for the black dagger by saying that it was with a dagger of black obsidian stone that Kukulkan laid low the evil one.”
Monk stood there and thought about the story for a few moments.
“Does the legend,” he asked sourly, “account for your standing here and telling us such a mess of nonsense?”
Sid said, “A man named Juan Don MacNamara sold the black stone to me. Juan Don MacNamara is the son of President Gatun MacNamara, of the South American republic of Cristobal.”[A]
“Where is this rock?”
“Juan Don MacNamara was to deliver it to me. He was going to fly it up. I presume he has already left Cristobal with the stone.”
“You a stone buyer by profession?” Monk asked skeptically.
“I am a collector of Incan relics,” the long-faced man said. He became indignant. “And furthermore, I’m through talking to you! You don’t believe what I’m telling you. If you’re fools enough to think I’m lying, that’s your hard luck!”
Doc Savage made no answer. Instead, the bronze man went over to the crashed plane, used a flashlight which gave a long thin beam of light and functioned off a spring-operated generator instead of a battery, and examined the cabin interior. He did not crawl into the plane immediately; instead, he took a small bottle from a pocket case, removed a flat disk of a faintly bluish hue, and tossed it into the cabin. He watched the disk; it did not change color. That was good. The tablet was a chemical test for lethal gas, functioning somewhat in the same fashion as the litmus-paper test used in detecting acids. There seemed to be no dangerous gas in the ship.
He climbed into the cabin and went over the mangled, scorched interior carefully. He made several chemical tests, but vouchsafed no opinion of the results when he climbed out of the craft.
“Well, what made the white flash?” Monk asked.
Doc Savage looked at Sid thoughtfully for a moment, then answered, “It is puzzling.”
| [A] | Author’s note: The name of the republic, Cristobal, is a fictitious one, for obvious reasons. |
