Читать книгу The Deadly Dwarf: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7

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The tree was small, gnarled and tough, as tropical trees often are.

Monk clung to the tree trunk with both arms and his chin. The expression on his homely face showed that he was using all his strength. His legs were stretched out parallel with the ground. Something might have had hold of his ankles, pulling with great force. Some medium, certainly, was doing just that. But there was nothing visible!

“Help!” Monk squealed. “Shoot the dang thing or somethin’!”

“Holy cow!” exploded big-fisted Renny.

Johnny said, “I’ll be superamalgamated!”

Long Tom and Ham looked on in astonishment.

Monk howled, “Help, blast it!”

Monk suddenly lost his grip. He was carried through the air at least twenty feet before he hit the ground. End over end he tumbled. A thorny shrub scratched him, and he squawled angrily.

“Shoot the dang thing!” he bellowed. “Make it leggo me!”

Big-fisted Renny dug into a concealed holster under an arm and brought out a weapon which had somewhat the appearance of an oversize automatic. Renny aimed. The gun made a noise like several big riveting machines going simultaneously. Renny arched his stream of bullets so they passed all around Monk.

Monk suddenly managed to stop rolling.

“Keep shootin’!” the homely chemist bellowed. “You scared the blame thing away!”

Renny started his machine pistol again, but stopped quickly. His sad eyes almost fell from his gloomy face.

“Holy cow!” he boomed hollowly. “Look!”

A tall, spindling tree between Monk and the ledge was bending over slowly, as if depressed by an invisible weight. It was leaning west. And blistered grass blades were bending as well. Great masses of gravel and earth began to slide!

“It’s coming this way!” Ham yelled.

Doc Savage said, “Get the instruments into the back of the recess under the ledge. Jam them against the solid rock, then do the same with yourselves. Cling to the cracks in the rock.”

The bronze man sounded totally unexcited.

The others sprang to follow the suggestion—and never made it. Something unseen, terrific, hit them. They were entirely helpless. Carried off their feet, they were driven deep into the ledge recess.

Renny’s head struck rock and he fell back stunned. Tall, lean Johnny and pale Long Tom got entangled, and hit with enough force to take air out of them both. Ham hit the wall of rock feet first, and did an eerie thing—he staggered around on the vertical wall, trying to keep his balance, just as he might have done on level ground.

The next instant, all were blinded by a roaring inrush of sand, dust and sticks. There was a great grinding and rumbling. The earth trembled. Came a tremendous crash, and it grew abruptly gloomy under the ledge.

Then silence fell.

“Stay where you are for a moment,” Doc Savage advised quietly. “It may come back.”

The bronze man was against one wall, half buried in the sand, dust and débris which had been swept into the ledge niche. Cradled and protected in the muscular cordon of his arms was one of the cases of sensitive apparatus. It seemed to be intact.

The other cases had been smashed.

The opening under the ledge was not nearly as wide as it had been. A huge boulder had come from somewhere and rolled against the aperture. Smaller boulders were stacked against it. The tents were down.

Suspended dust started the men coughing, sneezing.

“Holy—kerchoo—cow!” Renny exploded. “Where’s that native?”

Doc Savage was already on his feet and looking around, flake-gold eyes probing everywhere.

There became audible within the little cavern under the ledge, penetrating to all its recesses, a small, strange sound. The note was predominately a trilling, but it had an eerie nature, a quality which was ethereal. It might have been the progress of a tiny wind around some cranny in the big boulder blocking the entrance.

Doc Savage’s four aids stared at the bronze giant. They knew that sound, had heard it many times. It was a characteristic of Doc Savage, a small and unconscious thing which the bronze man did when surprised, or when confronted with a new discovery or realization.

Of the brown-skinned native who had tried to seize Monk there was no sign.

Monk yelled outside, “You guys all right?”

Doc Savage moved to the boulder. There was enough room to squeeze out. The others followed him.

Monk, rubbing his eyes, spitting out dust, joined them in staring in the direction of the lava stream.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” Johnny gulped.

The patch of big boulders was directly before them. The masses of rock had been fairly evenly distributed. But there was nothing even about the way they now lay.

A path more than a score of feet in width had been swept almost clean of loose stone. The rocks had been pushed, as if by a gigantic broom, to the sides, and in the direction of the ledge.

“Blazes!” Monk breathed. “Think how big that thing must be! Some of those rocks weigh tons!”

The others were silent. What had just happened was so fantastic, so impossible, that they could not think of much to say about it.

“What gets me,” Long Tom said hollowly, “is that you couldn’t see anything! I can’t understand that!”

“Well, it was somethin’ that was alive,” Monk declared. “You saw how it turned me loose when Renny opened up with his machine pistol. Say, where’s that native?”

“Gone,” said Ham.

“What?”

“He’s disappeared.”

Monk opened and shut his big mouth several times.

“Maybe that whatchacallit came after the native,” the homely chemist mumbled.

Big-fisted Renny peered about suddenly.

“Where’s Doc?” he boomed wildly.

The five men stared about them, then at each other. The bronze man was not in sight. Something pale and cold seemed to flow into the faces of each man.

“Doc!” Renny gulped. “Do you suppose——”

The rest of it stuck in his throat, and his fists made big blocks that might have been marble painted over with a brown stain.

“Doc!” Monk squawled.

“In here,” the bronze man said quietly from beneath the ledge.

The five men charged for the opening, got inside, saw the bronze man over the instrument which he had saved, and looked at each other sheepishly.

“As jittery as a bunch of kids in a spooky graveyard!” Renny thumped disgustedly. “What does that contraption show, Doc?”

The bronze man took a moment before answering.

“It is a little surprising,” he said. “This is a device to register and measure automatically the presence and strength of certain invisible wave lengths of light such as the so-called infra and cosmic rays, particularly those which have the property of penetrating solids. The device went completely haywire.”

“You mean it didn’t register?”

“It registered, but the recording lines make absolutely no sense.”

Renny boomed, “Say, Doc, you got an inkling of something queer here just by reading the newspapers and looking at that Yale seismograph record. You came here in a hurry. Just what did you expect to find?”

Instead of answering that, the bronze man said, “It might be best if we did something besides talk. Renny, suppose you look around for some trace of that native who tried to make Monk tell why we were here. Johnny might help you.”

Renny sighed, realizing he was not going to get any information now. “Righto.” The engineer and Johnny walked off.

“Long Tom,” Doc suggested, “you might look through the stuff under the tents and see if you can find our capacity field device to detect the presence of prowlers. Maybe it is intact.”

The pale-looking electrical wizard delved into one of the collapsed tents and came up with a black box which had a long coil of flexible insulated copper braid attached, as well as a headset. The box had a profusion of knobs. Long Tom tested.

“It still works,” he said.

“Bring it,” Doc requested. “Monk and Ham might as well go with us, also.”

When the bronze man got into motion, it was evident his destination was the stream of flowing lava. He followed the path which had been so fantastically swept clear of boulders. Doc and his aids saw plenty to interest them.

The trail led straight to the lava stream.

“Blast me!” Monk muttered. “What kind of a gollawhoppus can live in melted rock?”

“Gollawhoppus is right!” Ham agreed.

Doc Savage turned toward the sea. The aids began to notice queer things. In several spots, molten lava was splashed high on the banks of the little valley in which the lava flowed. Fires which this liquid hot rock had started had not burned far.

“I hate to think I might be going nuts,” Monk complained. “But it looks as if that thing did a lot of jumping around or something and splashed this rock out on the banks.”

Ham stopped suddenly, opened his mouth and began to giggle. Finally he laughed loudly and violently.

“Somethin’s goofed you!” Monk snorted.

Ham sobered with a snort.

“Nothing of the sort. This—this spirit out of the hot place, or whatever it is—tried to grab you and carry you off, didn’t it? It just struck me that Old Nick must be getting so anxious for your company he couldn’t wait for you to turn up your toes in the ordinary manner.”

Monk glared indignantly, but the best he could think of was, “The place is probably so full of lawyers by now that there’s no room!”

Doc Savage stopped.

“Long Tom,” suggested the bronze man, “here is as good a place as any to set up your capacity detector alarm. Stay with it, and if any one is following us, the apparatus should register that fact.”

Pale Long Tom nodded, moved back from the lava where the heat was not so intense and set up his device.

He hardly had the headset on when he shouted sharply.

“There’s something moving around here!”

Doc Savage got under cover so suddenly that he seemed to vanish where he had been standing. Monk and Ham were only a shade slower.

They listened. It was hard for their ears to tell much. The flowing lava made grisly sounds. Moreover, fires set by the splashing lava were crackling. Ethel’s Mama made an occasional rumble.

“Sure you ain’t hearin’ the lava in that contraption?” Monk asked.

“No,” Long Tom said. “Whatever it is is coming closer.”

Monk produced one of the rapid-firing pistols from an under-arm holster. The weapons had been perfected by Doc Savage, and since they fired anything from gas to demolition cartridges, could do surprising things.

“If it’s our invisible friend, I’ll be ready for ’im this time!” Monk said grimly.

A peculiar-looking creature came out of the jungle and ambled toward the group. It resembled a member of the ape family, although important anthropologists had disagreed on this. Very striking was the what-is-it’s likeness to the homely chemist, Monk. Had Monk been relieved of two hundred pounds or so, he and the ape would not have to be seen in a very thick fog for there to be a case of mistaken identity.

“Chemistry!” Ham exploded, relieved at seeing his pet.

“I got a notion to shoot anyway!” Monk grumbled.

A moment later, Monk’s pet pig, Habeas Corpus, appeared, trailing Chemistry. The two looked as if they had just had a fight. They probably had. They got along about as well as their owners.

Long Tom said, “That’s what my apparatus located.”

Doc Savage appeared from his hiding place and walked toward the sea, following the lava. Monk, Ham and their pets went with him.

Long Tom remained behind with the capacity detector alarm and suspended the braided, insulated aërial of his device between two small trees. It really was an aërial in substance. The whole contrivance functioned somewhat on the principle of the old-time regenerative radio receivers which howled when you brought your hand near them. Doc Savage had expended a good deal of his remarkable scientific skill on the device, however, and it was uncannily sensitive.

Long Tom donned the headset and adjusted the dials more carefully. It was very hot, even though he had a tree between himself and the flowing lava. He tried fanning himself with the tropical helmet he was wearing. But the capacity detector gave off little whines each time his hand moved. Long Tom stopped fanning.

The detector, not quite as finely refined, was already in use around New York as a burglar alarm. Rich men had a wire strung around the wall enclosing their estates, and when any one came near the wall a bell rang.

After about ten minutes, Long Tom showed suddenly increased interest in his apparatus. Some one was coming. The feeble-looking electrical wizard got to his feet and loosened his machine pistol.

The weapon was charged with “mercy” bullets which produced unconsciousness. They were chemical-filled capsules which did not do much actual damage.

When the new arrival popped into view, Long Tom nearly dropped his weapon. It was a girl.

A scared girl! Her eyes were big, and she breathed rapidly.

“Come quickly!” she gasped. “It may get away! That is, if it’s not dead!”

The big eyes were blue, a nice shade. There was more about her that was nice, too. Her nose, the shape of her mouth. Long Tom had a weakness for slender girls, and this one was certainly slender. She wore stout leather boots, shorts, a khaki blouse and a khaki pith helmet. There was a leather case for a miniature camera and a pair of binoculars slung over her right shoulder and a canteen over her left.

“Don’t stand there staring!” she snapped. “I want a witness! Somebody to prove I saw it. I took pictures of it, but they can be faked.”

“Er—I don’t—understand,” Long Tom said uncertainly.

She grabbed his arm. “It’s lying in a side canyon up above. I saw you men through the trees and ran down here as soon as I found it and took pictures.”

“Who are you?” Long Tom wanted to know.

“Special writer. Don’t ask questions. It may move.”

Long Tom swallowed twice. “What is it?”

The young woman looked impatient enough to shake him.

“It is about fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and about the same high,” she said rapidly. “It’s got the most fantastic kind of arms, and a horrible body. It was sort of like a mass of clear glass when I first saw it, but it is getting darker, changing color.”

“Good night!” Long Tom exclaimed. “The thing that grabbed Monk!”

“What’s that?” asked the girl.

“Nothing!” Long Tom snapped. “Let’s have a look at this critter!”

The electrical wizard looked in the direction which Doc Savage, Monk and Ham had taken. The trio were not in sight. Ethel’s Mama was making quite a rumble at the moment, and he doubted if they could hear him shout. He decided he could call them later.

He ran up the lava stream bank with the excited young lady.

“There’s a big palm tree on the bank of the side canyon where the thing is lying,” the girl said.

The big palm had lost its fronds in the heat. It was a coconut palm. The coconuts still hung in a knot at the top, charred and black, although not a frond remained. At the foot of the tree lay one of those big palm crabs, the kind which have relieved many an unwary native of a hand when he reached for a coconut. It was baked pink and had cracked wide when it hit the ground.

Long Tom looked at the crab and said, “That’s just the way I feel, Miss—Miss——” She didn’t take the hint, so the electrician came out with it. “What’s your name?”

“Alberta. Come on.”

They ran past the singed coconut, working around several large boulders, and the girl leveled an arm. The leveling gesture stretched her wrist out of her sleeve and revealed a wrist watch and a band—the band mounted with some diamonds that were nearly as big as the small wrist watch dial.

Long Tom coughed some of the sulphurous volcanic air out, hooked sweat out of his eyes with crooked forefingers, and stared.

“Say, what kind of a gag is this?” he growled.

There was not much of a side canyon. And there was certainly nothing in it. Nothing unusual, at least.

The girl gripped Long Tom’s arm. There was more strength in her fingers than Long Tom had thought any woman would ever have. It made his whole arm numb.

“Look!” she shrilled.

Long Tom looked.

He saw a wave of purplish black come out of the back of his brain and break over his eyeballs, and with it there was a phenomenon as if somebody had popped one of those Australian bullwhips over his ears. The ground somehow got up against the side of his face.

“Don’t!” he heard the girl cry.

Then the world and everything else went off somewhere.