Читать книгу Quest of Qui: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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There was no wind, and the authorities later decided this accounted for what occurred, for had there been a wind, many things would doubtlessly have been different.

Had there been a wind, a baffling mystery might never have come to the notice of the world, and to the attention of Doc Savage. A number of men might have gone on living. And a scheme of consummate horror would probably have been executed with success.

It was, however, dead calm on the Atlantic Ocean off the outer tip of Long Island. The calm had persisted since dawn, and it was aggravating weather for sailboats, and at the same time very nice weather for power boats.

The Sea Scream was a power boat, all eighty feet of her, mahogany, teak and brass, and she bowled along at almost twenty knots. The Sea Scream was a yacht, and she had cost somewhat less than a quarter of a million, which made her owner an important man, on the principle that any one who can pay nearly a quarter of a million for a plaything is important.

But neither the Sea Scream nor her wealthy owner nor her guests were of special importance to the world that day, as far as news was concerned. Millionaires and their yachts are a dime a dozen, as concerns news, around Long Island Sound.

What happened to those on the Sea Scream was important. It was also amazing, so much so that citizens in London, Paris, and elsewhere read about it in their newspapers that afternoon.

The Sea Scream was barely out of sight of land when the sailor at the wheel shaded his eyes, squinted, then picked up a pair of binoculars and focused them.

“Something dead ahead, sir,” he called.

The Sea Scream lunged on, bows knocking up spray. Owner, guests and crew glanced idly ahead, not nearly so interested as they were going to be soon.

The helmsman used the binoculars again, staring very hard this time, after which a blankness came on his face.

“I hope to swab a deck!” he grunted. “Captain, sir. Have a look.”

The snappily uniformed captain took the binoculars and stared through them.

“Bless me!” he said, and hastily went to the owner.

“Want to have a glance at an unusual vessel?” he asked, and presented the glasses.

The owner looked. So did the guests, one a lady. They murmured, interested.

“Strange-looking thing,” said the owner.

“Never saw one like it,” offered a guest.

“I have,” said the lady. “A picture, I mean. In my history books, when I was a girl.”

More to be polite than anything else, for his job depended on that to an extent, the skipper asked, “What would you call the craft, miss?”

“A Viking dragon ship,” replied the woman.

The men laughed, for the idea was, of course, a little preposterous, Viking dragon ships having gone out of style shortly after the days of Eric the Red and other noted Norsemen.

But the woman was correct. The Sea Scream swept up to the strange craft.

Double-ended, perhaps sixty feet long, the vessel had some of the aspects of a giant, fat canoe. Bow and stern reared up to support platforms, and amidships was deck planking, while along the rail, on the outside were fastened round things of rusty steel, objects which certainly resembled shields such as were carried by ancient warriors. There was a mast, and a sail draped around it, unfilled because there was no wind. The sail seemed to be made of animal skins from which the hair had been removed.

There was not a soul in sight on the decks of the weird craft. One of the yacht guests had an idea.

“Bet it broke away from some water carnival,” he laughed.

“Let’s go aboard,” suggested the lady.

“Of course,” agreed the owner. “It should be interesting.”

Interesting! So it was to be.

The Sea Scream captain shouted orders, and the yacht slowed her engines and nosed up alongside the Viking dragon ship, the sea being so calm that there was no necessity for going aboard in the tender.

Surprising aspects of the Viking craft became evident on closer inspection. For one thing, the vessel appeared very old, and it could be seen that the hull had been put together with thongs of hide. Some of the hide seemed new, as did the sail, but the shields along the rail were amazingly rusted.

The Viking ship had a smell, too, a very strong one. It was not a smell of death, but rather that distinctive aroma that arises where men live for a long time with no bathing facilities available.

“Take a line aboard,” the Sea Scream captain ordered a sailor.

The sailor sprang aboard the dragon ship with the line, which he made fast around the mast. Then things happened.

The sailor thrust both arms high over his head and screamed most horribly, after which his head slued forward, hanging with a hideous slackness, and he fell to the deck.

Sticking in the man’s back was a spear which had a thong-wrapped haft no more than three feet long.

Fantastic figures swarmed out of the dragon ship hold. They were men, but what men. They wore helmets of burnished steel, each helmet adorned with a fearsome pair of horns. The faces under the helmets might have been bearded visages of the very Norse freebooters of a day ten centuries past.

“Vikings!” the lady on the yacht gasped.

The whiskered horde on the dragon ship now boarded the Sea Scream. There was not a firearm among them, but they gripped spears and swords which were sharp, and which they showed no scruples about using.

The yacht captain tried to run to his cabin, where he had a gun, but a spear, ponderously cast, impaled one of his legs and he upset on the deck and lay there making faces.

The bearded raiders from the Viking ship began to bawl hoarsely. Not a word they said was understood by those on the yacht. But there were accompanying gestures which conveyed full meaning. The yachtsmen were being ordered to change ships.

There was some more fighting first, after which the yachtsmen, whipped, obeyed. They were ordered into a stuffy forward hold and the hatch slammed down on them.

The yachtsmen now heard sounds which were later the source of much newspaper conjecture—they heard some kind of a cargo being moved from one craft to the other. They never were able to decide what the cargo was, but some of them voiced the impression that it was something alive.

When the yachtsmen were finally released, it was because the bearded freebooters could not get the yacht Sea Scream going. The whiskered ones made faces and bawled, and finally collared the engineer of the yacht—he wore greasy coveralls which indicated his profession—and hauled him onto the yacht. The frightened engineer put the engines in full speed ahead, and the yacht pulled away, leaving the former occupants on the dragon ship.

The bearded pirates now threw the engineer overboard, and he swam to the dragon ship.

The Sea Scream made several wild circles, while the hairy thieves danced and howled on deck, and apparently experimented with the modern steering apparatus.

It was during this that the golden-haired girl was glimpsed.

Descriptions of the fair companion of the bearded freebooters, as later given, varied greatly. The lady off the yacht declared she was a she-tigress with the devil written all over her, and as homely as sin. But most of the men turned in a favorable report on her charms. In fact, they agreed generally that she was very personable, entirely too sweet a thing for such company as she was keeping.

The engineer, who had been taken aboard to start the yacht, made a startling revelation. He had seen the girl at close range. She was a knock-out.

Furthermore, the young woman was an unwilling guest of the whiskered men. They were leading her about by a long thong tied to one of her ankles.

At any rate, the Sea Scream was soon lost to sight of her frightened owner, who with his guests had been left aboard the dragon ship. The yacht, all noted, was headed toward New York City.

About noon, a breeze came up. The yachtsmen sailed the dragon ship into a harbor near the tip of Long Island, finding in doing so that the ship was extremely seaworthy.

The yachting victims of this twentieth century Viking raid promptly found themselves, once they convinced their listeners they were not crazy or lying, objects of feverish interest, both to the Coast Guard, and the newspapers. A swarm of photographers and reporters arrived. A news reel cameraman came in a plane. He got shots of the dragon ship, and his plane flew them back to New York, where that very night they were shown in the movie theaters.

The news reel shots of the Viking dragon ship got William Harper Littlejohn interested. William Harper Littlejohn was a very erudite gentleman, but he occasionally attended the cinema for relaxation.

Johnny was archaeologist enough to recognize, even in the news reel shots, the undoubted genuineness of the Viking dragon ship. He left the theater in haste.

He called Doc Savage. Doc was out of town. Johnny took a plane, the next morning, for the harbor where the dragon ship lay.

The arrival of Johnny on the scene created a furor among the newspapermen, who needed new angles for their stories, anyway, since absolutely no trace had been found of the yacht Sea Scream. The Sea Scream had vanished as completely as if sunken.

Appearance of Johnny, to the newspapermen, meant Doc Savage was on the job, for every one knew Johnny was associated with Doc. And Doc Savage, man of bronze, mental wizard, physical giant extraordinary, was big news, all the more so because Doc shunned publicity most effectively.

Johnny did not even bother to deny that Doc was interested in the Viking dragon ship. He went ahead and examined the craft. He used his monocle magnifier on the ponderous oars, almost too heavy for one man to lift, and on various hammered copper cooking utensils. He scrutinized the plank fastenings. He studied the stitching which held the skins composing the sail. Those watching him realized he was very interested indeed. A news reel cameraman took pictures of his every move.

Finally, Johnny secured from his plane several ponderous and rare volumes on history which he had brought along. He poured over these intently. He seemed to be learning things.

The news reel men asked him for a statement. They had asked numerous times, but on this occasion, Johnny consented.

“Oracular cognoscence of certain recondite aspects. I will hypothesize,” said Johnny, who never used a small word where he could insert a big one.

The news reel man looked stunned by the verbal flow, but hastily got his camera and voice recorder going.

Johnny fingered his monocle and began.

“Disquisitional recapitulation of imperspicuous symptomatology tends to an unequivocal belief,” he announced.

Twenty million movie-goers were destined to choke over those words. The news reel concern finally had to run a summary by a commentator at the end, translating the erudite Johnny’s remarks for the American hoi polloi.

The gist of it was that Johnny was thoroughly convinced that the Viking dragon ship was genuine, and that it had been built many centuries ago and repaired more recently. Furthermore, certain markings, coats of arms, in effect, discernible on the craft proved it had belonged to the fleet of one certain ancient Viking freebooter, “Tarnjen,” by name.

Tarnjen, stated Johnny, had been the bad boy of his day, so bad indeed that he had been chased out of Viking land with a number of ships and what loot he had amassed, which was probably considerable. A year or two later, Tarnjen had returned with only one ship, a vastly humiliated soul. His other ships and men had been taken by the Qui. Just who the Qui were, historians did not seem certain. Some history tomes suggested that Qui was a name Tarnjen had given to some savage tribe on some remote continent.

Whoever or whatever Qui was, they had taken most of Tarnjen’s men and ships, all of his loot, and sent him back, thoroughly broken. Qui, then, was a mystery.

Such was the gist of Johnny’s recital.

This was the beginning of the mystery of Qui, a mystery from which amazing things came.

Johnny returned to New York, but he was still interested; and since Doc Savage was still out of town, overseeing the construction of a charity hospital somewhere, and since there was no excitement brewing, Johnny had nothing to do but dabble with the mystery of Qui and the Viking dragon ship and the vanished yacht, Sea Scream, which still had not been found.

The raid of the Vikings was unusual news. It went far and wide. Reports came in. A liner captain had seen the dragon ship off Cape Cod, he reported. A fisherman claimed he had seen such a vessel in the Nova Scotia fog.

Johnny digested those two reports. They intrigued him. It seemed the dragon ship had come down from the north, had met the Sea Scream, and the freebooters had traded their craft for a more modern one which did not depend on the wind.

The upshot of it was that, some days later, Johnny was alone in a plane flying along the Labrador coast. Johnny had many accomplishments besides big words. Flying was one of them. Doc Savage had taught him, and Doc had an amazing faculty of transferring some of his own skill to those whom he instructed.

It was late afternoon. A snow blanket was beneath Johnny’s plane. To the right lay a jagged, rock-fanged shore line. This was a wilderness, primeval, cold, unpopulated. A fishing village, passed hours ago, had been the last sign of human habitation on the bleak Labrador coast.

Johnny peered overside often. He used binoculars. His ship cruised along a bare five hundred feet above the white terrain.

An ice floe out at sea held his attention for a time, mainly because of its ominous aspect, and also because there was a school of seals on its edge. Natural life always interested Johnny.

Johnny was not quite sure what he was looking for, so he kept an eye open for anything of interest. That was why he went to investigate the smoke column.

The smoke was actually not a column. It was small, a gray yarn which whipped in the frigid Arctic gale. But it was the only trace of life the bony archaeologist and geologist had seen in hours. So he banked his plane over in that direction.

The fire was in the lee of a cathedral-like spire of stone. Snowdrifts were all about. The beach was close, a necklace of rocks, ice-crusted, which rimmed the shore line.

Johnny was close overhead before he saw the man.

The man lay on his back and the snow was red beside him. His arms made feeble, horrible motions, movements that were not a supplication to the plane above, for the man seemed not to know that the ship was moaning over him.

The man on the snow was obviously in a bad way. The red patch was certainly leakage from a wound. No dogs, no sleeping roll, could be seen.

Johnny now made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He landed his plane.