Читать книгу Quest of Qui: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE KNIFE THAT THREW ITSELF
The radio is undoubtedly a remarkable invention, with many possibilities. And probably no one individual knew more about radio, or employed it more assiduously, than did Doc Savage, man of miracles, mystery and adventure.
Doc Savage stood beside the complex radio equipment in his New York headquarters and listened to a steady hissing note which came from a loud-speaker.
“This is strange,” he said. His voice was a remarkable one—controlled, a voice that had undergone much training.
Unusual as it was, the voice was hardly as remarkable as the man. Doc Savage was a giant. One did not realize that until comparison with ordinary objects, for his muscles were evenly developed; he did not have the knotted shoulders of a wrestler or the overdeveloped legs of a runner. Rather, his whole great frame was swathed in sinews that were remindful of bundled wires.
More striking was the bronze of his skin, a hue which might have come from many tropical suns, and the slightly darker bronze of his straight, tight-lying hair. His eyes were a little weird, being like pools of fine gold flakes being always stirred by tiny, invisible gales.
The loud-speaker hissed steadily.
“Renny!” Doc called.
There were windows on three sides of the laboratory which held the radio equipment, windows which looked down from a height of eighty-six stories up in central New York City. At one end was a door, which opened, revealing a library, a room with floor space taken up by bookcases.
The door was high, but the man who came through ducked a little so that its top would clear his head. He was broad, too, with arms that were beams. Yet somehow he looked lean, gaunt, hungry. Maybe it was his hands that made him look that way. They were fantastic hands. Huge. He could hardly have put either of them in a gallon pail.
“Yes,” he said, and his voice somehow brought thoughts of a lion which had jumped out of its cave and roared.
“Listen to that, Renny,” Doc Savage said, and indicated the hissing radio.
“Renny” came forward. He was Colonel John Renwick, M. S., C. E., D. S. C., C. M. H., and a lot of other things. He was a civil engineer noted over most of the world for his ability—and those fists.
He cocked an ear to the hissing from the radio. He walked over and eyed the dials, noting their setting. It was obvious that he was quite familiar with the apparatus.
“A transmitter sending on our wave length—the wave length we use for intercommunication,” he said. “Sounds weak. Must be some amateur with a little transmitter.”
“This station is hundreds of miles distant,” Doc Savage said.
“Sure?”
“Fairly. You can tell, after you have played with radio for a long time. This is one of our sets, the one Johnny had.”
“You can tell that, too?” Renny rumbled.
“The particular quality of the carrier wave,” Doc imparted. “There is hardly another transmitter that would emit the specific type of wave associated with our newly developed short-wave V. U. X. type tube.”
Renny used an enormous forefinger to scratch his head. “But what would Johnny be keeping that transmitter turned on for. Running down his battery, isn’t it?”
“Look here,” Doc Savage said.
He pressed a button, which lighted a ground-glass compass rose, over which was mounted a pointer actuated by a loop aerial through remote control. The loop was situated on the skyscraper roof for better functioning.
Doc Savage moved the loop in the regulation radio compass manner, not getting the signals to their loudest, but to their weakest point, which was more easily detected.
Renny read the compass indicator.
“North by east, a quarter east,” he said. “Holy cow! He’s somewhere on a line drawn approximately between here and Greenland, or maybe on the same line if extended south through New York City.”
“Exactly,” Doc said. “It is very strange, this continuous operation of Johnny’s transmitter.”
Renny extracted a newspaper from a coat pocket which looked as if it had been especially tailored with sufficient capacity to hold his enormous fists. He tapped the headlines.
“That business of the Viking pirates who took over that yacht is getting a big play,” he said. “There is a story in here to the effect that Johnny examined the Viking dragon ship and declared it to be genuine and some hundreds of years old. Funny, eh?”
“Unusual, to say the least,” Doc Savage agreed.
“And Johnny is supposed to have chased off somewhere investigating the mystery,” Renny boomed.
Doc Savage was still in front of the radio. There now came into being a sound so soft and eerie that its presence was at first unnoticeable. It was a trilling, low, indescribably mellow, a sound so fantastic that it defied description. The fantastic note seemed to filter from everywhere; it was as if the very air were saturated with it.
The trilling was the sound of Doc Savage, a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of mental stress. He did not do it willfully. He had made it always, since he could remember. And now he seemed to realize what he was doing, and the unearthly note ebbed away.
Renny eyed the bronze man sharply. That sound always meant something was up.
“Strange, that business of the radio transmitter going steady,” he said, echoing Doc’s earlier statement. “It’s got some queer angles——”
Queer angles, it did have. They found out just how queer an instant later.
Something that glinted whipped through the air. Renny had a flash realization of what it was. A knife! It flashed directly for Doc Savage’s back.
The knife struck Doc in the back, point-first, and with ugly force.
An alarm clock began ringing furiously.
Renny reacted with the abruptness of a man who had been in danger before. He slammed down and to one side, getting behind a case which held storage batteries.
The steadily ringing alarm clock seemed very loud.
Doc Savage had taken a headlong dive and was lying behind the battery case also. The bronze man’s back was to Renny.
Doc’s coat was ripped, displaying the fine chain mail undergarment which Doc habitually wore. The knife still stuck in the cloth of the bronze man’s coat.
Renny pulled the knife out and looked at it briefly. Short as his inspection was, he noted that the knife was extremely unusual.
Doc Savage had dug a thin tube, as long as a pencil and not much larger than a match, from his clothing somewhere, and he elongated this somewhat, then projected the tip over the battery case. It was a tiny periscope.
The alarm clock jangled steadily.
“Watch it, Doc!” Renny croaked in sudden apprehension.
Doc Savage had stood erect. He was staring steadily. There was, for the bronze man, an unusual tenseness about his posture. It was rarely that he showed excitement.
“Look out!” Renny boomed. “Whoever threw that knife may have a gun!”
“There is no one,” Doc Savage said.
Their voices sounded eerie over the frantic clangor of the clock.
Renny heaved erect. His eyes roved, as did the machine-gun pistol, which looked small in his enormous fist. He had dropped the strange knife on the floor. He walked forward, searching.
“Holy cow!” he rumbled.
There was no one but themselves. The windows were all closed, because it was windy, a trifle chilly this far up. The windows were hardly ever opened anyway, for air conditioning kept the laboratory at an even temperature that was necessary in some chemical experiments.
There was one door. This was almost at their elbow. No one could have passed through it without being seen.
The thrown knife had come from the other end of the room. There were no doors down there. It was a cul-de-sac.
Doc Savage was moving about, searching, flake-gold eyes roving intently. Renny trailed him. They opened a few cabinets which were large enough to hold a man. These were few in number, since most of the cabinets had transparent glass doors. There was no man in them.
The alarm clock stopped ringing. Doc Savage picked it up with the end of a long pole that had a grabber hook on the end of it and which was ordinarily used for taking bottles off the high chemical shelves.
The bronze man put the clock under an X-ray and examined the fluoroscopic screen. It was not an infernal machine.
“Ever see that clock before?” Renny asked.
“No,” Doc told him.
“Any finger prints?”
Doc used a vapor method of his own in searching the cheap tin alarm clock for prints. He held it in a chemical vapor which would mingle with the microscopic, oily deposit left by the human hand and cause a color change, together with a thickening of the oily deposit due to precipitation. The method would bring out the most infinitesimal print.
“No finger prints,” he said.
Renny knotted his big fists and knocked them together. Their hard bone and gristle made sounds reminiscent of bricks colliding. It was a small habit he had.
“Holy cow!” he growled. “If you ask me, it couldn’t have happened!”
Doc Savage said, “There was apparently no one in the room. Yet the knife was thrown.”
“You got secret trapdoors and things in this place,” Renny reminded. “Maybe the guy got in and got away through them.”
Doc Savage moved about the room. He touched innocent-looking bits of wall, floor and cases, and in the most unexpected places, tiny lids flew up to expose dials. It became evident that his skyscraper aerie was one incredible maze of mechanical devices. He came back and stood by the radio.
The hissing note still came from the radio receiver.
“All of the concealed doors have indicators on them which show when they have been used, and the indicators cannot be put out of commission without evidence of it showing,” Doc said. “They show that none of the secret entrances or exits have been used.”
“But why the alarm clock?” Renny scratched his head. “Say, that knife maybe——”
Doc Savage picked the knife up, turned it in his hands. He abruptly put it under a magnifying glass.
“Unusual thing, eh?” Renny commented.
Doc Savage lifted a glance. “Have you guessed just how unusual, Renny?”
“I can build a bridge or a skyscraper,” Renny said. “I don’t know a heck of a lot about knives. The one you’ve got in your hand looks as if some amateur had hammered it out of a piece of iron. As a knife, it don’t look so hot.”
“The knife is probably more than a thousand years old, Renny.”
Renny showed interest. He knew this was one of the things on which Doc was an authority.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It is a genuine old Viking knife,” Doc said. “A collector of such things might be willing to pay five hundred dollars for it.”
“A Viking knife,” Renny said. “Holy cow!”
The telephone buzzer whined.
Doc Savage went over and picked up one of several telephones, each of which was connected, instead of a bell, to a buzzer which had a distinctive note.
“Yes,” he said.
The voice which began talking to him was Monk’s.
“What goes on, if anything?” Monk asked.
“An alarm clock just rang in my laboratory,” Doc told him. “About the same time, a knife struck my back with force enough to make the discomfort of wearing a bulletproof jacket all the time seem a good investment.”
Monk was silent a moment. He must have been digesting that and trying to make something out of it. Then he asked, “Who threw the knife?”
“No one, so far as we can find.”
“Then what kind of a gadget done it?”
“No gadget, that we have seen,” Doc told him. “The alarm clock did not, obviously.”
“Alarm clock——” Monk made a mumbling noise. “Say, what is this?”
“A mystery,” Doc replied. “It seems to have to do with ancient Vikings and——”
“Ow-w-w!” Monk bawled.
Monk’s roar out of the receiver was ear-splitting. It made Renny, standing across the laboratory, jump.
Silence followed. Utter silence. Either Monk’s receiver had been hung up, or the telephone had been torn from its cord socket.
“Something’s happened!” big Renny barked, charging across the laboratory. “Monk don’t squall like that without reasons!”
