Читать книгу The Metal Master: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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Doc Savage’s profession was trouble. Other people’s troubles. He had friends, more friends than enemies by a large score. But there were plenty of enemies, and occasionally they tried to kill Doc Savage, figuring that was their only hope. Some of the enemies had very ingenious ideas about how to accomplish their ends. So Doc Savage had to take precautions.

One of these precautions was a system of sensitive alarms which registered the appearance of any prowlers near his office. A marauder did not need to break in. If he as much as walked near the door, buzzers whined and indicator lights glowed.

One of the buzzers suddenly whined. Its sound had an alarming quality.

The headquarters—a reception room first, then a library and laboratory covering many thousands of square feet of floor space—was dark, except for one light over a small germ culture table on which were experimental cultures of a spermatocyte nature. This light revealed nothing but a hand of the individual who was at the table.

It was a remarkable hand. The size did not seem especially striking until compared with surrounding objects, when it became evident that the hand was of no small size. The fingers were long. The skin had a surprisingly fine texture. But the unusual feature was the evidence that the hand possessed incredible strength. The sinews on the back were nearly as large as an ordinary man’s fingers.

The hand had a skin of a remarkable bronze hue.

When the buzzer whined, the bronze hand vanished from the glow of the tiny bulb. No lights came on. The owner of the hand moved through the murk with soundless speed that was surprising. A moment later, he opened the door of the reception room.

A tall girl in a mannish coat lay on the corridor floor. A masculine hat had been knocked off her head. Her face was upturned. It was an exquisitely attractive face.

Her mouth was open. A whitish powder was smeared around it.

There was a light in the modernistic corridor. It showed the bronze man who came flinging out of the reception room. He was a Herculean figure. His hand, seen alone in the light, had seemed huge, yet it was not out of proportion. Muscles remindful of big wire hawsers were evident under his clothing.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the bronze man was his eyes. They were of an unusual flake-gold tint, and the gold flakes seemed always in motion, as if stirred by tiny winds. They were strange, compelling eyes. Strangers on the street often looked at those eyes and were so gripped that they found themselves bumping into other pedestrians.

The bronze man’s features were regular. His hair, of a bronze hue slightly darker than his skin, fitted his head like a metal skullcap.

The bronze man did some fast moving. A glance whipped over the corridor showed no one else there.

He scooped up the girl and lunged with her into the reception room, through the library and into the laboratory. He did not turn the lights on. He evidently knew the place well.

He planted the girl on a marble-topped table. He felt for her pulse. He listened for her heart.

Her heart was not beating.

Many a famous doctor and surgeon would have liked to have been present in that laboratory during the course of the next five minutes. What happened was an example of what skill and medical knowledge can do.

Chemicals were mixed with flashing rapidity. They were administered to the girl, both as a draught and with hypos. Then she was shoved into a complicated device that was designed to start her breathing. Adrenalin was administered.

Twenty minutes of that, and the girl had her eyes open. She looked at the bronze man.

“You’re Doc Savage,” she said faintly. “I’ve seen your pictures.”

“You were attacked in the corridor?” Doc Savage asked.

The bronze man’s voice was as unusual as his appearance. It was deep, cultured, full of controlled power.

“Yes,” breathed the young woman. “What happened to Seevers?”

Doc did not answer that.

“Was any one beside Seevers with you?” he asked.

“No.”

He carried her to the rear of the laboratory room, to what resembled a solid wall. He put a palm to the wall, held it there, took it away, put it there again. He did this three times. A perfectly concealed panel opened. It had a lock that was actuated by a sensitive thermostatic combination concealed in the wall. Heat of the hand, applied in the proper combination, was enough to open the lock. It could be opened in no other manner.

The niche inside had a narrow couch. Doc put the girl there.

“Be back later,” he said crisply. “You are too weak to talk now.”

He brought stuff in a glass.

“If you get to feeling dizzy, drink this,” he directed. “It’s a stimulant. Do not make any noise.”

“O. K.,” she managed to say. It was a wisp of a whisper.

Doc Savage closed the hidden panel behind him. Only a very good magnifying glass would have detected the crack around it. Due to the clever construction of the place, the extra thickness of the walls could not be determined without measuring them with surveying instruments.

Doc Savage went back through laboratory, library and reception room and out into the corridor. The corridor door was of armor steel and had no locks or knobs or other visible means of being opened. It closed mysteriously behind the bronze man.

Doc Savage had scooped up, in passing through the laboratory, a rather unusual-looking metal box. It had a lens, and might have been an old-fashioned magic lantern, except that this lens was almost black in color. There was a switch on the side of the box. Doc flicked this.

A strange thing happened in the corridor. Along the floor in front of the elevators was a mat. It looked as if it were made of gray sponge rubber. It was wide enough that any one getting out of the elevators would be likely to step on it. In fact, only a spry jump would take a person over it without touching it.

This mat, when the eye of the strange lantern was turned on it, began to glow with an eerie blue luminance.

Footprints, as well, appeared on the corridor floor.

Doc Savage entered his own private high-speed elevator, and rode down to the street level. There were three other elevators in operation at this time of night. He asked the attendants questions.

“Who came and went from my floor within the last few minutes?”

“Why, an old man and a girl went up,” said one elevator operator. “The girl was a peach for looks, what I mean. And some men went up, too. Four.”

“Before or after the man and the girl?”

“After. They came down later, with the old man. They said he had been seized with a dizzy spell.”

“Thank you,” said Doc Savage, and went out on the street.

He turned his lantern on again. It was, in reality, a compact and powerful projector of invisible ultra-violet light. Ultra-violet light has the strange property of causing certain substances to fluoresce, or glow. Ordinary vaseline has this quality.

The mat in front of the elevators on Doc Savage’s floor was soaked with a chemical mixture which was sticky and glowed with an extraordinary brightness under the ultra-violet light. It would stick to the shoe soles of any one who walked on it, and tracks would be left for some time.

Doc Savage followed glowing tracks down the street. They led around a corner. He had a little difficulty, because the chemical footprints did not register well on the sleety sidewalk.

The trail, however, was not long. It led into an alley. It was a dark alley. Doc produced a flashlight which spouted a lean, utterly white beam.

On the alley pavement was a weird blob of metal.

The metal blob had a length of perhaps a dozen feet, and a width of half that. It appeared that a molten mixture of steel and brass had been dumped in the alley to harden.

But there were many queer aspects to the metal mass. For one thing, had molten metal been dumped there, the pavement around about would have shown some evidence of the terrific heat. There was none.

Yet it certainly looked as if the metal had been put there in a molten state. Little streams of it had run out at the sides, just as liquid metal would do. It had filled cracks in the alley pavement.

Most fantastic of all, pieces of wood stuck out of the mass, along with bits of cloth and leather. Doc Savage examined the leather.

Automobile cushions! Not the slightest doubt of it. This molten mass had been an automobile. He saw the tires, four of which had been on the wheels, and a spare. Fire. And the wooden wheel spokes were intact.

The bronze man moved about, using his flashlight. Then he did something that was rare with him. He had trained his nerves for shocks. He rarely showed emotion.

Yet he started violently.

For the next few seconds, he stood perfectly still. And there came into being a small, weird sound. It was a trilling. It ran up and down the musical scale, adhering to no definite tune, yet definitely melodious. Much about the strange trilling defied description. It might have been the song of some exotic feathered creature, or the note of a wind filtering through a denuded forest.

A small, absent thing which the bronze man did in moments of mental stress, was this trilling. It had a quality of ventriloquism, seeming to come from everywhere, yet from no definite spot. The reason for the trilling stuck up stark and horrible in the flashlight glow.

A bony, wrinkled human hand! Projecting from the wad of metal on the alley pavement!

Doc Savage worked furiously at the mass of metal. It was solid, as if molten and poured there. The body was imbedded in it. Some other parts of it were exposed, he found after a moment’s search. There was part of a leg. An elbow. The tail of the man’s coat.

Strangest of all, the man’s garments were not even scorched. Yet he was imbedded solidly in the mass of metal.

Doc Savage returned his attention to the hand which projected so horribly. On one of the fingers was a ring. He removed it. Identification, perhaps.

He used the ultra-violet lantern. The footprints ended here. There were marks on the street which indicated a car had gone away. There must have been two cars. One—something fantastic had happened to it. The other had taken away the remaining men.

There seemed to be nothing more to do. It would take hours, perhaps days, with hacksaws to free the body. Doc went back toward the skyscraper which housed his headquarters.

He carried the ring.

An elevator operator told him, “Some men went up to your floor, then came back down. I guess they found you weren’t there.”

“Know them?” Doc asked.

“They were the same men who took the old man down.”

Doc Savage said nothing. But he lost no time getting in the private express elevator to ride up. A moment later, he stepped out in the eighty-sixth floor corridor.

The armor-plate door of his headquarters suite was gone.

Not gone, exactly. It was a puddle on the floor. To all appearances, it had simply melted. Yet nothing was burned.

Doc Savage studied the incredible scene. Some of the metal casing of the door had also dripped down on the floor. He touched the wad of metal. Cold.

He entered. Nothing was disturbed to any extent. But the place had been searched. A few cabinets were open. They were large enough to have held a person.

He went to the secret panel and unlocked it by operating the thermostatic combination.

The girl smiled at him. She was still weak. But her nerve was all right.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said.

“Hear any one a few minutes ago?”

“Faint sounds,” she admitted. “You told me to keep quiet. I did.”

Doc Savage showed her the ring. There was nothing unusual about it. It was cheap; worn.

“Ever see it before?” he asked.

The girl nodded. “Yes. It belonged to Seevers. He always wore it.”

Doc Savage nodded, sat down, and gave her some of the stimulant to drink.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me the story.”

Her voice was firm enough.

“There’s not much of it,” she said. “Seevers telephoned me. He was worried. Wanted me to meet him and come to talk with you. He said something about a Metal Master, and something terrible about it. But he didn’t go into details. I thought he was—well, balmy. That is, until he got the cablegram from my brother. And my brother—his name is Louis—seemed to think there was something wrong, too.”

“Who is your brother?” Doc asked.

“Louis Tester,” the girl replied. “I am Nan Tester. We are twins. My brother is an expert on electricity as applied to chemistry. Or at least, he used to be.”

“Used to be?”

The girl drank more of the stimulant.

“I haven’t seen much of Louis the last two years,” she said. “He has been off in some out-of-the-way place working, where he has a laboratory.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“From where did the cablegram come?”

“South America. He is on his way North. I don’t know why he was down there. In fact, I didn’t know he was in South America.”

“Who was Seevers?”

“He used to work with my brother. Seevers was sort of a teacher for my brother for a long time. He is a nice old man.”

Doc Savage did not tell her she should have said was a nice old man.