The Land of Terror ds-2

by Kenneth Robeson

  "Call Renny, Long Tom, Johnny and Ham," Doc directed. "All of you show up at my place right away. I think I’m mixed up in something that will make us all hump."

  "I’ll get hold of them," Monk promised.

  * * *

  DOC stood by the phone a moment after hanging up. He was thinking of his five friends, "Monk," "Renny," "Long Tom," "Johnny," and "Ham." They were probably the most efficient five men ever to assemble for a definite purpose. Each was a world-famed specialist in a particular line.

  Renny was a great engineer, Long Tom an electrical wizard, Johnny an archaeologist and geologist, and Ham one of the cleverest lawyers Harvard ever turned out. The gorillalike Monk, with his magical knowledge of chemistry, completed the group.

  They had first assembled during the Great War, these adventurers. The love of excitement held them together. Not a one of the five men but owed his very life to the unique brain and skill of Doc.

  With Doc Savage, scrapper above all others, adventurer supreme, they formed a combination which could accomplish marvels.

  Doc went in search of Oliver Wording Bittman. He found the famous taxidermist in an adjoining room and thanked him for use of the phone.

  "I must take my departure now," he finished. "I should like greatly, though, to discuss at some time your association with my father. And any service I can perform for you, a friend of my father’s, a man who saved his life, I shall gladly do."

  Oliver Wording Bittman shrugged. "My saving of your father’s life was really no feat at all. I was simply there and shot a lion as it charged. But I would be delighted to talk at length with you. I admire you greatly. Where could I get in touch with you?"

  Doc gave the address of a downtown New York skyscraper which towered nearly a hundred stories — a skyscraper known all over the world because of its great height.

  "I occupy the offices formerly used by my father on the eighty-sixth floor," Doc explained.

  "I have been there," Bittman smiled. "I shall look you up." He gestured at an extension telephone. "May I not call you a taxi?"

  Doc shook his head. "I’ll walk. I want to do some thinking."

  Down on the street once more, Doc strode across traffic-laden Central Park West and entered the Park itself. He followed the pedestrian walk, angling southeast. He did not try to make haste.

  His remarkable brain was working at top speed. Already, it had evolved a detailed plan which he would put in operation as soon as he met his five friends at the skyscraper office.

  High overhead, a plane was droning. Doc looked up as a matter of course, for few things happened around him that he did not notice.

  The craft was a cabin seaplane, a monoplane, single-motored. And it was painted green. It circled, seemingly bound nowhere.

  Doc dismissed it from his thoughts. Planes circling over New York City were a more common sight than the discovery of an ordinary horsefly.

  The walk he traversed descended steeply. It crossed a long, narrow bridge over a Park lagoon. The bridge was of rustic log construction.

  Doc reached the bridge middle.

  Unexpected things then happened.

  With a loud bawl of exhaust stacks, the seaplane above dived. Straight down it came. There was murderous purpose in its plunge.

  Doc Savage did not have time to race to the end of the bridge. Had he done so successfully, there was no shelter to be had.

  A bronze flash, Doc whipped over the rustic railing. He slid under the bridge.

  An object dropped from the plane. It was hardly larger than a baseball.

  This thing struck the bridge squarely above where Doc had gone over.

  A gush of vile grayish smoke arose. With incredible speed, the bridge began dissolving!

  * * *

  Chapter 6. THE MISSING MAN

  THE weird phenomenon, as the rustic bridge was wiped out by the fantastic Smoke of Eternity, was even more striking than had been the dissolution of Jerome Coffern’s body.

  The metallic capsule bearing the Smoke of Eternity had splashed the strange stuff some distance in bursting. A great section of the bridge seemed to burn instantly. But there was no flame, no heat.

  The play of electrical sparks was very marked, however. In such volume did they flicker that their noise was like the sound of a rapidly running brook.

  The Smoke of Eternity, after passing through and destroying the bridge, next dissolved the water below. So rapidly did the eerie substance work that a great pit appeared in the surface of the lagoon.

  Water rushing to fill this pit, formed a current like a strong river.

  It was that current which offered Doc Savage his only real threat. For Doc had not lingered under the bridge. With scarcely a splash, he had cleaved beneath the surface. Guessing what was to come, he swam rapidly away.

  Doc’s lungs were tremendous. He could readily stay under water twice as long as a South Sea pearl diver, and such men have been known to remain under several minutes. He swam rapidly down the lagoon, keeping close to the bottom and stroking powerfully to vanquish the current.

  Overhead, the seaplane circled again and again. The only occupant, the pilot, peered out anxiously.

  "Got him!" the vicious fellow chortled. "Easy money, the twenty grand Kar is payin’ me for this!"

  The murderous pilot did not dream Doc Savage could have escaped. He had no comprehension of Doc’s physical powers.

  But he had been warned to make absolutely certain. He circled continuously above the lagoon, eyes roving like a vulture’s.

  Under an overhanging bush, a full hundred yards from the bridge, Doc’s bronze head broke water. He came up so smoothly that there was no splash.

  The killer pilot of the seaplane did not see Doc glide into the shrubbery, although he was staring mightily.

  An onlooker would have remarked a striking thing about Doc as he came out of the water. Doc’s straight bronze hair showed no traces of moisture. It was disarrayed. It seemed to shed water like the proverbial duck’s back. Nor did moisture cling to Doc’s fine-textured bronze skin.

  This was but another of the strange things about this unusual metallic giant of a man.

  Near by stood a Park policeman. The officer was goggling at the spiraling plane. He had seen the baseball-sized bomb drop. He had witnessed the upheaval of queer gray smoke.

  The cop was trying to think what to do about it! Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  The officer fingered the grip of his revolver. Then the revolver was spirited from under his fingers. He had heard no one come near. Wildly, he turned.

  Even as he spun, the revolver banged itself empty of cartridges. The shots came so rapidly as to be a single thunderous whurr-r-ram!

  The circling seaplane gave a wild lurch. A wing sank. It nearly crashed. The pilot was wounded. But he fought the ship to an even keel. The plane scudded away like a shot-splattered duck.

  The policeman suddenly found his warm, smoking gun back in his hand. He had a dizzy vision of a great bronze form in dripping clothes. He even noted the bronze man’s face and hair seemed perfectly dry, although his clothing was saturated.

  Then the giant was gone into the shrubbery. And there was no sound to show from whence he had come, or where he had betaken himself.

  The cop looked into the bushes and saw nobody. He gulped a time or two and wiped sweat off his brow.

  "Goshamighty!" he managed to croak at last.

  * * *

  AT the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park, Doc Savage got into a taxicab. It hurried him southward. Before a towering, gleaming spike of brick and steel, the machine let him out. Streets here were walled by buildings so tall the sunlight only reached the sidewalks at high noon.

  An elevator raced Doc up to the eighty-sixth floor. He entered a sumptuously furnished reception room. No one was there. He went to the next room. This was a library, a chamber which contained thousands of the finest technical tomes.

  Into another and much larger room, Doc went. This was
the laboratory. Marble and glass-topped work tables were everywhere. Scores of huge steel-and-glass cases held chemicals, rare metals, test tubes, siphons, mortars, retorts, tubing and apparatus of which only Doc knew the use. No one was there.

  This laboratory was exceeded for completeness by only one on earth — the one which Jerome Coffern had told his fellow chemists that Doc must visit to conduct his great experiments uninterrupted. Jerome Coffern’s guess had been right.

  Doc had another laboratory, vaster even than this. It was at the spot he called his "Fortress of Solitude." This was built upon a rocky island far within the arctic circle. No one but Doc knew its location. And when he was there, no word from the outside world could ever reach him. It was to his Fortress of Solitude that Doc retired periodically to study and experiment and increase his fabulous store of knowledge.

  Convinced none of his five friends had as yet arrived, Doc returned to the reception room. He stripped and donned dry clothes which he got from a cleverly concealed locker.

  Doc’s frame, stripped, was an amazing thing. He had the muscles of an Atlas. They were not knotty, but more like bundled piano wire lacquered a deep bronze color. The strength and symmetry of that great form was such as to stun an onlooker.

  Suddenly there came an interruption.

  Wham!

  The report was loud. With a rending of wood, the thick panel of the outer door caved inward, propelled by an enormous fist. That fist was composed of an ample gallon of knuckles. They looked like solid, rusty iron. And it would have taken a very big and violent mule to do as much damage to that door as they had done.

  The fist withdrew.

  A man now opened what was left of the door and came in. He was at least six feet four in height, and would weigh two fifty. The man resembled an elephant, with his sloping, gristle-heaped shoulders.

  He had a severe, puritanical face. His eyes were dark, somber and forbidding. His mouth was thin and grim and pinched together as though he disapproved of something.

  This was Colonel John Renwick. Every one called "Renny." He was honored throughout the world for his accomplishments as a civil engineer.

  Renny looked like he was coming to a funeral. Actually, he was literally rolling in joy. His popping out the panel of the door showed that. It was a trick Renny did when he felt good. And the better he felt, the more sour he looked.

  "Where’s this trouble you was tellin’ Monk about?" he asked Doc.

  Doc Savage chuckled. "It’ll keep until the others get here. I’ll tell you all together."

  * * *

  SOON two men could be heard haranguing each other loudly in the corridor.

  "You can’t tell me nothing about electronic refraction, you skinny galoot!" shouted a belligerent voice. "Electricity is my business!"

  "I don’t give a snap if it is!" retorted another voice. "I’m telling you what I read about electronic refraction. I know what I read, and it was in an article you wrote. You made a mistake — "

  There was a loud slamming noise. A man came flying into the room, propelled by a vigorous toe.

  This man was tall and gaunt, with a half-starved look. His shoulders were like a clothes hanger under his coat.

  He was William Harper Littlejohn. The year before, he had won a coveted international medal for his work in archaeology.

  "What’s the trouble now, Johnny?" Doc inquired.

  Johnny got up from the floor, laughing.

  "Long Tom wrote an article for a technical magazine and he made a mistake any ten-year-old kid could catch," Johnny chuckled. "He hasn’t seen the article since it got in print, and he won’t believe me."

  Snorting loudly, an undersized, slender man came in from the corridor. He had a complexion that was none too healthy. His hair was pale, his eyes a faded blue. He looked like a physical weakling. He wasn’t, though. It had taken a lusty kick to propel Johnny inside.

  The undersized man was Major Thomas J. Roberts on the official records, but Long Tom to everybody else. He had done electrical experiments with Steinmetz and Edison. He was a wizard with the juice.

  "Where’s Ham and Monk?" Long Tom asked. "And where’s this trouble? I’m gonna tear an arm off Johnny if I don’t get some excitement pretty quick."

  "Here comes Ham," Doc offered.

  Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks now appeared. He was a waspish, swift-moving, slender man. Of all the lawyers Harvard had sent forth from its legal department, it was most proud of Ham. He was an amazingly quick-witted man.

  Ham’s dress was the ultra in sartorial perfection. Not that he was flashily clad, for he had too good taste for that. But he had certainly given his attire a lot of attention.

  Ham carried a black, severe-looking cane with a gold band. This was in reality a sword cane, a blade of keenest Damascus steel sheathed within the black metal tube.

  Ham also was eager for action.

  They waited for Monk to appear.

  Monk was the fifth of Doc’s friends. He had a penthouse chemical laboratory and living quarters downtown, near Wall Street. He should have arrived by now.

  They were remarkable men, these adventurers. A lesser man than Doc Savage could never have held their allegiance. But to Doc, they gave their absolute loyalty. For Doc was a greater engineer than Renny, a more learned archaeologist than Johnny, an electrical wizard exceeding even Long Tom, a more astute man of law than Ham, and he could teach Monk things about chemistry. Too, each of the five owed his life to Doc, thanks to some feat of the bronze man on the field of battle, or the magic of Doc’s surgery.

  As time passed, they began to exchange uneasy glances.

  "Now I wonder what has happened to that ugly ape, Monk?" Ham muttered.

  Doc called Monk’s downtown penthouse place. Monk’s secretary — she was one of the prettiest secretaries in New York City — informed him that Monk had left some time ago.

  Doc hung up.

  "I’m afraid, brothers, that Kar has got his hands on Monk," he said slowly.

  * * *

  Chapter 7. THE UNDERWATER LAIR

  DOC was right.

  Monk wasted little time after receiving Doc’s call. He shucked off his rubber work apron. He had a chest fully as thick as it was wide. He put on a coat especially tailored with extra long sleeves. Monk’s arms, thick as kegs, were six inches longer than his legs. Only five feet and a half in height, Monk weighed two hundred and sixty pounds.

  His little eyes twinkled like stars in their pits of gristle as he gave his secretary a few orders about his correspondence. Monk knew he might be away six months — or only an hour.

  An elevator hurried him down from his penthouse establishment. The elevator operator and the clerk at the cigar stand both grinned widely at the homely Monk. They admired and liked him.

  Each carried a pocket piece presented by Monk. These were silver half dollars which Monk had folded in the middle with his huge, hairy, bare hands.

  Monk purchased a can of smoking tobacco and a book of cigarette papers. He rolled his own. Then he left the building.

  He headed for a near-by subway. The subways offer the quickest, most traffic free transportation in New York City.

  A slender, sallow-skinned weasel of a man fell in behind Monk. The fellow was foppishly clad. He kept a hand in a coat pocket.

  Monk’s forehead was so low as to be practically nonexistent. This characteristic is popularly supposed to denote stupidity. It didn’t in Monk. He was a highly intelligent man.

  Monk’s sharp eyes noted the foppish man trailing him. He saw the weasel-like fellow’s reflection in a plate-glass window of a store.

  Monk stopped sharply. His monster hand whipped back. It grasped the knot which the weasel man’s claw made in his coat pocket. Monk twisted. The weasel man’s coat tore half off. Skin was crushed from his hand. And Monk got the long-barreled revolver which the fellow had been holding in the pocket.

  The foppish man staggered into a deserted entryway, propelled by a hirsute paw. Monk
crowded against him and held him there.

  Both Monk’s great hands gripped the revolver barrel. They exerted terrific force. Slowly, the barrel bent until it was like a hairpin.

  Monk gave the weasel man back his gun.

  "Now you can shoot!" he rumbled pleasantly. "Maybe the bullet will turn around and hit the guy it oughta hit!"

  Monk was something of a practical jokester.

  The weasel man threw down his useless weapon. He tried to escape. He was helpless in the clutch of this human gorilla.

  "Guess I’ll take you along and let Doc Savage talk to you," Monk said amiably.

  Monk hauled his prisoner out onto the walk.

  "Hold it, you missin’ link!" snarled a coarse voice.

  Monk started and stared at the curb.

  A sedan had pulled up there. Four villainous looking men occupied it. They had automatic pistols and submachine guns pointed at Monk.

  "Get in here!" rasped one of them.

  * * *

  MONK could do two things. He could put up a fight — and certainly get shot. Or he could enter the car.

  He got in the sedan.

  The instant Monk was seated in the machine, manacles were clicked upon his arms and legs. Not one pair — but three! His captors were prepared to cope with Monk’s vast strength.

  Monk began to wish he had taken his chances in a fight.

  The sedan wended through traffic. It passed a couple of cops. Monk kept silent. To shout an alarm would have meant the death of those policemen, as well as his own finish. Monk knew men. This was a crew of killers which had him.

  The weasel man whose gun Monk had bent was in the car. He cursed the big prisoner and kicked him. Monk said nothing. He did not resist. But he marked the weasel man for a neck-wringing if the opportunity presented.

  Rolling on a less used street, the sedan reached the water front. The district was one of rotting piers and disused warehouses on the East River.

  The motor of an airplane could be heard out on the river.

  The sedan halted. Monk was yanked out.