DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (20 page)

The interior of the box was lined with a glassy greenish substance Doc Savage immediately recognized as jade. It was cunningly contrived, so that when closed, it formed a waterproof and airtight seal. That explained why it had been a safe repository for the artifact that lay within.

This did not explain the artifact. It was a rounded stump of a thing, as clear as crystal, but of no clearly understandable shape.

One end tapered down to a rough surface that suggested that it had been broken off a larger piece of the same substance.

The other end was rounded, polished and appeared to have been carved. There was an outline etched into one surface near the top of the fat end. This was an incised square.

The entire thing resembled nothing so much as the big toe broken off a crystal idol of some barbaric type, the incised square, the outline of a toenail.

Having seen all that was to be seen, Doc Savage carefully closed the lid, made sure it was tight, then tucked it under one arm.

As he walked back to the clearing where his men waited, his metallic face was grave.

HAM BROOKS, LEFT to guard the prisoners, spent much of his time questioning Mark and Mary Chan.

“You say that you were on your way to see the British authorities, when Dang Mi shot down your plane?” he inquired.

Mark replied, “Yes. But we were separated.”

Mary added, “I escaped Dang Mi. In Singapore, I read of Doc Savage. This caused me to change plans. I decided that he was the man to beseech for aid—the only man in the world capable enough to smash the menace of the Buddha of Ice.”

“Jove,” exclaimed Ham. “You speak of it as if it were a devil incarnate.”

“It is an infernal Buddha,” advised Mark. “A thing of incalculable evil.”

Mary nodded energetically. “If not checked, it will ruin the world.”

“In what manner?” asked Ham, impressed in spite of himself.

He kept one eye on the pirate prisoners, but they seemed content to hunker down in a circle, jabbering among themselves.

A few produced dice and began playing what appeared to be an Asian form of craps.

“I think,” said Mark, “that we had better wait to tell the full story.”

“Yes,” added Mary. “Doc Savage should hear the full story. Then he will know what to do.”

Ham frowned thoughtfully. His dark eyes glowed with an interested light.

Doc Savage, trailed by Renny and Monk, emerged from the jungle not long after. Renny was carrying fresh clothes scavenged from the plane.

The bronze man toted the crackle-finished strongbox, which contained the thing so terrible that all the corsairs shrank from sight of it.

“They’re sure scared of whatever’s in that strongbox,” muttered Monk.

“They should be,” boomed Renny Renwick. “It’s bad!”

Doc Savage found a flat hump of stone and set the box carefully atop it.

Slowly, he began divesting himself of the stratosphere suit, starting with the spherical helmet.

Monk took this from his hands and placed it on the ground.

Together, he and Renny helped the bronze man out of the gauntlets and thick boots. The rubberized suit itself took considerably longer, owing to its sealed construction. As Doc emerged, it could be seen that the suit consisted of several layers, some for insulation against cold, others designed to repel water and other hazards.

When Doc Savage stood free of the thing, he was sweating. Oddly, his bronze hair was undisturbed. It had unusual qualities, not the least of which was a kind of natural waterproofing.

Doc padded over to Mark and Mary Chan and suggested, “It is time to hear your story in its entirety.”

“It is not a pleasant one,” Mark began.

“Nor a simple one, either,” Mary added.

Doc studied them a moment. He could see the way in which Mary Chan’s feet were arranged that they had not been bound in the traditional fashion when she was very young. This suggested that she had been raised outside of Chinese society, which is many ways still smacked of feudalism. In her dress and manner of speaking, she appeared to be rather modern, yet still touched by the East in her thinking.

“Start at the beginning,” Doc Savage suggested.

“We are the children of Wah Chan. Perhaps you have heard of him?” Mary began.

Doc nodded. “Talk out of China suggests that he is a warlord in the Manchuria region. He started out as a bandit, but is now fighting the Japanese occupiers of North China.”

“Exactly,” confirmed Mark.

“But we never knew that our father was a bandit, you see,” contradicted Mary. “For we spent our young years in Hongkong, after which we were sent away to the States to be educated. We are geologists.”

“Graduates of the Colorado School of Mines,” added Mark. “After earning our degrees, we returned to China. By that time the Japanese had come. And it was terrible.”

“Very terrible,” agreed Mary. “Our father, Wah Chan, made us stay in the city of Shanghai while he was organizing against the Japanese army. He was in Nanking and other conquered places, harrying the Japanese there.”

“But no matter how hard he fought, he and his
Hung-Hutz
band,” continued Mark Chan, “Wah Chan could not repel the occupiers. He was growing disheartened. Very.”

“Then came Tang,” said Mary.

“Tang?” asked Doc.

“A monk,” clarified Mark.

“The most evil monk you could ever imagine,” Mary elaborated. “He had been schooled in a monastery in Tibet, some said. But he was too wicked to remain a good monk. And so he was exiled.”

“They say he wandered the Gobi desert for years, living off the barren land like a yak, drinking fermented mare’s milk and growing to hate the world,” Mark offered.

Mary Chan nodded in agreement. “Something happened in the
Kara-Kum
—the Black Gobi Desert. Something strange, Mr. Savage.”

“It was said that Tang entered the desert as fat as the Buddha himself,” Mark related. “But when he came out, he was a lean, wizened devil, looking very little like the gluttonous monk who had been exiled.”

“Stick to the facts you know,” suggested Doc Savage.

“One day the monk Tang showed up in Shanghai, clutching a box of jade,” continued Mark.

“The box which contained the Buddha of Ice,” added Mary.

Doc Savage indicated the blue container. “That box?”

Mark shook his head emphatically. “No, that box is merely lined with jade. This is a different box entirely. But it contained what that box contains, only more of it.”

“That was when the Buddha of Ice was whole,” added Mary.

“Keep going,” Doc advised.

Mark did so. “The wicked monk Tang was going around boasting that he possessed a power terrible enough to drive the Japanese out of China, if only someone would ferry him up to Manchuria to bring it to bear on the occupiers.”

“We heard this wild tale, Mr. Savage,” Mary inserted. “And we investigated.”

Mark nodded. “The jade box Tang possessed was fitted with an eyelet on its lid, to which he had affixed a long cord. He would set the box down and from a safe distance, open it.”

Mary wrung her delicate ivory-hued hands. “Birds would fall dead from the sky, their bodies parched,” she said. “Dogs howled and perished of thirst on the spot. It was terrible.”

“Very terrible,” agreed Mark solemnly.

“And worse things were demonstrated,” insisted Mary. “When a criminal was taken in the town square to be beheaded, Tang offered to spare the executioner the toil of cleaning up the beheaded man’s life blood.”

“So Tang set the box before the trussed man and opened it as before,” related Mark.

Mary hissed excitedly, “The man became as a mummy—in less than a few minutes!”

“That was when the Buddha of Ice was not so powerful as it is now,” Mark finished.

The others had crowded around as the story grew protracted in the telling. They began making thirsty faces. Monk took a swig from a canteen. Possibly this was a psychological reaction to the Chans’ account.

“Go on,” encouraged Doc.

Mary took up the tale. “We contacted our father by radio. He said he would come. And he did.”

To which Mark added, “Tang and my father Wah Chan conferred over the thing in the box a day and a night. My father wanted to know what was in the box, and all that Tang would reveal was that it was a Buddha carved from a crystal unlike anything ever found on earth. He said he had unearthed it in the Gobi. But he would not say any more.”

“Our father wanted to examine the Buddha of Ice, to determine what made it so terrible,” Mary offered. “We tried to figure out a way to study it, but it could not be safely removed from the box.”

“Each time someone tried,” Mark said with quiet sincerity, “the man quickly succumbed to an awful thirst that stripped his physical form of all moisture.”

Mark and Mary Chan looked uncomfortable. It was obvious that coolie labor had been employed to test the advisability of opening the box, and those who had volunteered had perished in the manner described.

A warm breeze came off the ocean, ruffling and stirring myriad palms trees, whose crowns shook like spindly giants throwing their shaggy heads about. Insects droned lazily.

“Continue,” said Doc.

“At length, Wah Chan and Tang came to terms,” Mark recounted. “Dad would ferry the box to Manchuria. He commanded a vessel—a five-masted junk. They were to sail up the coast to bring awful destruction to the Japanese army.”

“But before this could be accomplished,” Mary added, “another party entered the bargain. A trader from America. One who spoke excellent Mandarin and Cantonese. He appeared one day in the International Settlement section of the city.”

“This man recognized the terrible potential of the Buddha in the box and attempted to buy it from my father,” Mark husked. “But father would not sell it at any price. So he tried to bribe us.”

“But we would not be bribed,” Mary said firmly.

Mark nodded. “He implored us, saying that the thing in the box would be a boon to science, and could be used to fight floods, and accomplish other needed wonders.”

“This made perfect sense to us,” Mary admitted. “And we fell upon a scheme to obtain a sample. Through his contacts, this man acquired a pair of up-to-date atmosphere suits from Russia, in the expectation that they would protect us, which they did.”

Mark hesitated. “So we… borrowed the box outright.”

“We half succeeded,” Mary corrected quickly. “During the borrowing, the Buddha fell out of the box, and was broken. We failed to get away with the Buddha, or the box.”

“But the toe became ours,” said Mark.

Doc Savage’s eerie trilling slowly saturated the surrounding air. It carried with it a flavor of the Orient, hinting at its origins stemming from a period in the bronze man’s childhood when he had been schooled by a Hindu yogi in the subtle secrets of emotional self-control.

“The toe is what lies in that box?” Doc asked.

Mark Chan nodded vigorously. “Yes. Only the toe. But you see how terrible it is.”

“There’s that word again,” rumbled Renny. “Terrible.”

“They are gonna wear it out,” growled Monk.

Mark and Mary Chan ignored the interruption. Their Eurasian features remained composed and very sincere.

Mary said, “Because the Buddha had to be sealed in its box immediately, lest it mummify others, the loss of the toe was not immediately noticed.”

“Tang and Wah Chan took the Buddha of the box and set sail for Manchuria,” continued Mark. “That is the last we have heard of it.”

“But we secretly rediscovered the toe, and managed to transfer it to another box, one equally safe to carry it,” Mary elaborated.

Mark Chan frowned. “That is the box we employed.”

“The man who lusted for the Buddha later sought to bargain with us for it,” explained Mary.

Mark nodded in agreement. “But we would not bargain. This man then offered to back us financially, the better to conduct our experiments.”

“We considered this,” admitted Mary Chan. She colored slightly, skin blushing a sun-burnished ivory.

As if connected, Mary’s twin brother also acquired a slightly abashed facial hue.

“But we would not surrender the box, or what it contained,” said Mark. “So a bargain was struck. Our backer furnished us with an aircraft, with which we would fly the box safely out of China.”

“We agreed to rendezvous with this individual, at a certain place at a specific time, in the United States,” elaborated Mary.

“But in truth, we wished to carry the box to the west, where the best scientists could study it and unlock its secrets.”

A look of fear came over Mary’s ivory features. “Then came the trouble, when Chino-Japanese tensions reached a high point after the student anti-Japanese riots and the other unfortunate incidents that brought Japanese Marines onto the streets of Shanghai patrolling in their steel helmets with fixed bayonets.”

“We fled China at that point,” said Mark. “That was when we sought the counsel of the British authorities, only to be captured by Dang Mi and his cut-throats. Fortunately, Mary managed to escape and came upon your assistant, Mr. Renwick.”

“In the confusion of Shanghai,” Mary moaned, “we lost track of our supposed benefactor.”

“Who is the man who attempted these thefts?” asked Doc Savage.

“A fat man,” said Mary.

“A very fat man,” agreed Mark.

Mary nodded solemnly. “His name is Startell Pompman.”

“Blazes!” howled Monk. “That windbag ties into this after all.”

Ham eyed Doc Savage. “But you knew that all along, didn’t you?”

Doc nodded. “It was too coincidental that Pompman should show up at our headquarters at the same time that the boxed mummy arrived from Singapore. A tie-up seemed likely.”

“So where is that windy stargazer?” Renny demanded.

“We will endeavor to locate him at once,” Doc Savage said firmly. “Once that is accomplished, we are flying to China.”

“For what?” wondered Monk.

Doc Savage’s voice took on a level quality. “The Buddha of Ice must not be allowed to operate unchecked. It is far too dangerous to remain in a warlord’s hands. We must find it and seize it, and if possible discover some way to destroy it.”