Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (4 page)

But the fantastic progress of the secret enterprise had forced Doc Savage to move it out into the open, under the guise of a scientific research laboratory. Which it was, actually.

It was here that Doc Savage consigned malefactors whom he captured in the course of his adventures. In these austere confines, they were submitted to a singular course of rehabilitation.

First, their brains were operated upon by surgeons trained in the delicate process. This accomplished two things. It wiped out all memory of their past criminal lives, eradicating their memories even going back to earliest childhood. In the course of this, a gland Doc had discovered to be defective in those who were criminally disposed was operated upon and corrected.

This, too, served to eradicate all tendencies toward crime.

Once the prisoners recovered from this process, they were given new names and set upon a course of reeducation, which included good moral reinforcement, and taught a new trade. After that, they were released back into society to take their rightful place.

This would be the fate of the captured swindler they were now conveying to the institution.

There was a small airfield. This and the frequent visitations by private ambulances carrying the prisoners to the secret place were among the reasons for the recent renovations.

“There is no mooring tower,” Ham noticed.

“Let me take over,” squeaked Monk, shouldering the dapper lawyer aside. “Doc taught me how to moor this pocket Zeppelin when there ain’t no tower at hand.”

Reversing the engines with a smack of the throttle, the hairy chemist brought the airship to a shuddering stop. It began drifting.

Releasing ballast in the form of a heavy gas, Monk dropped the craft. It settled quietly. To any distant observer, it would look like an Army blimp on maneuvers.

Paying out the grappling hook, Monk snagged trees, then pulled on the guy-wire control, bringing the ship to a bobbing halt.

Ham looked out the windshield and side inspection ports, frowned.

“How the deuce do we get down?” he wondered.

“Ropes,” said Monk, kicking open the hatch and throwing out heavy lines suitable for climbing down.

“My clothes will be ruined!” Ham exploded. The wasp-waisted lawyer was fussy about his attire. A legend surrounding his taste in clothes had it that tailors sometimes followed Ham down the street just to see fine garments being worn as they should be worn.

“Or you can jump,” Monk suggested amiably.

Ham let Monk go first, and observed the hairy chemist scrambling with the long-armed agility of an orangutan, into the trees, and then to the ground.

He peered around the cabin, seeking an alternative.

There was a parachute, but their present height was insufficient for its safe use.

Finally, the fastidious attorney shinnied down the rope and managed to work his way down to the ground, ripping only a coat sleeve.

When he was on the ground at last, Ham waved his dark cane as if he wanted to thrash Monk about the face with it.

“I have ruined another fine coat because of you!”

“You should start dressin’ properly for our little expeditions,” Monk told him innocently.

Ham looked up. “How are we going to get our prisoner to the ground?”

“Watch this,” said Monk.

Reaching up into a lower branch, the apish chemist grasped the heavy wire that ended in the collapsible grapnel.

With his mighty shoulders heaving, Monk began hauling in the dirigible closer and closer to the ground.

“Why didn’t you do that the first time!” Ham flared.

Monk grinned. “I been hankerin’ for some exercise. Come to think of it, you could stand some, too.”

While Monk held the airship close to the ground, Ham reentered, and pushed the prisoner out unceremoniously.

Releasing the airship, Monk hefted the limp man across one burly shoulder and bore him toward the grim gray buildings.

“I never like visitin’ this place,” Monk muttered.

“It might do you some good if you were to spend time here, having your monkey brains cleaned out and straightening up your ridiculous baboon behavior!” snapped Ham.

They were within the inner perimeter, within sight of the electrical fence. Towering evergreens dotted the landscape. Many had knotholes. These concealed television cameras that were monitored by technicians in the log lodge.

Certain arrangements of stone, not recognizable except to those familiar with the glyphs comprising the Mayan language, warned of concealed pits and bear-traps that could snag a man’s ankles with steely mechanical jaws.

They skirted these, finally coming safely to the main building.

Armed guards met them, and they were permitted to enter.

“Got us another patient,” Monk announced.

“Yes,” added Ham waspishly. “And Monk has one, too.”

A voice that was remarkable in his modulation asked, “Did you bring the telegram?”

It was the unmistakable voice of Doc Savage.

Chapter III

THE FOREBODING

GULLIVER GREENE MOVED over and stood with his back to the one wall of the filling station which had no window. He kept the piece of the telegram in his hands and eyed it several times, chewing his lower lip thoughtfully. Globules of perspiration came out on his face and skidded over the greasy skin. Twice, he shook his head violently.

Gull gave up. There was no way he could make sense out of it. He swung to the telephone, intending to call the town marshal at La Plata and the State Highway Patrol in Macon, the larger town to the south. The mysterious runt and his men had gone in that direction and might be headed off by the police.

The telephone was an old-fashioned country instrument with a crank, and he sensed from the easy way the crank spun that the thing was dead, even before he listened and knew.

He located the flashlight, went outside with it and the shotgun, listened for a while, then followed the telephone wire with a flashlight.

Four poles away, in the direction of town, Gull found the wire down. It had been cut.

While he was wrestling with the two ends of the wire, trying to get them to meet, someone sent a ring into the line, giving him a disquieting shock. After he swore, he jumped the grader ditch onto the road and ran down the pavement.

Half a mile brought him to the nearest neighbor who had a telephone, and while he was loping that distance, four cars passed him with their noise and lights, like rockets traveling backward. The neighbor, an agriculturist who wore overalls and chewed tobacco, offered a remark that, “I heard that old scattergun go off down there a while ago. You see a skunk?”

“A small one and five big ones,” Gull said grimly.

“Whillikers! Lots of skunks, eh?”

Gull telephoned the Missouri State Highway Patrol headquarters at Macon and told them exactly what had happened, answered all their questions truthfully.

“That was kind of a queer business,” the officer suggested.

“You’re telling me!”

“You stick around there,” the patrolman directed. “This is a little worse than you thought, I’m afraid. We’ll want to question you.”

Gull frowned at the telephone, asked quickly, “What do you mean—worse than I thought?”

“Never mind. You just be sure to stay there.”

Gull made two thoughtful passes with the receiver before he got it on the hook. He hadn’t cared for that last remark.

AFTER hanging up, Gull stood at the telephone, rubbing his jaw absently and wondering just what the officer meant. A possible explanation occurred to him, and it was not cheering—in his newspaper reading, he had gathered the opinion that the police frequently “held the man for questioning,” which actually meant that they kept the fellow in jail.

Suppose they suspected The Great Gulliver of something criminal? Suppose they— “This is a little worse than you thought, I’m afraid.” The officer had said that. What in the devil did he mean by that? Gull absently grasped a fistful of his oily hair and moved the scalp hide around as if trying to loosen a growing tension.

Then an idea hit him—the telegram! It must have come through the local depot operator, and they kept carbon copies of telegrams, didn’t they?

Gull quickly called the depot and asked for the operator, but got someone else who was a word hoarder. Gull requested, “Put the operator on the wire.”

“Can’t.”

“Eh? What do you mean? Where is the operator?”

“Dead.”

“What?”

The succinct voice at the depot said, “Dead. Murdered. Knife. Heart.”

“But who did it?”

“Question.”

“Well then, why was he killed? He was a nice old fellow. What reason was there for anyone harming him?”

“Mystery.”

Gull absently strained his ivory hair with his fingers, then asked the man of few words to look for the copy of the telegram. The man was a long time coming back to the phone.

“Nope.”

“You made sure it wasn’t there?”

“Yep.”

“But where would a telegram for me come, if not there?”

“Here.”

Gull repeated his earlier gesture of absently combing his cotton-hued hair with his fingers, then wiped the hand on his trousers. His mouth worked around into various thinking shapes, then straightened out grimly when he remembered the unusual three-edged knife the hound-voiced little man had carried.

“Anything peculiar about the wound that killed the telegram operator?” he asked abruptly.

“Three-cornered,” said the word-hoarder.

Gull said grimly, “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Gull broke the connection and called the State Highway Patrol at Macon for the second time.

He told the Patrol officer, “It seems the telegraph operator at La Plata has been killed by the same fellows who took the telegram from me. It begins to look as if someone tried to get the wire and also dispose of everybody who knew anything about it.”

The Patrolman said, “So I figured when you called the first time. How did you come to get the idea?”

“The runt who got most of the telegram from me carried a knife with a three-cornered blade.”

“He did, eh? Well, we’ve already got our cars watching for him and the lads with him. Now you know why we want to question you. And by the way, here’s something you might tell me now—your part of the telegram just says that Christopher Columbus is alive?”

“Right.”

“That means the discoverer of America?”

Gull frowned, put his mouth close to the transmitter and said, “This doesn’t seem to me like a joking matter.”

“No? Who said it was? Listen, you stay there. We want to talk to you about this Christopher Columbus, whether he’s the discoverer of America or not.”

Gull replaced the receiver, nibbled his lower lip, then walked into the other room, muttering vaguely to himself, “Why do things have to happen to me?”

THE NEIGHBOR, the man whose telephone Gull was using, heard this remark but got nothing out of it but puzzlement. Anyway, he had something else on his mind, it appeared, for he shifted his cud of tobacco to one side and aimed expertly at a can half full of ashes which stood beside the heating stove in lieu of a goboon. He cleaned his chin with a hooked finger.

“Me an’ the woman been sorta talking,” he got around to advising.

Gull nodded, occupied with other thoughts.

“We calculate you’re around thirty years old.”

“Close,” Gull said vaguely.

“Beats all how some gets white-haired a-fore their time, don’t it?”

“What? Oh, my hair. Yeah, I got old kind of early.” Gull started for the door.

The elderly farmer said quickly, “That Spook is a funny feller, ain’t he?”

Gull halted reluctantly. “You mean Drury Davis?”

“Yep. Spook Davis looks just like you, don’t he?”

“Just exactly,” Gull agreed, trying, out of common courtesy, not to seem too undesirous of talking.

“But for his carroty hair, he might be your twin.”

“He isn’t,” Gull said hastily. “No relative at all. He’s just a stooge.”

“Stooge. What’s a stooge?”

“A stage assistant.”

“Drury Davis passed here going to La Plata to the movie earlier tonight, and we talked a while.” The old farmer shook his head and made a
tsk-tsk
sound with his tongue.

“That Spook is sure a liar, ain’t he?” he added.

Saying heartily, “He certainly is!” Gull managed to escape outside into the darkness.

The Great Gulliver stood for a while in the night, thinking, and the farmer’s pothound came and snuffled at his heels, after which a chicken in the hen house made one of the noises a chicken makes on a roost when another fowl pushes it. A few clouds were overheard and more clouds crowded in the east, in front of the moon. It was somewhat darker than it had been.

Gull walked back to the filling station, closed the door to keep out the bugs, and because there seemed nothing else to do, began cleaning up the mess on the floor.

The futile efforts of his mind to create some reason for what had happened caused him to become rather preoccupied; sufficiently so that he did not at once realize a sound he had heard was something clumping against the door.

A disheveled and gory young man pitched in on the floor when the door opened.

THE young man’s hair was as red as a burning brick. The remarkable thing about him—in almost every other particular, he looked exactly like Gulliver Greene.

A gash on the newcomer’s head had leaked a quantity of crimson and he reeked of whiskey smell. He blinked painfully at Gull.

“It’s a lie!” he said distinctly enough.

“Drunk!” Gull said grimly.

“That’s what I meant. That’s the lie.” The prostrate young man groaned deeply. “What you smell is one thing, and what you are looking at is an entirely different matter. What you see is the result of a young man being original.”

“Polluted!” Gull stated decisively. “Full to the gills!”

The young man on the floor felt of his head, gasped and relaxed.

“Have you a Bible?” he asked.

“No. I still would not believe you, no matter what oath you took.”