Next to the skysc.r.a.per laboratory was a vast library. It contained thousands of bulky scientific tomes. Doc and his men crossed it swiftly, went out into the corridor, and took the superspeed elevator downward.
Doc used the roadster for their journey.
DOC did not raise the roadster top. He seemed impervious to the bitter nip of the blizzard as he raced the car northward.
Monk and Ham sat beside the bronze man and shivered. They had donned overcoats. They turned the collars up around their ears. Their teeth clicked like a Spanish dancer"s castanets.
They did not suggest that Doc put up the roadster top. They knew why it was down. Doc preferred it thus, that he might more readily detect any danger which threatened. When using taxicabs, Doc usually rode the running board for the same reason that he was now keeping the roadster top down.
Between shivers, Monk and Ham wondered how Doc was going to locate Renny and Long Tom. Ordinarily, the television apparatus would have shown such landmarks as the sedan had pa.s.sed. But the blizzard had hidden the marks.
Doc solved the problem in simple fashion.
The tiny television transmitter in the sedan was still operating. From a compartment in the rear of the roadster, Doc produced a directional radio receiver. By manipulating the loop aerial of this, it was possible to get a line on the whereabouts of the sedan.
"You take the radio bearings," Doc directed Ham.
"It"s almost due north and south," Ham reported.
"That means the car is to the north," Doc decided. "A line to the south would run into the ocean. The girl told him to drive toward Westchester, anyway."
The roadster made only a great sucking sound as it whirled through the night. Monk and Ham crouched behind the windshield, avoiding snowflakes that stung like shot.
"My golly," Monk said in a tiny, shivery voice, "winter has sure come with a bang."Ham gave Monk a black scowl.
"Any one could tell, you would be more at home in a tropical jungle!" he snapped.
Monk glared at him. He knew the statement was Ham"s subtle way of saying he looked like a jungle monkey.
But it was too cold for an argument.
They crossed one of the many bridges which connect Manhattan Island with the New York mainland. The roadster swooped on to the northward.
With cold-blued fingers, Ham took frequent radio bearings. Doc changed the course of the roadster as the bearings altered. Eventually they rolled upon a country road.
Cold snow had heaped into the roadster seat and was inches deep on the floor boards. Their breaths became wind-torn plumes of steam.
Much to the discomfort of Ham, Monk bounced violently up and down in the seat at frequent intervals, claiming he had to do so to keep from freezing to death.
"The sedan is right around here somewhere," Ham reported. "The signal is very loud."
They pa.s.sed a large yard. In it stood evergreen trees and a ramshackle house. Doc seemed to pay the place no particular attention. But driving on no more than a hundred yards, he skidded the roadster to a stop at the side of the thoroughfare.
His sharp eyes had noticed the sedan standing among the evergreens in the yard.
THE house was extremely old. It must have been constructed long before Civil War days. Not only were shingles off the roof and paint weathered from the sides, but great cracks gaped in it. Through these the blizzard whistled like steam calliopes.
Inside, there was ruin. Plaster had fallen from the walls. Pilferers had torn boards from the floor, no doubt to use as firewood. The wind, coming in through the cracks, scooped up gray plaster dust and mingled it with the white of the snow.
The cold was biting.
Renny"s big fists were tied cruelly together with many turns of wire. To shake one he had to shake them both.
He did this now.
"You"re lettin" us freeze!" he thundered angrily.
"T" h.e.l.l with you!" growled the man. "And if you don"t stop squawking, I"m going to warm you up with some lead!"
Long Tom sat in the opposite corner. The unhealthy-looking electrical wizard seemed to be a man who would suffer greatly from the cold. The chill was not bothering him, however. Long Tom was keeping warm with his own rage. His usually pale face was ruddy.
"What"s the idea of holding us?" he demanded.
"Have we got to go over that again?" growled one of the captors. "We"re keeping you here in case Doc Savage tries to get funny. If he makes a pa.s.s at us we might cut off your ears and mail "em to him. That should make him stop and think."
Long Tom and Renny traded sober looks. Their captor was not joking with them.
The girl in the marvelous golden evening gown was nowhere about. Nor were Velvet and Biff present. The two men had departed some time ago, taking the girl with them. As to where they had gone, Long Tom and Renny had no idea."Are you fellows from South America?" Renny boomed at one of their hosts.
"No," said the man, "we"re hometown boys. Velvet and Biff are from South America, though. They just hired us-"
"Gonna blab your head off, eh?" interrupted another man.
The fellow who had started to give information fell silent, much to Renny"s disgust.
"Who is The Little White Brother?" Renny asked.
No one answered. The men slouched about in att.i.tudes of unconcern. But it was noticeable that their eyes rolled uneasily.
Renny tried a random stab. "I betcha we have an earthquake before long."
Again no one replied, but the words had a marked effect. The men looked somewhat uncomfortable.
"You know quite a bit, don"t you?" sneered one.
"Not as much as we"ll know before we"re done," said an entirely new voice. The tone was shrill, quarrelsome.
The men looked about wildly. They could see no new arrival.
"Over this way, boys," said the voice. "In the window!"
Every eye leveled upon the window. Jaws fell. Bewildered gasps caused plumes of steam to dribble through their teeth.
This was a second-floor room. Outside the window was only a swirling maelstrom of snow.
AT the first note of the strange voice, Long Tom and Renny had glanced at the window. They had thought it was coming from there. But they had seen nothing. Then they had realized the truth. They waited, faces suddenly eager, expectant.
The door into the ramshackle hallway was partially ajar. The figure of a giant man appeared in the aperture.
He might have been a cloud of bronze-hued smoke for all the sound he made. He hurtled across the floor.
The men staring at the window did not yet realize it was the voice of a master ventriloquist which they had heard. Not one in the group was aware of Doc"s presence.
Doc reached the first of the gang. One of his hands drifted out and up. He seemed merely to caress the back of the man"s neck. The ligaments on the hands of the bronze man stood out like drawn steel.
The man Doc had touched gave a violent twitch. Then he fell to the floor. Something unearthly and horrible seemed to have happened to him. His body was in the grip of a strange paralysis. His arms and legs projected stiffly.
He hit the floor like a wooden man. His limbs remained rigid, sticking up at grotesque angles.
The noise of his fall aroused the other men. They whirled. Then they yelled, and grabbed for their guns.
Two of them were either more brave or less wise than their companions. They tried to seize Doc with their bare hands. Headlong, they pitched at him.
Doc Savage couched as if to anchor himself more firmly on the floor. His hands grasped with a blinding speed-one hand for the head of each man. The thewed bronze fingers found their mark.
With apparent ease, Doc knocked their heads together. He exerted just sufficient force to produce unconsciousness. The men dropped.Things were happening with a blinding speed. The other men had not yet succeeded in drawing their revolvers. They leaped wildly aside as Doc charged. This caused them to collide with each other.
After that, a tornado seemed to seize upon the gang. They slugged, kicked. Yells and groans flew out of the vortex.
Doc Savage was a kernel in that human maelstrom.
Monk"s apish figure appeared abruptly in the door. He emitted a blood-curdling howl, and sprang into the fray.
The homely chemist"s voice was ordinarily mild, childlike. But he liked lots of noise with his fights.
"Ye-o-ow!" he howled. "Save some of "em for me, Doc!"
Ham came through the door behind Monk, rapping: "Get out of the way, you missing link! Let somebody fight that wants to fight!"
Ham was flourishing his sword cane. The blade no longer looked innocent-it was a bared, glittering thorn of steel. On the needlelike tip was a mysterious, sticky substance.
Ham made a pa.s.s at the nearest enemy. He made no effort to run the fellow through with his sword cane.
Instead, he barely p.r.i.c.ked the man.
The man Ham had p.r.i.c.ked seemed to go to sleep on his feet. He fell over backward.
Ham"s sword cane was tipped with a drug which produced instant unconsciousness-a sleep which would last an hour or more.
Possibly a minute of thundering action followed. When it ended, Doc and his men were blowing on their knuckles. Draped on the floor were all of their foes-seven rather evil-looking gentry.
DOC bent over Renny. The wire which secured the engineer"s enormous fists was thick. It had been tightened with pincers. Doc"s powerful fingers tore it away easily.
Moving to Long Tom, Doc freed him likewise.
"I overheard some of the talk here," he said. "It told me why they were holding you. But where is the girl in the gold dress?"
"Velvet and Biff took her away," Renny explained.
"Where to?" Doc questioned.
"I haven"t the slightest idea," Renny replied.
"And what about John Acre?" Doc persisted.
Renny shook his head. "I heard Velvet and Biff tell the girl that they had seized John Acre, but we never saw a sign of him."
The men on the floor began to stir with returning consciousness. Doc"s men began searching them rapidly, removing such weapons as they could find. Ham"s victim, of course, still slept.
Doc himself went to the man who had become so rigid at the touch of his fingers. The peculiar stiffness had been brought about by an unusual ability which Doc had perfected.
In the course of his surgical research, Doc had learned how to apply pressure upon certain nerve centers so as to induce a paralysis. By readjusting the same nerve centers he could banish the paralysis.
He did this now. At the touch of the metallic fingers, the victim recovered use of his limbs.Doc lined the prisoners up along the wall.
"They look like a cop"s nightmare," he remarked.
Monk blew on his hairy fists, and made ferocious faces. "Do we make "em talk, Doc?" he asked.
Doc turned slowly, as if eyeing the walls of the room. Only his four friends caught the slight flicker which one of his eyelids gave. He wheeled back.
"We"ll have to waste a lot of time to make "em talk," he said. "They"re not worth that."
From inside his clothing, Doc produced a small case. This disgorged a hypodermic needle. He walked to one of the prisoners and jabbed the needle into the fellow.
The man fell heavily to the floor.
Doc gave another jab. Another one also toppled.
"What are you doing?" yelled one of the survivors in a frightened voice.
Doc pointed his hypodermic needle dramatically at the two men he had dropped.
"Those two will never know what happened to them," he declared.
An uneasy stir swept the other captives. They changed feet. Their foreheads began to smoke in the cold air as sweat came out.
"Listen, can"t we make a deal?" one mumbled hopefully.
"No," Doc told him. "But it might help if you talked freely."