Doc Savage - 089 - The Magic Island, page 23
The Magic Island
(former title: Ost)
By Kenneth Robeson
Published August 1937
Doc Savage Magazine #54
by Street & Smith Publications
Actual author: Lester Dent
A fabulous city floats like a cloud over the Pacific Ocean, and those who witness it gain superhuman powers. Doc and crew trail a crime kingpin and cunning heiress to the impassable mountains of Papua New Guinea and the ancient secret of Ost. ******
DOC SAVAGE--"The Man of Bronze"--A remarkable personage who follows an unusual profession--righting wrongs and punishing evildoers. He is a mental wizard, a physical marvel, a skilled scientist. He is assisted in this adventure by his little group of companions, including:
HAM--Whose real name is Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks. Ham is one of the nation's leading lawyers, a fashion-plate, a fast thinker and a clever fighter. Often he fights with a specially devised sword-cane, tipped with a drug which puts his opponents into a quick sleep. For pastime he brawls with
MONK--At least that's what he's called, for he's a homely, hairy man with a 260-pound gorilla body. Yet Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, his real name, is regarded as one of the greatest living chemists, and as a fighter is only equalled by Doc himself and by
RENNY--Or Colonel John Renwick, to name him correctly, a giant of a man over six feet tall and tipping the beam at two hundred. Renny is an accomplished engineer, and he can fight like blazes with his great fists. He's an entirely different type from
LONG TOM--Who isn't tall as his nickname might indicate, but small in stature and unhealthy looking--although his health is really excellent; perfect, in fact. This man, Thomas J. Roberts he was christened, is such a skilled electrical expert that the world knows him pretty generally as "the wizard of the juice."
JOHNNY--Or William Harper Littlejohn, very tall, very gaunt. Johnny wore glasses with a peculiarly thick lens over the left eye. He looked like a half-starved, studious scientist. He was probably one of the greatest living experts on geology and archaeology.
Table of Contents
I THE CITY THAT WAS NOT THERE
II THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
III THE SAILOR WHO COULD NOT SWIM
IV THE HIDING PLACE
V THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
VI THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
VII THE BRONZE MAN
VIII MURDER VICTIM
IX THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
X SEA TRAIL
XI THE WATCHFUL WAIT
XII ADRIFT
XIII THE SUMMONING VISION
XIV THE STINGING BREATH
XV THE OTHER WHITE MAN
XVI THE THIRD VICTIM
XVII GOA
XVIII SIEGE
XIX THE REST OF THE VICTIMS
XX PAYMENT IN DEATH
XXI THE TRAP
I
THE CITY THAT WAS NOT THERE
IT was remarkable that anything Ben Brasken did should astound the world.
Ben Brasken was what is sometimes called "a poor fish." This had no connection with his being a sailor. He was meek, abused, and did not have many manly qualities of the hairy-chested kind. He was short. He was thin. He had never won a fight, although he had had several. He was as poor as a church mouse, and somewhat resembled one. Not that he went to church. They did not have a church on the Benny Boston. All they had was grease, heat, smell, hard work and a hard skipper and a first mate with bucko leanings.
Ben Brasken had one quality. It was this one thing that got him into all his trouble. And got some other people into theirs. Which also caused some heads to turn gray, and a few people to die.
To say nothing of the incredible chain of things it started happening.
A dreamer, this Ben Brasken. Not a student. Not a wise man. He read a lot, though. Most of his reading was simple stuff about heroes who were everything Ben Brasken was not. None of it was deep. What he read went in one eye and out the other. At any rate, he was kind of a dumb cluck.
Most of the time, he dreamed. He would stop and lean on his shovel and go off in reveries until somebody threw a chunk of coal at him. Ben Brasken was a fireman on the Benny Boston. The Benny Boston was a small tramp freighter, nearly as old as Ben Brasken, who was not a young man any more. It was a wonder the Benny Boston got by the inspectors.
Ben Brasken's dreams worried nobody but his employers, and didn't worry them much, because Ben Brasken wasn't worth worrying about. He was paid his not-very-good keep--a hammock in the creaking fo'c's'le, and a few of Uncle Sam's dollars each month, a very few.
Not that Ben Brasken was what is variously called a goop, a nut, bats in his belfry, or strange. Not a bit of it. Ben Brasken was just a poor failure of a sailor man who got his joy out of life by standing around, or going off in some corner where he was alone, and dreaming. They were light, harmless little dreams about Rolls Royces, penthouses, mints of money, and pretty girls. Just things he had seen in the movies.
An understanding of Ben Brasken, the kind of sailor man he was, is necessary to understand the fantastic things he started happening.
SOON after Ben Brasken shipped for his first voyage on the sea-going coffin, Benny Boston, he knew something was wrong.
The other sailors. They stood around in knots. When Ben Brasken, who was a sociable mouse in a quiet way, came up to them, they would stop talking and split up. They had a secret among them, and didn't want to share it.
Rough seas, a stinking tub of a ship, and hard work are wonderful ice-breakers where conversation is concerned, though. On the eleventh day out of San Francisco, destination New Guinea and other South Seas islands, a sailor told Ben Brasken what was what. The sailor had just polished off a pint he had smuggled aboard in San Francisco, but that was of no importance.
In truth, Ben Brasken did not give the story the credence he should have. He thought it was a little goofy.
"Say, what's the big secret around here?" Ben Brasken asked.
You see, his conversation was perfectly rational.
"Ah, it's somethin' most of us figure we saw on the last voyage," explained the sailor. "The skipper got mad and said he'd beach any sailor he caught talkin' about it. The skipper thinks he's got dignity. He don't want to get to be known as one of these captains who sight sea monsters.
"Everybody knows there ain't no sea monsters. Anybody who says he seen one is either a liar or tryin' to get his name in the papers, the skipper claims. See how it is? The old man don't want people to start laughin' at his boat."
Ben Brasken was naturally interested. "What did you see?"
The sailor squinted one eye and sucked his upper teeth. "I ain't sayin' we saw anythin'. It's what we thought we saw. It was a city."
"A city?"
"Yeah. It was at sea, at night. It was as dark as hell, and everybody knows you can't see anythin' when it is dark. But these buildin's in this city was there plain as could be. They showed up kinda like the stuff on the kind of watches you can tell time by in the dark."
"A mirage," said Ben Brasken.
"Huh?"
"A mirage. You see 'em in the deserts, and sometimes at sea."
"It was dark."
"Oh! Then it must have been phosphorescence in the water. You see a lot of that in the South Seas."
"This city was kinda up in the sky."
Ben Brasken scratched his head. He was baffled. "Where was this?"
"Two hundred miles off the New Guinea coast."
"That was kinda queer, wasn't it?" Ben Brasken said, after a minute. "How do you explain it?"
"Well, the skipper said it must be somebody on another boat throwin' a magic-lantern picture on a cloud. He said they use powerful magic lanterns and throw advertising pictures and stuff on clouds in New York and places like that."
"Of course!" exclaimed Ben Brasken. "That explains it."
The other snorted. "It don't explain how we all knew the name of the city was ."
"You what?"
"Everybody who saw the city knew it was called . Don't ask me how. We can't figure it out. Yet somehow, every man knew it was Ost."
"That's funny."
"It get still funnier when you know there ain't no city named ."
"There ain't?"
"No, there ain't. We looked on all the charts."
Ben Brasken was not without a sense of humor. He did not believe in such spooky tales. He was sure fortune tellers were fakes, mediums were hoodoos, and anybody who believed in spiritualism was only kidding himself. So Ben Brasken burst out laughing.
"How'd you like a bust in the snoot?" growled the other, offended.
That put an end to it.
Until, of course, Ben Brasken disappeared at sea.
WHEN Ben Brasken was missed, and the cry, "Man overboard!" rang through the ancient Benny Boston, it was too late for there to be any hope.
Anyway, every one aboard was in something of a dither, because the glowing city in the sky had been seen again. The watch below, loitering on the murky foredeck, discovered it first.
A sailor ran to get the skipper, whose name was Captain Smooth, a name, incidentally, which did not fit him.
The sailor met Ben Brasken in a companionway, and shouted, "We're seein' that thing again!"
"I know it," Ben Brasken replied. "I am on my way there now."
That was the last they saw of Ben Brasken on that voyage. A rain squall hit the old steamer a few minutes later, and while a rain squall is nothing to a good ocean freighter, when one blew down on the Benny Boston, things had to be watched. All hands were busy for a while, and they stopped seeing the city.
They missed Ben Brasken. They searched the fo'c's'le, the other places where he might logically be, and didn't find him.
The sailor who had met Ben Brasken on the companion got to thinking.
"He said he was on his way there," the seaman muttered. "Holy ladders! I wonder if he meant he was on his way to that city? I thought he meant he was headed for the deck to have a look."
Captain Smooth ordered the Benny Boston hove to. They laid there the rest of the night, the vessel rolling, and some of the men became seasick. Yes, sailors get seasick.
The day dawned bright and clear. There was no city in sight. There was just a lot of ocean.
They did not find poor Ben Brasken.
They sailed on to Melbourne, Australia, which was as far as they went. In Melbourne, the story got out, and the newspapers ate it up. Captain Smooth got a cable from his owners telling him to cut out such idiocy.
When they returned to San Francisco, some enterprising reporters got the first mate tight, and the front pages carried his remarks.
Captain Smooth was carpeted, the Benny Boston got a new first mate, and became an old-fashioned hell-ship on the leg back to Melbourne. It helped a little when they didn't see the strange city.
But they saw the city when three hundred miles off the New Guinea coast, enroute back to San Francisco.
And they found Ben Brasken climbing aboard the Benny Boston in the open sea, carrying an iron block.
BEN BRASKEN hauled himself over the rail, and stood, clothes leaking water, holding his piece of iron. The rope up which he had climbed was a line which trailed overside and down into the water.
The first two sailors to see Ben Brasken lit out running, reached the fo'c's'le, and didn't say a word. They thought they had seen a ghost.
And why not? Ben Brasken had vanished quite some time ago in the open sea, and here he was climbing aboard again! On the face of the thing, it was absolutely impossible.
Captain Smooth, when Ben Brasken was brought before him, took three fingers of rum in a water glass, although he was not a drinking man. Before he said a word, Captain Smooth looked for a long time at the sailor who had done the impossible.
A different Ben Brasken stood before him, yet it was the same man, or a shadow of the same man.
Ben Brasken was emaciated, so thin that the shape of his teeth actually showed under his cheeks and lips when his mouth was closed. His eyes were burning coals.
Water ran off him and made a pool on the old rug in the captain's cabin.
Captain Smooth looked at Ben Brasken's piece of iron.
The piece of iron was less than a foot long, less than half that wide, a little less thick than it was wide, and had a kind of handle fastened to one flat side. The other flat side was smooth.
In general, it was rather like an oversize flatiron of the old-fashioned kind that had to be heated on the cookstove. Except that it had squarish ends.
When Captain Smooth got a voice, he pointed at the iron and asked, "What's that?"
"An ordinary piece of iron," Ben Brasken replied hollowly. "But it was touched with the magic of the mighty Goa, and so with this key I was able to walk through the mouth of the cave into ."
Captain Smooth swallowed two or three times and squinted at Ben Brasken.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
"," Ben Brasken said. "I just told you."
"How did you get there?"
"I swam."
"How did you get back?"
"I swam."
"What did you find there, Ben Brasken?"
Ben Brasken shut his eyes and seemed to be thinking.
"I believe," he said grimly, "the main thing I found was the awful terror."
CAPTAIN SMOOTH sat back, relaxed, and tried to look as gentle as he could. He was suddenly convinced that he was dealing with a demented man.
"What is ?" Captain Smooth asked quietly. "We'd like to know all about your experiences, Ben. Is Ost a town on one of the Japanese islands?"
"No," Ben Brasken replied quickly, " is the city of the Ostians. The Japs probably never heard of it. You never heard of it either, did you?"
"I--I think I saw it in the sky," Captain Smooth said. "It was kind of a glowing color."
"The buildings were shaped like pyramids?" Ben Brasken asked. "And one of them, the temple of Goa the mighty, was upside down?"
Captain Smooth gulped. As a matter of fact, one of the queer aspects of the city in the sky had been the apparent upside-down position of one huge building.
The city, as he and the crew had observed it, had been somewhat vague as to outline, and the exact details of the structures did not stand out any too clearly.
"What was this horror you mentioned?" Captain Smooth asked.
Ben Brasken seemed to think again.
"It was so terrible," he said at last, "that you had better give me time to think of a way to describe it so you will understand. "
"That's all right, Ben," Captain Smooth said quickly. "Take your time. What else did you see?"
"I saw Martin Space."
"Oh, then the people in are white people, eh?"
"No. Martin Space is a white man. And there was a woman, who was also white. The rest were ians."
"What do the ians look like?"
Ben Brasken had to think over that, too. "I guess, when I first saw them, I thought of them as the spider-armed men."
"Eh?"
"The spider-armed men. They have blue bodies, too."
The skipper suddenly decided he had enough of this. Ben Brasken looked so inhuman that talking to him was not a pleasure.
"Well, well, Ben, this is all very interesting, and I know I want to hear more about it," he said. "But you must be tired, and now I want you to have a good long rest. You can have a cabin all to yourself, and we will just lock the door so no one will be bothering you."
Ben Brasken became animated.
"No, no!" he cried out vehemently. "You must turn and go to at once! That is why I am here. I came to get you to save Ost from the horror!"
"You know that way to ?" Captain Smooth asked, interested in spite of his common sense.
"Oh, yes. Come here and I'll show you."
BEN BRAXTEN went to a porthole and pointed through it.
"There," he said. "You can see as plain as can be."
There was nothing when Captain Smooth looked.
"Sure, sure," Captain Smooth said gently. "You just go to sleep and have a rest, and we'll wake you when we anchor at ."
He took Ben Brasken's elbow.
Ben Brasken looked at him. He jerked his elbow away.
"Don't act that way!" he shrieked. "You think I'm crazy! You don't believe me! I tell you, I'm as sane as any man on this ship! You've got to go to . They sent me for you. They need help. They've got to have it!"
"Of course, of course," murmured Captain Smooth. "Don't get me wrong, Ben. We'll sail for ."
Ben Brasken was not fooled. He became a raving fiend, and tried to get at the gun Captain Smooth kept in his desk.
It took five stout sailors to lash poor Ben Brasken to a stout, padded plank in a spare cabin. Ben Brasken then fainted. He was very weak, and apparently had been without food for days. They noted that his hands were skinned, and thick callouses were on the palms. The palms were also cut and bruised.
Ben Brasken would eat when he regained consciousness. But when they asked him questions, he only glared at them, after saying that what was the use, since they thought him crazy.
When the ship reached San Francisco, they transferred Ben Brasken to the mental ward of a hospital for observation.
II
THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
THE strange case of Ben Brasken came to the attention of Doc Savage in the shape of a typewritten report, the first sheet of which was headed:
INCIDENTS POSSIBLY WORTH ATTENTION.
No. 9163. BRASKEN, BEN.
(Sailor who saw phantom city.)
There were a lot of other reports with this one. They covered incidents pretty much all over the world. Some of the reports apparently had no meaning. The premier of an obscure European country had deposited a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account. A famous racketeer had been released from the penitentiary. A scientist had developed an electrical treatment for curing color blindness in the human eye, it was believed.
