The Motion Menace, page 6
part #64 of Doc Savage Series
“Trick on the house roof,” Doc Savage breathed quietly. “Got off the roof after I was left for dead. Picked the lock on a parked car. Followed you here.”
Cryptic, that. Made it sound easy. Monk, knowing Doc, understood there was a lot of clever work between the lines. Of course, thinking Doc was dead, the men had been easier to trail. They had not bothered to look behind much.
Ham and Long Tom were free now. They stood up, then did squatting exercises and windmilled their arms, getting ready for action.
“This is that bank, the House of Penroff, ain’t it?” Monk whispered.
“Right,” agreed the bronze man.
“Can we get out the way you got in?”
“It’s hardly feasible.”
“Why?”
“It entailed some wall climbing.”
Monk swallowed. The House of Penroff was in a building with sides discreetly bare of the ornamentation that makes the work of a human fly simple, sometimes.
“We will have to fight for it,” the bronze man said. “Once we take this place, we will have to stop the Munchen.”
“Munchen!” Ham exclaimed softly. “So you heard that old bird, Penroff, mention the Munchen?”
“The steps are stone and did not creak,” the bronze man replied dryly. “And sounds carry well in this place. Come. We are going to have our hands full.”
The bronze man led them down the stone steps. He wore no shoes, and was quiet. In the lighted room at the bottom—lighted from windows, this room—the torturers stood waiting.
“The door does not fit tightly,” Doc called. “You had better get out in the open air.”
His voice was a perfect imitation of the fellow who had gone to get the hydrocyanic.
It fooled the torturers. They scuttled out into the open court of the penthouse castle, which was a perfectly natural thing to do.
Monk ran over, slammed the door through which they had stepped, and locked it. They would have become alarmed outside in a moment, anyway.
“This way!” Doc rapped.
The bronze man whipped to a niche in the entrance hall. It resembled a closet. In the days of chivalry, it had probably been used by the knights to park the heavier parts of their armor. There were some pieces of armor in it now, along with a senseless man.
The unconscious one was Viscount Herschel Penroff.
“Blazes!” Monk gasped, and stared at Doc. “So you nailed him on his way out?”
The bronze man did not answer. It was obvious what he had done, anyway. He hauled the viscount out, tossed him to Monk.
“Take care of him,” Doc suggested quietly.
“With pleasure!” Monk growled, and all but yanked one of the viscount’s ears off to see if he was conscious. He wasn’t.
The man who had gone after the hydrocyanic was also in the place, minus his clothing. They left him. He was only a minor rogue in this thing.
The men locked out in the court began shooting.
* * *
“Quick!” Doc said. His voice did not sound as if he were in a hurry.
There was only one modern touch in the entry hall. An elevator button. Doc put a metallic finger against it. When the cage arrived in response, it came so silently that only Doc heard it. The doors were opened. The bronze man flashed inside.
“Hey!” the amazed voice of the operator said. “Who are you?”
There was a grunt, a falling noise.
“Come on in,” Doc suggested.
Ham and Long Tom dived into the cage. Monk followed, with the viscount. The operator was senseless on the floor. Doc grasped the control and sank the cage.
Monk inflated his chest and grinned. “Simple. This elevator probably lets us out in the lobby.” He bent over and searched the elevator operator, straightened with a gun. “This helps. We can charge out of the lobby, then cover the doors from the street until the cops get there.”
Ham sneered, “You make it sound easy, you ape.”
The descending elevator was making a faint sighing.
“Well,” Monk demanded, “is there anything wrong with my logic?”
The elevator stopped with a grinding shock. Bells rang. A faint hissing started.
“Well,” Ham jeered, “what do you think now, Monk?”
Monk opened his mouth. Then he shut his eyes, grabbed his throat.
“Tear gas!” Doc said crisply. “Close your eyes! Don’t breathe! Get down on the floor!”
He said it so fast that the words were a rattle. Then he jumped. The cage had a grilled top. But it was a fake grille, covered by a steel plating. He smashed against the doors. They were heavy steel.
They had a minute at the most. As soon as they opened their eyes or breathed, the tear gas would get them.
The bronze man’s sensitive finger tips explored along the junction of the two sliding halves of the elevator doors. There is invariably a small round hole there, its purpose being to afford a method of opening the doors with a key rod, from the outside, should they close accidentally.
Doc found the hole. Into it he dropped one of the tiny, high-explosive grenades which he invariably carried. The grenade was not half an inch in diameter, but it was probably as powerful a thing for its size as man had yet been able to create.
The explosion that followed deafened them and tore the doors apart. They were halfway between floors. They could climb out.
* * *
Doc helped his men out into a corridor which was like any other, except for the richness of the carpeting. They ran clear of the tear gas.
“They sure prepared things around here!” Monk exploded. “Fixin’ that elevator for a gas trap!”
“That is a common precaution in banks which keep sums of money on their upper floors,” Doc said.
The group turned into a room furnished with a long table, straight, uncomfortable chairs, and a water cooler. No one was there. A telephone stood on a tabouret in a corner, almost hidden.
Monk dumped Viscount Herschel Penroff on the table.
Doc looked out a window.
“Stay here with the prisoner,” the bronze man directed.
He whipped out of the room, for it offered nothing that would aid them. He ran through the corridor toward the rear. His flake gold eyes were busy. The other elevators seemed not to be running. There was a fire hydrant and its rack of hose in the hall. Doc turned the electric light on. That seemed strange.
The rear windows were frosted. Doc snapped the sash of one up. On a level with the window, fully thirty feet away, was a rooftop. It was evidently the back of a theater, because there was not a window.
There were no ventilators. There was only a water tank, situated near the middle of the roof, high on stilts, supported by iron guy wires which ran to steel rods set in the walls.
Feet rattled on the stairway. Men coming up from below. Two men, the sounds indicated.
“They’ll be in the elevator!” one gasped. “Be careful!”
“Don’t worry,” grunted the second. “The tear gas will discourage ’em some.”
Doc was waiting. The men came out of the stairway much too carelessly. The bronze man’s fist floored the first. The second aimed his gun, but Doc got hold of gun and hand. The weapon spouted three times, its bullets tore three pits in the ceiling, and the bronze man had the weapon.
The man had glittering black eyes and big white teeth. He showed them both.
“This thing is too much for you ever to stop!” he snarled.
His jawbone must have been brittle because of some affliction. It broke when Doc hit. The bronze man hadn’t expected that.
Monk, Ham and Long Tom came charging up, stopped, and looked disappointed.
“We thought you might be able to use a little coöperation,” Long Tom explained.
Doc said quietly and sharply, “Stay with Penroff! He is our key to this wild affair!”
“Blazes!” Monk gulped. “I left ’im lyin’ on that table!”
The homely chemist spun, raced down the corridor.
The electric light went out. It was the one Doc had turned on. Simultaneously, the air seemed to become quieter.
“Monk!” the bronze man rapped. “Stop!”
Monk halted, half wheeled. “Huh?”
The lean, gentlemanly—he still looked gentlemanly in spite of his manhandling—figure of Viscount Herschel Penroff appeared in the doorway at the end of the hall.
He stepped out boldly. A queer, sneering smile rode his features. He opened the window at that end of the hall. It was obvious he was going to shout down to some one in the street.
“Stop that!” Monk bawled. He drew the revolver which he had secured from the elevator operator. “Stay away from that window!”
Penroff ignored him and leaned out the window.
“For that, you’ll walk on one leg for a while!” Monk gritted.
He fired. Then he looked, grunted, “This dang thing must not shoot straight,” and fired again. Then he stared, and his small eyes came bulging out of their little gristle pits.
Both his bullets had stopped about halfway down the room, in mid-air. They had hung there for a moment. Now, they were falling, with an incredibly exaggerated slow motion, to the floor.
Penroff seemed to be shouting. They could see his chest pump the yells out—but they could not hear a word.
“He’s telling his men exactly where to locate us,” Doc said. “We’ll have to move fast, but carefully.”
* * *
Monk, his big mouth open, his little eyes still popping a little, was beyond saying anything. He kept glancing at the gun in his hand, then at the bullets down the corridor. By now, the lead pellets had fallen to the carpet.
“It must be that lick they gave my head!” he muttered once. “That would make anybody go nuts and see things that couldn’t happen. That’s it. The lick jarred my imagination loose.”
Ham and Long Tom were not much less baffled.
Doc Savage moved down the corridor. He went in a strange way, holding a fountain pen out ahead of himself and moving it about continually, as if trying to feel something. He progressed thus until he reached the rack of hose. He unscrewed the connection and came back quickly with the coil of hose. He tossed it to Long Tom.
“Loop in the end,” he said crisply.
Then Doc picked the revolver out of Monk’s limp fingers. He aimed briefly through the rear window, and the gun exploded.
The bullet parted the guy wire which was one of the tank supports. The separation was just above the rod to which it was attached.
“Here’s the loop,” Long Tom said.
It was no place from which to throw a lasso, and the heavy fire hose had never been intended for rodeo stunts. Doc leaned out the window, and began having his difficulties. The distance was fully thirty feet, more than any man could broadjump from a window take-off. Three times he missed. Then he ringed the upright rod.
The window had a steel sash. The bronze man knocked the glass out and tied the end of the hose.
“Monk,” he said quietly.
He held the sash end of the hose while Monk swung across.
Viscount Herschel Penroff had turned, and was watching them. He looked surprised, cheated. He wheeled and began to shout further instructions from the window.
Ham went over. He wore only a rag of his trousers, and they fell off during the gyrations of his legs. He cut a grotesque figure in his shorts. Long Tom scampered across with the agility of a monkey. That seemed to remind Monk of something.
“Habeas Corpus!” he yelled, and Ham echoed, “Chemistry!”
Doc Savage whipped across the swaying hose.
“The pets will probably be safe in the penthouse where we left them,” he said.
The group then ran across the roof. Behind them, the fire hose was swaying from the last kick which Doc had given it.
Mysteriously, the hose stopped swaying. The stoppage was abrupt, as if an invisible hand had arrested it.
Chapter VIII
SKY YACHT
The room in which Doc Savage sat was light enough, but it had the smell of a cave. Concrete floor, walls and ceiling were damp and cavernish-looking. From one spot in the ceiling, a drop of water fell occasionally. The place was full of electrical gadgets. The sole light came from electric bulbs.
It had been an old wine cellar, but Long Tom had bought it cheap and turned it into his experimental laboratory.
Doc held a cablegram. It was from Leningrad, U.S.S.R., and said:
INDIVIDUAL ABOUT WHOM YOU HAVE CABLED US IS NOT MEMBER OF OGPU STOP PENROFF WAS NOBLEMAN IN DAYS OF CZAR GOVERNMENT STOP WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE REST
OGPU CHIEF
Doc burned the cablegram carefully.
Ham sat on an uncomfortable iron stool, and was just finishing explaining how he had been captured. “Two of them stepped up and prodded my ribs with a gun as I left my hotel. They took me directly to the penthouse. I think we are up against some kind of gigantic organization which is planning some huge crime. They were afraid we would interfere with their plans.”
There was a stir at the door and a stooped old man with a mustache, a scar on his cheek, dark-colored glasses, and an “I Am Blind” sign around his neck hobbled in, struggling with two very large suitcases.
He pulled off his false mustache, plucked the scar loose, removed his glasses and became Long Tom, the electrical genius. He glanced around.
“Where’s Monk?” he asked.
“He should be back shortly,” Doc replied. “He is out getting some information for us.”
Ham spoke up, “Sure you were not followed here, Long Tom?”
Long Tom glanced at him, sniffed, and said, “I did my best.” He opened the large suitcases, adding, “I got Monk’s hog and your what-is-it.”
Ham sprang up, and looked very pleased. Chemistry sidled out of the suitcase, then turned around and looked it over gloomily.
The pig, Habeas, came out of the other case, also looked around, and showed his temper by making an abrupt rush at Chemistry, which the latter avoided with the agility of long practice. Habeas sat down and showed long, white tusks indignantly.
Ham complained, “Monk has been sharpening that hog’s teeth again! Where’s a hammer?”
He got up and walked off, looking.
Long Tom told Doc, “The pets were in the penthouse. The police were all over the House of Penroff building. They had found three dead men. Physicians declare each of the three dead men died in a most remarkable way—complete stoppage of all internal functions. Heart, lungs, everything, simply ceased working.”
Long Tom paused, eyed Doc, and asked, “That’s queer, isn’t it?”
* * *
Instead of answering, the bronze man said, “Penroff and his men were not there?”
“Every one of them got away,” Long Tom admitted. “And what’s more, they took their private records. They must have had everything set for a sudden flight. They left the radios, the tickers and the telegraph apparatus, of course. The stuff didn’t prove anything. Lots of banks have their private communication systems.”
“Nothing to indicate what this organization which calls itself the Elders is up to?” Doc queried.
“Not a thing.”
“What are the police going to do?”
Long Tom shrugged. “They’re stumped.”
Ham called from somewhere, “Say, where d’you keep your carpenter tools?”
“Get out of there!” Long Tom yelled. “I got a lot of delicate apparatus in there, and I don’t want you upsetting it!”
Ham muttered something.
There came footsteps; then Monk appeared. Monk had a large ear of corn in each hand. He waved the ears.
“What a town!” the homely chemist complained. “Where do you think I finally found some corn? In the Museum of Natural History! And dang near got caught stealing it!”
Long Tom snapped. “I thought you went out to gather information?”
“And vittles for my hog,” Monk added. “With them Elders watchin’ my laboratory, probably, Habeas’s food supply is kinda tied up. I hadda find——”
He stopped and scowled at Ham, who had come in with a hammer. “Whatcha gonna do with that, shyster?”
“I intend to perform a dental operation on that hog,” Ham said grimly.
Monk’s howl would have done credit to a lion which had been stepped on by an elephant. “I’ll hit you so hard you’ll have to pull down your socks to pick your teeth! I’ll——”
Doc Savage put in quietly, “What about the Munchen?”
When Monk and Ham started to quarrel, it went on for days.
“The Munchen,” Monk said, “is due in Lakehurst in two hours.”
“Did you book us on her?” Doc asked.
“Nope,” Monk said. “The Munchen is taking no outside bookings, because she is under private charter.”
Doc Savage was silent. Outwardly, at least. But his strange, small trilling noise was briefly audible.
“In two hours it will be dark,” he said.
“It sure will. It’s raining now.”
“We’ll have to move rather quickly,” Doc said.
* * *
In two hours, it was dark, and it was still raining. It was a warm kind of rain, seeming a bit sticky, somewhat remindful of clam juice. There was no thunder or lightning. The rain came out of clouds which were just high enough to clear the sleek back of the Munchen.
The Munchen was nine hundred and sixty feet of proof that somebody besides the Germans could build lighter-than-air craft. She was a hundred and eighty feet thick. She had been launched some six months previously, and had immediately assumed a schedule of regular flights around the world.
Her specialty was passengers who wanted to take a trip around the world by air. So far, there seemed to be quite a supply of them.
Besides Diesel motors and noninflammable gas, private cabins and a promenade deck, the Munchen had a billiard room, a dance orchestra, a floor show with some very snappy lady numbers, and a swimming pool. The swimming pool was not as nutty an idea as it appeared at first inspection. The water in it was really the supply of water ballast which all airships carry.
