Doc Savage - 089 - The Magic Island, page 7
Doc was waiting until they were near Melbourne because it would be a shorter run to port with the prisoners, with a correspondingly smaller lime for them to try to escape.
The Benny Boston was nowhere near Australia as yet. She was somewhere off the coast of New Guinea. The wilder part of that coast, too.
When Monk kicked over the traces, he left the cabin while the others were sleeping, and strolled down the deck getting a breath of sea air. Their cabins rather smelled, as cabins on old boats will. The Benny Boston had given the impression of carrying skunks in her bilge.
Monk had not strolled far when he saw a woman leaning against the rail. She was alone. She looked slender, and therefore she was probably young.
A woman was the downfall of Sampson, and as far as Monk was concerned, history repeated itself.
He went over and struck up a conversation.
"KIND of a rough trip, huh?" he asked, propping an elbow on the rail a discreet distance from the young lady.
Monk was an old hand at this stuff. Somewhat strange, that, since his looks frequently scared fierce bulldogs back under their porches.
"Eet ees bad," the young woman said.
"You bet," Monk agreed. "Now I know why they make portholes small."
"Why, m'sieu'?"
"If mine had been larger, I would have got out and swam," Monk replied.
This got the chuckle he had hoped for. She had a nice voice. She was probably a looker. These French babies were generally pretty snappy.
"I guess the ship is off New Guinea," Monk said. "Probably not more than sixty miles or so. That storm drove us a little out of our course."
Monk knew this because Doc had taken some observations through a porthole.
"Qui. "
the young lady agreed. "Ze captain ees tell me zat."
So she knew the captain. It was a cinch she was a good looker then. Captains always picked off the peaches.
"I bet your husband is seasick," Monk suggested.
She laughed again. Very nice.
"Zey always ask zat," she chuckled. "Non. I 'ave no oosban'."
"Swell," Monk said. "You like Australia?"
"Oui!" the young woman replied quickly. "I love ze seety of Melbourne."
"Live there?"
"Oui!"
Great stuff, Monk thought. Get her telephone number, then persuade Doc to hang around Melbourne for a while.
Monk opened his mouth to tell her she should see his pet pig, then remembered he didn't have any. A tough break, that one. Habeas Corpus had a way with the girls, Monk had discovered. Monk could lead Habeas down Fifth or Park Avenues any day and make half a dozen conquests.
Before Monk could think up another subject for conversation, the young woman turned from the rail.
"Au revoir. "
she murmured sweetly. "I theenk I will retire now."
"Nuts!" Monk thought, but he said, "Pleasant sleep, and I'll see you again sometime."
That was the stuff. Don't let them think you were chasing them.
The young woman walked away, and the night took her. Monk had not seen her face, but there was no doubt in his mind but that she would do. For that matter, if she had taken a look at him, he had not observed it.
Oh, well, she'd see him in the daytime, and his was the kind of hairy beauty that seemed to impress the femmes.
Monk went below in a happy frame of mind and turned in.
He got a lucky break, then. He could not get the young woman off his mind, and he had done nothing for days but sleep and quarrel with Ham when Renny was not watching, so he was not sleepy anyway.
He laid awake with his thoughts.
That was how he happened to see the puddle of stuff come creeping under the door.
MONK liked to sleep with all his pillows and sometimes a suitcase under his head. Ham claimed this was because his close ancestors had roosted upright in the trees with the monkeys and birds.
Monk saw the stuff coming under the door immediately. He thought it was water, and reflected that it was not raining, and he had not heard a sea break on deck which would send water into the corridor.
Then he got a whiff. Monk was a chemist. He knew what things were when he smelled them.
And he retained his presence of mind. Springing out of bed, he made no sound. Nor did he make a noise in scooping up the bedclothes, carrying them over and depositing them on top of the puddle spreading from under the door.
Monk held his breath.
He ran into the connecting cabins which the others occupied. He looked at the doors. Other puddles were spreading there.
He awakened the men quickly.
"Poison gas!" he breathed. "Quiet!"
The activity for the next few moments was wild but silent. It was Doc Savage who seized the rest of the bedclothing and spread it over the liquid, which had obviously been poured under the doors from the corridor. Then he opened the windows.
It was the bronze man, too, who really saved them. He did it by hurriedly opening his equipment cases which held chemicals, getting out various bottles, mixing the contents quickly in one of the big washbowls, and pouring the concoction over the saturated bedclothing.
A yellowish vapor arose, but this was harmless. The chemicals Doc had added to the gas liquid had rendered it harmless, just as water added to alcohol in quantities makes it noninflammable.
"Whoever poured the stuff under the doors probably fled immediately," Doc said. "They won't be back, but will wait for our bodies to be found."
Renny growled, "What I want to know is, how did they discover us?"
MONK had been doing some tall wondering on that point. And Monk, while he was a fellow who lacked discretion at times, firmly believed that confession is good for the soul.
"I don't think I done it," he said.
"You ape!" Ham grated instantly. "What have you been up to?"
"Aw, I hadda have some air," Monk explained. "I went on deck."
Ham sighed. "Well, if nobody saw you, that don't explain it."
"No, it couldn't have been me," Monk agreed. "The girl wasn't one of the gang."
Ham almost yelled at that. "What girl?"
"A French oo-la-la," Monk elaborated. "But she was just a passenger, and lived in Melbourne."
"Was she about the size of Kit Merrimore?" Doc Savage asked abruptly.
"Well, now--" Monk floundered. As a matter of fact, the girl had been about the size of Kit Merrimore.
"I examined Kit Merrimore's past," Doc Savage stated. "She was at one time an actress, and her best part was that of a French girl in America."
Monk emitted a feeble squeak.
"Catch me, somebody," he croaked. "I think I'm going to faint."
Ham said grimly, "Renny!"
"Huh?"
"How about letting me cut him up in little pieces?" Ham demanded.
"Go ahead," Renny directed.
"And I'll stand still for you," Monk contributed, after which they did not have the heart to roast him to the brownness that they would have liked.
It was now apparent that the enemy was not only aboard, but was going to make trouble. Doc's group hurriedly set about opening their equipment cases which held such weapons as they thought they might need.
They had hardly started on this task when a face appeared at the porthole. It was a face Doc's men knew. The owner was one of the men who had been with Kit Merrimore at the dirigible stealing in New York.
The face disappeared instantly.
Doc flung to the porthole. It was open. He thrust his head through. The man was legging it down the deck.
Several men were gathered toward the bow. Doc looked in the direction of the stern. More men gathered there.
There was a cheap leather suitcase standing under the porthole, on deck.
Doc whipped back out of the porthole.
"Run!" he said, and his voice was a crash.
DOC'S men had learned to do things quickly when the bronze man spoke like that, and they dived through the doors into the corridor, and when Doc gestured, dashed down the corridor.
Something hit the ship as if it were a great drum. The doors fell into the corridor. The old carpet jumped up off the floor. The light bulbs broke and came jingling down; only no one heard them jingle, because sound had pushed eardrums in and strained them until they could hear nothing for moments.
Probably Doc Savage was the only one who knew what had happened. His friends had not seen the suitcase. Had they, they were astute enough to guess it held explosive.
The bronze man was bringing out small objects and hurling them first one direction in the corridor, then another. They were smoke bombs, and blackness bloated up and engulfed the group, and it was darker than it had ever seemed to be before.
A gun banged, and another, and a small machine gun snarled like an iron bulldog. Bullets pecked and sizzled.
"Top deck," Doc Savage said. "Get together with me."
His associates got together with him.
"Your supermachine pistol, Renny," Doc said. "Demolition cartridges. The ceiling."
"Holy cow!" Renny said, which was the equivalent of O. K., and they stood there a minute.
Renny's supermachine pistol hooted; explosive-driven air buffeted them, and wood and metal fell. The Benny Boston's rusted old whistle started on a long toot, while all over the hooker men yelled, cursed and shot off their guns.
There was a hole in the ceiling now. Renny had made it with his little supermachine pistol bullets that were packed with high-powered hell. It was a big hole, and parts of the ceiling hung down, so that by grabbing and hauling, Doc and his men climbed out.
The smoke bomb smoke poured out around them. They got out of the smoke. The stars looking down at them seemed small, the moon big, a little red as if blushing.
Doc and his men started for the bridge, but red sparks sprang up along the bridge rail, and bullets began making those strange, awful sounds which nothing, but bullets make.
"Gas!" Monk squeaked. "We've got some!"
"They have gas masks, too." Doc pointed out.
Men ran here and there, mostly fore and aft, and once in a while they were in a spot where there was some light, and it could be seen that they were wearing gas masks and iron military hats.
"The ventilation funnels to the engine room," Doc said. "If we control the engine room, we control the ship."
Ventilators, flower-mouthed monsters, reared up from the top deck all around. Doc ran to one of these, sprang, caught the lip. Hanging half inside, he listened. It would be easy to go down, bracing his back and hands against one side, his feet against the other. But he did not go down. He listened.
Then he slapped his hands against the ventilator, making sounds.
A big, nonexistent snake hissed in the bottom. Hot steam came up. Scalding clouds of it. Men had been waiting with steam hoses at the bottom, and they had thought Doc was coming down.
A searchlight came on, splashed Doc's little group. Monk shot it out. Bullets traveled about without much system. But fore and aft, the attackers were organizing themselves for a charge.
Captain Smooth had had his ship taken away from him by now.
"The boats," Doc Savage said.
LONG TOM exploded, "You mean we're going to get off the ship?"
"Right."
"But we may be able to lick them!"
"Maybe. But we are leaving the ship anyway."
"Why?"
"A good reason," the bronze man said. "Quick! The third boat on the starboard is a motor dory."
There was no inclination for a lengthy debate on whys. Doc's group got the boat down to the water. The boat was the one modern thing about the Benny Boston, or rather, the davits by which it was lowered were. They were the type which could be operated mechanically from the boat.
Doc and his men got into the boat. Two of the group watched the controls. The others used flashlights and machine pistols. The flashlights gave bright light. The machine pistols gave out streams of mercy bullets at the right time.
The boat was now adrift. The Benny Boston went gurgling past, and the boat rocked and turned completely around twice in the boil pushed back by the propellers.
The dory had shipped a little water. Monk and Ham bailed. Doc did things with the motor and it began making noises; the bow of the lifeboat picked up, the stern settled down, and they made ten knots or so.
"Diesel," Doc Savage said of the motor. "It will run a long time on what fuel we have."
The bronze man and his aides were not as worried as landlubbers might have been. The Benny Boston had put about, it was true, and it could run them down as easily as a drunken motorist would run down a pup, if it found them.
If it found them. This was the open sea. There had been storms for days. It was calm now. But big swells kicked up by the storms were still rolling mountain high, and it was dark.
The only searchlight on the Benny Boston had been shot out. As long as the ship showed no light, Doc's little band was in no great danger of being picked up. And they would not show a light.
Twenty minutes put them in safety.
And Long Tom got around to finding out why they had left the ship in the open sea, when there still remained a chance that they could have overcome their foes. A very good chance, from what Long Tom knew of Doc Savage.
"I don't see yet," the electrical wizard said, "why we gave up the ship."
Doc pointed. "There is the reason."
They all looked, and they all saw.
"!" Monk breathed.
Monk was awed--It was rarely that he was awed.
OST! The little band had heard about it. Now they were seeing it. Fantastic vision of the sea. All had read its description as printed in the newspapers. It was all of that.
was high. It was as if it sat upon a distant mountainside, yet they could not see a mountain, and they could see the city.
Luminous. Like a photograph done, by some unknown process, in the radioactive stuff which is put on watches and clocks to make them tell time in the dark. And like that radioactive material when seen from a distance, this picture was indistinct. It seemed to be a trifle out of focus.
A city, it had been called. It was more of a town. There were buildings, dwellings or places where businesses were conducted, if this weird place had businesses.
Pyramids, these buildings. Every one of them. Broad at the bottom, sloping up, somewhat erratically, as if there was a porch or veranda every so often.
Topping each pyramid was an irregular something, tall, narrow. It was impossible to distinguish, due to the indistinctness of the image, what these topping things were.
Strangest of all, though, was the building at the back of the city. The big structure. A pyramid, too, but it was upside down. Inverted. Suspended in the air, apparently.
Hanging upside down with nothing to hold it.
Monk laughed. Did it suddenly, loudly, somewhat irrationally.
And somehow no one was surprised at the laugh, or even looked around. It was the perfectly natural thing to do. The thing they were viewing was too impossible, of course.
"Well, now we've got to figure out what we're seeing," Ham said.
"If it's a slide thrown from a powerful magic lantern on the Benny Boston, we should be able to see the light of the lantern," Long Tom contributed. "The Benny Boston is behind us."
But the group could see no magic-lantern glow.
Gaunt Johnny picked from a pocket a pair of binoculars which he had been carrying there. He studied the vision with the binoculars.
"I'll be superamalgamated!" he exploded.
"Eh?" Monk demanded.
"Look," Johnny said, and handed the homely chemist the glasses.
Monk looked. He put the glasses down, and said something that was only a mumble of astonishment.
"What's the matter with you two silly-sallies?" Ham asked sarcastically.
"Nothing," Johnny muttered.
"Yeah," Monk said. "Nothing except that these binoculars don't magnify that city."
"Don't magnify it? The glasses do not--"
"See for yourself," Monk invited.
Ham looked, and when he put the glasses down, his manner showed that they hadn't done their duty.
"Somebody took the lenses out as a joke!" he barked, an instant later.
But the lenses were in the glasses, and they magnified everything except what it was wanted most that they magnify now.
THERE was silence in the boat. Silence and eyestrain. Wonder. Bafflement.
"What's over there, Doc?" Monk asked at last.
"New Guinea," the bronze man said.
"How far?"
"Sixty miles or so."
"Nobody can see sixty miles at sea at night."
Doc Savage said nothing. No one else said anything. Doc headed the motorized lifeboat for the city.
No one talked much. They all watched what they could see high above the sea ahead. It was so wonderful, so amazing, that they did nothing but wonder and puzzle about it.
The little band hardly noticed the breeze when it kicked up. It was the type of breeze that always kicked up before dawn, and it turned into one of the vicious little squalls noted frequently happening in that part of the sea. Before long spray, and occasionally green water, was coming over the side of the boat.
Two thousand years ago, before the birth of Christ, the Norsemen built boats, open cockleshells fastened with thongs and wooden pins, and in them crossed the Atlantic. This lifeboat had lines like them, and it was perhaps not much smaller.
Doc and his men came through without much more hardship than a thorough wetting.
But the city was lost somewhere in the excitement and darkness and whining wind and stinging spray. They had been surprised at how long it had remained visible. Only near the height of the squall could they no longer see it; and after the squall had abated, they were too tired from their battle with the elements to show much interest in it. They lay down and slept as only exhausted men can.
