Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 088 - The Awful Egg

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 444.49KB 82 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE AWFUL EGG
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. MEN FLEEING
? Chapter II. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST
? Chapter III. FLIGHT FROM HATE
? Chapter IV. THE RED ROAD
? Chapter V. DINOSAUR COUNTRY
? Chapter VI. AN EGG IN A CAVE
? Chapter VII. DAMNED THING HATCHING
? Chapter VIII. THE MYSTERIOUS CHICK
? Chapter IX. TERROR GROWING UP
? Chapter X. REASONS FOR HATE
? Chapter XI. THREAT
? Chapter XII. AN OGRE PROWLING
? Chapter XIII. DECEIT FOR BAIT
? Chapter XIV. RAIDERS
? Chapter XV. OTHER EGGS HATCHING
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. MEN FLEEING
THE thing that ailed the doctor was not a fainting spell.
It was around ten o’clock when Dr. Samuel Harmony alighted from his limousine and instructed his
chauffeur to return at twelve with the car. Doctor Samuel Harmony entered his office, spoke cheerfully to
the receptionist, after noticing there were no patients waiting. He entered his private office and sat down
at his desk, where the morning newspaper was spread out for his perusal.
Ten minutes or so later, the receptionist entered to say there was a patient, and saw Dr. Samuel
Harmony sitting there at his desk, practically as white as a sheet of typewriter paper.
"Doctor!" gasped the receptionist. "What’s wrong?"
For a while Dr. Harmony’s mouth acted like that of a fish out of water.
"I . . . I had a fainting spell," he finally managed to say.
The receptionist fluttered around, not knowing what to do. She wasn’t very experienced.
"Do . . . do you want a drink of water, doctor?" she asked excitedly. "Shall I call a doctor?"
Dr. Harmony, very pale, clenched his fists on the top of his desk. He called the girl an ugly name.
"Get out of here!" he ordered.
"But, doctor—"
"Dammit, I’ll be all right," Dr. Harmony croaked. "Get out of here!"
The girl reached the door, then remembered.
"There . . . there’s a patient here," she said. "A man who can’t sleep at night."
"Tell him to come back later," muttered Dr. Harmony. Then he held up a hand. "No, I have a better idea.
Tell him to go find another doctor."
The receptionist fluttered into the outer office, a trifle puzzled. Dr. Harmony got up and shuffled over and
locked the door so she could not get back again. His movements were not normal, but at the same time
they were not that of a man who’d had a fainting spell. If anything, they were the motions of a man who
had his mind occupied with something else. He went back and sat down at the desk.
He sat there, scraping his fingers through his hair, rubbing his face, and showing other signs of nervous,
intense concentration.
Once he made a gesture for the telephone, but changed his mind and jerked his hand away from the
instrument.
"The damned line may be tapped," he muttered.
His distraught eyes kept going back to the newspaper. It was open to the page of pictures,
approximately half of which was devoted to the wars in various places. The other half of the photographs
were local happenings, and naturally there was the usual photo of prominent citizens landing from a
steamship.
Dr. Harmony glared at a picture that had been taken on the gangplank of a steamer.
Suddenly, in a moment when his rage reached an insane peak, he snatched up a pen and struck at the
picture, using the pen as if it was a dagger. The utter fury on the man’s face kept the gesture from being
childish. The pen broke. The newspaper was knocked onto the floor. A deep scar remained in the desk
top.
Dr. Harmony got up and went to the door.
"You!" he said to the receptionist. "Cancel all my appointments. Prepare to close the office."
"You—"
"I’m taking a long vacation," snapped Dr. Harmony.
The receptionist looked as if she was about to bawl.
"Will I be out . . . out . . . of a job?"
"Well, hell, you won’t be the first one who ever lost a job!"
Returning to his private office—he again locked the door to keep the receptionist out—Dr. Samuel
Harmony used the telephone and tried to get his chauffeur. He failed.
After he realized he wouldn’t be able to contact the chauffeur, Dr. Samuel Harmony sat there
contemplating the instrument. Obviously, he would have liked to use it. But he shook his head uneasily.
"May be tapped," he muttered again.
An idea occurred to him. He pulled a prescription pad to him, wrote a message on it, tore off the sheet,
put it in an envelope, which he addressed. He repeated the operation, the message being exactly the
same in each case. They read:
Calico Parks in town to see Doc Savage. This may mean they are investigating the South Orion thing.
Suggest scram out of town for two months at least.
Sam
With the writing of those messages, Dr. Samuel Harmony seemed to consciously lose his character as a
physician with an office in a swanky part of town. His manner as a physician had been suave and
dignified, somewhat on the snob side, but now he was only a scared man.
It had been fright, actually, which had turned him so pale a bit earlier, when he had told the girl he’d had
a fainting spell. It wasn’t any fainting spell. It was an attack of compounded terror.
He sealed the envelopes containing the messages, and carried them in to his receptionist.
She was sitting there, tear-eyed, wondering where she would get another job.
"Will you mail these?" said Sam Harmony. He made his voice sharp and harsh. "And don’t fail to do
it," he added.
The girl gave such a start of astonishment, because of the harshness of his tone, that he hurriedly made his
voice less snarling, so the girl would not be suspicious, and explained.
"Those are rather important," he said.
The girl looked at the envelopes, said nothing.
"They are prescriptions for several people," Sam Harmony said. "The prescriptions are vital to their
health."
"I see," the girl said, and went out to find a mailbox.
Sam Harmony looked after her, grinned thinly and reflected that she didn’t see at all; she didn’t suspect
anything. She was a nervous, excitable, timid kind of girl, and if she had suspected anything near the truth,
he reflected, she probably would have had hysterics and spasms.
He would be glad to get out of this damned office and this infernal town, he decided. He hated, though,
to be driven out involuntarily.
However, it’s a wise crow that takes to tall timber when he sees a shotgun, Sam Harmony reflected.
He got his hat and coat and was standing in the door when the receptionist came back.
He paid her salary up to date—but that was all.
"You attend to locking up the office, having the light, water and telephone shut off, and such things," he
ordered.
"What will I do with the key?" the girl inquired.
"Leave it with the building superintendent," Sam Harmony said, and departed.
THE receptionist stared after her boss, very, very puzzled. Then she busied herself with the task of
cleaning the suite before locking up and leaving the place.
The girl might have been nervous and excitable, but she was no knothead. She was curious about those
prescriptions which Sam Harmony had mailed. Her curiosity sprang from one very good reason—she
had never heard of the boss having patients with the names she had read on the envelopes.
Picking up the prescription pad, the girl held it so that the light fell across it in just the correct fashion to
make pencil indentations stand out so that they were readable.
She read the message which Sam Harmony had written. She was thoughtful for a moment.
"A prescription, all right," she remarked. "But not the kind he was trying to make me think."
Which was a logical statement.
It was also logical that the girl should find the gash in the desk top which the pen had made when Sam
Harmony struck with it, dagger fashion, at the news photograph—It was a matter of less than a minute
until she was looking at the newspaper picture itself.
The caption below the picture said:
MYSTERY MAN CAUGHT BY
CANDID CAMERA
Doc Savage, rarely-photographed man of mystery, was caught by the camera today as he met Edward
Ellston Parks, the mysterious international archaeologist as the latter landed from the S. S. Vancanic,
which docked in the Hudson this morning.
The girl noted that the pen had been driven directly through the photographic chest of the man named
Doc Savage. She sat there looking at Doc Savage. She rather approved of him. In fact, he was a very
good-looking guy, and if he rated his picture in the newspaper in such a fashion, he must be an important
fellow. Important fellows were usually rich. The feminine guile was at work.
The girl had a boy friend named Clarence, but called Hickey—Hickey Older. She picked up the phone
and gave him a buzz.
"This is Nancy," she said.
"Hello, sugar," Hickey said.
"Hello, hon," responded Nancy. After some more sirup-coated preliminaries of the same vein, Nancy got
down to business. "Do you know a man named Doc Savage?" she asked.
"Has some guy been makin’ passes at you?" Hickey yelled. "I’ll knock his block off!"
"Oh, don’t be silly! Have you ever heard of him? His name is Doc Savage, and the newspapers call him
the man of mystery."
"Oh," said Hickey. "That one!"
"Well, do you know him?"
"Oh, sure. I have breakfast with him every morning, lunch with President Roosevelt, dinner with J. P.
Morgan, although sometimes I have to go out with John D. Rockefeller, too, so he won’t feel slighted."
"Cut out the wisecracks, Hickey. Do you know him?"
"Hell, no."
"Do you know anything about him?"
Genuine admiration came into Hickey’s voice.
"Say, he’s quite a guy, from what I’ve heard. You used to read stuff in the newspapers about him, but I
guess he’s stopped giving out interviews. Still, they publish pictures of him now and then. He’s a big
bronze man, a mighty striking-looking guy. Come to think of it, his picture is in this morning’s Press."
Nancy asked patiently, "What does he do, Hickey, hon?"
"Well, the first time I heard what he does for a profession, I thought he was nuts," Hickey replied. "You
know what I mean—it didn’t make sense. Back in them days when knighthood was in flower and you
went to a tinsmith to get your pants made— Hah, hah, pretty good. Eh, Nancy. Tinsmith to get your
pants made. A hot one, eh?"
"They must have gone to a carpenter for that head of yours," Nancy said.
In a sobered voice, Hickey continued:
"Well, Doc Savage makes a business of helping people who are in trouble, aiding the oppressed, and
punishing evildoers. That’s what I read somewhere that the guy does. Only I don’t see where there
would be any profit in that. It sounds goofy to me. Like I said, back in the days when a knight went to a
tinsmith for his—"
"Where can I find him, Hickey?"
Hickey became suspicious.
"Say, why are you so danged interested?" he demanded.
"Don’t ask so many questions," Nancy retorted. "Just tell me where he can be found."
"Come on, honeybunch. Quit stalling," Hickey ordered. "Tell papakins what you got on your mind."
"Well—" said Nancy, hesitantly. She told him about Dr. Harmony’s sudden vacation and the peculiar
circumstances attached thereto. "And so I thought," she finished, "that I ought to see Doc Savage—"
There was a loud report. Nancy felt something jerk at her hair. Broken glass sprayed across the floor.
There was a thump, and plaster fell from the opposite wall.
Nancy put one hand to her head and felt of her hair. When she brought the hand away, a tuft of hair
came away also. She finally realized what had happened.
"Hickey!" she screamed into the telephone. "Somebody shot at me!"
Chapter II. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST
DOC SAVAGE maintained a headquarters on the eighty-sixth floor, which was the top floor, of one of
the city’s most prominent skyscrapers. The building served two desirable purposes: First, it was so
prominent that it was a landmark which made it easy for people who needed help to locate Doc easily.
Second, the internal arrangement—private elevators, secret private garage, another secret exit that led to
the bronze man’s boat-and-plane hangar that masqueraded as a warehouse on the Hudson—was such
as to afford privacy. There was also a filtering system whereby people with real business were separated
from the autograph-hunters and curiosity-lookers.
Nancy and her boy friend, Hickey Older, got out of a bus in front of the skyscraper. There was a little
coolness between them.
"Hickey, I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself," Nancy protested.
Nancy was a rather ambitious piece of baggage. If she was going to meet a very handsome man who
was also famous and wealthy, she didn’t want any boy friend hanging around to perhaps throw a monkey
wrench in the processes of nature.
The hope of meeting such a man, on the chance she could snare him with her charms—her charms were
not bad at all—had been her initial motive for deciding to come to see Doc Savage.
After the shot, Hickey had added firmness to her intentions.
"This Doc Harmony fired you without notice," Hickey said angrily. "You don’t owe him anything. Heck!
He didn’t even give you two weeks’ advance pay! And—well, somebody did shoot at you. I wish I’d
been there to protect you."
"Hickey, I can handle this myself," Nancy said.
"Nothing doing," Hickey retorted. "You need a man’s protection. Anyhow, I wouldn’t mind seeing this
Doc Savage myself."
Nancy resisted an impulse to kick his shins, and they entered the skyscraper, were directed to an
elevator in the back, entered it, and were soon deposited in a quietly furnished hallway—not on the top
floor, but on the twentieth.
Hickey nudged Nancy.
"Hey," he whispered. "They musta let us out in the wrong place. This looks like the training ground for a
circus."
Hickey was referring to two rather remarkable-looking men, and two animals.
One of the men was extremely short, wide, homely and hairy. His appearance was strikingly like that of
an ape, although his homeliness had a pleasant quality. It might have been pleasant because he was so
extremely ugly.
The other man lean-waisted, dapperly dressed—attired in the height of sartorial perfection, in fact—with
the wide, mobile mouth of an orator. He held a black cane across his knees.
These two men were glaring at each other. If appearances were any indication, they were on the verge of
a fight.
"Listen, Ham, you overdressed shyster lawyer," said the apish man grimly. "I didn’t ask you to eat
breakfast at my apartment. Anyway, I been cooking them breakfasts for years, and nobody has
complained before."
"Probably," said the dapper man, "because dead men tell no tales."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Well, something gave me a bellyache right after that breakfast."
"It was one of the blasted cigars of yours," said the homely man.
The other scowled. "Listen," he said. "Those cigars are all right. I only smoke quarter cigars."
"After somebody else has smoked the other three quarters, I bet," the homely man suggested.
Hickey Older stood there grinning, hoping the fight would commence.
It was hard for Hickey to decide which was the more remarkable, the intense disgust with which the two
men were glaring at each other, or the two animals which reposed sleepily on the desks.
One of the animals was a pig, a small-bodied animal with long legs and large, winglike ears.
The other animal was some species of chimpanzee or baboon, its principal claim for fame being that it
looked almost exactly like the homely man.
The homely man’s small twinkling eyes suddenly discovered Nancy. He forgot all about his quarrel,
sprang to his feet, and approached.
"I’m Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair," he announced. "Call me Monk. Everybody does."
The dapper Ham said, "He’s got a wife and thirteen half-witted children who call him pappy, in case he
forgets to mention it."
Monk looked injured. As a matter of fact, this was precisely the lie he had been getting ready to tell
about his companion, Ham Brooks. Or Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, one of the most
eminent lawyers—when he took time out from adventuring to work at it—who had ever been graduated
from Harvard.
Ham finished the introductions. The pig was Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet. The chimp was Chemistry,
Ham’s own pet.
"We’re looking for Doc Savage," said Hickey Older.
"You’re on the right track," Monk said. "All you got to do is convince us it’s something worth bothering
Doc about. We’re the filtering committee."
"Yes," Ham said. "Monk questions the men, and I interrogate the ladies."
"He’s got it backward," Monk said indignantly.
Hickey Older put his fists on his hips.
"Now listen, pals," he said. "Let’s come down to earth and talk sense. I’ve heard of both of you, and
you’re big shots at your professions." He pointed at Monk. "You’re one of the greatest living industrial
chemists." He pointed at Ham. "You’re a big lawyer." Hickey pointed at both of them. "Now we come
up here on business, so let’s stop kidding around and get down to brass tacks."
"He sounds tough," Monk remarked.
Ham looked at Hickey Older’s wide shoulders, beamy arms, sturdy wrists, thick neck, square young jaw
and confident eyes.
"He is tough," Ham said. "You shut up, Monk, before you get hurt."
"Nancy, here," said Hickey Older, "has got something to tell you that looks kind of mysterious. She
figured Doc Savage should know about it."
DOC SAVAGE was a giant of a man, yet so symmetrically proportioned that one had to stand close to
realize just how powerful he was. His skin had a deep bronze tint that had been given by tropical suns,
his hair was a bronze hue only slightly darker, and his eyes were like pools of flake-gold, always stirred
by tiny winds. Remarkably penetrating eyes, magnetic. He spoke with a low, well-modulated voice that
gave the impression of capacity for intense power and flexibility.
"Gosh!" said Nancy.
Hickey Older frowned at her. He’d heard Nancy say gosh that way before, usually when she saw a male
movie star.
Monk said, "Their story sounded as if it might have something, Doc. So I brought them up."
The bronze man nodded, asked a few questions in a quiet, friendly voice. He found out the occupations
of the two young people. Hickey Older was a supervisor of some kind of a big laundry, a position to
which he had advanced from driving a truck.
Nancy produced the pad of prescription blanks from Dr. Samuel Harmony’s office. She also had
brought the newspaper with the stabbed-through picture.
Doc held the pad to the light, read what had been written on it. He glanced at the picture.
He listened to Nancy tell about Dr. Samuel Harmony’s "fainting" spell and his sudden determination to
take a vacation.
"I don’t think he fainted at all," said Nancy. "And I think he closed up his office and went away because
he was scared."
Hickey Older cleared his throat to get attention, and carefully extracted from one pocket some small
object which was wrapped in paper. He unrolled the paper, dropped a blob of lead in the bronze man’s
palm.
"Here’s the bullet," he said. "I dug it out of the wall of the office."
"The bullet which was fired at Nancy when she was talking to you?" Doc Savage inquired.
" Yep."
"Just what had you said prior to the bullet being fired?" Doc asked.
Nancy put a finger on her lower lip while she remembered.
"Well, I guess I had told Hickey about just everything," she said. "And I was just saying that I thought I
would go see Doc Savage. Then— bang! The bullet come through the window." She opened her purse
and showed some strands of hair. "It came so close that it cut some of my hair," she added. "Look."
The homely Monk was not looking at the hair; he was gazing approvingly at the girl.
"Looks as if," said Monk, "somebody tried to pot-shoot her to keep her from coming to see us."
Doc nodded thoughtfully.
"Where did the bullet come from?" he asked.
"I figured that out," volunteered Hickey Older. "It came from a window across the street. You see, this
Harmony guy had big, airy offices with a lot of windows in each room. It would have been easy for
somebody across the street to spot Nancy as she was talking on the telephone to me."
"But," wailed Nancy, "how did the watcher know what I was talking about?"
Doc Savage said, "Well, we can only surmise the answer to that. But Dr. Samuel Harmony wrote
warnings to his friends, instead of telephoning them. That indicates that perhaps he had the suspicion that
his telephone wire was tapped. If so, and the eavesdropper on the tapped wire was located in a room
across the street, it would naturally explain what happened."
The bronze man’s voice was low, reassuring, and conveyed an impression of kindly appreciation.
Hickey Older put his fists on his hips.
"What you going to do about this?" he asked.
"Investigate it," Doc said.
"What do you figure is behind it?"
The bronze man made a slight negative gesture.
"Don’t you think it is a little early to form definite conclusions?" he asked.
"I don’t see nothin’ to form conclusions from," admitted Hickey. "This guy gets scared, tells his friends to
scram out of town, leaves himself. Nancy gets interested and calls me up, and some guy takes a pot shot
at her. It don’t make sense to me. Does it to you?"
Doc said, "Does the name South Orion mean anything to anybody?"
"South Orion,"
said Hickey Older, "don’t mean nothing to me."
"Nor to me," Nancy said.
Hickey sighed. "I’m kinda disappointed in you," he told Doc. "I always heard you just had to snap your
fingers a couple of times, and everything was all fixed up."
Doc Savage made no comment, but moved to the window, where he stood in thought. Spread before the
window was a remarkable panorama of Manhattan buildings, the bay and, far in the distance, the sea.
Turning, Doc beckoned Hickey Older to his side.
"We have reason to suspect that Nancy might be in danger," Doc said. "I believe we should assign one of
my men to guard her."
"What’s the matter with me?" Hickey asked. "You ain’t seen me do no guardin’. I’m pretty hot stuff, no
kidding."
"I’m going to assign a man to work with you," Doc said. "Which one would you prefer, Monk or Ham?"
Hickey Older looked at Monk and Ham. He wasn’t thinking which one would make the best guard. He
was wondering which one of those two clucks would be the least likely to try to steal his girl.
"Monk," he said. "Monk looks the strongest."
He neglected to add that, if any girl of his was dope enough to fall for a fellow as homely as Monk, he
might as well know about it now.
As a matter of fact, Hickey had made an error in his choice, and picked the one of the pair who usually
had the most success with femininity.
Monk was called over and given his assignment as guard for Nancy. The homely chemist, looking
pleased, grinned and winked at Ham, who did not return the grin. It was agreed that both Monk and
Hickey Older were to accompany Nancy while she made the rounds of the employment agencies in
search of a new job.
Monk, Hickey Older and Nancy left the eighty-sixth-floor headquarters.
DOC SAVAGE’S headquarters layout consisted of three great rooms. The first chamber, and the
smallest one, was a reception room furnished with little except some comfortable chairs, a huge safe and
a remarkable inlaid table. The next room was a library containing thousands of scientific tomes, one of the
most complete technical libraries on certain subjects in existence. The third room, by far the largest, was
the experimental laboratory where Doc Savage spent most of his spare time.
The bronze man entered the laboratory, weighed the bullet which had been fired at Nancy, then put it
under a microscope for a few minutes.
"A .25-20 rifle bullet," the bronze man remarked.
"Rifle?" Ham looked puzzled.
"Yes, the smart crooks have started carrying rifles instead of revolvers whenever it is convenient. You
see, a man caught carrying a revolver is obviously under suspicion, and subject to the State antifirearms
law. Where the man with the rifle might be merely going deer hunting."
Ham suggested, "The bullet hit the glass and was deflected just enough to miss the girl. Is that your
guess?"
"Yes."
He seemed to have something else on his mind, judging from his thoughtful expression. He rubbed his
jaw, scratched his head, hesitating. Finally he blurted it out.
"Look," he exclaimed. "Here, wait a minute." He went over to the desk and picked up the newspaper,
brought it back and pointed with his finger. "Who is this Edward Ellston Parks?"
Doc Savage said, "The man standing beside me there in that picture?"
Ham nodded.
"Yes, that’s the man I mean," the dapper lawyer explained. "It says here that you came down to meet him
摘要：

THEAWFULEGGADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.MENFLEEING?ChapterII.THEARCHAEOLOGIST?ChapterIII.FLIGHTFROMHATE?ChapterIV.THEREDROAD?ChapterV.DINOSAURCOUNTRY?ChapterVI.ANEGGINACAVE?ChapterVII.DAMNEDTHINGHATCHING?ChapterVIII.THEMYS...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 088 - The Awful Egg.pdf

共82页,预览17页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：82 页 大小：444.49KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 82
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注