Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 082 - The Dagger in the Sky

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THE DAGGER IN THE SKY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE DAGGER
? Chapter II. SID HAS A STORY
? Chapter III. DARK DEATH
? Chapter IV. BLADE OVER JUNGLE
? Chapter V. MYSTERY COMES NORTH
? Chapter VI. THE FRIGHTENED RICH MAN
? Chapter VII. THE FEAR
? Chapter VIII. MILLIONS ON A BOAT
? Chapter IX. JUNGLE QUEST
? Chapter X. THE QUEER NAVY
? Chapter XI. A MAN ALONE
? Chapter XII. JUNGLE DERELICT
? Chapter XIII. PAN AND FIRE
? Chapter XIV. RECEPTION IN CRISTOBAL
? Chapter XV. PRESSURE
? Chapter XVI. HACIENDA
? Chapter XVII. GOLD POOL
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. THE DAGGER
THE street should be very clean. The long-faced man had been sweeping it since daylight.
He had appeared at dawn with a broom and a cart—and his curiosity—and he had been cleaning the
street since, up and down and back and forth, doing all his sweeping in the one block.
Twice he had been nearly run over. First a truck almost got him; the next time it was a taxicab, the driver
of which leaned out and swore for a minute and ten seconds without once repeating himself, after which
the long-faced street sweeper walked over to the cab driver and they had words in voices low enough
for nobody to overhear. The taxi driver pulled his head back inside and drove off meekly.
If onlookers were interested, they probably thought the street sweeper had said something like, "Beat it,
or I’ll take this broom and knock your ugly head off!"
As a matter of fact, the conversation was slightly different.
"Doc Savage has not appeared," said the street sweeper.
"Any sign of the one from South America?"
"None."
"Well, you know the orders."
"You bet."
The long-faced man went back to sweeping streets; he continued to sweep back and forth, up and
down, on the same block.
The hours passed, and it got to be four o’clock in the afternoon. Now and then during the day a
pedestrian had paused and stared up curiously at the top of the huge building which filled one side of the
block. In a number of instances, pedestrians had also turned into the lobby of the skyscraper and stood
for a time gawking at the directory listing the firms which occupied office space in the building.
Two of these curiosity seekers came out and stopped, purely by chance, so that the street sweeper
overheard them.
"Joe, you’re as crazy as a bedbug!" said one. "His name wasn’t even listed in the lobby."
"Don’t care. He has his headquarters on the eighty-sixth floor. I know a guy who knows him, I tell you."
"Then why ain’t he listed?"
"How would I know? Because of guys like you and me, maybe—mugs who are just curious. Would you
want guys barging in on you just to see what you looked like? It must be hell to be a celebrity."
The other gave his jaw a thoughtful rub.
"It would be more hell," he said, "to do the kind of work that big bronze guy does."
The pair ambled away.
Soon after four o’clock a taxicab nearly ran over the long-faced street sweeper again. It was the same
cab. They went through the same display of tempers in order to exchange a few low-voiced words.
"Hey, Sid, any sign yet?" asked the cab driver.
"Nope." The long-faced man scowled disagreeably. "Say, I didn’t know this Doc Savage—or the Man
of Bronze, as they call him—had quite so much reputation. You know something? Half the people who
pass here gawk up at that eighty-sixth floor. I thought you said the public didn’t know much about him?"
"They don’t."
"Then why do they gawk?"
"They’re curious, Sid. It’s what they don’t know that makes them gawk, don’t you see? They’ve just
read wild stuff in the newspapers. A lot of guess-writing by the reporters. Stuff about Doc Savage being
one of the greatest scientists of this century, and—well—a physical marvel and mental wizard—those are
the words they use. And the other things they tell about him—the things he is supposed to have done."
"And that stuff isn’t true?"
"He’s overrated. Hell, every celebrity is overrated!"
"This one had better not be half what they seem to think he is," said the street sweeper grimly, "or I’m
personally heading for tall timber."
THE long-faced man had endeavored at the beginning of his day to give the idea that he was
stoop-shouldered and afflicted with a limp, but now he was getting tired, and he frequently forgot to
affect both stoop and limp. He was not a tall man, in spite of the lean length of his face. He had dark eyes
and hair; his face, once the make-up was removed, would probably be more healthy-looking, but not
exactly confidence-inspiring.
He did not seem overly happy about his present job.
Suddenly—it was exactly six o’clock—the man stopped sweeping, chucked his broom in the cart,
shoved the cart against the curb, and climbed into the most convenient taxicab. It happened—not by
accident, either—that the cab was the one driven by the man with whom he had talked twice that day.
"Savage leaving?" asked the hackman.
"Yes. Just pulled out of that drive from his private garage in the basement."
"Which car?"
"That black one yonder."
"Hell, that little jalopy? If I had his reputation, I would have me a limousine a block long, with a Jap to
drive and two Russian dukes to open the doors."
"Sure. And attract so much attention you’d get your head shot out from between your ears inside of
twenty four hours!"
The cab followed the small black car. It was not a difficult pursuit, the pace being slow and traffic not too
thick, particularly after they reached the vicinity of the Hudson River water front.
The cab driver had been thinking.
"If I had that bronze guy’s reputation, I would also have me a harem of chorus babes," he said cheerfully.
Then he made a clucking noise of disapproval. "I hear he never has anything to do with women. What do
you think of that?"
The small black car halted before a large, unimpressive looking brick warehouse which was built so that
it extended out into the river, and bore a sign reading: Hidalgo Trading Company. The car remained
stationary a moment, then big doors in the end of the structure rolled mysteriously open.
"Radio-controlled doors," the long-faced man muttered.
"Yeah. Say, Sid, I hear he uses more different kinds of gadgets—"
"Drive to the plane. Quick!"
The taxicab swung right, gathered speed for half a dozen blocks, then careened out onto a ramshackle
pier to which a seaplane was moored. There was nothing ramshackle about the plane; it was as fast a
thing as money could buy.
The pilot was a wide man with a gloomy expression and a habit of frequently looking all around him.
"Hello, Sid," he said. "What goes on?"
"Savage just went to his warehouse hangar," the long-faced man barked. He scrambled into the plane.
"Come on! Let’s get this thing in the air!"
"What if he don’t leave by plane? Hadn’t we better wait and watch?"
"And make him suspicious by having us take off directly behind him? Don’t be a dope! He ain’t as likely
to suspect a plane already in the air."
They untied the plane and started the motor, propeller slipstream flattened the water, and the ship soon
climbed up into the afternoon sky.
"There he comes," called the pilot, looking down.
Far below, a lean, bronze-colored seaplane moved out of the huge old structure that pretended to be a
warehouse. It nosed into the wind, suddenly gathered speed, then slanted up into the sky.
It flew south.
"Going south, Sid," said the pilot grimly.
The other man settled back, and his long face became longer and slowly twisted under the grease-paint,
street-sweeper disguise, so that his manner and his expression both were almost completely frightened.
"This is exactly what we were afraid of!" he groaned.
The pilot snorted.
"Why worry, Sid?" he said. "He’ll be dead inside of three hours!"
THE day was cold, but not as cold as it might have been, for the weather was not seasonal. This was a
late fall day. It had been pleasantly warm, even a little sultry, although radio predictions indicated a
blizzard boiling down from the north and the sun was wrapped in a cold, purplish haze. There was
something unnatural about the day.
Doc Savage flew the plane alone, relaxed in the comfortable seat. The air was sultry, the whole aspect of
the world was unpleasant, and he was glad to be heading south on his first real vacation.
It was his intention that nothing should happen to him—except eating and sleeping and fishing—for at
least a month.
Recently it had occurred to him that he might be turning into too much of a machine—becoming, in fact,
as superhuman as many persons thought he was. He did not like that idea. He had always been
apprehensive lest something of the kind occur. The scientists who had trained him during his childhood
had been afraid of his losing human qualities; they had guarded him against this as much as possible.
When a man’s entire life is fantastic, he must guard against his own personality becoming strange.
Doc Savage’s existence had been fantastic from the cradle. In childhood he was turned over to science
for training, and scores of the leading scientists of the world had contributed to building his body and
mind. The whole weird project—the scientific endeavor to build a superman—had been successful to an
uncanny degree, possibly because nature had already equipped Doc Savage with a strong body and an
unhampered brain.
The training was no experiment, no scientist’s crack-brained dream. There had been a deliberate
purpose, and the purpose was to fit Doc Savage for a strange career, the one he followed now.
The career was the unusual and always trouble-earning one of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers
who seemed to be outside the law, traveling to the far corners of the earth, if necessary, to do so.
He had five assistants in this unusual work. Each of the five was a specialist in some particular science.
They had associated themselves with Doc Savage because of a liking for adventure, and probably
admiration for the rather amazing fellow who was Doc Savage.
Outwardly, even, Doc Savage was unusual. His size was startling, although he was proportioned so
symmetrically that when he stood apart from other men, and from objects to which his magnitude could
be compared, he seemed of average build. His skin had a perpetual deep-bronze tint given by tropical
suns, his hair was a slightly darker bronze, very straight. But his eyes were undeniably the most striking
aspect of him; they were a strange golden tint, like pools of flake gold, and full of alert life, as if always
stirred by tiny winds. His unusual eyes gave him the most trouble whenever he donned a disguise.
He had made scientific discoveries in a dozen fields that were half a century ahead of the times; mention
of his name was enough to give the jitters to criminals in any part of the world; he could be instantly
received into the presence of any president, king or dictator in the world.
But he was getting worried lest he not feel the same things, like the same things, as an ordinary guy. He
hoped that a month of complete change would fix that up. It would be his first real vacation.
He landed at the big transatlantic seaplane base in Baltimore and watched the plane refueled, then
entered the comfortable restaurant. For dinner he deliberately ordered one or two dishes which scientists
claimed people would be better off if they never ate. On this vacation he wasn’t going to live scientifically
if he could help it. He spent two hours over dinner.
Sid, the long-faced man, watched Doc Savage come out of the restaurant. The pilot of Sid’s plane—the
craft had followed Doc’s ship carefully to Baltimore—stood nearby.
"There he goes," Sid muttered.
"Take a good look," the pilot suggested. "It’s probably the last anybody will ever see of him."
They kept their eyes on Doc Savage while he climbed into his plane—a group of airport attendants and
fliers had gathered to admire the advanced design of the ship—and taxied out into the bay. The breeze
was offshore at this point, so it was necessary to taxi far out in the bay in order to take off into the wind,
the proper way.
It was very dark out where the plane stopped and turned.
Sid made an uneasy growling noise. "We had better follow him."
"Why?" asked the pilot.
"Just to be sure we haven’t guessed wrong."
The pilot did not favor the idea, but Sid was evidently in charge, so they returned to their own fast plane,
which they had moored nearby, and climbed in.
A moaning comet passed them in the darkness, climbing skyward.
"There he goes," Sid said. "Keep track of his lights."
They whipped over the water, went on step with waves rattling against the pontoons, then arched up and
lined out after the Doc Savage plane, the white taillight of which was barely discernible. Their own lights
they kept extinguished.
Clouds dropped behind, and darkness gave way to remarkably bright moonlight.
"He may see us," Sid warned.
"What if he does? It’s too late for him to do anything about it."
Sid did nothing but look apprehensive and frightened. He watched tensely.
"Look!"
he squalled.
Intense white light had flooded the cabin interior of the Doc Savage ship. It was flame. Peculiar flame,
like the blaze that comes from old-fashioned photo flashlight powder. But there was no smoke. The flash
was momentary, then gone.
The plane rolled over slowly, as if tired, and began falling. It tumbled for the first few hundred feet, then
went into the madly erratic falling horror known as a tailspin. No smoke came from the ship, no flames.
It did not hit the earth squarely. It struck at a slant, nose first, scooping up a long cloud of dust that got
fatter. Out of this dust the plane came hopping, what was left of it. The carcass rolled possibly a hundred
yards, then stopped.
The black dagger then appeared in the sky.
Chapter II. SID HAS A STORY
THE blade, at a conservative estimate, was two hundred feet long. The hilt was less, perhaps fifty feet,
while the cross guard was twenty feet or so in length. It was black, intensely black, even in moonlight,
which tends to make all things seem gray.
The resemblance the thing bore to a dagger was instantly noticeable. The long blade came to a needle
point; the whole thing lying, roughly, in a north-and-south direction across the sky, the tip pointing to the
south.
Sid, his body full of tense muscles, stared at the phenomenon. His long face was jammed against the
plane window.
The dagger remained in the sky—it was a few hundred feet directly above the spot where Doc Savage’s
plane had crashed—for a long time. The interval during which the black dagger was in existence seemed
an age. Probably it was at least a minute.
Then the thing faded, vanishing rather quickly and appearing to turn into a dark haze, then into nothing, so
that the ugly black aspect was evident to the last.
Sid made a rattling noise when he tried to speak, cleared his throat.
"We bub-better go down and look," he said, stuttering a little.
Doc Savage’s plane had hit in a field which had been fall-plowed and harrowed, which accounted for the
dust when the craft struck. The soft ground was a poor spot for a landing, but a level meadow lay
adjacent, and Sid’s pilot landed there.
"You
go look," the pilot directed.
"But—"
"I’ll stay here," the pilot said, "and watch our plane."
His voice was harsh, determined.
Sid cursed him, said, "Damn you! You’re not taking any chances!"
"The hell with you! I was hired to fly, and that’s all."
Sid approached the plane warily. He carried a flashlight, used it. The fuselage of the Doc Savage ship
had shed wings, undercarriage, part of the tail, and was almost a ball of metal. He worked for a while
before he got the door open; it came off entirely, and he fell sprawling with it.
He got up, looked inside the cabin, said, "Ugh!" in a sick voice, and backed away.
The cabin interior was charred, blackened. Paint had curled, hung to the metal in scabs; leather of the
seats was darkly scorched. There could have been no living thing in the cabin, for it was as if a tongue of
white-hot flame had licked the place.
Sid tried to force himself to crawl into the plane. He wedged half in, put his hand on a seat; the metal was
still hot to touch, and the leather crumpled and broke and springs and stuffing jumped out, making a slight
chugging sound. The seat stuffing struck Sid in the face, and he cried out and staggered backward.
Suddenly his nerve collapsed.
He snarled, "I didn’t like this in the first place," and whirled and ran for his own plane.
He had covered about half the distance back to his plane—he was climbing through the brush-tangled
fence which separated the meadow from the plowed field—when Doc Savage tripped him, fell upon him
and clapped his hand over his mouth to prevent an outcry.
UNFORTUNATELY Sid had made noise in falling.
The plane pilot yelled, "Hey, Sid! What the devil’s wrong?"
Doc Savage called, "Nothing. I just stumbled." In a much lower tone, a whisper, Doc said, "Monk! Get
that man at the plane."
"Boy, watch me get ‘im!" replied a voice that might have belonged to a child.
The owner of the small voice—he was nearly as wide as he was tall—jumped out of the brush and ran
toward the plane. He traveled with a gangling lope that was something like the gait of an ape in a hurry.
The pilot took alarm, jumped back in his plane, and batted the throttle with a palm. The engine was
turning over. It whooped; slipstream scooped up a cloud of dry grass. The plane rolled. The apish fellow,
Monk, chased it. Once he almost closed large, hairy hands over the rudder edge, but didn’t quite make
it. The plane picked up its tail and fled aloft into the night.
Monk stopped and went through a remarkable performance of jumping up and down and squalling.
He went back to Doc Savage and reported: "He got away."
Sid had been staring with both his mouth and his eyes open as wide as they could possibly get. Now he
came around to believing the fact that Doc Savage was still alive.
"But you . . . you died in that plane!" he muttered.
Monk snorted, asked, "Should we disillusion him, Doc?"
"It would do no harm," the bronze man said.
Monk got a great deal of pleasure out of enlightening their prisoner. "Whoever you are, you ain’t as wise
as you figured. Doc saw that a plane was following him as soon as he left New York, and when he
landed in Baltimore for dinner he saw you were watching him. So he went to a telephone and called me
and Ham, and we came down in our fastest plane and staged a little circus for you."
"Circus?"
"Well, it’ll be a circus before we’re done with you. Did you ever hear of radio-controlled aërial
torpedoes? You should have. They were invented as far back as the World War."
"But you took off in the plane from Baltimore," Sid mumbled.
"There’s where you’re wrong. I’m explaining it. Doc just taxied down to the end of the bay where it was
dark, connected the radio-control robot on his plane to the controls—all of our planes are equipped with
the robots, incidentally, because we’ve used this stunt before—and then Doc jumped overboard and
swam to my plane. We simply sent the other plane off the water, controlled it by radio, like you control
an aërial torpedo, waited until we saw you take off in pursuit, and followed along to see what would
happen."
Sid shuddered, remembering some of the things he had heard about Doc Savage, and realizing that more
of it was true than he had supposed.
"Where is your plane now?" he asked.
Monk stuck a thumb at the sky. "Up there."
"But how did you get down?"
"Parachutes," said Monk, "while you two were landing your plane. You were too busy to notice." Monk
got down and took hold of Sid’s neck. "There’s just one thing," he added, "that will keep you from losing
your ears."
Sid took a deep breath.
"You’ve got me all wrong," he insisted. "I’m perfectly willing to tell you everything I know about this
fantastic affair."
"YOU can start off," Monk said, "with what happened to Doc’s plane."
Sid groaned. "I don’t know."
"What was that white flash of light inside the plane? What burned the interior of the cabin like it is?"
"I haven’t a vestige of an idea," Sid said. "I wish I did have."
Monk opened and closed his hands—the hands were sprinkled with hairs resembling rusty shingle
nails—and asked, "Do you know who I am?"
"You are Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, better known as Monk," Sid answered. "You’re
a famous chemist, and you’re also one of Doc Savage’s five assistants."
"You’re just half-right," Monk advised him. "I’m also the guy who is gonna tie a knot in your neck if you
don’t tell a better story."
"I’m doing my best."
"What was that black thing in the sky that looked like a dagger? What made it?"
"I wish I knew," Sid said. "I was following you in hopes of finding out."
The homely Monk was not a patient soul.
"That dagger-shaped thing was crazy, and I want it explained!" he shouted.
Sid spread his hands helplessly. "I’m trying to tell you that the thing is also going to kill me."
Monk stared at him. "Kill you?"
"It’s a long story," Sid explained. He looked at Doc Savage forlornly. "I’ll tell you how you became
involved in this. You probably don’t know. When I first found out that my life was in danger—when I
first realized that, fantastic as it was, the peril was very real—I decided at once to go to you for help.
You help people who are in strange trouble, I’ve heard. Almost immediately I was told that you would
be killed, and the exact time was set." Sid held his wrist close to his eyes and squinted at a watch in the
moonlight. "The time set was exactly the moment your plane crashed."
Monk said, "You haven’t explained how you happened to be following Doc."
"I can clear that up easily. I wanted to see this fantastic thing if I could. I wasn’t sure—well, it was hard
for me to believe such an unbelievable thing could exist."
"Who was the pilot who got away?"
"Merely a man I hired. There was another man I hired in New York to help me trail Doc Savage—a taxi
driver."
Monk snorted.
"Now suppose you tell us," he suggested skeptically, "what this black dagger is."
Sid’s long face grew longer. "Do you believe what I have already told you?"
"Oh, sure!"
"That’s what I was afraid—you’re skeptical. So there’s practically no need of me telling you the rest."
"Why not?"
"You certainly won’t believe the rest."
THERE was silence for a while. Doc Savage listened. Noise of the plane in which the long-faced man
had come was gone from the moon-whitened sky. Nor was there any sound of his own ship, the one in
which Monk and Ham, his two associates, had picked him up in Baltimore.
Ham was supposed to be following Sid’s plane.
Monk said, "What’s your name?"
"Sid. Sid Morrison."
"All right, Sid Morrison—let’s have the part of your story you think we won’t believe."
Sid tugged at his long jaw and squirmed.
"The black stone was probably in existence hundreds of years ago," he said. "At least, it is mentioned in
the legend history of the ancient Incas of Peru. It is variously referred to, one mention designating it as the
black soul of Kukulkan, the part that was evil and cast out by Kukulkan, who was the supreme deity of
the Mayans and some of the Incas. Another legend is that Kukulkan had an evil rival, who was defeated
and turned into a stone that was as black as the evil one’s sins. It was an accursed stone, then. It has
been accursed all down through history. All who touched the stone, or had anything to do with it, met a
violent demise. And always their death was signaled by the appearance of a black dagger."
Sid frowned and stared at them. His voice was low, his manner intense.
"Legend accounts for the black dagger by saying that it was with a dagger of black obsidian stone that
Kukulkan laid low the evil one."
Monk stood there and thought about the story for a few moments.
"Does the legend," he asked sourly, "account for your standing here and telling us such a mess of
nonsense?"
Sid said, "A man named Juan Don MacNamara sold the black stone to me. Juan Don MacNamara is the
son of President Gatun MacNamara, of the South American republic of Cristobal."
(Author’s note: The name of the republic, Cristobal, is a fictitious one, for obvious reasons.)
"Where is this rock?"
"Juan Don MacNamara was to deliver it to me. He was going to fly it up. I presume he has already left
Cristobal with the stone."
"You a stone buyer by profession?" Monk asked skeptically.
"I am a collector of Incan relics," the long-faced man said. He became indignant. "And furthermore, I’m
through talking to you! You don’t believe what I’m telling you. If you’re fools enough to think I’m lying,
that’s your hard luck!"
摘要：

THEDAGGERINTHESKYADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THEDAGGER?ChapterII.SIDHASASTORY?ChapterIII.DARKDEATH?ChapterIV.BLADEOVERJUNGLE?ChapterV.MYSTERYCOMESNORTH?ChapterVI.THEFRIGHTENEDRICHMAN?ChapterVII.THEFEAR?ChapterVIII.MILLION...

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