Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 054 - Ost

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OST
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE CITY THAT WAS NOT THERE
? Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
? Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD NOT SWIM
? Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE
? Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
? Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
? Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
? Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
? Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
? Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
? Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
? Chapter XII. ADRIFT
? Chapter XIII. THE SUMMONING VISION
? Chapter XIV. THE STINGING BREATH
? Chapter XV. THE OTHER WHITE MAN
? Chapter XVI. THE THIRD VICTIM
? Chapter XVII. GOA
? Chapter XVIII. SIEGE
? Chapter XIX. THE REST OF THE VICTIMS
? Chapter XX. PAYMENT IN DEATH
? Chapter XXI. THE TRAP
Scanned and Proofed by Tom Stephens
Chapter 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 Ost."
"You what?"
"Everybody who saw the city knew it was called Ost. 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 Ost."
"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 Ost."
Captain Smooth swallowed two or three times and squinted at Ben Brasken.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
"Ost," 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 Ost?" 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, "Ost 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 Ost are white people, eh?"
"No. Martin Space is a white man. And there was a woman, who was also white. The rest were
Ostians."
"What do the Ostians 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 Ost at once! That is why I am here. I came
to get you to save Ost from the horror!"
"You know that way to Ost?" 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 Ost 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 Ost."
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 Ost. 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 Ost."
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.
Chapter 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.
These reports were made up for Doc Savage by his five aids.
Doc Savage’s headquarters occupied the top floor of New York’s tallest building. He remained there
most of the time, and did not venture out in public, for he had a genuine dislike for being noticed.
It was impossible for him to go about without being noticed. He was a bronze giant who made almost
every other man seem small in comparison, although his muscular development was so symmetrical that
he did not seem such a giant when standing off by himself. He had straight bronze hair, a little darker than
his skin. But his eyes probably made him more striking than any other feature.
They were like pools of flake gold stirred steadily by tiny winds, and they possessed a penetrating,
almost hypnotic quality which was quite disturbing, especially to somebody with a guilty conscience.
Doc had been trained from childhood by scientists. He was a scientific product. He had never had a
normal youth. The result was that he was an amazing personage. The newspapers called him a mental
wizard and a muscular marvel.
Doc Savage read the report about Ben Brasken without showing any emotion.
With Doc in the library of the skyscraper headquarters were two of his aids.
William Harper Littlejohn, more often called "Johnny," had often been described as being two men high
and half a man thick. He wore a monocle attached to his lapel. It was really a magnifying glass. Johnny
was an eminent archaeologist and geologist. He had one habit which might some day get him slaughtered:
He never used a small word when he could think of a big one.
Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks was the best-dressed man in America, most persons
admitted. He was also a noted lawyer, and carried a harmless-looking black cane that was really a
sword cane. Those who knew him very well, or could outrun him, called him "Ham." He did not like the
nickname.
Ham had one bad habit: It was Chemistry, his pet. Chemistry was either an ape, chimpanzee, gorilla or
baboon, or a mixture. Scientists who tried to figure out just what Chemistry was frequently gave it up and
called him the what-is-it.
Doc had just put the Ben Brasken report down and was looking at it when "Monk" came in, looking very
excited.
MONK was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, chemical wizard, owner of a pet pig called
Habeas Corpus. Monk looked almost exactly like Ham’s what-is-it, Chemistry, would look like if he
weighted two hundred and fifty or so pounds.
Monk was indeed excited. He shifted from one stubby, bowed leg to another.
Ham looked at Monk.
"It must be a woman," Ham said sourly. "Something in skirts is sure to get that freak of nature all worked
up. Just anything in skirts will do the trick."
Monk looked at Ham. He looked at Ham as if the latter were a fly some one had missed with the
swatter.
"You shyster!" Monk squeaked, in a small child’s voice. "Some day I’m gonna cram you all into one
shoe!"
Doc asked quietly, "What is it, Monk?"
"A lady to see you," Monk said. He gazed at the ceiling ecstatically. "And brothers, is she class!"
"I told you so," Ham jeered.
"Show her in," Doc requested.
When the young woman came in, they all got to their feet courteously. But Ham sprang forward and, with
great politeness, escorted the young woman to Doc and arranged a chair for her, elbowing aside Monk,
who glared indignantly.
No one could recall Monk and Ham ever having treated each other with any civility.
She was sort of a pocket-edition girl. Not that there wasn’t enough to her to make a vision who would
have disturbed any man’s dignity. There definitely was.
Her mink coat was cost and class, and her stockings were so sheer that a second glance was necessary
to be sure she wore any. She had large brown eyes, and her hair was about the color of a pecan shell.
She carried her chin in the air, and began to act like a young woman who was accustomed to having men
let her have her own way.
"I am Kittrella Merrimore," she said.
Monk and Ham exchanged the kind of glances they might have swapped if they had discovered a
harmless-looking butterfly they had been handling was a deadly, venomous moth. They had heard of
"Kit" Merrimore. Indeed, she had more money than any young woman should have.
Two jackleg foreign noblemen had sued her in the courts, claiming she had promised to marry them. She
had started a transatlantic flight. Her pilot had tried to drown them both by diving into the sea when she
refused to wed him at the end of the flight. She was what is known as dynamite.
"You have a small dirigible, I believe," Kit Merrimore told Doc Savage.
The bronze man admitted he did have. If Kit Merrimore was having any effect on him, it failed to show.
"I came to buy your airship," Kit Merrimore stated flatly.
"For what purpose?" Doc Savage inquired.
"You’ll pardon me," the lady hell-raiser retorted, "but that happens to be my business."
DOC SAVAGE’S three aids waited with great interest for whatever might come.
Doc Savage said nothing after the pretty visitor advised him to keep his nose out of her affairs, which was
what it amounted to.
The silence appeared to irk Kit Merrimore. She started tapping the floor angrily with an expensively
custom-shod toe.
"Well," she snapped, "how much do you think your airship is worth?"
"It is not for sale," Doc replied quietly.
"Nonsense! Of course it is! How much?"
Doc Savage rested his metallic hands on the desk. The bronze skin on the hands were smooth and
fine-grained, and the tendons, when movement caused them to spring out, were hard cables nearly as
large as an ordinary man’s fingers.
"It seems you do not understand," he said, in a deep, well-controlled voice. "The dirigible is a private
craft which we had constructed especially for our own needs. And we would certainly not allow any one
to use it without knowing for exactly what purpose it was intended."
Kit Merrimore’s toe tapped the floor viciously.
"You talk as if you thought I was going to use it to drop bombs on women and children."
Doc used good judgement. He did not answer this invitation for a quarrel.
The young woman suddenly used a different tack. She had been studying the big bronze man, who was
himself far above the average in male pulchritude. Perhaps this had something to do with it. Kit
Merrimore smiled sweetly.
"Please," she said, "I really do want the airship badly."
"For what purpose?" Doc asked bluntly.
"I’m truly sorry, but I cannot tell you that," the young lady replied.
"I am equally sorry," Doc said. "You cannot have the airship."
Kit Merrimore’s smile would have stopped a war.
"Please," she pleaded.
"You haven’t a chance of vamping me into it," Doc said.
Kit Merrimore stamped both feet, and her eyes launched sparks.
"I demand that you sell it to me!" she hissed.
Doc shrugged wearily.
"I’ll make you wish you had!" the young woman snapped. "Perhaps you don’t know just who I am?"
"You are a young woman who was not spanked often enough when she was little," Doc Savage replied
earnestly. "And you have too much money."
Monk and the others held their breath, mortally certain Doc was going to get hit with the first thing the
young lady could get her pretty hands on.
Kit Merrimore did grab for a paper weight. Then something happened. She stiffened. She seemed to
forget all about Doc and her rage.
Her eyes were fixed on the report about Ben Brasken. She could see Ben Brasken’s name. She could
also see the notation: "Incidents possibly worth attention," preceding the name.
She moved her brown eyes to Doc Savage. The eyes were wide, amazed, shocked.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh!"
摘要：

OSTADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2001BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THECITYTHATWASNOTTHERE?ChapterII.THELADYDIRIGIBLEBUYER?ChapterIII.THESAILORWHOCOULDNOTSWIM?ChapterIV.THEHIDINGPLACE?ChapterV.THEPHANTOMCELESTIAL?ChapterVI.THENEWBENBRASKEN?ChapterVII.THEBRON...

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