Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 043 - Cold Death

COLD DEATH

A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson

http://www.blackmask.com

? Chapter 1. HAND IN A CROWD

? Chapter 2. THE HOUSE IN THE MARSH

? Chapter 3. THE CANAL OF DEATH

? Chapter 4. GHOST VOICE AGAIN

? Chapter 5. MONK IS SILENCED

? Chapter 6. COLD LIGHT STRIKES

? Chapter 7. MONK SNEEZES

? Chapter 8. TRAIL OF A SHADOW

? Chapter 9. MONK’S SWEET TOOTH

? Chapter 10. HAM’S IN A JAM

? Chapter 11. VAR BLINDS HIS TRAIL

? Chapter 12. DEATH OVER MANHATTAN

? Chapter 13. MONK BAILS OUT

? Chapter 14. A GIRL SEEKS SCRAGGS

? Chapter 15. THE MAGNETIC WALL

? Chapter 16. THE DIVE OF DEATH

? Chapter 17. SCRAGGS JOINS DOC

? Chapter 18. HAM GETS POISON

? Chapter 19. PLOTTED POISONING

? Chapter 20. THE WALLS OF LIFE

? Chapter 21. THE WOMAN IN IT

? Chapter 22. SHADOW OF DEATH

? Chapter 23. DEATH THREATENS DOC

? Chapter 24. THREE VISITORS

? Chapter 25. THE RUNAWAY PLANE

Scanned and Proofed by Tom Stephens

Chapter 1. HAND IN A CROWD

DOC SAVAGE knew a hand had touched his pocket. There was a swift, wraith-like

movement of fingers. Then the hand was gone.

The touch was fleeting enough, but Doc Savage knew it had not been for the purpose of

robbery. The fingers had not been explorative. They had merely deposited something in

Doc’s pocket.

Doc Savage did not pause. Nor did he make any effort to apprehend the man who had

touched him. It would have been simple to have laid hands upon him, corded bronze hands;

to have trapped him.

Doc knew the man was not a thief. He was aware nothing had been removed. Doc pressed

the back of a hand on the outside of the pocket and felt a square white card.

The man who had placed it there had slipped aside in the crowd. No doubt, he believed he

had succeeded in delivering his message without being detected. If he had known Doc

Savage better he would have known this to be an impossible feat.

It was Doc’s principle to avoid public encounter unless the circumstance was compelling. He

contented himself with a second’s glimpse of the man who had touched him. He saw the

back of a head.

The hair was scraggly, unshorn. This strung from under the frayed brim of a disreputable hat.

The neck was scrawny. Little more than a bony upper spine with skin wrapped around it.

Doc Savage removed the card from his pocket. He did not slacken his speed. He had been

moving through the Wall Street crowd with the easy movement of a jungle animal. Though

there was a press on the sidewalk, it being five o’clock, it was amazing how this

bronze-skinned man avoided contact with others.

Doc was careful to hold the card by its edges. The hands of the scraggly man had been

bare. There should be fingerprints.

Doc cupped the card. His eyes flicked across it. Doc’s eyes were like flaky gold with stirring

whirlwinds in their depths. The whirlwinds seemed to move more rapidly now.

For a few seconds there was a haunting, trilling note. Those who might have been watching

the smooth, bronze face of Doc would have detected no movement of his lips. There were

many thus watching, for the man of bronze was a marked figure.

The trilling seemed to emanate from all of his huge, symmetrical body. It was a sound of

which Doc himself was hardly conscious. It might presage danger, or that the man of bronze

was upon the eve of a discovery.

The message on the card in his hand was brief, but explicit:

TO CLARK SAVAGE, JR:—IF YOU WOULD PREVENT DEATH, DANGER TO

THOUSANDS, CALL UNION 0-1214 TO-NIGHT AT EIGHT.

The words had been printed with a leaky pen. There was no signature. But the back of a

man’s head was all the signature Doc would need. Intuitively, he knew he would see the man

again. Perhaps many times.

DOC SAVAGE continued through the Wall Street crowd. Now he moved with greater

speed, but still he touched no one.

The man of bronze had an errand in Wall Street. He completed his brief business before

returning to his headquarters. But his mind was busy with the problem the card in his pocket

might represent.

Because of his amazing adventures, his world-wide assistance to those in trouble and his

punishment of crooks, Doc Savage was always besieged with appeals. A few merited his

attention.

And he was likewise a target for many who feared him. Even this small card in his pocket

might be the bait for a trap.

When he had returned to his laboratory, Doc set about reading what he considered vastly

more important than the mere printed words on the white card. This laboratory, on the

eighty-sixth floor of Manhattan’s most impressive skyscraper, was most amazing in its

equipment.

Not even the latest equipment of the police or the Federal department of justice equalled the

means here for scientific investigation. In addition, as the man of bronze had entered, the

doors of smooth, chrome steel closed him in. No locks appeared on these doors. But their

electroscopic fastenings made them possible of opening only to Doc and his five

companions in adventure.

Doc first dusted the card bearing the mysterious message. The distinct imprints of a thumb

and forefinger appeared. The card was a trifle grimy. The hand delivering it had been that of

a man who worked. The soiled spots had a brownish tinge.

The bronze man dropped a colorless liquid upon these spots. The reagent brought out a

definite greenish color.

For the time, Doc made no further tests. He had arrived at one conclusion which was

significant. The hands placing the card in his pocket had been those of a working chemist.

THE bronze man placed the card carefully in a glass case. The voice of a man was

speaking from the library adjoining the laboratory. It was fretful and complaining.

"You danged shyster! I waited where you said, but you didn’t show up! Dag-gonit, you won’t

get the chance to stand me up again!"

The speaker was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair. His voice was shrill and

childlike. But his appearance was that of an ungainly ape covered with reddish-brown hair.

Because of this, he was known as "Monk." He was one of the world’s leading industrial

chemists.

Monk had been speaking into the telephone. The man he had called a shyster was

Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, otherwise known as "Ham." He was the legal

luminary of Doc Savage’s group.

Hearing Monk’s voice, Doc Savage removed the card from the glass case. He came into

the library and laid the card on the table before Monk.

"I received this about three hours ago," Doc stated. "Those greenish spots were brown."

Monk touched the edge of the card.

"The No. 7 reagent brought out the green."

Then he named a little-known chemical which had an acid reaction.

"That is correct, Monk," the bronze man approved. "The card was placed in my pocket."

A huge man with a melancholy face peered at the card and frowned solemnly. He was

Colonel John Renwick, the engineer of the group. The hand "Renny" extended toward the

card lacked little being the size of a ham. He read the words gloomily.

"Union Exchange, huh?"

The third man in the library said, "That’s over in Jersey. And every time we have business

with Jersey there is trouble."

This man had an unhealthy pallor. He was small, compared to the others. But many larger

men had been sharply surprised by his strength and fighting ability.

He was Major Thomas J. Roberts, electrical wizard. His appearance had given him the

name of "Long Tom."

AS Long Tom finished speaking, a clock started chiming with musical notes.

Doc Savage crossed to the desk and picked up the telephone. The clock chimes touched

the final stroke of eight o’clock with a harmonious lingering.

"Union 0-1214," said Doc, when he had the New Jersey connection.

A voice started to speak from the other end.

Without preliminaries, the voice said. "You’re Doc Sav—"

Then it seemed as if the receiver had exploded. The voice was sliced off. No reverberation

followed. There was no lingering roll of sound, such as could have been expected if the

instrument had remained even for a few seconds in service.

"That was a powerful blast," Doc said. "The phone was torn out. The man who tried to talk

was an old man."

Doc didn’t explain further. He didn’t waste more time in speech. He had thumbed the

receiver bar. Two minutes later, he was given a trace-back on the Jersey call.

"Blind number," he said to the others. "It’s off the Newark-Trenton highway in a marshy strip."

Doc moved ahead through the outer door. His three companions paused only to make a

swift collection of a few special devices they might need. The bronze man did not seem

hurried, but the others were compelled to move fast.

Doc’s special elevator dropped with the speed of a rocket. It slowed with a cushiony

rebound, when it reached the bronze man’s private garage in the basement. Doc’s long low

car, with its extra-powerful motor under the long hood and its windows of bulletproof glass

set in armor steel, glided toward the Holland Tunnel.

Chapter 2. THE HOUSE IN THE MARSH

SHORTLY before the eight o’clock telephone call made by Doc Savage, a battered old

roadster turned off a paved New Jersey highway. Headlight beams laid ghostly fingers

across a foggy strip of marshland.

When he was perhaps a mile and a half from the main highway, the driver abruptly switched

off the lights. He parked the little car in concealment of bushes beside a crooked lane.

Climbing from the car, the driver walked cautiously ahead. Dim lights made a blur in the fog.

They indicated some habitation.

Close up, this might have been seen to be an old log house. It appeared to squat gloomily in

the murky depths of the Jersey marsh. The bulk of its presence was marked only by faint

illumination from an upper window and one slanting finger of dancing, vari-colored light

emanating from what seemed a mere slit at ground level.

From the basement, or some underground chamber, came a low throbbing. A trained

observer would have said delicate machinery of some sort was being operated. Apparently,

there was but one outside watcher. And his figure was only a furtive shadow among other

sinister shadows cast by this strange, penetrating light.

At times, the escaping light gave forth a rainbow glow.

A rutty, obscure road that was little more than a twisting trail through overgrowths of waving

swamp grass apparently was the only traffic communication between the old house and the

highway of civilization, some two miles distant.

Across the swamp a pair of telephone wires had been strung along available trees, most of

them gaunt-limbed and dead.

In the upper story of the old house there was no movement. Except for the faint light at the

one window, there was no evidence the structure was then occupied by a living person.

THE man from the roadster apparently feared something or some one within the old log

house. As he walked, it might have been observed he was a vague, catlike figure. He kept

to the tall marsh grass beside the road, pausing every few yards to listen intently.

In the swamp at a point off the road, some considerable distance from the old house, was a

single glowing eye of fire. The man hissed an oath under his breath. He crossed the soggy,

yielding ground with such quick lightness his feet seemed to leave no imprints.

Before he reached the spot, the red eye of fire winked out.

"Hunter maybe," the man murmured. "Well, he’s picked a poor spot for a camp."

As if the possible presence of another human no longer interested him, the luminous-eyed

man retraced his steps. He glanced at the radium hands of a wrist watch.

"The time is near," he mumbled, "if old Jackson hasn’t been having hallucinations."

Picking out a slightly higher, dry spot some two hundred yards to one side of the house, the

thin figure became a motionless part of the deeper marsh shadows. His thin lips continued

to emit whispered words.

"The great Doc Savage will be calling at eight o’clock, or old Jackson has guessed him

wrong."

Again he glanced at his watch. It lacked five minutes to eight o’clock. There was no doubt

but he had some objective which was closely related with the phone call Doc Savage had

been requested to make from Manhattan.

"It won’t work out," he muttered suddenly through gritted teeth. "And Doc Savage saw me. I

could feel him looking at the back of my head. I never really touched him, but somehow I

believe he knew I was there."

The radium hands of the wrist watch showed two minutes to eight o’clock. To the watcher’s

apparently raw-nerved senses, the lonely marsh had become alive with voices. His teeth

chewed nervously at his lower lip.

He glanced at a dead-armed tree. It seemed almost as if he were waiting to read the

message that might go out over the wires he knew were strung there. The thin threads of

communication between this eerie desolation and the teeming modern heart of Manhattan.

One minute to eight o’clock. The spear of multi-colored light piercing the slit of the

underground window of the squatting old house winked out. The wind moaned a little, as if

the withdrawal of the rainbow gleam were a signal.

The catlike man became rigid. He glanced over his shoulder. The red eyes of fire deeper in

the marsh had not reappeared. Perhaps this unexpected camper was no longer in the

swamp.

Eight o’clock.

From the heart of the marsh, from no definite direction, came a low whirring sound, vicious

as the warning of a poisonous rattler.

The cat-eyed watcher had reared to his feet. He had turned and was running away. The

soggy ground of the swamp rocked and swayed. The earth heaved with a convulsive,

shuddering blast.

THE explosion started at the place of the old house. A knife of giant flame shot upward and

moved with ripping effect across the marsh.

The fleeing man was twice hurled from his feet. Each time, his face and clothing were

befouled by the ooze in which he fell.

The man staggered at last to the side road. The slicing destruction that had seemed almost

to be racing with him, had died as swiftly as it had come. The blast had been accompanied

by an expanding phosphorescent glowing of steely blue light.

As the fugitive from his own apparent terror reached the spot where he had concealed his

roadster, darkness again had enwrapped the silence that was of itself, by contrast, terrific.

Over all of the marsh, the air had taken on an icy chill.

The dank, sulphuric odor of death permeated the country for many miles. Shuddering, the

man leaped into the roadster. He glanced only once at the place where the old log house

had squatted evilly in the marsh.

Only blackness, emptiness was there. There was no light of any sort. Not even the deeper,

bulking shadow that had been the house.

Something like hatred twisted the man’s thin face. His lips slavered and his eyes burned.

Then he turned the old roadster and sent it leaping away over the rutty side road toward the

main highway.

Chapter 3. THE CANAL OF DEATH

THE mysterious watcher had ample time to get far from the scene of the explosion before

State police were aroused to investigate. The narrow lane to the old log house was some

ten miles from the city of Newark.

Some time, therefore, elapsed before the tearing jolt of the blast had been definitely traced.

But cars of the State police were blocking the marsh side road when Doc Savage drove into

it.

"Holy cow! What a job!" growled Renny. "Look, Doc! It’s a canal, straight as if it was laid out

with instruments and this was intended for a feed reservoir!"

Renny saw everything from an engineer’s point of view.

"It does seem to have remarkable symmetry," replied the man of bronze. "It’s the first

explosion I ever came upon that seemed to have been done to a geometrical pattern."

"Howlin’ calamities!" muttered squat Monk, his homely, apelike features showing

puzzlement. "It’s about the completest mess I ever bumped into!"

"Complete’s the word, all right," assented Long Tom. "And it looks as if it wiped out some

high-class electrical machinery. Look here, Doc!"

They were then beside a deep, rounded crater. It could be seen from a few remaining

foundation stones imbedded in the earth that this had been the site of a house. But

underneath it the ground had been scooped out as if by the swing of a giant shovel.

On three sides of the cavernous hole in the spot where the house had stood, the explosive

force had apparently lifted directly upward. An ordinary powder blast, if of sufficient strength

and buried deeply, could have done this.

But Doc was coming to some startling conclusions, as he glanced along the fourth side of

the explosion crater. Instead of spreading in a mushroom burst, the blast had been definitely

directional.

Passing up, for the moment, the smashed electrical equipment Long Tom had pointed out,

Doc led the others away from the blast’s place of origin. They saw the explosive force had

moved laterally along the ground, cutting through the marsh by reason of the road having

curved in a wide bend more than two miles in extent.

The great ditch that had been cut was as evenly grooved along its sagging banks as if a

steam shovel had heaved out the soggy mud. Where the house had been, this canal was its

exact width. As Doc and his companions made their way along the sucking marshland, the

cut gradually narrowed.

They had proceeded about a fourth of a mile, when Renny grunted, "Doc, would you look at

this!"

A man lay at the edge of the knifed-out ditch. The torso, head and arms were there. The legs

were missing. The man had been sliced in half. It was as if a giant cleaver had suddenly

descended.

A shotgun and a pack showed the victim had been a hunter. Doubtless, he had made his

lonely camp, waiting for dawn and the first flight of fowl. Ashes of a dead fire were near by.

Doc examined the explosion cut more closely under his generator flashlight. The character

of the clean incision in the soft earth and the phenomenon of the hunter’s body having been

neatly severed in the middle were supplying him with information.

LONG TOM said, "There’s a busted electrical machine back there. Something must have

gone up accidentally. But that would mean tremendous voltage. Giant generators would be

needed to create the energy for a lightning blast like that. Unless—"

"Unless," said Doc, "the secret of cracking the atom has been coupled up with transmitted

electromagnetic force, or something similar to that."

A short distance from the dead man, possibly a mile from the annihilated house, the canal

cut petered out. It terminated in a rising indentation only a few inches wide and an inch or

two deep.

Doc had placed the warning message card in his pocket. Now he led the others rapidly

toward the site of the greater explosion. In all that mass of scattered wreckage, the State

police had passed up the thought of discovering fingerprints.

Doc produced his own outfit. He had noticed every detail of the wrecked electrical machine

indicated by Long Tom. A polished copper ball had fallen to one side. With State police

watching curiously, Doc dusted the gleaming surface.

The lines of a forefinger, then of a thumb, took form. Under a powerful glass, Doc studied the

grimy message card, then the convolutions and whorls of the lines on the copper ball.

Returning the card to his pocket, he said, "One and the same man, a scraggly little fellow

with the prehensile type fingers."

A State police sergeant stared at him.

"You’re Doc Savage, aren’t you?" he inquired.

"Yes."

"Wouldn’t worry any more about those prints then," said the sergeant. "If he was in there, he

isn’t much use to anybody now. Come over here, Mr. Savage."

The man who had been in the house would neither be a menace nor a help to any one

again. Only one foot remained, the leg severed roughly at the top of a high-laced boot such

as a man might be wearing in the marshy ground.

Doc only glanced at it.

"No," he said, "this wasn’t the man. It’s some other person. I think this may be the one who

was on the phone."

DOC’S final words were addressed in a low tone for his own companions only to hear. Doc

was piecing together the scanty material he had.

Some one in the house in the marsh must have known he was under a sentence of death. At

least he was aware of some menace hovering over him. This other man, he of the scraggly

person, had been sent with a message.

That might be it, but Doc was not thoroughly satisfied. Perhaps the person, or persons,

responsible for the gruesome tragedy might have a reason for bringing him to the scene.

This thought stuck with him strongly.

He pondered the possibility of this having been a demonstration. The messenger might

have intended to have him on the telephone when the blast was set off. He would be sure

Doc Savage would go directly to the scene. Then his purpose had been fulfilled.

No more likely evidence appeared in the wide-flung jangle of house wreckage. The booted

foot was all that told a man had been in the house. Doc led his men to his car.

DURING the investigation of the explosion, an automobile had been playing hide and seek

with State police and other cars arriving at the scene of the great explosion. Several times,

the automobile was swung into side roads as sirens screamed warnings that forces of the

law were arriving.

At last, the police having passed, the elusive car came into the main highway and sped

northward toward Newark.

A motorcycle patrolman who had remained watching the highway was hidden around a

curve as the speeding auto flashed by. He immediately swung onto the concrete and gave

chase.

The motorcycle forged abreast of the auto’s rear fender. The driver of the car jammed his

foot suddenly on his brakes. The auto swayed and rubber squealed. When it skidded, the

motorcycle patrolman hadn’t a chance.

The motorcycle catapulted into the air. It turned over three times. The policeman became

only a limp bundle in the ditch.

The driver of the car glanced along the highway. No other lights were showing. The man

talked rapidly for perhaps a minute. It was peculiar behavior, for he seemed making some

sort of a speech.

Then he climbed from the car. He kicked around in the loose soil a few yards from where the

motor cop lay motionless. The driver then got back under the wheel and the car sped toward

Newark.

By this time, some of the State police were returning from the scene of the explosion.

When Doc Savage and his men reached this spot, a State police car had just discovered

the policeman in the ditch. The motor cop was beginning to revive. He had only been

knocked out.

He was able to say it was a car of well-known make, that had wrecked him. The license

plate had been smeared with mud.

Doc eased from his car.

Two other police cars stopped. Passing motorists halted their machines. Soon there was a

small crowd around the motor cop. The man’s face was badly slashed.

From the last of the civilian cars to stop, three men got out. None noticed the driver of this

car turn off into a near-by side road. At this moment, the small group around the injured

patrolman had frozen to silence.

From the wall of foggy darkness over the marsh beside the highway, floated a high-pitched

voice.

"Doc Savage beware! Do not seek more information! I cannot be overcome! I control the

world’s most terrible force of destruction! I will not brook interference! For I am—Var!"

The mysterious voice ceased abruptly.

"Holy cow!" grunted Renny. "What is it, Doc?"

DOC had scanned every foot of the near-by ground. It had been much trampled. The

flashlight produced nothing.

"We’ll have a look along the edges of the marsh," advised Doc. "You might try kicking

around a bit in the loose grass."

Monk’s short body with his gorilla arms trailing vanished in the fog. The chemist peered

closely from the eyes deep-set in rolls of bristly gristle.

"Dag-gone it!" he growled. "I did hear it!"

He was not referring to the sepulchral tones coming from nowhere on the highway. Monk

had heard another faint voice. It had sounded like a man’s hoarse cry for help. Where any

one needed help, there might be a fight. Monk pushed forward hopefully.

Separated from his companions, Monk decided he would rather handle this alone than wait

and miss it. Pushing deeper into the marsh, he saw a man waist-deep in the sucking mud of

a bog. The man was sinking deeper with each second.

"Keep your chin up, fella!" Monk called, and started to wade into the mire.

From the tall grass, figures sprang upon him. There were three of the men. They had Monk

at a disadvantage. He was already knee-deep in the bog. One man hurtled through the air

and landed on Monk’s back. It was his mistake.

Monk’s long arms snapped up and back. His clasped hands hooked behind the other man’s

head. Monk’s shoulders barely twisted and the man turned over twice in mid-air before he

splashed face down in the mud.

Unable to release his mired feet, Monk whipped a fist into another man’s face. The man sat

down with a whoosh! The third man had been more wary. He had held back. When he

moved, a thick, heavy club swished down upon Monk’s unprotected skull.

Monk fell as if he had suddenly sunk in the quagmire. Oozing mud and water choked his

mouth and nostrils.

AFTER several minutes of fruitless searching for the origin of the spoken warning, Doc,

Renny and Long Tom came back to the highway. They waited ten minutes, but Monk did not

appear.

A big car, with a rear trunk compartment opening under the wide seat, came from the side

Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 043 - Cold Death

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