Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 010 - The Phantom City

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THE PHANTOM CITY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter 1. THE SUBMARINE QUEST
? Chapter II. THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL
? Chapter III. THE ARAB PRINCE
? Chapter IV. THE SNATCH
? Chapter V. THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL'S CALL
? Chapter VI. THE GHOSTLY DEATH
? Chapter VII. FLOWN BIRDS
? Chapter VIII. THE VOICE FROM HELL
? Chapter IX. THE MYSTERIOUS CITY
? Chapter X. A GUIDE TO TROUBLE
? Chapter XI. DOC'S FAST ONE
? Chapter XII. DECOY
? Chapter XIII. BROWN DEVILS
? Chapter XIV. THE PIG KISS
? Chapter XV. THE WORLD OF BLACKNESS
? Chapter XVI. VOYAGE OF TERROR
? Chapter XVII. THE WHITE BEASTS
? Chapter XVIII. JOY RIDE
? Chapter XIX. THE RED CITY
? Chapter XX. PHANTOM
? Chapter XXII. CAMEL BOATS
? Chapter XXII. THE TORRENT
Chapter 1. THE SUBMARINE QUEST
NEW YORK is a city of many races. All nationalities are seen on her streets.
Hence, four brown-skinned men walking down Fifth Avenue attracted no unusual notice. They wore
business suits, neat and new, but not gaudy. This helped them to escape attention.
They kept in a tight cluster. Their eyes prowled alertly. They were nervous. But strangers from far places,
overawed by first sight of Manhattan's cloud-puncturing skyscrapers and canyon streets, often act thus.
Their subdued excitement failed to draw more than casually amused glances from pedestrians.
Slight smiles aimed at the quartet would have faded to glassy, loose-jawed stares, had their real character
become known. The four were as vicious a bevy of throat-slitters as ever sauntered along one of New
York's cracks of brick and glass. Gotham's machine-gunning gangsters were babes compared to these
four nervous brown men.
They were on a mission - a mission which, had slightest hint of it reached the police, would have drawn a
howling swarm of squad cars.
The slightly stiff-backed manner in which each man walked was due to a long, flat sword in a sheath
strapped tightly against his spine. Thin, spike-snouted automatics were concealed expertly in their
clothing.
Within the past hour, the tip of each blade and the lead nose of each bullet had been pressed
ceremoniously into a piece of raw meat. The chunk of red meat was one into which a highly venomous
serpent had been goaded to sink its fangs repeatedly, loading it with poison.
On other occasions, these men had proved that a scratch from weapons treated thus was sufficient to
cause nearly instant death.
It was night. Clouds scraped spongy gray flanks against the sharp tops of the tall buildings. F!Flashing
signs on Broadway splashed pale, colored luminance against the wadded vapor. A thin gum of moisture
covered streets and sidewalks. It had rained at sundown, an hour before.
The four men turned into a side street, reached a darkened doorway, and stopped before it. The entry
was shabby; its frame was scratched and grooved where heavy merchandise had been taken in and out.
A large packing box, obviously empty, stood in the gloom.
Out of the big box came a voice.
"Qawam, bilaja!" it growled. "Make haste! Conceal yourselves in this place! Our quarry may soon
appear!"
The quartet started for the box, evidently with the idea of wedging themselves into it.
"Not here, sons of dumb camels!" gritted the man in the box. "The doorway will be shelter enough! It is
best that I remain hidden here throughout, not appearing at any time. Do not, by your glances or actions,
betray my presence. Anta sami? Do you hear?"
In guttural Arabic, the four muttered that they understood. They arranged themselves in the murk.
Reaching under their coat tails, they produced their long swords. The sheaths were tight enough to hold
the weapons in place, and they could be drawn downward in handy fashion.
"Fools!" their chief hissed from the box. "Replace those! There is to be no killing until we have the
information we desire!"
Back into the spine scabbards went the blades, each man being careful not to prick himself with the
deadly tip of his weapon.
"HE is coming soon?" one man asked in Arabic.
"At any minute," replied the man, remaining unseen in the box. "Watch the street to the left, my sons."
"How will we know him?"
"He is a big man. Wallah! He is the biggest man you ever saw! And his body is of a color and seeming
hardness of a metal - bronze. A giant man of bronze!"
The four peered down the street, then drew back.
"It is a dark street and full of bad smells," a man muttered. "You are sure he will come this way?"
"Directly across the street is a great steel door. See you it?"
"Na'arn, aiwah! Yes!"
"Beyond that door is a garage where this bronze man keeps many cars. In this street one is permitted to
drive in only a single direction. Therefore, he will come from the left."
The four men peered at the giant steel doors across the thoroughfare. For the first time, they noted the
towering size of the building above it. The structure was of shiny metal and expertly fitted gray masonry.
It shot upward nearly a hundred stories.
"The bronze man lives there?"
"On the eighty-sixth floor," said the voice in the box.
"Wa!lah! This fellow must have great wealth to live in a place like that!"
"He is a strange man, this bronze one! He is a being of mystery, one about whom many fantastic tales are
told. His name is familiar to every one in the city. The newspapers carry feature stories about him. Yet he
is almost a legend, for he does not show himself to the public, and does not seek publicity."
"But he has that which we want?"
"He has. We have but to find where it is kept. That is your job."
Squatting like four brown owls, the quartet kept unwinking eyes fixed to the left, down the somber
street.
"Have you found aught of the escaped white-haired girl?" asked the man in the packing case.
"No trace, 0 master. But our comrades search everywhere!"
"Taiyib malihi Very well! She must be caught and brought back to my yacht!"
"It is well none in this city can understand the language she speaks," a man said thoughtfully. "Only you, 0
enlightened one, can converse with her. And it took you, even with your learning, many days to master a
few words of her tongue."
"Watch the street!" snapped the hidden man. "Draw your guns! But use them only to produce fright!"
One fellow muttered: "The girl should be slain - "
"Fool! We may need her to guide us to this Phantom City! We keep her alive and unharmed. Understand
that. If something happens to a hair of her white head, Allah help the man responsible!"
The four squatting men drifted uneasy glances at the box, as if it held a dangerous monster. They feared
this master of theirs.
"The bronze man whose arrival we await - is he the only one we have crossed the ocean to see?" one
fellow mumbled.
"He is the one," said the voice in the box. "He is Doc Savage!"
TWO blocks distant, a limousine cruised to a street intersection and turned left. The car was long,
expensive, somber in color. There was nothing flashy about it. The windows were up.
The traffic cop on the corner glanced at the license tags. He snapped erect. In New York, low license
numerals designate the cars of the influential - this one was a single figure. The officer squinted to see who
was in the machine. He smiled widely and executed a brisk salute.
Several pedestrians who chanced to gaze at the car fell to staring, jaws slack. Each of them recognized
instantly the limousine occupant.
At the next corner, a fat man stepped back to the curb to let the big machine pass. He got a good look at
the man behind the wheel. He nearly dropped a bundle he was carrying.
"For the love of mud!" he breathed
An enterprising newsboy, witnessing the incident, rushed up and offered the portly man a newspaper.
"Wanta read about that guy mister?" he asked eagerly. "Buy an Evening Comet! It's got a feature story
about him! Tells how he just cleaned up a gang that was terrorizing a manufacturing town!"
"Who is he?"
The newscarrier looked disgusted. "Mister, I thought everybody knowed that man! Why, he went into
this manufacturing town of Prosper City with his five helpers, and mopped up an outfit that had murdered
no tellin' how many people! He does them kind of things regular! Helpin' people who need it, and
punishin' wrongdoers is his profession!"
The stout man blinked. "Was that Doc Savage?"
"You said it!"
The limousine rolled on two blocks, and turned into the gloomy side street which led past the giant spire
of gleaming metal and gray stone which housed Doc Savage's quarters. It neared the recess where the
brown men lurked.
"Ta'al!" grunted one of the swarthy quartet. "Come along!" The four leaped into the street, spread fan
fashion, and rushed. They flourished their long-barreled automatics.
"Wallah!" hissed one. "Truly, this man is of amazing appearance!"
A faint glow from the dash was sufficient to disclose the man at the limousine wheel - the only occupant
of the car. The features of this individual were striking - so remarkable that it was very apparent why, a
few seconds ago, the fat man had been awed by his single glimpse.
The figure behind the wheel was that of a giant sculptured from solid bronze. In the metallic man's neck,
in the great hands on the wheel, huge sinews stood out in repose like bundled cables.
The bronze of the hair was a shade darker than the bronze of the skin. The hair lay straight and smooth,
like a metallic skullcap. The unusually high forehead, the lean, corded cheeks, the muscular mouth,
advertised a rare power of character.
Most striking were the eyes - like pools of flake gold glistening in the vague light. Their gaze seemed to
have a hypnotic quality, an intensity almost weird.
"Get your hands up!" gritted one of the Arabs in fair English,
DOC SAVAGE studied the four. His bronze features did not change expression; the quartet might have
been putting on some kind of a show, for all the excitement he showed. His hands remained on the
wheel.
The body of the limousine was armorplate steel, although the fact was not evident to the casual glance.
The windows were an inch thick, of the latest bullet-proof glass; it would take a steel slug from a tank
rifle to get through them.
He spoke in a low voice, not moving his lips. His words were distinct.
"Four men!" he said. "They look like Arabs. They popped out of a doorway with pistols."
The dark gunman quartet saw no lip movement indicating speech. They heard no words. The limousine
was soundproofed against normal noises.
"Anta sami'!" rapped the spokesman. "Do you hear? Get your hands up!"
Doc continued, still without moving his lips. "These fellows are strangers. Think I'll play along, and see
what's on their minds. You men can cover us, if you crave a little action."
Once more the Arabs failed to realize words had been spoken. Had they heard, they would have been
puzzled at the brief descriptive speech. It was unlikely that they would have understood its purpose.
Reaching over slowly, Doc unlocked the door. He started to get out.
"La!" grunted one of the men. "No! Stay where you are!" The fellow eased into the front seat, gun alert.
The other three clambered in the back.
They did not notice the bullet-proof glass or the armor plate, and did not guess the bronze man's
surrender was deliberate. They were jubilant.
"Talk freely, and you will not be harmed!" one advised.
"Shu biddak?" Doc asked in excellent Arabic. "What do you want?"
The four looked somewhat surprised.
"So you speak our tongue!" one muttered.
"Slightly," Doc admitted. He used the dialect peculiar to the part of Arabia from which these men hailed -
the southern coast. He neglected to add that he had a fluent command of dialects from almost all other
sectors of their native land.
This business about the language was the first contact the four had with the bronze man's remarkable
knowledge. This giant, metallic man was something of a mental marvel. The fact that he could converse
fluently in the tongue of nearly any race on the globe, was only one of his fantastic accomplishments.
"You have a submarine," said one of the Arabs. "A submarine with which you once went under the ice of
the north pole!"
"That is right," Doc admitted in Arabic.
The brown man reached under his coat tail, squirmed, and drew his flat sword. He indicated the poison
on the tip.
"We want that submarine!" he declared. He put the sword point against Doc's chest. The steel slit a few
threads of the bronze man's coat fabric. "You will take us to it!"
Chapter II. THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL
DOC studied the sword. The edge was thin, hollow ground like a razor. Back of the cutting edge were
grooves resembling the corrugations in a file. These held the poison.
"What do you want with the submarine?" he asked.
"That, bronze man, is our affair!"
Doc had expected some such answer. "If I refuse to take you to it, what then?"
The man tapped the sword. "This! You will die suddenly!"
"That does not leave me much choice," Doc said dryly. "Shall I drive you to the boathouse? It is not far."
"We will walk, sajyid! We do not know the city, and you might drive us to a station of the police."
They got out of the limousine. One man slapped hands over Doc's clothing, fingering pocket contents
through the cloth. When he found nothing large enough to be a weapon, he seemed satisfied.
"Imshi!" he grunted. "Go on!"
They strode westward toward the Hudson River water front, setting a leisurely pace which would not
attract attention.
In the gloomy street where the holdup had occurred, there was at no time a sign of the man who had
given the Arabs their orders - the chap hidden in the box. He had kept under cover.
They walked through a section of garment shops, the streets almost deserted. The way sloped
downward. The asphalt had been rutted by wheels of heavy trucks, and rain residue lay like pools of
molten lead in the chugholes.
Body smells of the four Arabs reeked faintly. They were in need of a bath. Here, where the way was
darker, the shabby streets empty of life, they kept their long-barreled pistols in hand.
"Wallah!" hissed one of the four. "Is it much farther?"
"Not much." Doc pointed. "There!" A row of covered piers was before them. The buildings might have
been gigantic match boxes, with slightly arched tops. Here and there was a wharf which was not
covered.
Down the wide water-front street, a sign on the front of a pier warehouse read:
HIDALGO TRADING CO.
Perhaps two hundred feet nearer was an uncovered pier crowded with crates, moving cranes, and tool
sheds.
Doc made directly for this pier. They entered the litter of boxes and machinery, worked outward through
an alley between high stacks of oil drums. The floor planks were very greasy, oil-soaked.
It was very dark. The men found it impossible to see each other. Two guns were kept pressed to Doc's
back.
Quickening his pace slightly, Doc drew away from the muzzles.
"lmshi 'ala mah!" gritted a man. "Go more slowly!"
An instant later, the guns again shoved against cloth.
"Go on!" grunted an Arab, when there was no movement. No answer.
The man cursed, dug a match out, and whipped it alight on his trousers.
"Wallah!" he wailed.
Instead of Doc's back, their guns were gouging a burlap covered bale of rope.
THE four brown men cackled Arabic profanity in chorus. "Son of a dumb camel!" snarled one who had
brought up the rear. "You let him trick you! He slipped away in the darkness! There is no submarine
here-e-e-o-oww!"
His words turned into the squawl of a cat with its tall under a chair rocker.
There had been no perceptible sound, but bronze hands had suddenly trapped the speaker's elbows from
behind. The Arab's yell rose to a piping bleat of agony; he felt as if he had lost his arms at the elbows.
Pain caused his hands to splay open. His gun bounced across the oil-saturated wharf planks.
He felt a terrific wrench at his back. Cloth tore; leather straps snapped. The poisoned sword came away
from his spine, sheath and all.
The man was lifted, hurled forward. He was not flung head first, but sidewise. He struck two of his
companions. All three piled against the baled rope.
The swarthy fellow with the match jumped aside. The movement extinguished his match. He flourished his
pistol, but did not shoot. He was not too excited to realize the shot sound would draw the police. Wildly,
he clutched for his sword.
Great steel jaws seemed to clamp his ankles. He was lifted as lightly as if he had been a rabbit. He swung
head downward. His whole body was carried up and down with a tamping motion, causing his head to
bang the solid planks. He became limp as a punctured inner tube.
The trio piled against the rope bale untangled themselves and sought to arise. Then the blackness above
them seemed to ram huge bronze fists. Metallic fingers touched various parts of their persons, seeking
nerve centers, leaving numb paralysis and excruciating hurt.
"Mercy of Allah!" a man croaked. "He is not human!" The three found themselves without pistols. With
rippings and snappings, the swords were torn from place. The weapons sailed away to drop into the
near-by river.
One sought to flee, plunging blindly through the stacked boxes and machinery. He covered a score of
yards, and began to entertain visions of safety. Then he was snatched up. A great arm banded his chest,
tightened.
Air went out of the Arab's lungs with a sound as of water pouring from an upset bucket. His ribs ground
together.
"0 Allah, I am dying!" he gurgled.
He was mistaken. His ribs did not break, although one or two cracked. Doc Savage, possessing a
profound knowledge of human anatomy, knew about how much pressure they would stand.
Doc carried his victim back to the other three. The one who had been dropped on his head was
flippering his hands nervelessly with returning consciousness. The remaining two were too dazed for
flight.
Roughly, Doc slammed them against the mound of rope bales. Then he waited for them to recover.
AT first, the quartet showed more fight. Doc drove out bronze hands, open, and cuffed them back. The
men shrank against the rope, shivering. They squirmed on the greasy boards.
They peered at the metallic giant as if he were some incredible Titan from another existence. They
numbered four, and they were fighting men. Yet their best efforts had seemed puny, childlike. He was
something new in their experience, this big man of bronze.
Doc produced a tiny flashlight. He gave the lens a twist, causing the beam to widen to a fat funnel, and
placed it on the wharf boards. The glow sprayed over the four prisoners, and back-splashed on Doc
himself.
The Arabs continued to stare at Doc. One by one, their gaze rested upon his strange golden eyes -
stayed there.
"Wallah!" one repeated his earlier declaration. "He is not human!"
Doc did not change expression. His lips did not move. He was waiting, knowing that the more the men
thought of the recent fight, the more frightened they would become.
Abruptly, the surrounding night seemed to give birth to an eerie sound. The note was trilling, mellow, low,
like the song of some strange jungle bird, or the noise of wind filtering through a naked, cold jungle forest.
It was melodious, but rose and fell without tune. It was not a whistle, and neither did it seem a product of
vocal cords.
The swarthy men squirmed and rolled their glances over the adjacent darkness. It seemed to come from
everywhere, that sound. They looked at Doc, at his motionless lips, at the sinews that were like alloy
steel bars on his neck.
Probably not one of the four realized Doc was making the weird note. They had no way of knowing that
the sound was part of this mighty bronze man - a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of
utter concentration. It came when Doc was thinking, or when danger threatened; sometimes it
precoursed a plan of sudden action. Just now, it meant merely that the bronze man was pondering what
possible motive the Arabs could have for wanting the under-the-polar-ice submarine.
Noting the fright which his tiny, unconscious trilling sound had caused, Doc decided to make his
questioning as ghostly and fantastic as possible. These men, superstitious by nature, would be unusually
susceptible to that sort of thing.
A hollow, unearthly voice, apparently coming from the darkness overhead, demanded: "Why do you
seek the submarine?"
The four brown fellows gave tremendous starts. They shrank back; their eyes popped. It was evident
they had never before encountered ventriloquism - at least, never the voice-throwing art handled with the
uncanny facility which Doc possessed.
They did not answer the question.
"What use do you intend to make of the underseas boat?" the voice repeated.
The swarthy quartet still made no reply. But their fear grew. Watching them closely, Doc became quite
certain he could scare them into talking freely, given a little time. Like most barbaric people, they were
easily terrified by something they did not understand.
The questioning, however, came to a sudden end.
There was a singular e-e-eek! of a noise. A vicious, brief combination of squeak and whistle. The ripping
sound of it was almost against Doc's left ear.
A round hole - it might have been made by a bullet - opened in the rope bale before his eyes.
The bronze man whipped backward out of the flash glow. The best of gun silencers permitted some
noise, he knew. There had been no such sound behind him. Yet the missile which had embedded in the
rope had come with the velocity of a rifle slug.
His strange golden eyes roved alertly. He was puzzled. The mysterious weapon which had hurled that
missile was something new in his experience.
E-E-EEK! The short, ugly bleat was well to the right this time. It was the sound of some sort of slug
passing through the air. The thing glanced off a lifling crane with a loud clang, and moaned away in the
night, not unlike a ricocheting bullet.
"Wallah!" gulped an Arab. They scrambled to their feet. Elation was on their faces.
Doc Savage threw his voice at a hulking crate some yards away, ordering: "Ihda! Be quiet!"
The dark-skinned quartet sank back to crouching positions. Simultaneously, another of the bizarre
projectiles squeaked past, and sank deep into the big crate. It had been directed at Doc's voice.
Gliding backward, Doc encountered more neatly stacked oil drums. He climbed silently atop them. There
was a feline stealth and quiet about his movements. He even put his weight only on the rims of the barrels,
lest the metal heads boom, drum fashion, under his great weight.
He worked almost to the other side of the wharf, then veered shoreward. Over ropes, big-linked chain,
shipping crates, machinery, he made almost no sound. A bystander a few feet away would have been
ignorant of his passage.
Not having heard the bronze giant depart, the four Arabs crouched immobile, afraid to flee.
Near the shore end of the wharf, Doc paused briefly to listen. His hearing was in keeping with his other
remarkable faculties-his aural organs had been developed from childhood by a system of intensive
exercise, part of a two-hour routine which he took daily.
Keen as his hearing was, he had detected no sound to show from whence the mystery missiles had come.
But they must have emanated from this vicinity.
He caught movement. The scrape of cloth against rusty iron. He whipped silently for the sound, gliding
over the greasy wood.
Out at the river end of the wharf, there were grunts, curses, and the rattle of running feet. The four Arabs
had gotten up nerve enough to take flight.
At that noise, the skulker in front of Doc stirred about, then headed shoreward. The grease squished
softly under feet.
Doc lunged. His metallic hands, sensitive for all of their indurate strength, encountered cloth. They
gathered in great fistfuls of the fabric and the yielding flesh beneath.
There was a gasp, a low bleat. A fist pecked twice at Doc's face. The tensile cushions of his cheek
muscles absorbed the blows. Releasing his grip and clutching again with incredible speed, he captured his
victim's hands. They were weaponless.
There was a telltale slenderness about the hands.
Doc moved to the right, where the beam of a distant street light glanced through the piled merchandise.
Remaining in the shadows himself, he shoved his captive out into the dingy glow.
HE had rather expected what he saw. But the amazing beauty and exotic appearance of the girl all but
caused him to loosen his grip. The slenderness of her hands had betrayed her sex.
She had white hair - the whitest hair Doc had ever seen upon a human being. It was unshorn, slightly
wavy, a dazzling wealth of it like loose snow.
She came almost to Doc's shoulder, which made her very tall for a woman. Her features were regular,
magnificent in their cameo perfection. There was color in her exquisite lips, in her entrancing eyes; but
other than that, her face was pale. It was a paleness of terror.
Her garb was unique, as astounding as her strange white hair and gorgeous beauty. She wore full,
ankle-length pantaloons, after the Moslem fashion. Her blouse was of silk. Strange little slippers,
silk-brocaded, shod her small feet.
Doc glanced at her wrists. They were ringed with narrow purple marks. She had, he decided, been tied
recently with ropes.
She rocked her head back, and screamed. Her voice held a tearing fear.
Her words - three of them repeated over and over - were of a tongue Doc had never before heard. He
failed to understand them, yet they had a vague familiarity.
He tried Arabic on her. "T'al, ta'al, la takun 'khauf! Come, come, don't be frightened!"
She answered him with another yowl - the same three strange words.
He mulled the words over, trying to place them in his memory, that he might address her in her own
dialect.
Suddenly, be flung her away. There had come a rush of feet in the murk to one side. He sought to whirl,
got half around. Then the equivalent of two lions seemed to hit him.
For one of the few times in his life, Doc was knocked down. The men who sprang upon him had the
strength of monsters. His assailants were not the Arabs - all four of those could hardly have matched one
of the pair who now held him. They swung fists which landed with the awful force of iron mauls.
The white-haired girl ran away in the night.
摘要：

THEPHANTOMCITYADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2001BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?Chapter1.THESUBMARINEQUEST?ChapterII.THEWHITE-HAIREDGIRL?ChapterIII.THEARABPRINCE?ChapterIV.THESNATCH?ChapterV.THEWHITE-HAIREDGIRL'SCALL?ChapterVI.THEGHOSTLYDEATH?ChapterVII.FLOWNBIRDS?Cha...

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