Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 179 - The Green Master

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THE GREEN MASTER
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine Winter 1949
Chapter I
MONK MAYFAIR stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes—he did not smoke—in one of those glittering
drugstores on Fifth Avenue that seem to be made mostly of glass. Then he left the place by a side door.
Trying to be casual about it, he stopped for a while to watch the gardeners transplanting full-sized trees
into Rockefeller Plaza, and he remembered that they seemed to set out fully grown trees there every
year. That fact was not as important to him as another one of which he was now certain, that he was
being followed.
The third one was following him now. First, it had been a girl. Then a tall honey-blond man. And now it
was a taller string bean of a honey-blond man. They were doing it in relays, which wasn't a bad idea from
their standpoint. As for the girl who had started off the shadowing, Monk was sorry she had dropped
out; she was one he wouldn't have minded following himself.
There were a few things about the honey-blondes that puzzled Monk. Traffic lights seemed to confuse
them. They showed a somewhat comical fear of cars; they crossed streets with about the same air that
they would ford an alligator-infested stream. Not that it wasn't all right to be wary of New York traffic.
But they overdid it.
An odd outfit, Monk thought. Strange-looking. Acted as if they didn't understand a city at all.
Monk was almost as much amused as puzzled. Deciding to toughen up the trailing job a little, he stepped
suddenly into the street and whistled down a cab.
“Take it easy,” he told the driver. “Go slow. Catch the stop light at the next corner if you can.”
“Yeah?” the driver said, surprised. “You mean there's somebody in this town who isn't in a hurry?”
“Why not?” Monk said, and watched the performance of the thin honey-blond man who was following
him.
It was interesting. The blonde, Monk concluded in amazement, didn't know how to hail a cab. A simple
matter like getting a cab—you stood on the sidewalk or in the street, whistled, whooped, waved an
arm—baffled the man.
“The silly dope!” Monk said, grinning.
The blond man had started a pursuit of Monk's cab afoot, running along the sidewalk. Now and then the
thin man sprang in the air like a dog seeking a rabbit in tall grass. His purpose, of course, was to keep
track of Monk's cab. Monk began to laugh.
“Something funny?” the cab driver asked. “Or you just feeling that way?”
“Search me,” Monk replied, and added, “I think this is as far as I'll go. Catch that stop light, and I'll get
out.”
“What the hell!”
“Don't let it worry you,” Monk told the astonished driver, and got out.
Feigning an unawareness of being followed, Monk sauntered west on Forty-sixth Street. He used a shop
window to assure himself he was still being trailed.
Monk summarized the situation. He did not know this man. He had no idea why he was being followed.
He was amused, but it might be nothing to be amused about.
Monk knew he had enemies. He was an associate of Doc Savage, and, therefore, automatically included
in Doc's troubles. The nature of Doc Savage's business guaranteed trouble. Doc Savage's profession—it
was not as much of a Galahad affair as it sounded—was righting wrongs and punishing offenders who
seemed to be untouched by the law. The profession was odd, and the results frequently unexpected. But
it hardly warranted the appearance of a tail of thin, blond screwballs.
Or did it? The unusual had a way of happening to Doc Savage. The nature of the man invited it. In almost
all ways, Doc Savage was remarkable; he was a more than passable combination of mental genius,
physical giant and scientific wizard. He applied his abilities to other people's business, when it was the
wrong kind of business. So the variety of people who had wished to kill him at one time or another was
odd and surprising; frequently they were the kind who would act on such a wish.
Monk walked along. Less easy of mind, he thumbed through his mind for the enemies most likely to be
on the currently active list. There were several candidates. None of them, however, fitted the present
rather bizarre situation. They would know how to get a cab on a New York street.
Halfway down the block, Monk found what he considered a satisfactorily private spot. He turned into an
office building doorway, waited, tightened his belt, tucked his necktie inside his shirt where it couldn't be
conveniently grasped and used for choking him, and when the long blonde came trotting along, Monk
reached out and got a double handful of throat.
He shook the man enough to cause some snapping together of teeth. There was less resistance than he
expected. “Brother,” said Monk, pausing to peer at his victim, “don't you resent this?”
“Not at all,” answered the other mildly.
He was not only a very blond man, but he had a deep tanned cream skin that set off the blondness quite
spectacularly. Not an albino. The man didn't have an albino's lack of pigmentation in the eyes, which
were a pleasant enough shade of brown.
“You don't,” said Monk, “seem much upset.”
The other had an amiable voice and English certainly wasn't its mother tongue.
“Why should I be?” he asked.
“You were following me,” Monk told him. “That interests me. It could even rile me. When I'm riled, I've
been known to get rough.”
The man looked Monk straight in the eye. “I was not following you,” he said.
“You—” Monk's mouth came open, and remained open. Not because he had been lied to. That wasn't
what surprised him. It was something else.
It was another thing, and the more Monk thought about it, the more stunned he became. Monk realized
that he believed the man hadn't been following him.
Now here, Monk thought wildly, is an impossibility. This guy was trailing me. There was another one
doing it before him, and a girl before that. They were teamed up, and they were trailing me. I've got eyes.
I saw. But now the funny looking guy tells me a bald-faced lie and I believe it.
“This,” said Monk, “is really something.”
The amiable brown eyes twinkled. “It really isn't extraordinary, I'm sure.”
Monk looked him in the eye. Well, it isn't so unusual at that, he thought. Wait a minute! The hell it isn't!
What's this guy doing to me?
“No, I guess it's not extraordinary,” Monk heard himself saying. He began to feel as if he were having a
mental chill.
“However,” the man went on, “now that we've encountered each other, I'd like to ask a question which I
know you will be glad to answer.”
Monk stood there in cold horror. He knew he would answer any question that was asked him, and be
glad to do so. But why would he do a goofy thing like that?
“Sure,” Monk said foolishly. “Sure, I— No, I won't do anything of the sort! No, No. I mean I'll be glad
to. Yes. Sure.” He swallowed terribly. “What is your question?”
For the love of mud, he thought.
“Who is the one from Keew who has been in touch with your friend Doc Savage?” asked the other.
Monk felt an odd sensation. He found himself wanting to answer the query. He wished to do it as much
as he had wanted to do anything in his life. He would have given literally anything he possessed if he
could have come out with a frank, friendly answer. But there was a slight hitch. He had never heard of
anything called Keew, and as far as he knew Doc Savage had had no contacts from such a place.
“Gosh, I'm sorry,” Monk said. “I'm so awfully sorry. I'm so sorry that I'm deeply ashamed, but I can't tell
you a single thing because I don't know.”
Monk realized that although he wanted to answer the man's question the worst way, he didn't want to tell
a lie. In fact, a lie would have been repugnant, a circumstance that was not always the case with Monk.
He was a man who believed a little lie at the right time did no harm.
The recipient of the information was disappointed. His feeling of sadness was intense. Monk found he
was disappointed and felt badly, too.
“What,” asked the blond man, “about the small green stone?”
“Search me,” Monk replied. “I don't know what you're talking—” Then he remembered. “Gosh, I'm
sorry again, but it slipped my mind. You mean the little rock that came in the mail from South America?”
The man felt badly over this news. Monk sympathized with him intensely. Then the man became enraged,
and Monk felt enraged, too.
The rage was what did it. Monk snapped out of the spell when he became angry. Rage was an inclusive
emotion. It broke the thin man's influence over Monk, granted that “influence” was a very inadequate
word to apply to Monk's tizzy.
“What you been doin' to me, you washed-out scoundrel?” Monk howled. This was more words than he
had used in some time before a fight, and then he knocked the blond man down.
The man managed to fall expertly, bound to his feet, and start to expostulate, “Really, my good friend,
you—” He evidently concluded it was not feasible to convince Monk he was a good friend, so he turned
and ran.
Monk pursued the fellow. As Monk had observed earlier, he was totally unfamiliar with the city and its
ways. He did not, for instance, know that some of the buildings on this street—it was Forty-fifth Street
between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas—had arcades which extended through to the
next streets to the south and north, thence made very good quick avenues of flight. These were also
honeycombed with niches which would make good refuge. This man ran straight and openly, making no
attempt to hide.
Fast, too. Monk was no terrapin on his feet, but he found himself extending. And not gaining too much.
However, full of confidence, he put his head back and stretched out.
Then the weirdness came back into it. The man he was chasing began to shout anxiously. He started
telling Monk what good friends they were, and how amiably they should be getting along. His voice,
while labored from the effects of the race, was plainly understandable.
When Monk found himself believing they were going to stop this and be friends, he turned around and
ran about equally fast in the opposite direction. Later, when he looked back, he saw his late adversary
nowhere in sight.
Chapter II
IN Doc Savage's laboratory, one light in a bank of many lights flashed, and Ham Brooks, attorney and
associate of Doc Savage, came over and plugged the scanning screen into that socket. This gave him a
view of the interior of their special elevator, which was somewhere near the twentieth floor and rising.
“Just the missing link,” Ham said, and started to shut off the scanner. He took a second look. “Hey! Old
Monk looks as if he had been dog-bitten.”
Doc Savage, making adjustments on a fluoroscopic analyzer, asked, “Something wrong?”
“With Monk?” Ham shrugged. “Who can tell with a guy like that. He was made wrong in the first place.”
Doc Savage made no comment. As far as he could recall, neither Monk nor Ham had spoken a pleasant
word to or about each other for years, and it could get a little tiresome. Actually, they were very close
friends.
Doc was one of those men who—he considered it a great handicap—looked fully as unusual as his
reputation. He was a physical giant with a startlingly bronzed skin, hair a little darker bronze, and eyes
that were like pools of flake gold always in motion, a rather unnerving effect. He had a handsome face,
but its handsomeness was a matter of angles and strong lines, which he felt redeemed it somewhat.
Monk came in presently. Undoubtedly, there was something amiss. He sauntered past them, rather too
elaborately, and disappeared back of a chemical processing rack, after answering Ham's “Hello,” with a
polite “Hello,” of his own.
“He didn't have some nasty remark,” Ham said in alarm. “Something's wrong with the guy. Do you
suppose he's sick?”
“Better find out,” Doc suggested.
Ham Brooks, a dapper, thin-waisted man who overdressed for all occasions and carried a thin black
sword cane in the most romantic manner, sauntered back and exchanged a few words with Monk.
Monk's answers were exceptionally polite. Ham became convinced Monk was in trouble, and he
demanded, “What's wrong with you, stupid?”
“Nothing,” Monk answered nervously. “Nothing at all.”
Ham came back to Doc. “Monk must be dying,” he reported. “He was polite to me.”
Doc Savage approached Monk casually and asked, “Feeling O.K. this afternoon?”
“So-so,” Monk said, and didn't meet Doc's eye.
“So low down, you mean?” Doc suggested.
Monk clenched both hands. He said, “Damn!” in a strained voice. Then he turned to Ham Brooks and
said, “Get out of here, Ham. Beat it!”
Ham looked relieved, but bristled. “Say now, short and homely,” he said. “You know who you're
speaking to with that tone?”
Monk said he knew. He said he was speaking to what would soon be a grease-spot on the wall. He
picked up a flask of foul-smelling chemical and heaved it at Ham. The latter ducked, got a whiff of the
smell after the flask smashed, and departed in haste.
“I knew that would get him,” Monk said, locking the lab door behind Ham. “He prefers to go around
smelling like a rose.”
MONK told Doc what had happened. “I didn't want Ham hearing that. He would never stop ribbing
me,” Monk explained. “That's about the way it was. They began following me, first a babe, then a tall
blond guy, then another tall one just as blond, and when I collared the latter, he got me to believing
everything he said. He would say something I knew damned well wasn't the truth, and there I would
stand believing it and agreeing with him.”
“I can see why you didn't want Ham to hear this,” Doc said.
“Sure. He would think I was crazy. Maybe I am.” Monk dropped into a chair, grimacing. “My God, do
you reckon I could be dropping my marbles?”
“Let's get it straight,” Doc said. “You didn't know these people?”
“I never saw them before.”
“And they weren't familiar with the city?”
“They acted,” Monk said, “as if they'd never been in any kind of city before.”
“They weren't Americans?”
“No. Or the guy who ran the razzle-dazzle on me wasn't.”
“What nationality?”
“That,” said Monk, “would be a hard one to answer.”
“Care to guess?” Doc asked.
Monk hesitated, then said, “I may be putting my neck out on this, but I would guess some South
American aboriginal origin, because I caught traces of Incan inflection, the ancient Incan tongue, because
of the lax consonant delivery, and the syllable stressing was on the first syllable. There wasn't much
Oriental lilt, and there was quite a glottal stop such as the old Hawaiian language had. Mind you, the guy
spoke English, but it was English he had learned from somebody.”
Doc nodded. “If you analyzed it that close, I doubt if you are putting your neck out.”
“I didn't really place the guy. But primitive South American would be my idea.”
“What,” Doc asked, “about the green stone?”
Monk shook his head. “I told you what he said. Asked me about it.” Monk flushed uncomfortably. “And
I told him one had come in the mail.”
“Why did you tell him that?”
“I didn't want to, dammit,” Monk said in embarrassment. “That was part of the razzle-dazzle. I tell you,
this guy ran some kind of a whizzer on me.”
“Hypnotism?”
“Heck, no.”
Doc frowned. “You seem confident it wasn't hypnotism.”
“I know a little about hypnotism,” Monk replied. “I know enough about it to make it a tough job for
anybody to hypnotize me, even with a little time to devote to it. And this guy didn't use any of the
standard formula.” Monk eyed Doc earnestly. “There aren't many hypnotic operators more expert than
you are, Doc, and I don't think even you could run me into even the first stage of hypnotic suggestion as
fast as this guy did. No, I wasn't hypnotized.”
“But you were something?”
“Yeah, I was sure something.”
“We'd better look at that green rock,” Doc said.
THE green rock seemed to be exactly that. It was not even a pleasant shade of green, and it certainly
wasn't a jewel.
“Sort of heavy,” Monk said. “Was there a letter with it or anything when it came?”
“Nothing at all,” Doc told him.
“It was mailed from South America, as I recall,” Monk said. “From Caracas. That's in Venezuela, and
doesn't prove much, except that it's a South America tie-in.”
Doc carried the stone to another part of the laboratory and began to run tests. The test for magnetic
quality was negative, and he tried a Geiger counter on it for radioactivity, also negative.
Monk said thoughtfully, “You know, there's one odd thing about this rock. It feels warm to the touch. I
don't mean hot, but about body temperature.”
Doc Savage looked at Monk sharply and said, “So you noticed that, too.”
“Wait a minute!” Monk began to register amazement. “Who's kidding who, here? You mean that rock
felt warm to you, too?”
“Yes.”
“What would explain that?” Monk demanded. “It's kind of surprising, isn't it?”
“Here's something that will surprise you still more,” Doc said. “That piece of stone has been in a
refrigerator for two days. I took it out several times during that interval, and each time it was warm, or
felt warm.”
“That's impossible. You mean that rock stays warm in a refrigerator?”
“I mean it retains its feeling of warmth.”
“If it feels warm, it is warm, isn't it?” Monk demanded.
Doc said dryly, “I'll show you something. Get a small glass beaker just large enough to hold the rock, fill
it with ice water, and bring it here, along with a thermometer.”
Puzzled, Monk followed the instructions. Doc dropped the stone in the ice water and inserted the
thermometer. “Watch what doesn't happen,” he said.
“Oh, the rock is warm enough to raise the temperature of the water slightly,” Monk said. “But what will
that prove?”
“Watch.”
Monk's jaw sagged presently. “The water doesn't warm. The thermometer must be screwy.”
Doc lifted the thermometer from the liquid, and immediately the column of mercury lengthened, indicating
that the warmer air of the room was sufficient to raise its indication instantly. He inserted it in the water
again, and it returned to about the previous level. “The thermometer is O.K.,” he said. “And the warmth
in that stone, enough warmth to make it comparatively pleasant to the touch, should raise the water
temperature somewhat. Yet it doesn't.”
“The water lowered the temperature of the stone,” Monk said abruptly. “Sure. That's what happened.
Why didn't I think of that before.”
Doc's usually expressionless bronze features broke in a slight smile. He used a pair of tongs to lift the
rock from the water, and dropped it in the palm of Monk's hand.
Monk held the stone for a moment. Then his homely face slowly blanched.
“It's still warm!” he blurted. “What kind of damned rock is it that is warm, but not with a warmth you can
measure with an instrument?”
WHAT had been a routine mystery of piffling proportions now assumed some magnitude to Monk. He
was a chemist, a skilled one, too, even though he did look somewhat like an ape, and he knew that here
was something that shouldn't be. He made a couple of additional tests, then stepped back.
“That's the damndest rock I ever saw,” he commented. “Let's give it a going-over with an analyzer.” He
waved at a gadget which, without the necessity of demolishing and pulverizing a sample of the stone and
running it through a lot of chemical tests, would give a complete analysis of the molecular composition of
the fragment.
“I have,” Doc said.
“Huh?” Monk remembered Doc had been working with the fluoroscopic apparatus when he came in.
“That what you were doing?”
Doc nodded. “Not,” he added, “for the first time, either. I've checked the atomic structure of that rock
half a dozen times, each time believing it just couldn't prove to be what it turns out to be.”
“Which is what?”
“A rock,” Doc said. “A common garden, middle-of-the-road, laying-on-the-beach variety of pebble.
Technically, it's a type of magma of the trachyte type, considerably weathered, but not at all unusual, as
far as chemical tests and inspection indicate.”
“You mean it's just a rock?”
“Exactly.”
“But it stays warm.”
“Yes.”
“It must be our imagination,” Monk said. “I'll call Ham in and let's try him. He's a cold-blooded cuss and
that should settle that.”
Ham Brooks came in, grinning, and said, “I'm allowed back in the human race, am I?” He had been
waiting in the library, evidently, for Monk to cool off.
Monk peered at him, and decided, “You had the intercom turned on. You've been eavesdropping.”
“It was already turned on,” Ham told him. “I merely didn't turn it off,” he added virtuously.
“O.K., feel the rock anyway,” Monk growled.
Ham did so, and said, “Warm. Not hot. But warm, as if someone had been holding it in his hand for quite
a while.” Ham eyed Monk thoughtfully, and asked, “Now what are you trying to pull on me, having me
feel of a warm rock?”
“Nothing,” Monk said. “Shut up.”
“What,” Ham asked, “did this babe look like?”
“What babe?”
“The gal who followed you before the long blond guy took over,” Ham said.
“You were listening!” Monk yelled.
Doc Savage said hurriedly, “Before you two start on one of those dog fights, let's get back on the subject
of the slightly warm green rock. There is one more demonstration I should like to make. I've made it
before, but a recheck won't do any harm.”
The big bronze man led the way out into the hall, Monk and Ham trailing him with puzzled expressions.
The regular building elevators did not rise to this floor, so Doc took the stairway down to the eighty-fifth
floor, rang for an elevator, and when it arrived, empty except for the attendant, he handed the operator
the green stone.
“What about it, Mr. Savage?” asked the surprised operator. “Somebody lose it, or something?”
“We only want some information,” Doc told him. “Does it feel warm to you?”
“Not particularly,” replied the elevator man.
“Not warm, as if perhaps someone had been holding it in his hand for some time?” Doc asked.
“No. On the contrary, I'd say it feels a bit cool, and certainly no warmer than room temperature, Mr.
Savage.”
“Thank you,” Doc said. “That is all we wanted to know.”
Monk and Ham carried blank looks back upstairs. “What the devil?” Monk muttered.
“This rock,” Doc said, “feels warm to us, but it doesn't feel warm to anyone else whom I've tried. And
I've tried several.”
“By Jove!” Ham said. “A rock which bestows its personality only on certain individuals, eh?”
“About the oddest rock,” Doc told him, “that I've ever run across. I don't know what we have here, but I
think it's something quite weird.”
Chapter III
AT two o'clock, Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks went downstairs to the restaurant in the building for a
bite of lunch. It was an elaborate place with a lot of blue glass, blue leather and chrome, and a manager
who wore striped trousers and cutaway. The latter looked alarmed at their appearance, and hustled them
to a booth where, if they began shouting at each other in the inevitable row, the fewest customers would
discreetly summon a waiter and suggest calling an officer.
“You sharp-nosed, overdressed, eavesdropping shyster,” Monk said to Ham, by way of preliminary.
“You had the intercom turned up full force so you could hear what I was telling Doc, and you know you
did. Some day I'm going to take me a stroll across your face.”
Ham sneered at him. “You keep tampering with me, and I'll influence you worse than your friend did.”
“What friend?”
“The long, hungry one with the pale hair. That one was a little thick even for you.”
They gave the waiter their orders, then Monk glared and asked, “You think it didn't happen?”
“To you, anything happens,” Ham replied. “Let's put it with logic, and say I would believe you were
influenced if the girl had done it.”
“I only hope,” said Monk, “that it happens to you. Then—” He stopped, his mouth, which was ample in
size, open as if prepared to receive a baseball. “Speaking of the long, pale devil,” he muttered.
Ham bolted up. “What? You don't mean—”
“You don't even need to turn around,” Monk advised him. “The guy is coming over here.”
“The tall blond man who—”
“Pssst!” Monk said. “I wonder what these chairs cost? Because I'm going to wrap one around his
head.”
Monk did make the first move to do exactly that, standing and hefting a convenient chair, much to the
alarm of the manager who was still hovering in the background with an eye on them. But the tall blond
stranger, in what seemed to Monk the most utterly pleasant voice he had ever heard, said, “How do you
do, Mr. Mayfair. I'm awfully sorry about the mixup this afternoon, and I hope you don't resent this
intrusion.”
Monk, feeling a little like a man suddenly standing apart from himself, observed his rage evaporating. He
realized he didn't want to swat the guy with a chair. That is, whacking the fellow with a chair was the
logical thing for him to do, but he suddenly didn't want to. He saw Ham Brooks grinning, and he said
bitterly to the blond man, “This is Ham Brooks, a shyster lawyer of some unearned repute. Mr. Brooks,
this is—I don't know your name, do I?” Monk realized he was speaking politely, and summoned enough
stamina to add bitterly, “Let's see you work some of your razzle-dazzle on Ham.”
Smiling, the blond man turned to Ham. “Mr. Brooks, I'm delighted to meet a man I have long admired,
and who has contributed so handsomely to the legal profession, and even more handsomely to humanity
through the medium of having served Doc Savage, that great humanitarian. It is a pleasure. A great
摘要：

THEGREENMASTERADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXIIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineWinter1949ChapterIMONKMAYFAIRs...

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