Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 175 - The Pure Evil

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THE PURE EVIL
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
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine April 1948
Chapter I
HE drove his little roadster lickety-split to work that morning. His age was twenty-four, and he was a
long boy with freckles and all grin.
He got whistled at warningly by a traffic cop on Pollard Avenue, but Gail smiled at the cop. “Hello,
Gordon,” she said to the cop. And so the cop waved them on.
And he in turn whistled at a girl at the corner of Truce and Lansing. Gail laughed at that. “That's the Riles
girl,” she said. “Her boy-friend is Nick Pardo, and he will take you apart if you don't watch it.”
His grin shone all over his face.
“You always take care of me, don't you?” he said.
Gail smiled. Gail was his sister. It was probably true, what he said.
His name was an easy Yankee one. Daniel Adams. Dan Adams, and he drove his little car with dash and
pulled a cloud of the grey coastwise dust along the road to A.A.E. Station 3. He stopped before the tan
brick building and the effect was that of a kid who had slid down a bannister.
Gibble was standing there. Gibble threw away his cigarette.
“Good morning, Gail,” he said with enthusiasm.
“Good morning.”
Dan Adams hopped out and palmed the roadster door shut and pointed his finger at his sister. He said,
“You be careful of that car, baby. Was you to ding one fender, I'd be ruined.”
“I'll be careful of the car,” Gail said. “I'm always careful of the car.”
“Sure,” he said. “But be special careful.”
“I'll be extra one-hundred-and-ten-volt careful,” his sister said, and she put the car in gear and drove way
and down the road. She and the car were going approximately seventy-two miles an hour when they
disappeared.
“Careful, she said!” he complained.
Gibble grinned. He said, “She's quite a girl, that Gail.”
Dan looked at Gibble. Gibble was a fairly average-sized man who looked small, and a moderately neat
man who looked sloppy. The color of his face, eyes and hair were all shades of sand.
“Gibble, you make it out here every morning when she brings me to work, don't you?” Dan said.
“Huh?”
“Your time worth much, Gibble?”
Gibble said, “Huh?” again.
“Don't waste it, Gibble, if it is,” Dan said. “And you'll be wasting it, boy. I can tell you that.”
Gibble didn't say anything, and Dan went into the Station and sailed his hat onto a hook and got his
schedule sheets and tracking data forms from the locker and went into the tracking room. Not the tower
one where the radio equipment was, but the one where they were conducting the experiments in
short-range tracking. He told Steigel, the man working the early trick, hello and goodbye. He settled
himself, spread out his cigarettes and matches, and that was the way Steigel saw him when he said his
so-longs and see-you-tomorrows from the door.
That was the last time anyone saw Dan Adams when he seemed to be exactly right.
The tracking statistician was fortyish, thin-faced, brainy, wore prim mannish suits the year around, and
was named Miss Bradley. Miss Bradley's job was correlating all the figures and graphs from the radar
experiments, putting them in shape for digestion by the men with the large brains. She had formed the
habit of dropping around to the trackers every two hours to pick up their sheets.
Miss Bradley came in, leaned across Dan's shoulder and got the sheets, turned away, and was at the
door when she did a double-take. She wheeled back and frowned at Dan.
“Watch out, that expression might freeze on your face,” she said.
Then Miss Bradley's lips slowly parted. Her mouth made itself into a hole and remained so.
Dan Adams neither moved, spoke, breathed. His complete suspense was impressive. He was—Miss
Bradley thought of this now, and remembered it later—like a man who had found a poisonous snake in
his hands, six inches from his eyes. In the radar scope, for example. The scope screen was about six
inches from his eyes.
Time passed. A great time, it seemed to Miss Bradley. Twenty seconds or so. Then Miss Bradley started
trying to say something, and tried for a while, and succeeded in making a kind of hiss. She was shocked.
It was odd to see a man so frightened that when you tried to make words you only made a hiss.
Now Dan arose slowly and stiffly in his chair. In rising, he could have been pushing against weight,
hundreds of pounds of weight. His terror weighed that much. And now he brought both hands in front of
him and pointed at the radar scope. Pointed wordlessly with both hands.
Pointing, he made a few wordless sounds. Miss Bradley couldn't have identified them.
Miss Bradley, from where she stood at the door, couldn't see the scope screen because of the external
illumination control hood. Actually, only from a position directly in front could the scope be viewed
successfully. So Miss Bradley started to move—frightened, fascinated, the nape of her neck getting
cool—to a spot where she could see the screen.
And now Dan screamed. He shrieked, high and girlishly, as if terror had taken all the virility from him. It
was a raw thing, that yell, a bloody nerve torn out, a shred of living flesh.
Now Dan's intensity took to frenzied action. His hands clamped to his chair. He swung the chair. A
heavy thing, serviceable steel, it ruined the scope with the first wild overhead blow. But he didn't stop. He
struck and struck, and glass whizzed in the air and skated on the floor and the place was full of guttering
purple light from electrical shorts and the acrid lightning-bolt odor of voltage discharges. The man,
white-faced, his cheeks all gouts of muscle, continued to swing the chair, beating the scope as if it were a
reptile.
“Oh my God,” whimpered Miss Bradley, and she wheeled and ran for help. She found Gibble and a man
named Spencer who was a maintenance technician.
“Dan—he saw something in the scope—oh, hurry!” wailed Miss Bradley, grabbing her own words out in
unstable groups.
Gibble said, “Huh?”
But the other man, Spencer, was quicker, and he ran into the scope room. Dan was still wielding the
chair. There wasn't much left of the scanning part of the scope, wires, battered metal and glass dust, but
he was at it yet.
“Cripes, eleven thousand bucks worth of scope!” Spencer blurted. Not that he cared that much about
eleven thousand of Associated Aircraft's Experimental's money. Being maintenance, that was merely
what he thought of to say. Then he yelled, “Dan! What in the hell!”
Dan didn't turn. He stopped pulverizing the wreckage. He stepped back, holding the chair cocked,
staring at the mess on the floor as if it was still dangerous.
Gibble came in now. Gibble varied his routine slightly from “Huh,” and said instead, “Whew! Whooeee!”
“Dan!” Spencer called. “Dan, what happened?”
Dan still didn't turn his head, didn't take his eyes from the unidentifiable conglomeration that had been the
radar scope and cabinet. But he knew they were there. He began backing away—one step at a time, the
chair still cocked for defense.
Spencer said, “Dan, what on earth got into you.”
He watched Dan begin shaking, a trembling at the knees first; then a progressive increase in tremor set
the young man's entire body to twitching. There was, or seemed to be, an accompanying loss of color, a
greater gouting of facial muscles. Dan came to the wall, his back against it, and he began to slide his
shoulders along the wall toward the door.
“Spencer,” he said, vaguely and as from a distance.
“Okay, Dan. Take it easy.”
“I want to go to a church.”
“What?”
“I want to go to a church. I want to go quick. You take me there, will you? You got your car here.”
“What church?”
“I don't know. The first one you think of.”
“Don't you go to a church?”
“No, but I got to go to one now.”
He had said all this without noticeably taking his eyes off the scope ruin, and he had not lowered the chair
nor loosened the tension in any way.
“Sure, Dan, sure,” Spencer's voice had gone up a little. “Sure, I'll take you. If you have any particular
church in mind, that's where we'll go.”
In a tone of thin high tension, Dan Adams said, “Isn't any house of God a refuge from evil? That's what I
want, a refuge from evil.”
“Okay, I'm a Presbyterian. I'll take you there,” Spencer said. Then he went over and cautiously laid hold
of the chair Doc held. He said, “You won't need this chair, will you? Be all right to leave it here, won't
it?”
Dan was silent for a while, back jammed against the wall, shaking. In the most defeated, hopeless voice
Spencer had ever heard, he said, “A chair wouldn't be any defense, would it?”
“Defense against what?”
Dan hesitated again, silently. Spencer didn't think the pause of particular importance at the time, but later
he realized the other man had made a hair-raising decision.
“You wouldn't want to know what,” Dan said sickly.
“Want me to take the chair, Dan?”
“What? . . . The chair? Oh, all right.”
Spencer took the chair and put it in Gibble's hands, using the act as an excuse to whisper, “I'm taking him
to the First Presbyterian. Get on the phone and have a doctor there.”
“Maybe the police—” Gibble began.
“Don't be a damned fool! If you were sick like that, would you want the cops hammering on you with
questions?”
Gibble said unsympathetically, “If I busted up a scope, I would sure expect somebody to ask questions.”
But he didn't telephone for the police.
The car ride that followed aged Gibble. He found, toward the end of the trip, that he had to stop glancing
at Dan Adams, because he was getting the creeps.
Reverend Pollard, pastor of the First Presbyterian, was out on a parishoner call. He did not return until
the medico Gibble had phoned for, a Doctor McGreer, had completed an examination with somewhat
unsatisfactory results. The two had a private conference.
“Reverend, I don't know what to think about this,” the Doctor said. “Prior to the examination, from what
had been told me, I thought I would find a more or less clear-cut case of neurasthenia.”
“Nervous breakdown, you mean?”
“Well, the term nervous breakdown is so general that we don't use it. But a nervous disorder is what I
expected.”
“And you found?”
The doctor frowned. “A perfectly healthy body, normal nervous responses, and apparently an extreme
case of terror.”
“But from what Mr. Gibble and Mr. Spencer tell me, I imagined—”
“Reverend, the man isn't insane. The man is scared stiff.”
“Frightened?” the pastor said wonderingly. “Well, fright is the product of a stimulus. Where there is fear,
there is a reason for it. This shouldn't be so difficult.”
“I hope it's as easy as you think it is,” the doctor said, shrugging. “I can't do anything for the boy, except
give him a sedative, which I did, and which won't do him much good.”
“Has he told you of what he is terrified?”
“Not a word. He clams up on it.”
“Perhaps he will tell me, then, and be better for the telling. The fact that he came to the House of God
indicates he wished solace and counsel.”
“He's your baby, Reverend,” said the doctor dubiously.
Dan Adams was sitting silently in the secluded dimness of the church, and Reverend Pollard went to him
alone—went, he soon discovered, to a baffling experience. Because Dan gave blank stares, silence,
head-shakes, to all questions and words of comfort.
Fifteen minutes later, the Reverend retired to consult with Gibble and Spencer. “You say this man
suffered his attack while at work?”
“That's right,” Spencer explained. “He was at the scope today doing short-tracking and—”
“Excuse me, but what is a scope, and what is short-tracking?” the minister asked.
Spencer gave a light dose of radar technology, finishing, “It's the same radar that was used in the war,
only improved. Very high-frequency emissions are sent out, bounce back when they encounter an object,
and are received on a scope where they can be seen. Short-tracking is a project of Associated Aircraft
Experimental, which is a research agency financed by the government and the airlines. We're trying to
develop a better method of following aircraft at very close range, perfecting the landing system for blind
flying landings on airports.”
“I believe I understand that,” said the minister. “But what could have frightened this man? Could he have
caused, or nearly caused, an airplane crash, for instance?”
“Not a chance,” Spencer said flatly. “He was tracking seagulls.”
“What?”
“Oh, it's not as silly as it sounds. The idea of the research was to see whether individual birds, or flocks
of birds, could cause errors in tracking data.”
“But what did this boy see that induced such terror?”
“There you've got me,” Spencer said.
The baffled minister returned to the dim chapel where Dan Adams crouched. He noted how Dan's hands
gripped the armrests with such force that the sinews were crow-footed in grey. He listened to the long,
careful, difficult breathing of the man.
“My friend,” said the pastor, “perhaps you should go home.”
A series of nearly inarticulate gaspings came in answer. The minister made it out as: “Reverend—would
like—to stay here.”
“But why?”
“I know of no place as safe.” This was the way the added gaspings seemed to translate.
“Very well, my friend.” Then the pastor went back to Spencer and Gibble, who were waiting in the
anteroom, and gave them his candid opinion. “That man would be better at home, among relatives and
friends. He has a family, hasn't he?”
“He has a sister,” Gibble said promptly. “Very lovely girl. Competent. Looks out for him.”
They persuaded Dan to let them take him home. Spencer did most of it; Dan wasn't inclined to listen to
Gibble. Dan didn't like Gibble.
“You'll be better off at home, Dan,” Spencer said as they were riding to the small brick bungalow in
Meno Park which was occupied by Dan and his sister.
Dan stared fixedly at distance for a while. “I won't be safe.”
“Nonsense. You'll be as safe as you would be sitting there alone in church.”
Dan closed his eyes. “A man isn't alone in church, is he?”
Spencer shifted uncomfortably. “I don't know what to say to that, Dan.”
“I could tell you something to say. It's this: you didn't know what I was trying to defend myself from.”
“Dan, what was it?”
“I'm not going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Spence, believe it or not, I think too much of you to tell you. I wouldn't want you feeling the way I do. I
wouldn't want any man feeling that way.” He glanced at Gibble. “Not even Gibble, here.”
“Huh?” Gibble said. “Now that's a hell of a remark to make.”
Spencer scowled a warning at Gibble and said, “Take it easy, Gibble. Dan's not feeling well.”
“He feels well enough to insult me,” Gibble said.
“I wish I felt a little better, and I'd walk on your face,” Dan muttered.
Spencer took this to mean the patient was becoming more rational. He gouged Gibble in the ribs,
silencing the man, and they arrived at Dan's home.
Gail was not in the small but rather pleasant cottage of stuccoed white construction, with four palm trees
growing precisely at the four corners of the little lot.
Dan stopped and scowled at the palm trees as if he had discovered something about them that he had
never noticed before.
“The precise order of human endeavors!” he remarked bitterly. “By God, it's certainly going to be upset.
Goodbye order! Goodbye peace of mind!”
“Dan,” Spencer said.
“Yeah?”
“Was it something you saw in the scope?”
Dan's eyes became haunted, his mouth grooved grimly at the corners, and he said, “What do you think,
Spence?” And he walked into the cottage, crossed to a bedroom, entered and slammed the door behind
him. When Spencer, hurrying after him, tried the door, he found it was locked.
It was still locked when Gail came home an hour and a half later.
Gail called to her brother several times. There was no answer. They went outside and looked at the
windows to the room. These were closed and, they discovered by pushing against the sash with a long
stick, locked. Gail said she wished to look into the room.
“I'll lift you up so you can see what he's doing,” Gibble said rather too promptly.
Gail ignored him, said to Spencer, “Spence, will you give me a hand up? Perhaps if I sat on your
shoulder, I could see into the window.”
She perched there on Spencer's shoulder for a while. He said finally, “Well?” Then he gasped. “Hey!
Watch yourself! I can't hold you up there if you—” He let the rest go unsaid, being busy trying to keep
the young woman from toppling off his shoulder. He didn't succeed, but did break her fall.
“She fainted,” Gibble said.
Chapter II
THE question that gave the police some trouble was this:
How had he hanged himself when he wasn't hanging from anything?
The silken cord—it was easily established that it came from the bathrobe his sister had given him at
Christmas—was about six feet long, three eights of an inch in diameter, and the knot in the end was a
regulation hangman's knot. Dan Adams had been a Boy Scout, and the police tried to establish that that
took care of his knowing how to tie a hangman's knot, but someone remembered the Scout Handbook
didn't have the hangman's knot among its collection. Gail insisted her brother didn't know how to tie a
hangman's knot. The police felt she would hardly know whether he did or not.
He had taken a bath. Without toweling himself quite dry, he had slipped on underwear shorts—it was a
humid day, and the drops of water had not evaporated from his skin. Spencer and Gibble hadn't heard
him taking a bath, but the evidence was obvious—the wet shower cabinet, the damp footprints on the
bathroom floor, the soap cake with some lather still on it.
The bathroom connected with that bedroom and another one and with the living-room. That meant the
bathroom had three doors. Two were locked, the only unlocked one being into the bedroom where the
body was found. There was one window. Locked.
Therefore all windows and doors admitting to the room where the body lay were found locked. There
were no other openings.
The police, then, had to account for the fact that the body was in the middle of the bedroom, on the floor,
dead of strangulation, and not hanging from anything. The police were practical. They didn't believe in
such foolishness as locked-room mysteries.
The decision was delivered by Sergeant Doyle: “He hung himself from the door, tying the end of the cord
to the knob on the other side. See that upset chair there? . . . That's what he stood on. Okay, he hung
himself. Then the cord slipped off the knob, and he floundered out into the middle of the bedroom, but
couldn't get the cord loose, and finished strangling there on the floor.”
Gail, white-faced, said, “But there's no knot in the other end of the cord.”
“It slipped loose, Miss. It did that when it let him down. If it hadn't, he would be hanging to the door.”
White-faced, Gail whispered, “But Dan took a bath this morning.”
“Well, he took another one. Suicides often prepare themselves that way.”
“Dan wouldn't kill himself.”
“Lady, the doors were all locked, and the windows. You all three say so. It has to be suicide.”
Gail burst into tears, and let Gibble lead her into the other room. Spencer remained behind, frowning at
the body, looking thoughtful.
“The way the body is lying, you might think it had been suspended from the cord there until dead, and
then let drop,” suggested Spencer.
Sergeant Doyle did not favor this remark. “Look, pal, the guy hung himself from the door and the cord
came loose too late.”
“Well, I guess so.”
“I know so,” said Doyle sharply. “I know a suicide when I see one. I've seen a few.”
“There's no note.”
“Is there a law says they got to leave a note?”
“I thought they did.”
“This one didn't. This one blew his top today and came home and hung himself. It's that simple.”
Spencer didn't contain his resentment too well, and said doggedly, “He didn't come straight home. He
went to a church first.”
“And why not? Wouldn't you figure maybe it would be a good idea to visit a church before you knocked
yourself off?”
“Not the way Dan visited church.”
“And how was that?” Doyle asked curtly. And when Spencer started telling him, Doyle snapped. “Hell, I
heard that story once. The guy didn't see anything in that radar contraption that made him bust it up.
Maybe he thought he did. Who knows what a crazy man thinks he sees?”
“Sergeant, the sister doesn't think it was suicide.”
Completely disgusted, Doyle shoved his jaw out and said, “What're you tryin' to do, give me the idea one
of you guys hanged him?”
Spencer said bitterly, “The hell with you, Sergeant,” and walked out. He telephoned a Miss Cook, a girl
friend of Gail's, and when the young lady arrived with her mother, he collected Gibble and went back to
the station. Gibble was not particularly downcast during the ride. The ghoul, Spencer thought. Thinks he
has a better chance at Gail now that Dan is out of the way.
Spencer was off duty at four. A little before that hour, Gail appeared at the station. She was chalk-faced,
thin-lipped, and tense with determination.
“Spence, I want you to show me where Dan first began acting strangely,” she said.
“You'd be better not to look at it,” Spencer said, after hesitating. “It was the downstairs scope room. I
don't know—they may have cleaned up the wreckage. There probably isn't much for you to see. Why
don't you forget it, Gail?”
“I don't think Dan took his own life.”
Spencer pocketed his hands self-consciously, and finally explained, “Neither did I at first, Gail, but I've
thought it over and changed my mind. The evidence that he did was pretty conclusive.”
“Evidence!” Gail shook her head tensely. “There was no note. Dan had a bath this morning. He would
never bathe twice a day. Why, he didn't like but one bath a week.”
“I know, Gail, and I'm sorry. But that's what the police seem to think.”
“Will you take me to the scope room?”
“If you insist, but it won't do any good.”
The scope room where Dan had been working had, as Spencer had indicated, been partly restored to
order. It was a slow process. Technicians from the laboratory which prepared the experimental radar
equipment were going over the wreckage carefully to salvage what they could. It wasn't much.
Gail frowned thoughtfully. “Aren't the images from a specific antenna often piped to more than one
scope, or to recording cameras?”
“Why, yes,” Spencer admitted. “But how did you know that?”
“Oh, Dan told me quite a lot about the operations that weren't restricted. . . . Do you suppose there
could have been a recording camera on the scope Dan was watching?”
“Say, I never thought of that.”
“Could we find out?”
“Sure. By checking with the switchboard,” Spencer said. “I'll do that right now.”
“I'd like to come along.”
The man they found on duty was named Cal Smith. He greeted them pleasantly, smiling at Spencer's
obvious surprise to see him on duty.
“Where's Cooper, the day man?” Spencer demanded.
Shrugging, Cal Smith said, “Home, I guess. He said something about feeling under the weather, and
telephoned for me to come down and relieve him about noon. So I did.”
Gail's hands had tightened at the information. “You mean that Mr. Cooper, the man who was on duty
when my brother—when Dan smashed the scope—became ill and had to go home?”
“I don't know whether he was ill. Or just upset,” Cal Smith explained.
“Upset? What do you mean by that?”
“Well, Cooper was pale and shaky. Not the type for it, either.”
“Was Mr. Cooper frightened?”
“Could have been. I didn't place it as that, but now you mention it, he did seem scared.”
“And Cooper isn't the scary type?”
“No. No, he isn't. . . .” The wire-chief was frowning at Gail now. “Say, what's going on around here,
anyway?”
Gail compressed her lips grimly. “I don't know. I intend to find out.”
Spencer now asked the wire-chief if they could ascertain whether there had been a monitoring camera on
the scope circuit that Doc Adams had been computing that morning. Wasn't there a record kept? Cal
Smith said sure, there would be a record. He did some hunting, then reported in surprise, “The sheet's
gone!”
摘要：

THEPUREEVILADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineApril1948 ChapterI HEdrovehislittleroadsterl...

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