Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 163 - The Exploding Lake

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THE EXPLODING LAKE
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
? Chapter XIII
? Chapter XIV
? Chapter XV
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine September 1946
This months Doc Savage novel takes you to the mystery land of Patagonia, where nature plays curious
tricks and the schemes of evil men conspire to make it a country of dread. Read it and see if it isn't a real
thriller.
Chapter I
FROM the Negros River southward to Beagle Channel, distance measures somewhere near a thousand
miles, and the cross-span measured from Carmen de Patagones to Point de Corral is somewhat less,
about six hundred miles. Transplanted on to the United States, the dismal area would cover a triangle
roughly with its three corners at New York City, Chicago and Key West, Florida.
Of a part of this godforsaken region the Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say: “From Lake Buenos
Aires southward, the Andes are known in detail only on their eastern border. Two great fields of inland
ice fill all the central part of the cordillera from about 46° south latitude to 51° south latitude. From these
ice-fields great glaciers flow down to the lake region on the eastern border of the cordillera and to the
fjords of the western border. At the time of writing this article these ice-fields have never been crossed,
although the southernmost field has recently been penetrated to some distance by expeditions working in
from Lake Argentino and Lake Viedma. . . .”
Juan Russel, while he was no expedition—he was one man, two mules—could perhaps have added to
the description, and certainly his words would have made it less forbidding. Juan had a romantic heart, an
inheritance from his Spanish mother; he also had a practical streak, drawn from his father, a man from
Kansas who had been a particularly good mining engineer. From his Castilian mother, Juan Russel drew
a love of beauty and the arts. His father had sent him to Rolla School of Mines, which was in Missouri,
not too far from Kansas, so Juan was a good metallurgist.
Juan Russel looked a little like a bum, it should be said here; but he had quite a wide name in his
profession in South America.
Where Juan got his idea of humor was a question, but it was probably from American comic strips. His
humor was of an obvious sort. He had, for instance, christened his pack mules Andy and Uncle Bim.
Andy, who was perverse and unpredictable, carried the tools and what equipment that could not be
broken easily. Uncle Bim was used for the provisions, the necessities. You could depend on Uncle Bim
as much as it was safe to depend on a Patagonian mule. And Andy would follow Uncle Bim.
Uncle Bim—the mule was not all angel—suddenly balked. With feet planted and head down, he stopped
at the crest of a hill.
“Get going, you blank-blank so-and-so,” Juan urged. He did not have much confidence in the profanity.
He jabbed a thumb in Uncle Bim's ribs, and that didn't get results either.
Beneath them a couple of thousand feet, then outflung for miles, lay an irregular plateau, its surface dotted
with a series of small lakes. The view was imposing. Juan Russel paused to gaze at it, for he liked this
country—he liked the view down there, although it was far less imposing than what he had seen recently.
He had been skirting the edges of an almost inaccessible and little-known glacier, and it was lovely
country. The practical side of him had made wondering note of huge waterfalls, with their promise of
unlimited power. He had found indications of oil formations, not exactly oil—but could be. And he had
been interested in ore outcroppings. This country, Juan thought, will be a hell of a place, some day.
He walked around in front of Uncle Bim and prepared to strike a match. Uncle Bim was impressed by
fire. A lighted match in front of his mule-nose—it didn't need to touch him—would cure him of a balk.
Juan made the first pass at the match with his thumbnail. The results were more impressive on Juan than
the mule. First there was a blinding, an incredible, glare of light. Juan peered, half-blinded, at the match in
his hand. It was un-struck. It had not caused whatever had happened.
“What the hell!” Juan gasped.
Then came the blast. Powerful, it shook the hill itself—then the sound, and the sound was enough to
paralyze the eardrums for a few moments.
“Earthquake!” thought Juan. He flung himself flat, a good thing to do when there was an earthquake, he
had heard.
Presently, he said stupidly, “No earthquake!” and sat up and looked around.
He saw, down below in the comparatively level pampas, a gigantic billow of dark smoke that was
growing and mushrooming as it lifted into the sky. The proportions of the thing were astounding.
Uncle Bim, the mule, was regarding his owner with admiration. Apparently he thought one match had
caused all this, and he was impressed.
The mule stood with docility while Juan got out his binoculars and took a look at the base of the smoke
column.
As nearly as Juan could tell, there should have been a small lake at the base of the smoke plume, and it
was not there.
Juan was a scientist, as all metallurgists are to an extent, and presently the fear began to touch him. He
didn't like what he saw. He continued to watch the lake, or rather the stupefying absence of a lake.
Unquestionably, where water had been, there was a blackened depression, and the surrounding area was
bare of vegetation and trees which should have been there.
The item that contributed as much to crawling horror as anything was the absolute lack of human life in
the vicinity. A volcanic eruption? Not at all. There was no crater, no fuming, and after all it wasn't
volcanic territory. An explosion? Yes, an explosion, but of an eerie sort.
“Atom bomb!” Juan thought. “Oh, hell! It can't be. There would be observers around. And it would have
come from an airplane.” He rolled on his back and scanned the sky for a plane, and found none, although
the binoculars were good.
He shivered. Presently he arose and started descending the slope, which was in places cliff-like. Both
Andy and Uncle Bim were unusually uncomplaining, as they moved toward the scene of whatever had
happened.
FOUR days later Juan Russel led his mules into Piensa de Blanca, a small village which was on the
outskirts of nowhere, even in Patagonia.
“El telefono?” said the first native he accosted. “It is miles to nearest, many miles. Say, stranger, you
are in a bad shape, no?”
“A telephone,” Juan mumbled. “I gotta get to a telephone.” He said this in English, then translated it into
Spanish when he saw the native's open mouth. “Yo querer telefono!”
“Friend, it is trip tough to nearest telephone,” said the native. “What you need . . . rest. Eh?”
Juan Russel, it was obvious, needed rest. But he needed something else much more, and that was peace
of mind. The old Juan, the guy who was a good romantic Spaniard and a hard-headed American
businessman, and a practical humorist, too, was gone. He was no more. He was terribly lost.
“Got to reach telephone,” Juan mumbled, and set the gaunt mules in motion.
He collapsed, though, at the end of the street, and they brought him back to the local hotel. There was a
bar in connection, and they took him in there to put some soup inside him. But first they put in a shot of
hard liquor.
Juan did not intend to talk about what he had seen. But, as soon as the liquor was in him and working,
there was a battle between his inherited instinctive taciturnity—from his father—and his naturally
garrulous mother's Latin temperament. He was stewing with what he had seen anyway, and he could no
more have kept quiet than a fish could keep from swimming.
At first, it didn't make much difference. The peons thought he was crazy. A nutty prospector had
wandered into town; the same sort of thing that happens in little desert towns in Arizona and Nevada and
all the way up to the Klondike.
Furthermore, few of the peons in this isolated village had any idea what he was talking about. Juan was a
scientist, and regardless of his looks—particularly, now, his condition—an erudite and learned man. He
was too incoherent to use non-technical terminology, and so most of the peons merely decided he was
loco and let it go at that.
Presently they got some soup into Juan, and he fell over in a stupor of exhaustion. They put him to bed,
and the hotel proprietor, naturally wondering whether he was going to get paid for food and meal, looked
in Juan's pockets. He learned the man was Juan Russel—and the name of Juan Russel, prospector,
metallurgical research man, was known here.
Talk went through the village, as it naturally would. The talk became garbled—the things Juan had
mumbled drunkenly mixed themselves up ludicrously—but eventually it reached the ears of a man who
wore a blue shirt, and who was staying at the Casa Negros, the Black House, a rooming-house which
was genteel in spite of its name.
“Juan Russel, eh?” this man said. “What did you say he saw? . . . Spontaneous disintegration. . . . The
beginning of the end of the universe, you say. . . . Crazy? Oh, sure he's crazy. I wouldn't know.” He
beckoned Señora Coliz, the proprietress. “Vino blanca,” he ordered. “By the way, I shall leave early,
Señora. Very early. I will pay you now, so I need not awaken you when I leave.”
He went out presently and filled the tank of his car with gas.
He left about two o'clock in the morning, headed in the general direction of Buenos Aires.
JUAN RUSSEL, somewhat refreshed—although very tight of tongue—left in a rented automobile about
eight o'clock the following morning. He left behind him in the village the impression that he was about the
most terrified man who had ever visited the place.
Around noon, Juan reached his first fair-sized town. It had telephonic connection—of a poor sort—with
another town, and then another town, and eventually with Buenos Aires. Juan placed a call. He got the
next town, and was informed he could not talk to Buenos Aires—or to New York, which was where he
wanted to talk. Line down.
“Listen,” Juan said desperately. “Listen, Operator. If the lines are repaired, get me—I mean, get hold of
Doc Savage, in New York City. Tell him it is Juan Russel calling him on a terrible, an infinitely terrible
matter. Tell him to be available for my call, which I will attempt to place. I am heading on toward Buenos
Aires, any place I can find a telephone line. Tell Doc Savage that.” He was extremely earnest. “El Señor
Doc Savage, Ciudad Nueva York. Estados Unidos. . . . Si, si.” He made the operator repeat it. “That
is correct. Doc Savage is very well known in New York. They will be able to find him by name alone.”
Juan Russel got going again in search of a telephone. He was, those who happened to notice him agreed,
about the most terrified man who had ever been through that village, too.
JUAN RUSSEL had met Doc Savage once, several years ago, while attending a special meeting of
metallurgists in New York City. There had been a notice on the convention bulletin board:
CLARK SAVAGE, JR., WILL SPEAK TUESDAY AT 2 PM ON “THE MOLECULAR
STRUCTURE OF SEVERAL LESSER KNOWN METALS.”
Juan had heard vaguely of Doc Savage before, but he had been surprised to find the lecture hall crowded
to capacity, which was unusual, because metallurgists were not much different from all convention
attenders; most of them spent their time getting tight and raising what hell could be raised. Juan had been
fortunate to squeeze his way into the hall.
DOC SAVAGE was a conservatively dressed man who did not appear particularly large physically at
first, although later, when Juan got close to him, he realized the man was a giant. Savage had rather
regular bronze features; his coloring—the deep bronze—was rather striking, it was true. Physically, he
struck a contrast to the anemic-looking faces of the audience, most of whom has spent the night in the
nightclubs.
The man spoke in a voice that seemed low, well-modulated, but a voice that carried to every corner of
the lecture hall. His text was a revelation. Juan had thought he knew something about metals. He began to
feel like a school kid.
Later, he met Doc Savage personally—one of those things where you shake the speaker's hand and tell
him what a wow he was.
“Oh, yes, Juan Russel, the Patagonian metallurgist,” Doc Savage said. “You have done good work down
there pioneering in fluorescence for prospecting, I understand.”
That was the extent of their acquaintance, but Juan's interest had been aroused in Doc Savage. After that
he read everything he could find about the man, and his uncanny abilities. He found out that Doc
Savage—sometimes called the Bronze Man by the newspapers—was an expert in a number of fields,
and that actually his specialty was surgery.
Juan also learned that Savage had a reputation as an adventurer, that he liked excitement, and that he had
a name as a sort of modern Galahad who went around getting people out of trouble which was either of a
fantastic nature, or outside the abilities of the law enforcement agencies.
Doc Savage, it developed, had five assistants, all experts in their fields; their fields were electricity,
chemistry, law, civil engineering and geology. These men were also adventurers at heart. This group, Juan
found out, had been given credit for wiping out some vicious criminal organizations and solving a number
of fantastic mysteries.
Doc Savage's specialty, Juan had gathered, was the unusual. And he had always retained his admiration
for the big bronze man. Juan, being an adventurer himself in a sense, felt that Doc Savage embodied
some of the things he himself would have liked to be. In the back of his mind, probably, there had been a
secret wish to someday be associated with Doc Savage in a matter involving something weird and very,
very important.
THAT evening, Juan reached the town he had called by telephone, and found the wires were still down.
He visited the telephone office, and he was a wild man. He impressed on everyone from the telephone
company manager down that he must, absolutely must, get hold of Doc Savage, and he repeated the
request that, should the break in the wires be found and repaired, Doc Savage should be contacted at
once and urged to wait at the phone for his, Juan's, call.
“Tell him”—Juan gasped—“tell him that it is a matter so important that—that—well, words cannot
describe the horror of it. It involves—involves everything!”
Here, too, they thought he must be a little touched. No man in a normal stage of mind could carry that
much terror.
At the Cochina, an eating place, Juan had a steak which he forced himself to eat. And presently, while
he was still at the table, a man sat down opposite him. The stranger was fairly well dressed. He wore a
blue shirt.
“Juan Russel?” he said.
“I—yes.” Continued terror was making Juan's tongue a little thick. He had trouble with words.
The man in the blue shirt was plain, almost mouse-like; there was a tiny scar across his lower lip; his
voice, like his eyes, was flat and emotionless.
“I am Monk Mayfair,” the man said.
“Monk—for God's sake!” Juan gasped. “You—I—mother of mercy!” He suddenly seized the man's
hand. “Oh, what luck! Mother of all things—what wonderful luck!” He lapsed into Spanish in his
excitement and babbled about how wonderful this was.
“I am one of Doc Savage's assistants,” the man said, and the tiny scar flickered faintly on his lip.
“You—I recognize the name—Monk Mayfair!” Juan blurted. “That is why I am—oh, this is wonderful!”
The man who had called himself Monk Mayfair nodded. The expression in his eyes did not change. He
said, “I heard you are trying to telephone Doc Savage. They—at the telephone office—are a bunch of
gossips.”
“Si, si!” Juan gasped. “Mio dios! Magnifico!”
Juan Russel had never met Monk Mayfair, but of course he had read of him. Monk was one of Doc
Savage's five aides, the one who was a chemist. Doc Savage's men had a reputation for working in
various parts of the world—they were consultants of high skill—so it did not seem strange that Monk
Mayfair should be in Patagonia.
“Maybe I can help you out,” the man in the blue shirt said.
“Yes. Yes, you can.” Juan nodded vehemently. Relief was making him weak, almost incoherent. “I have
much to tell you—a—a thing that is terrible, incredible. A lake—it disappeared—a lake—I mean—”
“I heard about that,” the other said quietly.
“You heard!”
“Rumor travels fast in this country.”
“Rumor?”
“You talked—you were a little drunk, I understand—in the town where you stayed last night. News
about you has preceded you.”
“Oh!”
“You wanted to keep this secret?”
“I—yes. That is—well—terror! The terror of it! I did not think—”
“Maybe,” the man in the blue shirt said, “we had better not talk here. Rather public.”
“We—yes. Yes, not here. My hotel. We will go—”
“Good enough.” The other arose.
Juan's spirits did not rise as they moved toward the hotel, but they at least became somewhat settled. It
was dark—the hour was about ten—and they had to move slowly, since the pavement was none too
good. Doc Savage, Juan thought, was going to be reached. Things were going to be—well, maybe not all
right. But there would now be a chance. Doc Savage, Juan believed, was possibly the only man living
who stood a chance of coping with this thing.
“I think we're being followed,” said the man in the blue shirt.
“Dios—!”
“In here.”
They were opposite a small alleyway. The other man drew Juan into the blacker murk of the alley. He
said quietly, “we will wait here and see—” and did not trouble to finish the sentence, because his knife
had by that time gone into Juan's back near the left shoulder-blade and descending at an angle, reached
his heart.
Blue-shirt used the knife half a dozen more times to make sure Juan was dead. He wiped the blade on
Juan's clothing casually, replaced the knife in its holster, and fished in the darkness until he found Juan's
billfold and took what folding money it contained. He sauntered out of the alley, went to the place where
he had his car parked and before starting the motor, counted Juan's money. It came to a little over a
thousand pesos.
“A fair bonus,” he remarked.
He started the engine of his car and left town. Five miles or so out of town, he paused long enough to get
a portable radio transmitter out of the car trunk, warm up the tubes, and whistle into the microphone
several times. Presently he got an answering whistle in the receiver.
“Juan is dead,” he reported, and put the transmitter back in the trunk and got going.
Chapter II
THE Dias Escribe was not the leading Buenos Aires newspaper, but it was not under the government's
thumb as much as some of the others, and was a little sharper in going after news. Pedro Verde, the
managing editor, a sour, skeptical little man, called his makeup editor to the desk and pointed at a story
and demanded, “What is this piece of tripe? . . . Don't you know we don't print fairy stories?” He rapped
the item with his fist and yelled, “A lake disappearing! For God's sake!” The item was headed:
STRANGE NEW MYSTERY IN
PATAGONIA
A LAKE VANISHES
The text of the story related how two men had been flying their plane over Patagonia when they had
heard and felt a tremendous blast, a blast that almost took their plane from the sky. Frightened, they had
gone to their home airport, but had returned two days later, and had taken a picture of the scene.
The picture was reproduced, and showed a blackened area, and, nearby, a number of perfectly normal
lakes.
“It is a good story—”
“It is so damned good that it is no account at all!” the managing editor yelled. “Listen, too many
cockeyed stories about Patagonia have been floating around. They get on the wire services, get up north
to the United States, and people up there think we are a bunch of screwballs, lovers of Nazis; and
relations get worse. That sort of thing has got to stop. We've got enough trouble as it is with the kind of
guys we've got in government office down here, without helping the stink along. That story is regular
goofy sea-monster stuff.”
“Yes, but even a sea-monster story makes good reading now and then. In the United States' papers,
every once in a while, you see—”
“The hell with that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Find these two aviators. I want to know whether they are dependable.”
“Yes, sir.”
The next day, the makeup man had to make an embarrassed report. The identity of the two men had
been determined. Carlos Juarez and Rodrigo Unos. The reporter assigned to the story had sought the
men to get more details, but they could not be found; they had apparently disappeared after giving the
picture and the story to a correspondent to send in.
“It's a phony,” said the managing editor bitterly. “Print no more of it.”
The Associated Press, though, had already picked up the story and put it on their wire-photo to New
York. The A. P. man didn't particularly believe the cockeyed thing, but it made a good story.
THE murder of Juan Russel got quite a play all over Argentina. The man's family background was
reviewed at length, and his scientific achievements got an extended accounting. The police, it was stated,
were positive the slayer would be in custody within twenty-four hours.
Presently reporters, on the trail of details about the man's death, unearthed the fact that he had come out
of the Patagonia wild-lands in a condition that was best described as highly erratic. The man seemed to
be suffering from hallucinations, and under the delusion that the world—the universe, even—was
menaced by something infernal and fantastic.
They played down the fantastic and infernal menace, because it seemed to be evidence that the man was
mentally unbalanced.
In justice to the reporters on the story, there was really nothing told them that would connect Juan Russel
with the business of the vanished lake. Juan, drunk as he had been that night when he talked, had been
either too canny—or too terrified, which was more likely—to let out the connection with the lake.
Anyway, it did not get in print. But the story of Juan's death made all the newspapers, and was cabled to
New York by the press associations, where it got some play—another murder in that trouble-making
country down there, Argentina.
There was obviously no political cast to the crime, though.
Chapter III
THE steward of the Clipper for New York took a last deep breath of the fine Buenos Aires atmosphere,
flipped his cigarette into the grass, and went into the terminal.
“I suggest you get aboard, Señor,” he said. “Departure is shortly.”
“Thank you,” said the man who had a small scar on his lower lip. He was of medium height, clad—he did
not wear a blue shirt now—in white linen and Panama. His mouse-like features were as expressionless as
they were when he had put the knife into Juan Russel.
He had been reading the newspaper account of Juan Russel's murder. He said—to himself—cheerfully,
“Ah, so they expect an arrest in twenty-four hours.” He folded the newspaper, put it in his pocket. “They
always do,” he remarked.
“Sir?” said the steward.
“Nothing,” said the man. “Nothing that will come to pass.”
He showed his ticket and passport to the first officer, who said, “Paul Cort?”
“Paul Cort. That's right.”
“Portuguese, I see.”
“Yes, Lisbon. The visa is in order, I think.”
“Yes, visaed by the U. S. Consul. Okay.” The first officer nodded. Paul Cort boarded the big seaplane,
found a seat, and noticed that the ship was already filled, except for one seat. Paul Cort became uneasy,
thereafter.
Presently there was a commotion on the ramp. A big man, an enormously big man, had just arrived.
Perspiration was streaming down his red face. He got through the formalities with the First Officer.
“Name?”
“Dartlic—Orlin Dartlic.”
“Dutch, eh?”
“Netherlands. The Hague,” the big man boomed. “To New York, is going.”
He did not handle the English so well, and some of the passengers, overhearing, chuckled. Paul Cort did
no chuckling, but he seemed considerably relieved about the one empty seat.
A few moments later, the big man—enormously fat, he was—from the Netherlands lowered himself into
the vacant seat, overflowing somewhat, and holding a briefcase clutched tightly on the balloons of flesh
that served him for a lap.
“I thought I be left yet,” he puffed. He had a loud voice, and a boisterously amiable way of using it.
The seaplane engines began rumbling and vibrating, the ship taxied to the end of the take-off area. A
launch finished making the safety-run over the take-off area to make sure there were no floating menaces,
and sent a flat signal back to the seaplane. The pilot did his cockpit check, fed fuel to the carburetors,
and the seaplane moved, presently began bouncing, got on step, then lifted. It was airborne.
It was about this time that the fat Mr. Orlin Dartlic of the Netherlands saw the mouse-like Mr. Paul Cort,
of Portugal, and the effect on the fat man was something to see. He turned quite white. He said
something, or a number of things, in Dutch or some language similar. It was a little too inarticulate with
terror to be understandable.
The big man dashed back to the door. “Off I want!” he gasped. “Off! Off! Quick.”
“Hey, we're in the air,” the steward said. “What's the matter?”
“I—uh—something I forget. Something that very important is!” The big man was frantic. “This ship you
land quick, no?”
The steward was very sorry, but it was out of the question. No could do. Company regulations, and
other things, including inconvenience to the other passengers. Very sorry.
The steward was of the opinion that it was the fat man's first flight—a plain case of air-scare. The
steward talked smoothly, logically, and got the big man back in his seat, then administered a sedative, a
calming drug of mild qualities. The fat man took that. He was glad to get it. He needed calming.
Paul Cort continued to be quite expressionless.
A COUPLE of hours later, the fat man paid a visit to the men's room, and Paul Cort joined him there.
The two men gave not the slightest sign of knowing each other. The big man did swallow audibly, and his
huge head turned until he was staring into the impassive face of the other.
Paul Cort produced his newspaper with an offhand manner.
“Too bad about this fellow Russel, Juan Russel,” Cort said. “Did you read about it?”
“I—Yes, I read.” The fat man swallowed again, a sound like a trout gulping a bug off the surface. I—a
friend of yours, no?”
“No, not exactly. I never met him. A promising young man, I heard, though.”
摘要：

THEEXPLODINGLAKEADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIV?ChapterXVOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMag...

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