Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 152 - The Thing That Pursued

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THE THING THAT PURSUED
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 October 1945
Chapter I
THE small man must have been waiting for him, because when he paid off the cab at the airport and
turned, there the small fellow was.
“Hello, Lew,” the small man said.
Lew could not think of an answer, and in a moment the taste of danger was in his mouth. For him it was a
burnt taste, dark brown. He had been a photography fan at one time; he always thought of danger as
having a taste like developing solution for film.
He looked about him nervously, but he could see none of the small man's usual companions, which was
not quite reasonable, but not reassuring, either.
“Let's have a small talk, Lew,” the little man said.
“I haven't got time,” he said. He had difficulty with the words. “I'm due to take off right now,” he added,
weakly.
“Let's have a drink, anyway.”
“There's no bar at the airport.”
“Cup of coffee, then.”
He opened his mouth to say nothing-doing — the-hell with-you — I-don't-want-any-part-of-you —
keep-away-from-me. But what he said was the only thing he dared say: “Well, okay.”
The restaurant, in the west wing of the airport administration building adjoining the passenger waiting
room, had large plate glass windows which overlooked the loading ramp and the runways, and the tables
here were crowded. They took a booth along the north wall.
They sat there looking at each other, wordless. Lew Page was wordless because of fright, and knew it.
The small man—Lew had never heard him called by any other term except the small man—probably felt
no trace of fear. Lew believed the little fellow had something psychologically wrong with him so that he
was incapable of experiencing emotions. At any rate the small man was sitting there unconcerned, like an
imbecile of a mouse deviling an elephant.
“Coffee, black, and only half a cup,” the small man told the waitress. “And a glass of water.”
Lew mumbled that he wanted coffee with cream and sugar, and the waitress went away.
“All right, say your say,” Lew growled, with a sound like loose leaves in his throat.
The small man nodded.
“Are you going to see Newsome?” he asked.
Lew Page didn't answer, because no answer was needed.
“Don't,” the small man said. “For your own good, don't. You are still in the ATC, but you are on leave,
and you've rented a plane and you plan to fly to Kansas City and talk to Newsome. That I know. This I
also know—the smart thing for you to do is get your leave cancelled and go back to flying the Atlantic
with the ATC. What do you think of that?”
“You can't scare me out,” Lew said.
The waitress brought their coffee, Lew's with sugar and cream, the small man's cup half full, and a glass
of water. The small man used the water to finish filling his cup. He drank. The waitress left. She was a
leggy, sullen-looking silver-blonde.
“No, I guess not. You won't scare out,” the small man said. “You're scared right now. Probably as
terrified as you will ever be. But not scared enough.”
“That's right.”
“I'm sorry . . . No, I'm not. I just think you are a fool.”
“We'll see.”
“We sure will.”
“That all you've got to say?”
The small man drank more coffee. “Yes.”
“Doesn't Mants want me to tell Newsome anything?”
“No. Mants knows you will never see Newsome.”
Lew Page had not touched his coffee. He knew he could not drink it now, knew that his throat would not
let anything pass. But suddenly he drank it all.
He hit the small man, hit him as hard as he could with his fist, lifting slightly and leaning over the table to
do it. Lew Page was big and burly and the blow could have killed an ox; but it only dazed the small man,
driving him back against the booth seat where he remained staring at Lew Page from loosely-lidded evil
eyes.
Lew Page left in a hurry.
PRESENTLY the leggy, silver-blonde waitress came over to the table under the pretense of picking up
the cups. She was showing a certain amount of hard-faced anxiety.
She said, “The big bum! I saw him slug you! Are you all right?”
“Get the hell away from here!” the small man said as violently as his sickness permitted. “Want to queer
the whole thing, you dope?”
The blonde looked relieved and picked up the cups.
“I was just worried, honey,” she said.
She went away.
The small man had been hit hard on other occasions and he could judge the effects. He began testing his
legs for strength, found them weak, and remained where he was for a time, until he was sure he could
walk without seeming more than mildly drunk. Then he arose and walked outside.
He made his way to a sedan in the parking lot where three men were waiting, and climbed inside.
“Did it go through?” he was asked.
“My part did.”
“What about Flo's?”
“Ask Flo when she gets here.”
“What's the matter with you?”
“He hit me.” The small man lay back against the cushions and closed his eyes. “If I had been the least bit
sorry, I wouldn't have been after he hit me,” he said in a low voice.
The three men looked at each other, wishing to grin at the idea of the small man being sorry for what he
had just done; but at first they didn't grin because the horror of the thing they were doing was a sobering
force, until finally one did grin, and then they all grinned like apes.
Flo, the leggy, sullen-looking waitress, came to the car about five minutes later. “Let's get out of this
place,” she said, and got inside.
“Your part go all right?”
“Yes,” Flo said.
“How much of his coffee did he drink?”
“All of it. At first he didn't touch it, and then all of a sudden he drank every drop. That was just before he
hit my sweetie.”
The small man grimaced violently, for he hated being called sweetie and honey before others. To that
extent, Lew Page had been wrong about the small man. The little fellow could be embarrassed.
“Let's go,” he growled.
The driver said, “Wait a minute,” for he was listening to an airplane engine, the sound of which was rising
to a snarling howl of power in a take-off run. Presently a plane, already off the runway, flashed between
the buildings and passed on.
“There goes the last of Lew Page,” the driver said.
He had spoken to be facetious, but it sounded surprisingly unfunny and after he had spoken he became a
little pale. The mood caught the others, and they were all silent, their thoughts busy with what they had
done to Lew Page.
Chapter II
FROM La Guardia Field, Lew Page did a climbing turn in traffic and lined out, still climbing, on the route
the airliners followed, passing across Manhattan Island above Central Park, crossing the Hudson, then
swinging a little south to catch the N side of the Newark radio beam westward.
It took him some time to get back to breathing normally, and to take his mind off his dry skin and the
brown taste in his mouth which the coffee hadn't erased. He must have still been in somewhat of a daze,
though, because he passed Allentown and State College without really seeing them, and presently the
Pittsburgh beam was beating at his eardrums. He settled down and flew steadily then, and eventually
passed Columbus, Ohio. His stomach felt unsettled, he thought as a result of the horrible experience of
meeting the small man, so he decided to set down at Indianapolis for something to eat.
Indianapolis was pleasantly quiet, but it didn't seem to soothe his nerves; he was by now aware that a
sense of foreboding plagued him, but he was at a loss to account for the feeling. The threats of the small
man were of course the direct cause of it, but they did not account for the present grim bite to the feeling,
because he had been threatened before without having this almost ill sensation.
From Indianapolis he took federal airway Green Four to St. Louis, and he felt no better when he crossed
the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers at their merging points. He was flying high, sixteen thousand,
and he decided he had a good tail wind, about seventy miles an hour, and didn't need fuel to make
Kansas City. He was anxious to get to Kansas City, more consumingly anxious by the minute, to talk to
Newsome.
Newsome was a competent guy in a two-fisted way. Carl Newsome might not have received an
overdose when they were dishing out brains, but when they added the guts and aggressiveness, they
spilled quite a lot extra.
Lew Page picked up Columbia, Missouri, then lined out over farming country where the section lines
were laid out in neat panels, north and south, east and west, with a country road marking each panel. It
was easy to keep a course in such country.
SOME time later—he didn't know how much later—he saw the thing. He gave it what Hollywood would
call a double-take; he saw it and looked away, and then he raised himself as far out of the seat as the
safety belt would let him lift, and he looked again.
He kept looking and danger crawled over him like hotfooted ants; he could feel it begin in his feet and his
hands simultaneously and creep, and the sick taste of it was in his mouth.
His next movements were natural ones. Aimed at escape. He slammed his palm against the throttle and
began changing the mixture control; he nosed down the ship so suddenly that he left the seat for a while
and was pulled along by the safety belt. The airspeed needle started moving, and presently it passed the
redline point, the speed placarded as being the highest considered safe for this ship.
The airstream began to lift a banshee howl around the ship. Lew Page was a good pilot, and it was
probably the instinct of this, rather than conscious will, which made him watch the airspeed and come
back slowly on the stick so as not to shed the wings. The pull-out was sharp. But he didn't black out.
The average man doesn't black out until a pull of around seven times the force of gravity, and this ship
wasn't stressed for much more than that. He pulled probably five g's, and came up in the beginning of a
loop, rolled out at the top.
He looked, and the breath ran out of him in a horrified rush, for it was still with him. He did a snap roll, a
stall, kicked off in a spin, let it spin until he became sick, neutralized everything and pulled out of the spin.
He wasn't going to be able to escape. The terror in him was now a physical violence, making him do
wild, mad things. The speed in his dive had been near three hundred, and he tried that again, watching the
airspeed, watching also the thing that was pursuing him.
He thought of the title of a story he had once heard; he hadn't read the story, only heard the title, which
was The Damned Thing . . . I must be going nuts, he thought. This can't be happening to me.
He pulled out of the dive, got out of it successfully, but then he did a snap roll which took the right wing
off. A rending roar, and the wing was gone.
He pulled the red handle and the escape hatch flew off, then he went out headfirst into space.
It was not a particularly good jump and he somersaulted for a while. Each time he went over he could
see the falling ship gyrating off into space, and he felt better, because the thing was pursuing the ship, not
him.
He hauled the parachute ripcord out of its sheath and set himself for the opening shock.
Chapter III
THE ringing of a telephone penetrated the afternoon stillness in the rich and well-bred offices of Graphic
Mutual Insurance on Grand Avenue in Kansas City.
T. Nedden Page looked up, and in a moment grinned in derision at the idea that even the telephone bell
at Graphic Mutual was a little golden sound. This joint, he thought, is saturated in dignity, and sometimes
it gets in my hair. What hair I've got left, he thought wryly. He was not old, unless thirty-two was old, but
he had become bald in what he considered a very ugly way. In front of an imaginary line over the top of
his head from one ear to the other, he had no hair whatever.
It was his telephone ringing. Deliberately, he let it ring. Today he was gripped by the suspicion, which he
frequently had, that he was a wild mustang trapped in a pasture with the plow-horses. A fine rich pasture,
true, but not much fun for anyone to whom excitement was a spice. I'm old and getting bald and missing
life, he reflected. Which probably was his mood rather than the truth.
Reluctantly, he picked up the telephone, said, “Renewal Department, Page speaking.”
“Are you the brother of Lew Page, ATC flier?” a crisp voice asked.
“Yes.”
The crisp voice stated it was speaking from Sunflower General Hospital. A patient named Lew Page had
been brought to the hospital quite recently for treatment. In his possession had been two names, a Mr.
Carl Newsome and T. Nedden Page—hence the call.
Ned's first stricken thought was: Lew has crashed.
“Is he—badly smashed up?” Ned asked tensely.
“Not exactly physically,” the hospital voice said. “However his mental condition is very bad. I suggest
you come at once.”
“Where did it happen?”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Page, but I haven't the details.”
“All right,” Ted said thickly. “I'll be right out.”
Leaving his desk, Ted Page's manner was something near normal, and his voice steady as he told the
supervisor, “My brother has been hurt, I understand, so I am leaving early.”
In the rich walnut-paneled reception room, he met Sethena Williams. Seth was talking to the receptionist,
Mrs. Kessing.
“Ted!” Seth exclaimed. “What's wrong?”
Rather dully, Ted Page explained, “My brother, Lew. The hospital called. Something's wrong.”
“Are you going out there now?”
“Yes.”
“I'm going along,” Seth said. “Poor Lew.”
SETHENA WILLIAMS did some thinking during the long cab ride to the hospital. She wouldn't
truthfully be surprised if Lew Page had a bullet in him, and not much more surprised to hear it was from a
policeman's gun. She considered Ted's brother, Lew, a little more wild and adventure-loving than a man
should be, with a little of the unscrupulous tossed in.
Actually, Seth was afraid of the thing in brother Ted. She believed she could see it in him. Ted was in
love with her, he said. Certainly he had asked her to marry him numerous times. She was not entirely sure
why she hadn't, or whether she would in the future, the reasons probably being that she had a good job
and was happy as it was, and also that strain of pirate spirit which Ted's brother Lew had, and which she
thought she could see in Ted. Pirates didn't make good husbands.
Sunflower General Hospital was in the Swope Park Section, a large rambling pleasant building,
impressively built in the modern shiny motif. There was some red tape until they found who had called
them; Ted had forgot to ask the caller his name. It had been a Doctor Howard, they eventually found.
Doctor Howard was a stout, middle-aged, serious man who said, “There are some things I would like to
tell you before you see your brother.”
“What's wrong with Lew?” Ted asked uneasily.
“Ah—to tell the truth, it's an unusual case,” the doctor said. “Here is the background as I heard it: your
brother was found by a farmer south of Lake City about two hours ago, after the farmer noticed an
airplane behaving queerly and saw the occupant jump out of the ship after a wing broke off. Your brother
was the one who jumped.”
Ted heard this only vaguely. “How badly is Lew hurt?”
“He has a few bruises.”
“That's all?”
“That seems to be the extent of the physical damage.”
Ned Page let out a long breath and said, “Thank God! The way you called me, I thought he might be in
bad shape.”
The doctor looked uncomfortable, his expression showing that he had been misunderstood, and that Lew
Page wasn't all right. It was Seth who pinned the doctor down with a question.
“Doctor, you said the case was unusual. What did you mean?” she said.
“Yes, exactly. I'm afraid I didn't make that clear,” the doctor said. “By unusual, I meant both the patient's
condition, and certain circumstances related by the farmer who saw the parachute jump. You'll see the
patient in a moment and will understand what I mean by his condition. So I'll pass that by for the moment,
and tell you what the farmer reported as to the accident.” The doctor hesitated, pulling at his jaw, fishing
in his mind for words, and finally burst out with: “The thing sounds silly any way you could say it. Fact is,
the farmer said something fantastic was pursuing the plane.”
Seth was puzzled. “You mean Mr. Page's plane was being chased by another plane?”
“Not at all. Chased, yes. But by some fantastic luminous monster. Mind you, that's the farmer's version.
What I'm inclined to believe is that this agriculturist must have seen fire or smoke from the disabled plane
instead of anything more novel.”
Seth studied the doctor's uncomfortable face, then asked, “If you believe it was an error on the part of
the farmer, why take such pains to tell us the story?”
The doctor fell to rubbing and pulling his jaw again.
“I suppose I did so because I'm puzzled by the patient's condition,” he said. “Here, I'll take you in to see
him.”
THE first thing Seth noticed was that the nurse in Lew Page's room wasn't looking as if she enjoyed
being there. She'd apparently been having a difficult time.
“Hello, Lew,” Ted Page said.
He had been fooled by the calm way his brother was lying in bed. Lew Page seemed all right, except that
his color wasn't good, and there was a naturalness about his eyes that was reassuring, but he did not
respond to Ted's greeting.
“Hey, bub, don't you know me?” Ted demanded.
Lew Page did not reply, did not look at his brother.
Ted asked the doctor, “What'd you people do, shoot him full of morphine?” Ted was not looking at his
brother now, but he whirled to stare at Lew after Seth leveled an arm, pointing at Lew, and gasped,
“Look! Oh, Ted, how awful!”
Lew Page's body had started to stiffen under the sheets. The stiffening became an arching of the man's
full length, and they could see the sheet moving where the muscles trembled with strained rigidity. This
posture held for a moment; then the patient's mouth opened, a scream tore out of his throat, and
simultaneously he squirmed sidewise, first with his head, then with his whole body. The squirming turned
into a violent struggle, an effort to escape from something imaginary. The attempt dislodged the sheet,
which permitted Ned and Seth to see that Lew was encased in a straightjacket.
“Oh, my God, Lew!” Ted cried, and leaped to the bedside to lay soothing hands on his brother and say,
“It's me, kid, your brother. Cut it out, Lew! You're going to be all right.”
The man on the bed continued to wrench himself about and scream. Seth was horrified by the indications
that Lew Page was endeavoring with every muscular effort he could summon, trying with an absolutely
insane frenzy to escape from something which simply wasn't there. The nurse and doctor helped restrain
Lew, and between them they managed to keep the patient on the bed, although his wild struggles
persisted. Frantic, Ted Page cried, “Can't you do something for him?”
The doctor looked at the nurse and asked, “How much morphine has he been given?” Seth failed to
catch the nurse's reply, but evidently it was a large amount, because the doctor told Ted, “There's nothing
more we can do.”
The patient had continued to scream, mew, whimper and moan, most of it incoherently, but toward the
end, just before he collapsed into that strangely peaceful calmness again, Seth heard him cry distinctly,
“You can't outrun the damned thing! Three hundred miles an hour, and it's keeping right up with me!”
The silence in the room was shocking.
“You had better step outside for a while. You look a bit shaken,” the doctor told Seth and Ted.
When Seth turned to the door, she saw a small man standing there, looking into the room. He had an
expression on his face that arrested her attention, for the expression was pleased and knowing.
“I'm sorry. I was passing by and heard a noise and thought something was wrong,” he said.
“A mental patient,” the doctor told him. The doctor was disheveled, and he added, “Incidentally, this is a
private room.”
“My apologies,” the small man said, withdrawing.
Seth and Lew went into the hall, and Seth watched the small man departing.
THE man, while small, wasn't diminutive enough to be a dwarf, and there was a razor-like neatness about
him. He didn't look, Seth thought, as if he'd just heard a noise and put his head in the room. He'd seemed
pleased and knowing, which weren't the natural emotions for a passerby who had witnessed such a thing.
A queer idea hit her. Had Lew Page's seizure been brought on by seeing the small man in the door?
“Doctor,” Seth said, going back into Lew's room. “Doctor, is that the first spell like that he's had?”
The nurse answered the question. “He has them every few minutes.”
Then it hadn't been the small man's appearance that brought it on.
“The brother looks rather shaken,” the doctor said. “I suggest you take him down to the cafeteria and
have some coffee. I'll join you presently.”
Ted Page heard, and nodded dumbly when Seth joined him. The cafeteria, high-ceilinged and extremely
plain and antiseptic, was not a particularly cheering place, but they got coffee and sat at a table. Presently
the doctor joined them, carrying a cup of coffee for himself.
“Doctor, what's wrong with him? Shock? Is that what it is?” Ted asked anxiously.
The doctor, stirring sugar into his coffee, examined the table gloomily, an unpleasant task before him. “It's
more than shock.”
“What else?”
The doctor turned his gaze to Seth and asked, “Are you Mrs. Page?”
“No, I'm a friend of Ted's. And I know Lew slightly—I've met him twice.”
The doctor, who had used the question to delay the grim job of telling the truth, looked at the table. “We
are not definitely sure about the condition yet. Further diagnosis will be necessary, and a specialist is
coming later in the evening. Also, as is usually true with psychiatric cases, the condition may be
temporary and subject to improvement at any time, although in this particular instance I do not wish to
arouse hopes which may later be disappointing.”
Ted cleared the tension out of his throat and asked, “What are you trying to say?”
“That your brother is suffering from a mental collapse.”
“A nervous breakdown, you mean?”
“The term, nervous breakdown, is ambiguous. The terminology I would use is primary dementia brought
on by neurotrosis.”
“What does that translate into?”
“Madness,” the doctor said, then watched Ted Page intently to see whether he was taking it all right.
Ted jerked his breath inward hoarsely and clenched his hands.
After a few moments which none of them enjoyed, Seth asked, “Doctor, what does neurotrosis mean?”
“A wounding of the nerves,” the doctor explained.
“What caused it?”
“We haven't found out yet. That is why the specialist is coming.”
Seth had more questions, but they recoiled back into her mind at sight of the small man, who had entered
the cafeteria and was picking up a tray, sauntering along the counter, selecting a salad, a meat dish, and
coffee. Seth, watching the small man, knew that his presence alarmed her, although she did not know
exactly why.
TED PAGE now unclasped his hands. The act seemed to require a considerable conscious effort, and
the act of speaking even more. “Doctor, does that—wounding of the nerves, you called it—mean that my
brother is hopelessly crazy, and can't recover?”
The doctor's hand went over and clamped reassuringly on Ted's arm. “Not necessarily. Wounds heal,
you know.”
The small man presently took a table, and proceeded to eat with birdlike despatch and evident relish.
Seth, still watching him, was sure that he was eyeing their table frequently, and that he had come into the
cafeteria for that purpose.
“Doctor,” Seth said, “do you see that small man over there?”
The doctor turned his head. “Yes, of course.”
“Have you seen him around the hospital before?”
The doctor pondered. “If so, I don't recall it. Why?”
“Oh, he's so small, I was curious,” Seth said evasively. “Do you happen to have the name of the farmer
who found Lew?”
摘要：

THETHINGTHATPURSUEDADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIV?ChapterXVOriginallypublishedinDocSavage...

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