Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 150 - The Wee Ones

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THE WEE ONES
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 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
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
JOHNNY began barking a few minutes after ten o'clock. It had gotten dark at eight.
Johnny was John Fain's Great Dane, and under normal conditions the only thing to do when he started an
uproar was to look into the matter and then scratch his chest for him the way he liked, or fan his stern
with a folded newspaper, depending on what he had on his mind.
Tonight it was different. The dog's barking started John Fain to trembling violently. Fain was already pale,
and almost ill with incredulous disbelief, so stricken in fact that he would not have been surprised at
himself for fainting.
But the trembling took him by surprise.
He eyed his hands foolishly, like a man who had discovered a hole in his new fifty-cent socks. John Fain
was a hard-muscled man of forty who had never before seen his hands shake of their own accord. His
physical fitness was one of his prides. He took setting-up exercises daily, even had a gymnasium in the
basement of his home, although his wife, Grace, had laughed at him for that. Grace didn't believe in
exercise for exercise's sake, because her metallic nerves obviously didn't need it.
Then there was the bluish haze overhead.
This haze, a slightly darker azure hue than tobacco smoke, made a layer about two feet thick against the
ceiling. It was semi-transparent; at least it was possible to discern the rough texture of the plaster ceiling.
It smelled of ozone. Ozone. The stuff you smell after a lightning bolt hits close.
And there was the female clothing on the floor.
This clothing, a young woman's garments, lay in a rather shapeless pile and consisted of one complete
outfit for one woman. A young woman. Slippers, hose, panties, garter belt, brassiere, and a beige dress
in a sculptured model. All just piled there. But not arranged as if they had been casually dropped there.
Not quite.
The scarf, John Fain thought . . .
The scarf was missing.
At the south end of the room, the window was down from the top, and the haze was gradually drifting
outdoors. The stuff was clearing out of the laboratory. The apparatus was making noise. The generators,
two of them, were whining, and a condenser was leaking now and then with a popping sound, and tubes
were humming.
Fain shook his head violently. “Nuts,” he said.
It didn't do much good. He didn't fool himself.
THE dog was still barking. He sounded excited, but puzzled, too.
Fain discovered the hole in the window screen. Slashing hadn't made the hole in the screen. Actually,
there was not a hole in the screen; the screen wire had been loosened by prying away the moulding, or
forcing it outward by a blow, then bending up the loosened corner of the screen wire. The opening thus
made was about large enough to pass a man's two fists held close together.
Fain put his hands in his coat pockets. He could feel them shaking there, actually knocking against his
ribs.
“Lys!” he called.
The name burst out of his throat, jumped past the constriction there, loud enough to be a shout. But it got
no answer.
“Miss Smith!” he tried again.
He did better, a little, that time, but it drew no response. Fain shut down the apparatus, threw switches
and pulled plugs. He did this more from habit than from conscious thought, because he had spent most of
his life working in a laboratory, It was the same sort of a gesture a motorist makes in switching off his
engine after he has had an accident.
“What the hell kind of a gag is this?” he demanded loudly.
The silence, for that was all there was now, made the nap of his neck creep.
Gag. Sure, a gag. He began telling himself that was what it was, because he wanted to believe that was it.
A gag. Couldn't be anything else.
He went over to look at the hole in the window screen. He had to make himself go, and he didn't like
that. He examined the window sill, and there was a little dust there, he saw. The laboratory didn't get a
cleaning as often as it should, because he didn't like to have his tools and books disturbed.
After he had looked at the dust film a while, he knew his face must be quite white, or maybe it was blue,
as if it were cyanosed. It felt that way.
He began repeating to himself that it was a gag, and he was in earnest now, for he really needed to think
that. Gag, gag, gag. It's gotta be a gag. Hell, am I going nuts?
The footprint on the sill was clearly defined in the dust, slender and feminine. The trouble with it was that
it was about two inches long.
There was a peach tree outside, one branch of which had grown close to the window sill.
He went to the door, stepped out into the night.
HIS home was in the country, on a hill. Below and about half a mile away he could see the plant. Electrar
Corporation. His plant. Not large as some industrial plants go these days, but it was all paid for and it
was his and it was making good money now and had a sure future. Worth about five millions, probably.
He had built his home on the hill because he liked to look at the plant whenever he wished. Not bad for a
man of forty, Fain liked to think. Worth the unrelenting work and attention to business which the plant
had cost him. The plant was his life. That, and his research work. But of course they were the same thing,
since the results of his research had built the plant.
Beyond was the town, Hammond City. Not quite a city, for the population, last census, had been
14,575, although it was slightly larger now. The streetlights made even patterns; lighted windows were
plentiful, and the business district was a distinct glow. An average, prosperous, midwestern town.
John Fain drew in a deep breath.
“Johnny!” he shouted. “Get him! Johnny, get him, boy!”
This was harmless. Johnny was a city-apartment-raised dog; there wasn't a bite in a carload of him. He
was really Mrs. Fain's dog; she'd had him before she and Fain were married, two years ago.
But Johnny had one hair-lifting vice. He liked to dash right up to people, barking like hell. When he did
this he was like a lion twenty feet tall, strangers said. John Fain felt the same way, because the dog had
surprised him with that trick a time or two. Johnny weighed about a hundred and forty pounds; he was
the size of a calf. He would frighten the pants off any practical jokers hanging around tonight.
“Take him, Johnny!” Fain yelled. “Get him!”
But the big dog behaved strangely, bouncing around the yard, saying, “Woof! Woof!”
“Damn!” said John Fain, although he didn't feel like saying damn. He felt more like having a good shake,
from head to foot.
He said, “Johnny! Lie down!”
The dog now came to the porch, as big as thunder, and as noisy.
“Lie down, Johnny. Down.”
The dog did not lie down, which was strange, because lying down was probably the thing he did most
enthusiastically, next to bolting his dinner.
The telephone began ringing. It rang two longs, which was the laboratory ring.
John Fain actually ran back into the lab, to the telephone. He was that glad to get hold of something
tangible, something believable.
The fluorescent lights in the laboratory took a moment to come on after he threw the switch, and he had
the telephone in his hands before the bluish light spilled into the room.
“John? Golly, I hope I didn't bother you,” a voice said.
“Gard!” Fain exclaimed.
“That's right. Look, John, I hope I didn't interrupt you in the middle of anything.”
Gard's in trouble, Fain thought. Gard McKim was never conscientious about other people, particularly
about such small things as bothering someone at work, unless he was in something sticky and wanted you
to put a jack under him.
“What is it, Gard?” Fain asked.
“Look, John, my car is out of gasoline and Ikey, darn him, won't give me a drop.”
Outdoors the dog, Johnny, suddenly barked. He barked loudly for a moment, stopped, whined.
Fain said, “Gard, where are you?”
“At Ikey's filling station.”
“Oh.”
“What the hell?” Gard said. “You sound funny, John.”
Fain thought: Shall I tell Gard about this? Gard McKim had come in as manager of the plant about a year
and a half ago. Fain hadn't liked him at first. Gard McKim was all business, and cold-blooded business,
too. After he got hold of Electrar Corporation as general manager, the plant began to grow like the devil.
He was directly the opposite of John Fain. Fain was a dreamer, a creator. McKim was aggressive, a
go-getter. Now, a year and a half later, John Fain felt that McKim was exactly what the plant needed.
He didn't particularly like McKim even yet, any more than he would have developed a fondness for a
shark, but he considered the man invaluable.
He decided he wouldn't tell Gard McKim what had happened.
He asked, “Gard, whose car have you got?”
“Yours.”
“Okay. In the baggage compartment, behind the spare tire, there is a five-gallon can of gasoline.”
“Oh, thanks.” Gard McKim was silent a moment. “John, I found that gas can last night and emptied it.
And I've no B coupons and Ikey won't give me any gas without coupons.”
John Fain said, “I know, Gard. But I filled the can this afternoon again.”
Gard McKim swore with pleasure.
“John, you're sure God's gift to improvident lugs like me,” he said.
He hung up.
John Fain hung up himself. He put a hand to his forehead and found wetness under it. There was wetness
on his cheeks, on the backs of his hands. He was in a nervous perspiration from head to foot.
“Miss Smith!” he called. “Miss Lys Smith!” There was no answer.
Sick with terror now, he went to the house.
HIS wife was on the terrace with another woman, long gin drinks before them. The way to the garage led
past the terrace, and John Fain stopped for a moment, said, “I'm going to drive downtown a moment,
dear.”
He saw then that the other woman was Faye Linsky, and at another time, when his mind was not in such
a grisly turmoil, he probably would have been surprised. He barely knew Faye Linsky. The girl was in
some department or other at the plant and he had met her only once or twice. She seemed a quiet, gentle
sort. Not exactly Mrs. Fain's type.
“Good evening, Miss Linsky,” he said.
She said, “Hello, Mr. Fain.” She could have been a little tight. Maybe not. It might have been excitement,
restrained, and perhaps it was the last thought which motivated his next question.
“Have you seen Lys Smith around?” he asked.
Faye Linsky looked puzzled.
Grace Fain explained, “Lys Smith is John's laboratory assistant.” She turned to Fain. “No, I haven't seen
Lys recently, darling. Not for an hour or two, when she came to work.”
Faye Linsky asked, “Why?”
The question shocked him; he didn't know why she should ask it. Or maybe his wonder was just the
product of his upset condition.
“If you see her, tell her to wait in the laboratory until I get back,” he said, not answering the Linsky girl's
question directly.
“Of course, darling,” Mrs. Fain said.
He went to get his car.
The garage was on the west side of the house, and it was an ample sort of a place with room for a station
wagon and three other cars, and electrically opened doors and a little workshop in the back where the
chauffeur could keep things in order. Of course there wasn't any chauffeur now because of the war.
There wasn't a station wagon, nor three cars either. There was only one car; Fain had two really, but
Gard McKim was driving the second.
He was behind the wheel when he heard Mrs. Fain scream.
The shriek did a great deal to his already strumming nerves. It nearly pulled the cork out for him; for a
moment he thought he was going to have one of those things the doctors called a nervous collapse. Then
he was out of the car and running.
His wife's scream had been terrible, and its echoes, glancing back from the valley to the east of the
house, had the same guttering quality of horror.
“Grace!” he shouted. “What happened?”
His wife was standing with an arm upraised, her hand clutching the cut-glass bowl which had contained
ice cubes for their drinks. She was all ready to throw the bowl. She was peering into dark corners of the
terrace, under the bushes; she wasn't moving about, just standing still and peering.
Faye Linsky came out of the house. She had a quart bottle of ginger ale.
“What happened?” Fain asked the Linsky girl.
She shook her head. “I was in the house.”
Suddenly Mrs. Fain screamed again. She hurled the glass bowl. She hurled it at a darkened spot under
some bushes near the corner of the terrace. The bowl broke with a jittering crash.
The Linsky girl said, “For God's sake, Mrs. Fain, what's the matter?”
THEY saw then that Mrs. Fain was hurt. Her leg, the right one, was welling crimson from a point below
the knee.
Fain's wife seemed to snap out of her horrified preoccupation with something near the terrace. She
screamed again, this time with words. She shrieked, “John! Oh, John! Something horrible attacked me!”
And she threw herself in her husband's arms.
John Fain had thought nothing could shock him much worse, but this did. He looked over his wife's head
with glazed eyes, and he saw that the servants had appeared.
There were two servants, the maid and the cook. Annie Rice was the maid, and Mrs. Giggins the cook.
Fain did not have a very high opinion of them, particularly of the morals of the maid, Annie Rice. And
Mrs. Giggins, a respectable old lady, was a terrific gossip. For that matter, they were both gossips, which
was another reason Fain didn't like them to tidy up his laboratory.
“John!” Mrs. Fain gasped. “John, you'd better call Doctor Willimetz.”
Fain took her to a chair, or started to; when she hung back and wailed. “Please! Take me away from this
terrace!” he changed his mind and took her in the house.
He examined the wound on her leg.
“This is only a cut,” he said.
“Get Doctor Willimetz!”
“First aid will do the job, Grace,” he explained patiently. “Times like these, the doctors are busy and—”
She looked at him with glazed fright.
“Don't you understand—I want to know whether I've gone insane!” she said, and there was nothing
rational about the tone of her voice.
“What cut you?” he asked.
She looked at him wordlessly. He had the feeling she wasn't going to answer, but he tried again.
“Grace, what was it?” he asked.
“I won't tell you,” she said.
He turned to the cook, Mrs. Giggins. “Will you telephone Doctor Willimetz.” His voice was hoarse.
Mrs. Giggins said she would. Her eyes were as large as saucers.
“John!” his wife gasped.
“Yes?”
“Will you—look—on the terrace.” Her words were separated by intervals of strain.
“Look for what?”
She didn't answer. She wasn't going to answer. He went out on the terrace, very carefully, and looked.
He turned on all the lights, the floodlights that illuminated the yard and which they didn't use because it
was patriotic to conserve lights. He hunted for a while, and he didn't find anything. There was nothing
where the glass bowl had broken. There was no dust that would have retained fingerprints.
He went back into the house.
Mrs. Giggins was saying, “I got Doctor Willimetz. He will come right out.”
John Fain cleared his throat. His voice wasn't normal, but it was as normal as he could make it.
He said, “Keep all the lights on. Miss Linsky, will you stay with Grace? You too, Mrs. Giggins?”
They said they would.
“I've got to go to town,” John Fain said. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”
He went to the garage and got in his car, drove toward town.
Chapter II
THE telegraph office for Hammond City was located in the business district adjacent to the Merchant's
Hotel. It was not a large place, and the manager, Mr. Bartlett, had been the manager for nearly twenty
years. Of late, because of the scarcity of help, he had been coming down himself one night a week to let
the regular evening operator have a day off. The office remained open until midnight because of the
Electrar plant business.
“Why, hello Mr. Fain,” said Mr. Bartlett. “I haven't seen you in a long time.”
John Fain tried to make his voice natural. He said, “No, Mr. Bartlett, I don't get downtown much any
more.”
“Things keeping you busy at the plant, eh?”
“Rather.”
“These times are keeping us all busy.”
John Fain drew out a telegraph blank, picked up a pencil. On the address line, he wrote: DOC
SAVAGE, NEW YORK CITY. . . .
The text of his message proved more difficult. He wrote the address with considerable vigor, because it
represented—the name did—a life preserver for his sanity. He had a great deal of confidence in Doc
Savage, although he knew the man but slightly—had met him only once, in fact, more than a year ago.
For a moment he was distracted by his own inability with words so suddenly after he had written Doc
Savage's name, as if by merely writing the name he'd settled things. There was going to be a lot more to it
than that. Finally he got enough words together to make:
WISH YOUR AID ON MATTER BORDERING COMPLETE FANTASY STOP VITAL
IMPORTANCE STOP WILL YOU COME AT ONCE.
That was what he wrote, but it struck him as inane, silly. Unable to improve on it, though, he signed his
name and shoved it across the counter. As an afterthought, he withdrew the message, added:
PRESIDENT, ELECTRAR CORPORATION after his name. That was in case Doc Savage should
think the message came from a nut.
Mr. Bartlett said, “New York City . . . that's a right fair-sized town. Shouldn't there be a street address?”
“I imagine he's well enough known,” Fain said. “Anyway, I don't know his street address. They'll find
him, I'm sure.”
“I'll send it this way if you wish.”
“Do.”
“You want me to charge it to the plant account?”
“No, I'll pay for it personally.”
John Fain paid for the telegram and left.
IT happened that John Fain's message was one of the last taken by Mr. Bartlett for transmission before
he closed up and went home. He handed it to the operator, began checking up the day's receipts and
entering them in the forms, and had not finished when the operator got his hat and coat and paused at the
door to say, “Good night, Mr. Bartlett.”
“Good night, Fred.”
Mr. Bartlett locked the cash and the money-order code in the safe, tidied up his personal desk, and lit a
cigar. He locked the front door, and followed his usual routine, which was to go to the south one block,
then half a block west to a parking lot where he kept his car.
However he followed this routine only as far as the alley halfway between McPherson and Broad
Streets, where he was hit over the head with a hard object and knocked senseless.
The striking was done by a man who stepped up behind old Bartlett. A second skulker had waited in the
alleyway.
“He out?” the latter demanded.
The one who had struck the blow did some wrist-holding. “Yeah, out.” He was relieved that he had
found a pulse.
“Get his keys.”
“Okay.”
Mr. Bartlett's keys were not hard to find, and the two men coöperated in dragging the old man into the
alley.
“Reckon you'd better bop him again?”
“Nah, I don't think so.”
“He got any dough on him?”
“Didn't find any.”
“Okay. Let's go.”
They walked to the telegraph office. They did not skulk, but neither did they make themselves
conspicuous. The night was not particularly warm for the season, a circumstance which enabled them
legitimately to turn up their coat collars and yank their hats down. The shadows hid their faces.
One said, when they reached the telegraph office, “You unlock the door. I'll keep look-out.”
“No, you fool, act as if we were on legitimate business,” the other ordered.
They tried several keys without attracting any unwelcome attention; finally the door swung inward. They
entered.
“Turn on the lights,” one ordered.
“But hell—”
“Turn on the lights!” the first man growled. “You want a night cop to notice us prowling around in here
without any lights and figure something has gone wrong? Where's you head.”
“What if some guy wants to send a telegram?”
“Just accept it.”
But no one came in, and they found what they had come after.
They found the telegram John Fain had filed.
“Oh, my God!” The searcher said when he read the message.
THE other one read it, and he said, “Let's get out of here with that. No, better take a copy of it. We
might as well not advertise this any more than we have to.”
They left, after copying the message, and locked the door behind them. They walked three blocks
rapidly, got into a car, and drove to an apartment house in what was known as the Country Club
Addition, one of the swankier parts of town. Sportier was probably a better word. Sporty, and not
always on the up-and-up.
Their apartment was on the second floor rear, and they did not turn on the lights for a while, not until they
had pulled the shades.
“I always hate living on the second floor,” the shorter of the two men complained. “The damned
neighbors always looking in your windows.”
The other said, “It's always easier to slide out of a second-story window in case of a raid.” There was
nothing in his manner to show whether or not he was in earnest.
They searched their apartment thoroughly.
“I don't know why we're doing this,” the tall man complained.
He got on the telephone. Hammond City had the dial system, so there was no worry about operators
listening in. But the man spoke enigmatically, anyway. He said: “The shipment contained the merchandise
you believed it contained. . . . Yes, that's right. No, no details, just the bare merchandise. . . . Who?
Well, hold your hat. It went to Doc Savage, in New York City. . . . Yes, it sort of got me, too. Okay,
hang on.”
There was a wait now, and the man put his hand over the mouthpiece and told his companion, “Thinking
what to do.”
“Scared?”
“You bet. That's the reason for the thinking.”
“I was scared, too.”
“You weren't by yourself.” He took his hand off the mouthpiece to say, “Yes . . . Yes, I guess that's the
thing to do . . . Okay. Sure. We'll meet you.” He hung up.
The other man was leaning forward from the hips, lips parted. “Well?” he demanded.
“We get the hell to New York,” he said, “and try to take care of this Savage at that end.”
Chapter III
CLARK SAVAGE had a sensible arrangement. He was unmarried, had no close family ties, did no
entertaining at all in a social sense; so he did his living at his laboratory-office. This included his sleeping.
He had a folding bed arrangement in a cubicle off the laboratory, and there was also a bath and a clothes
locker and a kitchenette. The latter was a joke to his five close friends who frequently worked with him.
Doc was an awful cook. His friends considered this remarkable for the reason that Doc had so many
other abilities that it didn't seem possible he could be such a Ptomaine Pete when he got hold of a skillet.
His friends didn't even consider his jungle cooking safe. So the kitchenette was purely atmosphere. The
headquarters' layout of laboratory, library and reception-room-office was located on the eighty-sixth
floor of a midtown building, had a wonderful view and was about as unnoticeable as a sore thumb.
Anyone who wished could visit the place, and get shunted into the screening room on the twelfth floor
where the cranks were sorted from those who had legitimate business. But the twelfth-floor sieve didn't
摘要：

THEWEEONESADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIVScannedandProofedbyTomStephensChapterIJOHNNYbega...

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