Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 137 - The Man Who Was Scared

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THE MAN WHO WAS SCARED
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
? Chapter XV
? Chapter XVI
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
HE was about forty years old and looked something like the fellow the insurance companies always put
in their advertisements—the fellow who is supposed to be a fairly prosperous businessman with a family
that needs providing for. He wore a blue suit, a blue shirt, a blue-and-gray regimental tie, rimless
spectacles, black shoes, and earlier he had been wearing a conservative gray bowler hat with a darker
gray hatband, but he had lost that.
Three times in the last hour, efforts had been made to kill him. It was this last time, the third time, that he
had lost the hat. It had spilled in the street where he had dodged the cab. The hat lay there in the street
now, mashed where the wheels of the murder-bent cab had charged over it.
He looked dazed, standing there thinking how nearly death had missed him. Absently, he rubbed a hand
over one cheek, for both cheeks felt blazing hot, the way cheeks get to feeling on a devilishly cold day.
A pedestrian stopped and asked, “Are you all right?”
The pedestrian had no interest in proceedings other than that he was amazed at the agility of the jump by
which the other man had saved himself from the oncharging cab.
The man seemed to have no words.
The pedestrian said, “The guy in that cab must've been blind!”
The other man kept rubbing his hot cheek.
“Have you got a gun?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Where can I get a gun?” the man demanded.
The pedestrian looked more disgusted with himself than startled. He was a native New Yorker. When
you are a New Yorker for a few months, you learn to adopt an attitude toward strange incidents and
unusual people. You ignore them. Usually it is a gag, and never is it any of your business. So you walk
away with dignity, but you don't lose any time. The pedestrian left hurriedly.
The man who looked like the ideal insurance policy holder stood there. His nervousness crawled out of
his nerves into his muscles, and he trembled uncontrollably.
New York sidewalk traffic flowed about him. Across the street were forty-odd stories of an office
building. Twenty yards away was a street corner and a lamp post carrying a Fifth Avenue and
Forty-Third Street sign. The Fifth Avenue shop windows were gay, even if the merchandise displayed
was sparse and dated and a little wartime-shoddy.
The man thought: Everything looks the same, so like a normal June afternoon on Fifth Avenue. The idea
made his mouth strangely dry. Death was so horribly close to him.
A policeman came by. A big cop in blue with a shining shield on his left breast and another shining shield
on his uniform cap, with the telltale thickness around the hips where he carried his handcuffs and gun and
sap under his coat.
“Oh, officer!”
“Yes?”
“How many blocks to that building yonder?”
The officer glanced in the direction of the building at which the man was pointing. His glance was brief.
The building was a famous one, with its picture in all the encyclopedias and all the books about New
York, simply because it was one of the tallest in the city.
“About eleven blocks,” the cop said.
“Would you—would you—” The words seemed to dry to dust in the man's throat. He wanted to ask the
officer to walk that far with him.
“Would I what?”
“Walk that far with me!” The man got it out.
THE policeman was reasonably surprised, and his next emotion was suspicion. It was part of his business
to be suspicious.
“Why?” he demanded.
“I'm afraid.” The word seemed to crawl around like snakes in the man's throat before he got them to
come out as sounds.
“Yeah?” The policeman was very suspicious now. “What're you afraid of?”
“Did you see that taxi a minute ago?”
“Which one?”
“It almost ran me down.” The man pointed. “Right there, at the corner.”
The officer shook his head. “I didn't hear any brakes squealing, or anything.”
“They didn't use the brakes. They were trying to run over me.”
“Who? Who done that?” The officer was interested. “Say, what's going on here, anyway?”
The man looked worried as he said, almost pleadingly, “Officer, please walk as far as that building with
me. That's all you need to do. Just walk—”
A young man is not a policeman in downtown New York very long before he loses his diplomacy.
The cop gripped the man's arm. “Buddy, I asked you what gives here!” he said ominously. “Answer the
question!”
The man was not accustomed to having anyone grab his arm and demand answers to questions. His
manner now, the tone of his voice, the way he disengaged himself, showed that.
“Take it easy, officer,” he said. “This whole thing is a little extraordinary. A man named Clark Savage,
Jr., has headquarters in that building yonder. I am trying to reach him. Attempts are being made to
prevent me doing so. I want your help, your protection. I could give you a full explanation, but believe
me, it would not be wise to stand here on the street and talk. Once I safely reach Clark Savage, I assure
you there will be a full explanation.”
The cop said, “Clark Savage? You mean Doc Savage?”
“Yes.”
The officer was impressed. “You know Savage? Can he vouch for you?”
“Of course. I work for him.”
The cop frowned. “Doc Savage has five assistants. You're not one of them.”
“Naturally not. I'm the president of a company which Doc Savage owns.”
“You are. Well, that's different. Come on, then.”
They set out together, moving with the crowd. The policeman was very self-conscious, very much the
watchdog, for a block or two.
THEN the officer began to talk. At first his conversation was designed to ease the obvious
near-screaming nervousness of the man who was so obviously the average-businessman type. But then
the cop got around to something that was on his mind. He had never met Doc Savage, the officer
explained casually, although he had heard a great deal about him, and had studied, when he was in rookie
school, a short pamphlet on practical criminal psychology which Doc Savage had written. Good stuff,
mighty good stuff.
And of course everyone knew about Doc Savage, and his strange profession—a little like the stuff you
read in the books about the days when guys went around wearing armor—of righting wrongs and
punishing evildoers who were outside the reach of the law. The officer chuckled self-consciously here
and said, of course, it had a goofy sound when you came right out and said that a man had such a
profession, but then he understood that was what it amounted to. And anyway, Doc Savage sure wasn't
a crackpot, or he wouldn't have become as well-known as he had, and he wouldn't have a special
commission of high rank on the New York police force, which he did have. And he wouldn't be able to
afford the kind of a headquarters he maintained, the whole eighty-sixth floor of that skyscraper yonder,
and planes and speedboats and all the equipment he used. And he wouldn't be known everywhere in
scientific circles, and medical and surgical ones, for the specialized research work he had done, unless he
was a normal fellow, but on the extraordinary side, too.
What the cop was driving at finally came out. He wanted to be introduced to Doc Savage. He wanted to
meet the Man of Bronze, as Doc Savage was now and then called in the newspaper headlines.
He wanted to meet Doc for about the same reasons any ordinary guy would have liked to have met
MacArthur, or Bing Crosby, or Churchill, or Henry Kaiser, or Stalin.
Why sure, it could be arranged, said the scared man.
The cop was grinning his pleasure when a blackjack smashed down on his head.
THE blackjack was a monkey wrench wrapped in a pullover sweater. The long-faced man who swung it
put everything into the blow. He wanted to get that cop down, no matter how, and he did. When the
blow hit, there was a sound as if a coconut had cracked, and the young cop just spread out on the
sidewalk.
Now two other men had the scared man. One got a bouncer's grip, coat collar and seat of the pants.
With that hold, a man can get another man up on tiptoes and make him run helplessly, if he knows how to
do it. This one knew how. The other assailant grabbed a handful of the scared man's nose and mouth and
held it, held him practically silent.
They ran the man headlong into an automobile, a sedan, which drove up conveniently.
The car got moving. The whole thing actually took no more than five seconds. The cop was hardly
spread motionless on the walk before the scared man was in the car, and the car was leaving.
The fellow who had slugged the cop was last in the car. He pulled the door shut.
“You kill the cop?” asked the driver.
“I don't know. Maybe.”
The driver was a heavy man with a green necktie and a green hat. He became the color of dried putty,
and terror was a hoarse thing in his voice as he said, “Lord, I wish we could've got around that.”
“What the hell else was there?” growled the long-faced man. “The cop was walking along with him.
What else could we do.”
“Maybe the cop won't die.”
“Maybe. But I heard something crack in his head.”
The driver, his voice even worse, said, “You better get rid of that wrench. The sweater you wrapped
around it, too.”
“You let me worry about that,” the long-faced man muttered. He was worried.
They drove rapidly for about twenty blocks, turning often. Then they changed to another machine,
another sedan, but of different color. In this car they traveled at a more leisurely pace, going uptown.
The long-faced man fell to scowling at their victim. The latter lay on the floorboards, adhesive tape over
his mouth. Whenever he would try to yell, the long-faced man would reach down and hold his nostrils
pinched shut until the victim's face turned purple.
“You're a damned nuisance!” said the long-faced man, his voice bitter, hateful. “You sure give us a
chase!” He began to kick the victim.
“Here! Here! Cut that out,” said the driver.
Why?”
“We don't want no bruises on him.”
“Oh.”
The ride ended at a brownstone house in a once fairly swanky section of the east Thirties, a house which
had a basement garage into which they drove. The door was quickly closed behind the car.
“You sure it's safe here?” demanded the long-faced man.
The driver got out. “Be funny as hell if it wasn't, wouldn't it?” He sounded relieved. “Get old
run-and-tattle out of there, and we'll take him upstairs.”
The house had an unlived-in smell of rats and spiderwebs and dust and deteriorating plaster. The
wallpaper hung in unsightly scabs and the steps grunted and whined under their feet as they carried their
victim. The latter did what struggling he could, but he was hopelessly outnumbered, and his captors knew
where to hold him and how to make it hurt.
“Don't mark him up, dammit!” the driver kept warning. “It's got to look like a natural death.”
THEY stripped every stitch of clothing off the victim, doing it on a blanket which they spread on the
dusty floor so that his naked body would not get dirty. When his body was found, the driver warned,
there had to be no sense of any suspicious dirt smears on it to start anybody wondering.
They pried open the victim's mouth, using a flashlight to examine his teeth.
“A perfect set of choppers,” said the driver.
“Is that good?” asked the long-faced man.
“It's not likely a dentist has ever done anything but clean his teeth. That means no X-rays. With X-rays,
they can identify a body sometimes. With fingerprints and dental X-rays, you got to be careful.”
“What about his fingerprints?”
“We'll take care of that. When he dies, he will fall over a stove or into a fire and his hands will get nice
and burned.”
They made no attempt to question the victim. They made no offers of life or liberty. He seemed to have
nothing whatever that they wanted, except his own life, which they were grimly preparing to take from
him.
“Get the syringe,” the driver said. “And fill it full of that juice.”
The hypodermic needle was not large. The “juice” was syrupy looking stuff.
The long-faced man shot the stuff into the victim, selecting the inside of the mouth, an inner cheek which
could have been accidentally bitten by the man, as the spot.
“They'll never think of looking there for any mark,” he said. “And there shouldn't be any mark anyway.”
“You sure the thing will work out?” the driver demanded.
“Stop worryin' about it.”
“But—”
“Look,” said the long-faced man patiently. “We know this guy has a heart ailment. We know he has been
taking medicine for it for years. All right, the autopsy will show the heart ailment and it will show his
system having traces of the medicine, and nobody is going to be suspicious about that. So we give him an
overdose of the medicine administered intravascularly, and when they make the autopsy, if they do, they
won't be able to tell for sure whether there is an overdosage or a normal dosage of the medicine in his
system, because they won't know what the normal dosage was. They can't prove murder.”
“I wish I was as sure as you are,” the driver said.
“Listen pal, I didn't go three years to medical school for nothing in my younger and more sensible days,”
the long-faced man said.
“Can they prove it's murder?”
“They can suspect, at the worst. I don't think the best damned lawyers and the best doctors could get on
the witness stand and actually prove the man was murdered, going only by the autopsy signs.”
“How long will it take?”
“About three hours, and he oughta be dead.”
SLIGHTLY more than two hours later, one of the men decided he wanted some hot coffee, and went
into the ragged kitchen to light the gas stove, unaware there was a leak in the stove somewhere. The
stove blew up.
The explosion had not much violence. Mostly it was whoosh! and outrush of flame. The noise was
contributed by the stove-lighter falling over a chair and howling in alarm.
Everyone dashed for the kitchen.
The drugged prisoner was left lying on the bed. He lurched off the bed, staggered to the window—he
was tied hand and foot—and fell through the window headfirst. His luck was good; he was not cut.
A shed roof, sloping gently, lay immediately below the window. The bound man hit that, slid down it,
along with some of the glass from the broken window, and fell about eight feet to a brick court. He lit,
still with excellent good fortune, on his feet, so that he was not injured at all.
He shuffled around on the bricks, got a pane of glass between his fingers, and with one slice, cut through
his leg bindings.
He got up and ran. He ran through an entry, out into the street, and down the street until he found a cab,
into which he piled.
“Cut my hands loose,” he told the driver.
The astonished driver complied.
The man sagged back on the cab cushions. He told the driver to take him to Doc Savage's headquarters,
and the driver, a rare fellow who knew urgency when he saw it, did so without delay.
The cab driver, however did linger in the vicinity after he unloaded the man at the skyscraper. He took a
second thought, remembered you usually got in plenty of trouble when you put your nose in something
that didn't concern you, and realized further that he was going to be inducted into the army early in the
morning. He drove away, the one man who could have given a slight idea of where the victim had come
from—at least he could have told where he had picked up the fare with his hands tied, which would have
been a great help. The driver left, to disappear immediately into the hungry impersonal machinery of the
United States Army. In justice to him, he did not know how important it was.
The victim staggered into the building.
His face was getting blue. In other ways, too, he was beginning to look the way heart cases look.
Chapter II
LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANDREW BLODGETT MAYFAIR was known as “Monk" Mayfair. He
was short and wide, homely, with a remarkable growth of rusty hair practically everywhere, and he was
admittedly one of the great living industrial chemists, although judging from his appearance his intellectual
level would be about the same as that of an amiable ape jumping around in a cage.
Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks was called “Ham” Brooks by his friends. Lean and dapper,
a man with the wide mobile mouth of an orator, he invariably made the lists of best-dressed men back in
the days when people didn't have anything more important to do than to make up lists of best-dressed
men. He was a lawyer. An eminent lawyer, as a matter of fact. The Harvard Law School was very
emphatic about this, pointing to him as its most accomplished product.
Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks were aids of Doc Savage.
Each had a pet.
Monk's pet was an astounding pig with long jackrabbit legs and a set of ears like the wings on a
ramshackle bat. This pig was actually some peculiar breed of Arabian hog, it seemed, because he was
quite old for a pig, a Methuselah among pigs indeed, and he showed no signs of being any older than
when Monk had acquired him quite a while ago in Arabia. The pig's name was Habeas Corpus. Monk
had named him Habeas Corpus to irritate Ham Brooks, who didn't like pigs, hogs, pork, shotes, swine,
boars, sows, bacon, pork chops or even pigskin gloves.
Ham's pet was a what-is-it chimpanzee from South America which bore a disgusting—disgusting to
Monk—resemblance to Monk Mayfair. This chimp was named Chemistry, because Monk was a
chemist, for the same purpose of irritation that the pig was named Habeas Corpus. Monk didn't like
Chemistry. Chemistry didn't like Monk.
Monk and Ham, Habeas Corpus and Chemistry, all spent their surplus time quarreling with each other.
The result generally was discouraging to anyone who happened to know that Monk was a world-known
chemist and Ham was an equally famous lawyer. One expected more dignity from such notables.
Dignity was a commodity Monk and Ham had the least of when they got together. For years they had
been carrying on a rousing fuss, which ranged from pulling snide tricks on each other to coming to actual
blows a few times.
They enjoyed their quarrel thoroughly. No one had ever been able to put a stop to the perpetual row.
Quite a few people had tried, including Doc Savage, and Doc had had no better luck than anyone else,
which meant the quarrel would probably last through the ages like the Rock of Gibraltar and Santa Claus.
Monk and Ham, Habeas Corpus and Chemistry, were in Doc Savage's headquarters on the eighty-sixth
floor of the midtown building when the dying stranger walked in and talked about his breakfast food.
THE man didn't knock on the door. He hit it, or rather fell against it, and his unnerved fingers trying to
make sounds on the door made scratchings. When Monk Mayfair opened the door, the man could
stand, and came shuffling into the room in a vague way, looking straight ahead as if sightless.
“Here, here, you don't belong in here,” Monk said.
Monk thought he was a drunk.
The man kept walking, but acted as if he was trying to stop and couldn't, then finally he did stop, swaying
wildly, his hands out and feeling.
“My breakfast food,” he said in a thick dying voice.
They had no doubt but that was what he said. Their uncertainty about it later just came from the
strangeness of the words, such an unusual thing for the man to say.
He said exactly the same thing again, but thicker, with more of eternity crawling loosely in his vocal
cords.
“My breakfast food,” he said.
Then he began turning slowly, as if he was going to pivot around and around, but going down slowly as
the strength went out of his knees. And probably the life left his body at about the same time.
Monk caught him. Monk was still under a misunderstanding which led him to think the man was
intoxicated.
“Drunk as an owl,” Monk said.
Ham said sharply, “I don't think so!”
They put him on a large leather chair, and Ham stood holding his wrist.
The pig, Habeas Corpus, lowered his ears until they were hanging like rags, then sidled under a table.
The chimp, Chemistry, suddenly put his hands over his eyes. Monk, who was watching the animals, had
an extremely creepy sensation.
“Whew!” Ham said.
Ham went to the telephone.
HAM called three numbers, each time being told that Doc Savage was not there. At the fourth number
he called, there was a great deal of background noise made by a crowd and he was advised that Doc
Savage was present, but at the moment was addressing the conference—it was the Eastern Conference
of Surgical Research, and Ham had forgotten that Doc was to appear there tonight—from the platform.
Was it important enough to interrupt Mr. Savage's speech? Ham said no, not to do that, but to give Doc
a note saying, “Unidentified man just dropped dead at headquarters. Sending him to hospital.”
Monk grunted, and said, “You're a little mixed up. Do they send dead men to hospitals?”
Ham said, “I'm no doctor. He looks dead to me, but there might be some life left in him. I'm not taking
any chances.”
He put in an emergency call to the nearest hospital.
“You should have called the hospital first,” Monk said.
Ham muttered that he knew that; he guessed he was a little confused.
“There's nothing in his pocket,” Monk said.
“You mean nothing to identify him?”
“I mean nothing at all.”
“Isn't that sort of queer? Did you ever hear of a man going around without at least something or other in
his pockets?”
They stood there looking at each other, puzzled. It was queer, all right.
Monk looked inside the dead man's inner coat pocket, then inside the other pockets, the trouser
waistband, the shoes.
“The labels very carefully cut out,” he said. “That don't look right.”
Ham went outside to question the elevator operators, immediately finding the one who had brought the
man up. The man had merely walked into the elevator and said, “Eighty-sixth floor.” That was all the
operator knew. And that was as far, it developed, as they were able to trace the man's back-trail.
An ambulance arrived downstairs. Because the call had come from Doc Savage's establishment, one of
the chief surgeons of the hospital had accompanied it in addition to the usual intern.
“Heart case,” the specialist said immediately.
“You mean it was a natural death?” Ham demanded.
“I wouldn't go that far with a snap judgment,” said the physician.
“But he is dead?”
“Yes. You want us to drop the body off at the morgue?”
Monk said he did, but added he had better check with the police, so there would be no mixup. Monk
got on the telephone, and received an okay on the transferring of the body. The procedure was not
irregular, because both Monk and Ham, as well as Doc, had special police commissions which justified
what otherwise would have been a legal irregularity in moving the body.
The body was transferred to the ambulance.
Chapter III
DOC SAVAGE was unusual, but this did not mean that he was a superman. Now and then a tabloid
newspaper would label him as the man who was a remarkable combination of physical giant, mental
wizard and scientific marvel. But they did this for the same reason that a corny movie publicity man now
and then used the words stupendous and marvelous and unparalleled in describing some medium-grade
flicker opera. It was stretching the facts somewhat.
The screwball fact about Doc's life was seldom mentioned, because not many knew it. This was his
strange childhood. He had been taken literally from the cradle and placed in the hands of scientists for
training for the career which he now followed. This in itself was not particularly unique—scientists
frequently get it into their heads to take some baby and raise him and make a wonder-man out of him.
Usually they have a flop on their hands at the end.
Doc Savage's father, about the time Doc was born, evidently received some kind of shock which
completely warped his outlook on life—made him devote the rest of his days to raising a son who would
follow the career of righting wrongs and punishing criminals who seemed to be outside the law. Doc
never knew what happened to his father to give him such an idea.
Heritage had given Doc a big frame and good health, and to this the years of scientific development had
naturally added a great deal. He was a phenomenal physical specimen, but so would anyone else have
been who had received the same interminable training.
His mental abilities and the superior efficiency of his senses were genuine, but only the result of a fellow
who hadn't had anything like a normal boyhood.
The training had been endless. Some of it was tortuous, some of it interesting, some of it silly, and a
normal kid would not have stuck with any of it long enough for it to mold him as it was intended. But
Doc, because they had caught him young, had taken the works. Not always willingly, but he had taken it.
He still endeavored to devote two hours a day to exercises intended to develop every muscle and sense.
Sometimes, as any other guy would, he let it slide. But not too often.
His five assistants, who were with him most of the time, had never ceased being amazed at Doc, although
摘要：

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

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