Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 112 - The Speaking Stone

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 431.39KB 81 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE SPEAKING STONE
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
? Chapter I. RED VEST
? Chapter II. ABOUT A STONE
? Chapter III. LIFE INSURANCE
? Chapter IV. THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY
? Chapter V. OLD LADY
? Chapter VI. RED VESTS
? Chapter VII. THE UNEXPECTED TRUTH
? Chapter VIII. THE HIGH WORLD
? Chapter IX. STRANGE ARRIBA
? Chapter X. DEATH WALKING HIGH
? Chapter XI. MOUNTAIN FANTASIA
? Chapter XII. SIEGE OF ARRIBA
? Chapter XIII. THE STONE SPOKE DEATH
? Chapter XIV. THE TALKING-ROCK TRICK
? Chapter XV. THE CLAIRVOYANT
The Speaking Stone was originally published in Doc Savage magazine, June 1942
Chapter I. RED VEST
THE story that brought the newspapermen to the little island of Jinx in the South Pacific had nothing to do
with the little man with the red vest, other, of course, than it accounted for his arriving in the plane with
the reporters.
Doc Savage did not give the little man with the vest any particular notice. Doc was embarrassed by the
coming of the newspapermen, because he had always gone to great lengths to avoid publicity. Therefore,
Doc did not notice the small man right away.
He was an avid little man, this fellow in the red vest. He came with the others to meet Doc Savage, but
he remained in the background. And although he had paper and pencil in hand, he did not ask any
questions.
The small man just tucked a thumb in an armhole of his red vest and listened. He had a small, pinched,
quizzical face that had not much expression, except the quizzical one. Neither did it have a normal amount
of color; it seemed to have been washed with acid, the way a piece of cloth is bleached. The other
newspapermen asked plenty of questions. Their inquiries were a flood.
One could have suspected that the man in the red vest was not interested in the questions. The inquiries
were about an adventure in which Doc Savage had just participated, an affair in which an ocean liner had
been taken over, crew and passengers, by some gentlemen with more greed and nerve than ability to
finish what they had started. Doc Savage had become involved in the affair, and his hard, bronze hand
had ended it on the side of justice, and somewhat on the spectacular side. (See Pirate Isle)
The man wearing the red vest showed interest, though, in the attitude of the newspapermen toward Doc
Savage. Doc was a celebrity, a man of great accomplishments, a man of mystery. All of that was in the
attitude of the newspaper writers. They were courteous to Savage. They were very polite to him. A
thorough newspaperman is usually courteous only to the leaders of religious faiths and the President of
the United States.
The “red vest” seemed deeply pleased by this evidence that Doc Savage was not run-of-the-mill.
The newspapermen went away, and the little man went with them.
He came back later, alone.
He stood in front of Doc Savage.
“Renny Renwick?” he asked. He spoke as if the name was hard for him, and he had put a great deal of
time on saying it over and over, so that it would be very perfect.
Colonel John Renny Renwick was one of a crew of five specialized assistants which Doc Savage
maintained.
“Over there,” Doc Savage said, pointing. But the bronze man—Doc Savage was a giant man of
bronze—watched the small man intently.
Renny Renwick had two identifying tags—a going-to-a-funeral face and a pair of fists that could have
been subdivided into a half dozen pairs of normal fists.
The little man with the vest looked at Renny, then took something out of his pocket. They did not notice
the object, except that it was pale-blue and round.
The little man looked at Renny. Then he screamed. There was the quality of ripped-out lungs in his
shriek.
He turned and ran.
Renny Renwick was gap-mouthed with surprise. Then he began laughing. “Holy cow!” he said. “What
kind of a gag is this?”
But then the little man with the red vest fell dead!
THERE was no mark on his body. That was the first thing that they noticed. And so they thought he was
not dead; that this was just more of a joke. A peculiar joke, but surely a gag. All but Doc Savage, that is.
The bronze man's features were so devoid of expression that they were a little strange.
Johnny Littlejohn—Johnny was William Harper Littlejohn, another of Doc Savage's five assistants, a
renowned archaeologist and geologist—held the small man's wrist for a while. He dropped the wrist.
Bewildered, he looked up. “Doc, is he— How could he be?”
Doc Savage examined the small man. The others watched. Doc was a man of many abilities and many
surprises, with the greatest of his skills being in surgery. There probably was not a great surgeon in the
world who was not familiar with one or another of his developments in operative technique.
“Dead!” Doc said.
“But he just fell over,” gasped William Harper Littlejohn. “I'll be superamalgamated! An
uncomeatability.”
Johnny had a habit of long words.
Big-fisted Renny Renwick, for whom the small man with the vest had asked, rubbed his jaw in
amazement. He took an absent step or two backward as if he wanted to get away from the situation.
Then something occurred to him. He went to the small dead man and bent over.
Renny picked up the object that had rolled out of the small man's fingers—the object that was pale-blue
and round.
“What,” Johnny asked him, “is that?”
Renny stared at the thing.
“What is it?” Johnny repeated.
“A rock,” Renny said thoughtfully. “Just a rock. Round and blue and not very heavy.”
Johnny stepped forward. “Let's see it,” he said.
“It's nothing but a rock. Guess he picked it up.”
A note of excitement came into Johnny's voice. “No, he didn't,” he said. “Not on this island, he didn't.
That rock—it's a strange—”
He broke off, because Renny was suddenly looking as if the stone had bitten him. His eyes got very
round. “Hey!” he muttered. “I've seen this rock before. It's Monk Mayfair's pocket piece! He's carried it
for months—or did.”
The last, the “or did,” was a natural afterthought, because Monk Mayfair, fourth member of their group,
was not with them on Jinx Island. He was in South America. Monk was a chemist, and he was supposed
to be in Patagonia somewhere, giving a whaling company valuable information about how to get the most
out of their whales.
Johnny, the geologist, scowled at the stone. “Where'd Monk get that rock? I don't place its type.
Here—let me see—”
Renny started violently. He did a strange thing—put the stone to his ear, as if he had heard something.
His face screwed into a listening grimace, then slowly emptied of color.
“Monk's voice!” he croaked. “Monk's voice in this rock! You can hear it!”
William Harper Littlejohn's face became a foolish grin. He couldn't stomach stuff about a rock talking.
But it was not a joke and not a lie; the stark set of Renny's face told him that.
“Voice?” Johnny said.
Renny nodded. “Monk's voice.”
Johnny kept his foolish grin until the impossibility of the thing made him explode, “You must be insane!”
Renny grimaced. He spread the corners of his mouth. “Holy cow!” He sounded almost frightened.
Doc Savage swung suddenly forward and leaned close to the blue stone without touching it or taking it
from Renny's hands. He listened intently, his eyes half closed.
Then the bronze man slowly straightened. His facial expression did not change to any great extent. But
the others knew that he was emotionally moved when they heard a small trilling sound, a low and exotic
note as strange as the call of some tiny tropical bird, as vagrant as a wind over polar ice. The sound
seemed to come from everywhere and yet from nowhere, with a ventriloqual quality. It was the sound
Doc Savage unconsciously made when intensely excited.
“He isn't insane,” the bronze man said in a low voice.
ONE of the newspapermen who had appeared on the plane came into view then, apparently just out for
a walk with nothing on his mind. But he saw the prone figure of the man with the vest.
“What's wrong?” he demanded. Then he turned and yelled at the other newsmen, “Hey, you lugs!
Something's on out here!”
The newspaperman who had shouted was tall and ran to bones. He had a stony, unpleasant face,
equipped with a pair of black mice for eyebrows.
The other newshawks popped up from various places.
Long Tom Roberts appeared, also. Long Tom was the remaining member of Doc Savage's five-man
group of assistants. There was nothing particularly outstanding about him. Quite the contrary, he looked
as if he had grown up in a particularly deep mushroom cellar. Not realizing what had happened, he stared
at them, muttered, “Who's the little guy with the vest?”
Doc Savage caught his eye and made a slight negative gesture, then indicated a lifeboat drawn up on the
beach. Long Tom walked to the boat.
Doc Savage then sank to a knee and quickly removed the red vest from the small dead man.
The tall newsman with the black mice for eyebrows scowled, said, “Hey, that's funny cloth that thing is
made of. Let's have a look at it!”
Doc Savage seemed not to hear the fellow. He stood with the vest in his hands and wheeled.
“Here!” barked the reporter. “Let me see that!”
Doc Savage walked away, still without appearing to have heard him.
Renny, Long Tom and Johnny stood with Doc Savage beside the lifeboat. Johnny made sputtering
noises, finally got out an excited, “I'll be superamalgamated! Let's see that speaking stone!”
Doc Savage handed him the round blue rock. Johnny immediately clamped it to his ear. But nothing
seemed to happen.
The bony, big-worded archaeologist and geologist looked up. “I don't hear anything. Did it really talk?”
“It really talked,” Renny said.
Johnny listened to the stone for a while. Then he lowered it. He frowned. “Now, look—that's too
screwy! A talking stone. Don't give me that!”
Renny compressed his lips, turned slowly to Doc Savage. “What about it, Doc?”
“The stone spoke,” the bronze man said.
That, as far as Johnny Littlejohn was concerned, settled the point of the stone speaking. It had spoken, if
Doc said so.
“All right,” Johnny said, “explain how a rock can talk, somebody?”
The bronze man did not answer. He was examining the red vest. The fabric was unusual. It did not seem
to be fabric at all, but some other substance that was closely akin to a plastic.
Then, abruptly, the bronze man rolled the vest into a small package. He took off his coat and bundled the
vest inside that, then handed it to Renny Renwick. “Take care of this,” he said.
Puzzled, Renny asked, “You mean—nobody is to look at it?”
“Right.”
The newspaper reporters approached—that was obviously why Doc had hastened to get the vest out of
sight—with a barrage of questions: What had killed Jones? What was going on? How had Jones died?
“The little man was named Jones?” Doc Savage asked.
“Yes, that was right. Or so he had said.”
“What newspaper did he represent?”
“He worked for La Pluma, of Buenos Aires, South America,” someone said.
The long string of bones with the mice for eyebrows was staring at Johnny Littlejohn. “What's the idea of
holding that rock to your ear?” he asked.
Johnny tried not to look foolish and took the stone away from his ear.
THE situation on the island was this: On the island was a home and apparatus for taking plankton from
the sea. This plant had been erected by a scientist for experimental purposes, and it was the cause of the
trouble that had just been settled. Also on the island was a plane, the one in which the newspapermen
had arrived. There was no other available means of transportation to or from the island.
However, anchored offshore was the small ocean-going liner City of Tulsa, which had been run aground
during the course of the lately settled adventures, and which had been floated by a battery of tugs that
had come from Tahiti and other South Sea ports.
Having refloated the liner, most of the tugs had departed, but two of them were standing by to see that
nothing more went wrong. The radio apparatus of the City of Tulsa had been put out of commission
during the adventures, but the tugs, being large seagoing craft, both had powerful radio equipment.
Doc Savage used the radio equipment of one of the tugs to dispatch a radiogram to the newspaper La
Pluma, of Buenos Aires, asking if they employed a correspondent named Jones, who would be in the
South Seas at the present time. To make sure there was no error about Jones, Doc Savage included a
full description of the small man with the red vest. He mentioned the vest.
He waited for an answer.
The newspapermen, inclined to couple anything unusual with some spectacular feat by Doc Savage, were
not satisfied that the little man with the red vest had simply collapsed of heart failure.
Doc Savage did not say he had died of heart failure. But the bronze man did ask a number of questions
about the man's health—if he had ever mentioned heart failure, fear of heart trouble, or any similar
malady.
“To tell the truth,” said the newspaperman he was questioning, “we did not know a lot about the little
guy.”
“Except Bear Cub,” interposed another newsman.
“Bear Cub?” asked Doc Savage.
“That reporter from the Melbourne Advertiser,” the newshawk explained. “The long and bony fellow,
you know.”
“The one with the eyebrows?”
“Yes. The black eyebrows.”
“What,” asked Doc Savage, “about Bear Cub?”
“Oh, he seemed to take a liking to little Jones,” one of the others explained. “Shined right up to him.
Gave him cigarettes and sat around talking to him. Followed him around, in fact.”
The other newspaper reporter corrected, “He talked to Jones, you mean. Little Jones didn't do much
talking. Bear Cub did it all.”
“Yes, that's right, now that I think of it,” said the other member of the press.
“Jones did not speak very good English,” Doc Savage suggested.
“He spoke a funny kind of English,” agreed the newspaperman. “Careful. No accent that you could
place. Not a Spanish accent, anyway. Just careful talking. That was Jones.”
Doc Savage was silent a moment. “You did not know him well—but Bear Cub did?”
“That's it.”
Doc Savage found the man called Bear Cub. The fellow greeted them shortly, without much courtesy.
His eyes were small and dark under his remarkable eyebrows. He was not a likeable personality, seemed
aware of it and apparently did not care.
“Look, you can't pump me about the little guy,” he said scowling, “because I never got anything out of
him. Sure I hung around him. That was because I figured he was a little nut of some kind.”
“You cannot tell us anything about him?”
“No.”
“Where did he join your group?”
“Tahiti.”
“Where did you join the group?”
“Tahiti.”
“Had you ever met the small man before?”
Bear Cub snorted. He ignored the question. “How about letting me have a look at that red vest?” he
growled.
“Why are you so interested in the vest?” Doc Savage asked.
“Why are you not letting me see it?” Bear Cub countered. “Afraid I might find out something?”
Doc Savage did not care for the man's tone. Renny Renwick had knotted his big fists several times,
wanting to take a swing at Bear Cub.
Bear Cub glared at them all, then snorted violently. “I'm not bluffed by you big shots,” he said. “And
don't try pushing me around, or I'll cut loose and rain a bit on you.”
Renny told him, “Now you're talking the kind of language I half expected out of you. Don't get too near
the end of the plank, my eyebrow-heavy friend. You might get dunked.”
Bear Cub said something under his breath—something not complimentary—and strode away. He was
not afraid of them. That was obvious. And he had an extraordinary dislike for them.
Johnny Littlejohn said, “A protervitive personality.”
Renny looked that up later and found out it meant something simple, like “quarrelsome fellow.” Which
was a big-worded way of putting a fact.
Long Tom reached them out of breath.
“Got a radio answer from that South American newspaper,” he gasped.
“Yes?”
“They don't have any correspondent named Jones, or anyone who answers the description of the small
man with the vest,” Long Tom explained.
LONG TOM ROBERTS and Johnny Littlejohn held a private conference that evening. They sat on the
beach with long white waves crawling up and creaming on the sand at their feet, with fish jumping in the
lagoon, with lights of the steamer dancing spots of gold out across the sea.
Long Tom strained sand through his fingers. “There is something mysterious behind this business,” he
said. “I can tell by the way Doc is acting. You can always tell when Doc gets wind of something big and
probably fantastic.”
Johnny grunted. “Jones had nothing in his baggage that a newspaperman would have. Apparently, he
wasn't a newspaperman, at all.”
Johnny was using small words. He did not often do this unless he was too preoccupied or too
excited—though it was not often he got too excited to think of large words.
“The red vest,” said Long Tom, “is what narrows my eye. What do you make of it?”
“Unusual material.”
“Not cloth. You know, I sneaked it out of Doc's coat and gave it a good looking over. I even put it on.”
“Feel anything when you had it on?”
“No, of course not. But I did notice several things. First, of course, it's made of some stuff that is like
plastic glass, but probably it isn't. The coloring isn't fast. It kind of rubs off on you—not much, but a
little.”
“Renny still have that rock?”
“No. That is, he doesn't have it now. I saw Doc ask him for it just before dinner.”
“You figure that rock really said anything?”
“Doc said it talked, didn't he?”
They were silent. The moon was a silver tint on the horizon. Behind them in the bushes, two tropical birds
got involved in a quarrel that sounded like two hags fighting.
“Jones asked for Renny,” Long Tom finally reminded. “And neither Renny nor anyone else has said what
the speaking stone said to him. And this reporter guy, this Bear Cub, as they call him, is behaving
strangely.” Long Tom abruptly got to his feet. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I'm gonna find this Bear Cub and have a little nose-rubbing with him.” Long Tom—he was far more man
than he looked—hitched his belt. “I'll bet I get words out of him.”
“Want any help?”
“No, thanks.”
LONG TOM left Johnny Littlejohn on the beach and walked into the jungle. The electrical expert was
excited at the idea of getting hold of Bear Cub. It was Long Tom's conviction—the thought was
frequently shared by the bronze man's other associates—that Doc Savage's fist was not hard enough
when he dealt with fellows like Bear Cub. Long Tom liked action. He planned, frankly, to work Bear
Cub over with his fists and see what he could pound out of the fellow.
Bundled in his own thoughts, Long Tom walked into the end of a gun before he realized there was such a
thing about!
“Looking for me?” asked the voice behind the gun.
Long Tom exhaled a deep breath. “You!” he said.
The voice—it was not pleasant—said, “Getting a long nose, ain't you?”
“Meaning?”
“The little guy in the red vest, the rock that talked and so on.”
Startled, Long Tom blurted, “You knew about the rock and what made it talk?”
The other said quietly, “This is what made it speak. Here, look.” He held out a hand.
It was the oldest of fighting tricks. Get the other guy to look at something while you slug him. Long Tom
fell for it. He got a vague impression of something—probably a hard flexible tree root shaped like a
blackjack—coming around and down on his head. He knew, also, momentarily, that things were going to
turn black. And very black indeed was what everything became!
Chapter II. ABOUT A STONE
DOC SAVAGE proceeded with his investigation with what seemed to be too much leisure. He dawdled,
in the opinion of Renny and Johnny, who watched him with initial irritation. The bronze man browsed
around without a point, it appeared; and some of the time, it was not even evident that he was after
information.
Johnny and Renny became disgusted. Then, quite unexpectedly, they were ashamed of themselves. The
shame came when it was apparent that Doc Savage had been sneaking up on the quail, as it were.
When the bird broke cover, it was this: Someone had made a previous attempt to murder Jones.
A newspaper reporter named Wilfair Wickard unwittingly pushed the skunk out into the air. Wilfair
Wickard was a well-constructed young man with an enormous inferiority complex about his name. The
first thing he told people was to call him Spike or Bill or Butch—something besides Wilfair.
“He was a queer little guy, Jones was,” Wilfair said. “Come to think of it, he didn't act much like a
newspaper correspondent. I didn't think much of it at the time.”
Renny remarked, “I should think you would be able to recognize anyone in the same profession as
yourself.”
Wilfair Wickard shrugged. “It's not like it used to be. A lot of people are correspondents who have never
been near a newspaper office. It works like this: You build yourself a reputation; then somebody with a
chain of newspapers hires you as an expert on what you are supposed to know. You don't even have to
know how to write. The poor devils in the home office whip it into readable shape for twenty-five dollars
a week.” Wickard grinned faintly. “Had strange dreams at night, little Jones did.”
“Dreams?” Doc Savage said.
“Nightmares, maybe you'd call them,” Wickard explained. “I remember the night before we left Tahiti in
the plane. Jones busted into my room. It must have been three o'clock in the morning. He thanked me for
sending a drink up to his room.”
“Drink?”
“The strange thing,” said Wilfair Wickard, “is that I hadn't sent him any drink. It was whiskey. One of
those tiny bottles of it, you know—the size that holds an individual serving. It was Scotch whiskey.”
“Jones had it?”
“Oh, yes—in his hand. He assured me that he didn't drink. He handed it to me, saying it was a shame to
have it go to waste. And then he looked at me in the strangest way and said that it was poison; that it
would—”
Wickard's mouth remained open. His breathing and pulse seemed to stop.
“Poison!” he exploded. “Great grief! Do you suppose—”
“Do you still have that bottle?”
Tightly excited, Wickard nodded. “Sure! I kept it. Tossed it into my brief case for a lift later, in case I
needed one.”
He wheeled, ran for the thatched shelter which the newspaper correspondents had erected for
themselves. When he came back, he had the small flask.
Doc Savage spent fifteen minutes analyzing the contents of the bottle, then said, “Whoever put in the
poison knew about poisons. There is enough to kill a man instantly, yet not so much that it would be
noticed.”
Wilfair Wickard got his lips loose enough to say, “Somebody tried to kill Jones and lay it onto me!”
DOC SAVAGE entered into a really complete examination of the body of Jones. He did this privately, in
the house of the scientist who lived on Jinx Island. The newspapermen, as well as his own assistants,
were excluded.
“I wonder,” said Renny, “what has become of Long Tom? Haven't seen him around for some time.”
“Probably out to the steamer,” Johnny suggested.
Doc Savage finished his inspection of the small man who had died so strangely, then joined Renny and
Johnny.
“What was the cause, Doc?” Renny asked. “Those newspaper guys—that wise guy, Bear Cub, at any
rate—claim that just looking at me is what scared Jones to death.”
“Stratosphere sickness,” Doc Savage said.
“Huh?”
“Occasionally, it is given other names. Extremely technical, some of them,” Doc Savage told them quietly.
“But stratosphere sickness is the best description.”
“How come?”
“The small man died from being too high in the air for too long a time,” Doc said.
Renny considered that. “Holy cow.” He reviewed his experience with flying. “From being too high, eh?
How high would you say?”
“Above twenty thousand feet.”
“Over twenty thousand, eh?” Renny pondered some more. “Say, I've done a lot of flying. You and I and
all of us have done a lot of it, and not a little at above twenty thousand feet. I never got anything like
stratosphere sickness.”
“You did it with oxygen equipment and much of it in planes equipped with pressure cabins,” Doc
摘要：

THESPEAKINGSTONEADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.comScannedandProofedbyTomStephens?ChapterI.REDVEST?ChapterII.ABOUTASTONE?ChapterIII.LIFEINSURANCE?ChapterIV.THESOUTHAMERICANWAY?ChapterV.OLDLADY?ChapterVI.REDVESTS?ChapterVII.THEUNEXPECTEDTR...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 112 - The Speaking Stone.pdf

共81页,预览17页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：81 页 大小：431.39KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 81
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注