Doc Savage - The Giggling Ghosts Part 13

A. King Christophe beamed as much as a man could beam behind a gas mask.

"I should be delight!" he said.

Doc Savage took out the third disk of metal which looked like steel. He gave the disk to A. King Christophe.

"I would be very pleased if you brought the information to the address on that disk." Doc said. "I am-oh-hiding out at that address."

He explained how the coinlike piece functioned as a key.

"I do that," A. King Christophe said. "I tell you what I are learn. That Littlejohn-pah."

Doc Savage asked, "Have you found any trace of ghosts that giggle?"

"Ghosts-pah!"

Doc Savage went back to his car, consulted his wrist watch as if he had an appointment. Apparently he decided he had plenty of time, because he drove at a leisurely pace through the district which was affected by the gas.

For the sake of safety, he rolled up the car windows. This coupe, like all of his closed cars, could be shut up until it was completely gasproof.

THE bronze man was taking advantage of his first opportunity to survey the district haunted by the giggling ghosts. His previous knowledge was secondhand, gained from the newspapers, and newspaper accounts were often overdramatized.

The picture he saw now was grim, as heart-rending as an evacuation in the path of a war. Most houses were now empty, but a few moving vans were backing up to doors or rumbling along the streets. The district already looked dead, despite the fact that the gas had first appeared only a few days ago.

Newspapers littered the sidewalks; shrubbery looked ragged.

Real signs of the giggling gas terror were few. A few dead birds and pigeons lay in the streets. At one place lay a peddler's horse, dead from the gas, which the Department of Sanitation had not yet removed.

Doc Savage got out a gas mask, put it on, then opened the car windows. He opened a cardboard box which contained empty bottles having airtight rubber corks.

The bronze man got air samples throughout the gas zone in these bottles.

Doc Savage then drove back to his warehouse-hangar on the Hudson River water front. The big hangar doors opened with the radio device; he rolled the car into the vaulted gloom.Doc showed no immediate interest in the bell or the two prisoners inside it; he made, in fact, no effort to see how they were getting along.

In the warehouse-hangar was stored quant.i.ties of equipment: mechanical devices the bronze man had used in the past, others he'd prepared for future emergency. Most of the regular equipment was kept here, for this was the point from which Doc and his aids started expeditions by plane or boat.

One item was Monk's portable chemical laboratory. Monk usually took this on expeditions. The laboratory contained, among other things, a device for spectroscopic a.n.a.lysis-a contrivance for ascertaining the chemical make-up of any given substance by examining a burned vapor spectrum.

Doc Savage used the a.n.a.lyzer to examine the air samples from the gas district. These were not the first gas samples he had a.n.a.lyzed; he had taken others from the storehouse, at the beginning of all this strange mystery. But examination of these had not been especially helpful; they had contained such microscopic quant.i.ties of the gas.

When Doc Savage finished a.n.a.lyzing the gas samples, he stood frowning thoughtfully. Now he knew the composition of the gas. Knew it exactly. It was not exactly a pioneer discovery. The police chemists had already managed to ascertain the general nature of the gas.

The stuff affected the human respiratory centers and a.s.sociated nervous system, eventually producing complications which resulted in death. But that was already known.

Where was it actually coming from? That was what Doc was trying to learn. Had he secured any clue?

The sample bottles were numbered, and he'd made a mental note of where each sample had been selected. He knew, now, exactly where the gas was thickest.

The bronze man stood contemplating the results of his efforts.

Then, almost imperceptibly, there came into existence in the huge warehouse a tiny, trilling note, a low, strange, exotic sound which rose and fell. A sound with a strangely human quality, this trilling; and yet it was eerie, as fantastic as the call of some rare jungle bird, or a chill wind in an Arctic waste.

It had a quality of ventriloquism; although the sound was perfectly real, it would have been almost impossible to locate the exact source. It was the sound of Doc Savage. The sound he made without conscious effort.

The sound invariably presaged, or accompanied, a state of intense mental activity or a discovery.

Doc Savage went back to the place where he had sunk the captives in the diving bell.

THE two men in the diving bell had lived longer than they had expected; had lived too long. Too long by ages, as time in terror is measured.

They were pale. They trembled. They had spent so much of themselves in fear, that they had hardly vitality to move. The water was rising. Rising, rising, and rising; it should have filled the diving bell long ago. Strangely it had not.

At times, hope had come to the two, only to leave. Maybe air pressure would keep out the water!

Maybe the bell would fill only so high, no higher! But when they got one of these frenzied hopes, they would see the water had crept above another seam. Above another bolt or another rivet head.The pair stood now with only their chins out of the water. Their eyes, wide and mad, were fixed in the darkness.

"We haven't-haven't-"

"Not a chance!"

One man took hold of his own throat; the water was up high enough that part of the hand was under water.

Earlier, the men had cursed profanely. They had raved, beat and kicked the walls of the diving bell. But now that ugly fire was gone, and they were limp. They were men who were looking at death with plenty of time for doing it.

"If we-we-"

"If we'd talked, you mean?" the other croaked.

"We-could have told him Monk and Ham are alive. And the girl."

"We should've done it!" the other said wildly. "We should've told him the prisoners were at Hart's penthouse!"

"Yeah!" the other croaked. "And then Hart would've fixed us!"

They were trying to keep up their spirits. They did not have deep minds, so their talk was not spiritual, not philosophical. It was talk of realities. But even that did not keep up their courage.

One man suddenly began to scream. To his mad mind came somehow the idea that his partner was responsible for his predicament. He struck out at the other, clawing, digging, biting. They went under water.

Later, half drowned, they had to stop fighting. They came to the top separately, stood choking, panting like animals.

They did not realize the diving bell was being lifted out of the water. Then the hatch opened. The hatch!

A hole through which they could crawl back to life!

The men fought to be first through the hatch; once through it, they jumped around, yelled, swore. They were mad with delirious pleasure.

But the joy took a drop when Doc Savage fell upon them. Doc tied their wrists and ankles.

"What-what-" The men glared at him.

"You could've drowned us!" one snarled.

"Hardly," Doc Savage said quietly. "Didn't it seem strange you were able to breath the whole time?

Normally, the oxygen would have been used in a short while. You would have suffocated."

"But-"

Doc said, "Oxygen was being supplied to the bell automatically. Too, the water level was not allowed to get over your heads."They gaped at him, puzzled.

One said, "But why-"

"This is why," Doc said.

The bronze man went to a device in a portable cabinet, a mechanism for recording sounds picked up by a microphone.

Doc said, "The microphone of this recorder was in the top of the diving bell."

He set the recording device to play back. The "playback" functioned through a loud-speaker. For some moments there was clatter, thumping, grunts and curses-the noises as Doc Savage first put the prisoners in the bell.

Every word, every curse, every whisper in the diving bell had been recorded.

The prisoners stared at each other.

"So Monk, Ham, and the girl are being held in a penthouse owned by Hart," Doc said.

DOC SAVAGE contemplated the prisoners gravely. "What is behind this giggling ghost business?"

They glared at him, for they had recovered courage.

"Devil with you!" one gritted.

"It's too big for you to stop, anyway!" the other snarled.

Doc's face was grim. He picked the two up, popped them into the diving bell.

"There will be no oxygen this time," he said. "No control of water level."

Then the men yelled. Horror faced them; their nerves broke.

Doc Savage hauled them out and they talked.

The men knew little, really. Only that a man named Batavia had hired them. At Batavia's orders, they had helped with the bridge trap for Doc Savage.

To-night, Batavia had ordered them to follow Long Tom, and Johnny and Renny; to kill them if possible.

But princ.i.p.ally, about the giggling ghosts, they knew nothing.

"You are sure," Doc asked, "that you do not know the reason for the gas? And you don't know what the giggling ghosts are?"

They knew nothing about the gas, or the reason for it.

Doc Savage got a hypodermic needle, administered to each prisoner a drug which would cause them to remain unconscious for some time. Doc then sent the captives away to his upstate criminal-curing inst.i.tution-the "college", as they called the inst.i.tution.

A weird place, that "college," its existence unknown to the world. At the "college," criminals underwent delicate brain operations that wiped out memory of the past, after which they received vocational trainingto fit them as honest citizens.

They were turned into a.s.sets to society.

Chapter XV. HIGH TROUBLE.

WHEN Doc Savage walked into the skysc.r.a.per headquarters, William Harper Littlejohn was frowningly contemplating an inked seismograph recording. The record was off Doc's seismograph the night there was supposed to have been an earthquake.

Johnny glanced at Doc Savage and frowned. He did not recognize the bronze man; Doc still wore a disguise.

"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny complained. "Can just anybody walk into this place-"

"Make anything out of that record?" Doc asked.

"Oh!" Johnny recognized Doc's voice.

Johnny got over being surprised, pointed at the seismograph record. "There wasn't any earthquake!" he said.

Doc asked, "Did you compare that record with the recording of the seismographs at the university, the museum, and in Washington?"

Johnny nodded. "I did. Funny, too. The other records are exactly like this one except for this single earthquake. Our seismograph doesn't show the earthquake. The others do."

Doc Savage said, "Monk and Ham are still alive. We have a line on their whereabouts."

Johnny sprang up from the table; he looked as delighted as a man who had won a sweepstakes.

"Renny!" he howled. "Long Tom! Come here!"

The other two came running out of the laboratory.

"Doc's got a line on Monk and Ham!" Johnny shouted.

"Where are they?" Renny roared.