Doc Savage - The Man Who Shook The Earth Part 14

"Will you hunt my sister?" he asked over the thousands of miles of radio and land line. "I've heard you don't work for money, but if you'll find Tip I'll contribute every cent I've got to any charity you name."

"We are already hunting her," Doc said.

"By George, that's great! What I said about giving to charity still goes."

"Do you know John Acre?" Doc repeated.

"Yes," replied Dido Galligan's faint voice. "I saw him and talked to him here in Antof.a.gasta last night."

"Are you sure he was the real John Acre?"

"I'm going to tell you something in confidence," Dido Galligan declared. "A friend of mine, Whistler Wheeler, and myself followed John Acre last night. We were suspicious of him. We learned-"

Ping!

went the telephone receiver. A complete silence followed.

Doc Savage slapped the lifeless telephone on its stand.

"Wires have been cut," he rapped. "It was done in this building!"

A BRONZE flash, Doc whipped to a large chest, and threw it open. It held numerous cylinders. These were as thick as tomato cans, and perhaps two feet long. The coverings resembled cardboard. From each protruded a length of fuse.

Working rapidly, Doc pa.s.sed an armload of these to each of his men.

"How do you know the wires were cut in this building?" asked Monk as Doc worked.

"From the sound," Doc said. "There was absolutely no noise after the cut. This building has an individual exchange, and if the circuit had been broken beyond the exchange, I could have raised the operator. I couldn't, so they were cut in the building."

Doc pa.s.sed out the last of the cylinders.

"Get to the windows on all four sides of the building," he directed. "Light the fuse on these things, and toss them out."

The order was hardly issued when Doc was gone.

His five men lost no time finding windows on four sides of the skysc.r.a.per. They touched matches to thefuses. Then they flung them out into the cold winter air.

After he had hurled all of his burden, big-fisted Renny leaned out to see what would happen.

He had gotten rid of the cylinders with great speed. The first of them had not yet hit the street, eighty-six stories below.

"Holy cow!" Renny muttered. "I hope they don't smack anybody on the skull. They're pretty heavy."

Renny's apprehensions were needless. Some distance above the street, the first cylinder turned into a ball of grayish vapor. In swift succession the same thing happened to the others. Each composition container was consumed completely in a small flash of greenish flame.

There was nothing left to fall on the heads of pedestrians. The gray vapor billowed and swelled. It was much heavier than the air. It sank rapidly.

Within a few seconds, the stuff lay in the street like a fog. Office employees and business executives on their way to work stopped shivering in the cold, and gaped at the mysterious vapor.

They sniffed. The strange haze had a very slight odor, not unpleasant.

"A funny kind of smoke," a stenographer commented aloud.

New Yorkers are people who like to stand around and gawk at anything unusual. Ordinarily the sidewalks would have been jammed with rubberneckers eyeing the vapor. But this morning was too cold. Pedestrians resumed their way; most of them ran in their haste to get out of the chill.

Some of those who entered the great skysc.r.a.per were witnesses to a bit of drama.

On one side of the lobby was a stairway which led to the bas.e.m.e.nt regions. Two men dashed up this.

One fellow was handsome in a vaguely evil way, and he wore evening clothes. The evening garb was enough to attract attention, since it was now daylight. The other man was big, with a scar across his face, and a nose which was two fuzz-rimmed holes.

The doorman saw the pair. Their running gait aroused his suspicions.

"Hey!" he yelled. "What's the idea?"

Scarcely pausing in his stride, the burly man with the hideous face swung a fist. The doorman went down, knocked senseless.

The two runners sprinted outside. They dived across the walk, raced down the middle of the street, and bounded into a car.

If they noted that a fantastic gray vapor filled the street, they ignored the fact in their excitement.

The automobile into which the pair leaped was a touring car. The side curtains were up. The engine of this machine was running. The man in evening clothes took the wheel, and the touring car leaped away.

THE car was pointed in such a direction that it had to pa.s.s in front of the skysc.r.a.per. Excited yells went up from the walk. Several persons had seen the doorman knocked unconscious, and had rushed outside to shout for a policeman.

There seemed to be no cop in the neighborhood. The crowd could only stand helpless and watch the machine bearing Velvet and Biff go thundering past.

They were not silent, however. They yelled l.u.s.tily, trying to give an alarm.

Three shots roared from the touring car. The sound was brittle thunder in the cold morning air. One bulletbroke a window; another pitted a brick wall; the third knocked a snow shovel out of the hands of a man two blocks distant.

Biff was doing the shooting.

"You scar-faced fool!" Velvet screamed, and knocked Biff's gun down. "You dope! You dumb-bell!"

"Aw, I thought I'd scare 'em," snarled Biff. "Make 'em forget what we look like."

"Forget!" gritted Velvet. "You made 'em remember us. Haven't you any brains at all? Why'd you cut that phone wire?"

"Dido Galligan was fixin' to spill somethin' about John Acre," said Biff. "I wanted to stop that."

"You goop!" groaned Velvet. "Doc Savage will merely get another phone connection. You didn't do any good by cuttin' the wire. All you done was show Savage that we were listenin' in the conversation!"

"Aw-"

"Shut up!"

Velvet smashed the car angrily through a small snowdrift. White flakes. .h.i.t the windshield like a flood of milk.

The car wheeled right, left; it ran for a time toward the water front, then northward. Eventually, Velvet parked near a drug store. He left Biff in the machine, went in and used the telephone.

He spoke for some time.

"I just talked to the boss," he told Biff when he came back. "He gave me our orders. We're leaving town."

"Leaving town-what for?" Biff demanded.

"This Doc Savage," Velvet explained. "The boss has decided we don't want no part of him. We're blowing."

"What about the Galligan girl?"

"We're takin' her along."

"Aw!" grunted Biff. "Why?"

"Don't ask so many questions," said Velvet, and put the touring car in motion.

Chapter XI. SOUTHWARD DASH.

So they got away in a curtained touring car?" Doc Savage asked of the crowd in front of the skysc.r.a.per.

At least six persons tried to answer at once. There was a magnetism about Doc Savage's giant bronze figure which fascinated spectators. Moreover, many of those present knew Doc by sight. Their manner showed that they considered the bronze man a noted personage.

"The car went north," volunteered a man. "It was a touring, all right. There's not many touring cars out on a cold morning like this. That should make it easier to locate."

"The ugly man with the scarred face fired three shots," vouchsafed another bystander.

"Exactly what make of car was it?" Doc asked.

Several replied to this. There was some uncertainty. But all of the answers varied between two moderate-priced makes which closely resembled each other."Thank you, very much, gentlemen," Doc said. He wheeled back into the great building.

Doc rode to the eighty-sixth floor in his high-speed private elevator. His five aids were still in the laboratory.

They were watching the grayish cloud in the street below.

They had not as yet managed to figure out what the cloud was.

"Velvet and Biff cut the phone wires," Doc said. "At least the two who did it answer their description. They fled in a touring car before I could reach the street."

"There ain't many touring cars out on a cold morning like this," Monk muttered. "That'll help us locate 'em!"

"It was one of two different makes," Doc added. He gave the trade names of the cars. "Those who saw it were somewhat uncertain. The average individual is not very observant."

Monk groaned loudly. "Then we ain't got such a hot chance of findin' 'em."

Doc did not reply to this. Instead, he gestured toward the door.

"We won't find them standing here," he advised.

Slightly more than a minute later, they were in the bas.e.m.e.nt garage. Four minutes after that they were pulling up before Doc's airplane hangar, which masqueraded as the Hidalgo Trading Co. warehouse. They were riding the big sedan.

Once inside the hangar, they unloaded as if the sedan were on fire.

Doc waved an arm. He included all of the planes in the gesture.

"Each of you men will grab a separate bus," he directed. "Get into the air as quickly as you can. There's an ordinance against flying low over the city, but I guess this emergency justifies us breaking it. Get down as low as you can. Sc.r.a.pe the tops of the buildings."

"What's the idea?" Renny boomed.

"You be looking for touring cars," Doc replied. "There won't be many of 'em this cold day."

Renny blinked incredulously, his big hands making vacant gestures.

"Holy cow, Doc" he muttered. "You don't expect us to spot those two guys, do you? We can't fly down in the streets and look inside every touring car."

Instead of replying, Doc reached into a coat pocket. He drew out an object which might have been a very compact magic lantern. His bronze fingers stroked a switch on the side of this.

Nothing seemed to happen to the little lantern. Certainly, it gave forth no visible light.

Ham suddenly burst into a roar of laughter. He pointed his sword cane at Monk.

"Haw, haw, haw!" he squawled. "Did you ever see anything that looked more like a big green bullfrog?"

Monk scowled at Ham. His little eyes brightened in their gristle pits. He also burst into laughter.

"And you look like a little green devil!" he chortled.

A startling thing had happened to Doc Savage's men. When Doc switched on his strange, tiny lantern, each man seemed to turn an unholy green color.

Doc's big sedan had also a.s.sumed a gra.s.sy hue.

"ULTRA-VIOLET light," said Long Tom, the electrical wizard.

The homely Monk stopped laughing to wave an arm.