"Doc Savage Adventure 1934-03 Meteor Menace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

A disappointed murmur arose from the crowd as they understood they were not to glimpse the famous man of bronze.

"Look, Ham!" Monk snapped. "Over there by the hospital corner!"


MONK'S words impinged against the microphones, and all of the two hundred thousand or so people present must have heard the ejaculation. Countless necks craned, eyes seeking the corner of the hospital building.

A girl, tall and exquisitely beautiful, with hair the hue of mahogany, was struggling with several swarthy, broad-faced men.

"It's Rae Stanley!" Ham barked.

Monk was already lumbering across the speaking rostrum, holding the box containing his pig over his head with both hands. Ham leaped after the hairy chemist. They hammered heels down the rostrum steps.

Monk put his head down, hunched his shoulders, and hit the crowd like a torpedo. Ham trod his wake, fending off Chileans who resented being shoved, and showed it by lustily swinging their fists.

Hands suddenly seized Ham's ankles and jerked. He went down.

An avalanche of moon-faced, stocky men piled up on the lawyer.

"Hey, Monk!" Ham howled.

Monk spun and saw what was happening. He lowered his pig case carefully, then leaped into the fight, emitting a bawling roar. Monk was ordinarily quiet, but his fights were howling bedlams.

Monk's hirsute hands clamped on the necks of two of Ham's assailants, and banged their heads together. The pair became magically limp, their arms and legs hanging like strings.

Ham managed to sit up. His sword cane, whipping about, glinted like a sliver of solidified sunlight. The steel leaped at a brown man.

The man threw himself madly backward, but saw he was going to be too late. His eyes protruded, and a scream ripped past his teeth. Mentally, he could feel that glittering steel blade already fixed in his pumping heart.

Ham turned the blade aside, however. Doc Savage and his men had a policy of never directly taking human life.

The blade merely opened a a small gash in the squat man's shoulder. But a surprising thing happened. His eyes closed slowly and his arms dropped to his sides. The man seemed to go to sleep on his feet. He fell heavily, blindly to the ground.

The tip of Ham's sword cane was covered with a drug, a tiny quantity of which in a wound was sufficient to produce instant unconsciousness.

The dark attackers cursed viciously in their native tongue and rattled orders at each other. Monk and Ham spoke many languages, and could recognize others.

"Tibetans!" Ham snapped.

Monk opened his mouth to make some reply. There was a sharp report, not unlike a handclap. Monk closed his mouth and a vacant expression came into his eyes. His legs hinged at the knees.

A Tibetan had struck him from behind with a heavy revolver.

Ham, staring at the fallen Monk, saw a gun clubbing for his own head. He tried to dodge, but too late, and cart-wheels of colored fire spun in his eyeballs as the weapon landed.

Ham sank in what seemed like a pleasantly warm sea of black ink.

The Tibetans gathered up Monk, Ham, and their own unconscious companions. They even took the case holding the pig, Habeas Corpus. Then they moved through the crowd. Their menacing guns opened a path.