"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-05 Secret in the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

"MONK" - Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair - lifted out of the chair. He was not much over five feet tall. He was only slightly less broad than that, and he had a pair of arms which gave the grotesque impression of being nearly as long as he was tall. Red hairs, which looked coarse as match sticks furred his leathery hide. His was the build of a gorilla.

"I read about it in them blasted newspapers," he said, and his small voice was doubly ridiculous, Contrasted with his physique. "Willard Spanner was seized in Frisco at noon. He was found dead here in New York at ten minutes to three. Screw loose somewhere."

Monk wrinkled a fabulously homely face to show puzzlement. He looked amiable, stupid, when, in truth, he was one of the most clever industrial chemists alive.

"Maybe the newspapers got balled up on the difference in time between San Francisco and New York," he added.

"All times given are New York time," Doc Savage said.

"Then the guy seized in San Francisco wasn't Willard Spanner, or the one dead here in New York isn't Spanner," Monk declared. "The bird didn't go from Frisco to New York in a little over two hours. It just isn't being done yet."

Doc Savage asked, "Any messages?"

"Ham phoned, and said he was coming up." replied the homely chemist. "I haven't been here long. Dunno what was recorded before I got here.

The bronze man went into the next room, which was a scientific laboratory, one of the most complete in existence, and crossed that to the vast, white-enameled room which held his laboratory of chemical, electrical and other devices. He lifted the cover on the telephone recorder, switched a loud-speaker and amplifier into circuit with the playback pickup, and started the mechanism.

Monk came in and listened, slackjawed, as the device reproduced the call from San Francisco complete to its violent termination. The pig - Habeas Corpus was the shote's full appendage - trailed at the homely chemist's heels.

Doc Savage examined the time stamped on the recording roll.

"Two minutes past twelve," he said.

"Was that Willard Spanner's voice, or would you know it?" Monk demanded.

"I would know his voice." Doc replied. "And that was, unquestionably, Willard Spanner."

"Speaking from San Francisco?" Monk grunted incredulously.

"We will see." Doc Savage made a call, checking with the telephone people, then hung up and advised, "The call came from San Francisco, all right. Willard Spanner appears to have been seized while be was in the booth making the call."

Monk picked the pig, Habeas, up by one oversize ear - a treatment the shote seemed not to mind.

"Then the dead man here in New York is not Willard Spanner," declared the simian chemist. "Nobody goes from Frisco to New York in not much more than two hours.

"We will see about that," Doc told him.

"How?"

"By visiting the New York morgue where the dead man was taken."

Monk nodded. "How about Ham?"

"We will leave him a note," Doc said.


APPARENTLY, it had not occurred to any one in authority on the New York civic scene that the surroundings of the dead were of aesthetic value, for the morgue building was a structure which nearly attained the ultimate in shoddiness.