"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-12 The Fantastic Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

Patricia Savage cast an idle glance around the horizon, She started violently.

"Look!" she cried. "Ahead there, a bit to port. Green and red lights!"

"Huh?" Monk jerked around. "Channel lights that sounds like."

Ham stared intently, forgot himself and his feud with Monk. "Channel lights they are, but they were not there a minute ago."

Monk's small eyes blinked rapidly. "It ain't possible."

"Some mistake," Ham muttered. "No lights are indicated on the chart."

Pat pointed at them and said, "There they are," with inescapable feminine logic.

Ham and Monk crowded forward for another inspection of the charts. They offered a strange contrast in appearance, these two men. Ham was meticulously attired in a blue marine uniform, a blue cap with its insignia in gold set jauntily on his head. He carried a slender black cane. He was handsome, lithe, and wore his clothes like a fashion plate.

Monk, on the contrary, wore a not too white pair of duck pants, wrinkled across the thighs and bagged at the knees. An enormous green-and-white-striped undershirt fitted around his barrel chest like a circus tent slipped on over an elephant. Rusty hair stuck out on his bulletlike head like mashed bristles on a wire brush. The hair grew low down on his forehead, half burying his ears, almost meeting his scrubby eyebrows. His homely face was mostly mouth and flat nose. His body was nearly as wide as it was long and his fists hung down almost to his knees. In fact, he did not look like a man. He resembled an amiable ape.

It was a mistake to judge either of these two by appearances. Ham was no fop. He was one of the most astute lawyers Harvard had ever turned out. And Monk, as Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Biodgett Mayfair, was recognized as one of the greatest, living, industrial chemists.

The greatest claim to distinction of these two men, however, was that they were members of Doc Savage's group of five remarkable aids. That alone made them unusual, for each of the bronze man's five aids was a master of some particular profession.

Pat went over now and disconnected the robot control which had been steering the ship.

"Shall I hold to the channel lights?" she asked, swinging the wheel slightly over.

"I don't like this," Ham said, uneasily. "There should be no harbor at all near us, least of all a lighted harbor, even a lighted channel. But there is nothing else to do."

"Why not?" Monk demanded. "We don't have to go in that channel, do we? --if there is a channel."

Ham snapped, "It's worth investigating. That is what I mean."

It looked as if their perpetual quarrel were going to break out again.

Pat solved the problem by turning the Seven Seas toward the channel markers.


THE yacht was caught in a choppy cross-current now, and the wind was rising. It no longer sighed like men at death's door. It wailed and howled.

Ham went to the end of the bridge and clung to the railing to keep from being pitched off the violently tilting craft into the boil of black water around them. In spite of the wind, the night was oppressive, muggy, with a faint sulphurous smell. Suddenly a flickering glow, as of sheet lightning, sprang into life, tinging the low-hanging clouds.

Ham made a mistake. He dismissed it at first as ordinary lightning. Then he saw that there was something different about these luminous flashes. They were weird, unearthy. They stained the low-hanging clouds a bloody red.

Ham heard a rasped breath behind him and was startled into whirling. It was Monk.

"Red lightnin'," Monk uttered, hanging on against the fetid, sulphurous wind at the deck tip. "That's funny-lookin', ain't it?"

Again the gory light mushroomed out under the clouds. It was more sustained, brighter this time, and it showed them things. Off to one side bulked a shore line; but this did not strike them with terror. Pat called attention to the thing that did.

"Look!" she screamed. "Look! All around us!"