"Doc Savage Adventure 1939-07 Merchants of Disaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

In fact, he had noticed the queer light signals for several days before his interest was aroused. Even then he was only mildly intrigued.

That is, until he discovered he was the only one who saw the signals at all!

At that, he had no inkling of what he was about to discover or his actions might have been different. In which case the course of many lives would have been altered. A great number of those lives probably would have been saved.

Les Quinan didn't know about the death of Joe Goopy, of course. But if he had he wouldn't have connected that death with the queer light flashes.

The flashes, in themselves, seemed insignificant enough. Actually, they appeared only as long streaks of sunlight.

But sunlight does not originate in the fifth floor of a Washington office building. And besides, Les Quinan could not see sunlight anyhow. He was snow-blind.

Big, dark-colored glasses covered his eyes. He paced his office restlessly, unable to read, cursing the impulse that had taken him on a skiing trip and his own lack of caution which had resulted in the snow-blindness.

Les Quinan was a patent attorney, and a good one. But he needed his eyes to read law books and to draw up legal documents.

Those eyes were improving, but he still could barely see well enough to get around at all.

But he could see the queer light flashes!

The surprise of that was so great that unconsciously he yanked the dark-colored glasses from his eyes, trying for a better look.

Without the glasses he could see nothing at all!

When the significance of that penetrated, the lawyer almost forgot his irritation. He called his secretary to see if she could see the strange lights. She couldn't.

There still would have been time for the attorney to have prevented much of what followed if he had obeyed his first surge of interest and investigated. He didn't

He might be excused for that. He had expected an important client to arrive several days before. The client still hadn't appeared. Quinan was worried. He would have been more than worried had he known how much his client was involved in what was to happen.

It wasn't until next day that he turned his attention back to the queer flashes. Then he noticed they were of different timing. Some were short and some were long.

For the first time he realized that signals of some kind were being sent.

Before he could do anything about it, the flashes stopped. But now, Quinan was fully aroused. He grabbed a handful of paper clips, paced back and forth flipping those clips absently at an old-fashioned cuspidor, but keeping his eyes on the fifth-story window across the way.


THE flashes had seemed to shoot upward and out at a slight angle. They would, he estimated, miss all buildings, continue on up into the air.

A frown creased his forehead. He turned, tossed another paper clip and nodded with satisfaction as a metallic cling rewarded his effort.

If the flashes merely went on out into space, how could they be received at the other end, that is if they were really intended to be signals?

Still frowning, he spun back to the window. He could barely distinguish the outline of the building across the street, but light streaks suddenly shot before his eyes.

Those light streaks were going on and off with great rapidity.

A gasp came from the lawyer's lips. He whipped a pencil out of his pocket, then swore helplessly.