"Doc Savage Adventure 1949-03 Up From the Earth's Center" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

UP FROM EARTH'S CENTER


A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson

(Originally published in "Doc Savage Magazine" for Summer 1949. Bantam Books reprint in Omnibus #13, October 1990)

BACK COVER


Up from Earth's Center

A shipwrecked lunatic, a mysterious cavern, and a plump little man with a fear of fire lead Doc on his strangest and most legendary adventure ever - straight to the gates of hell itself!



"Up from earth's center by the seventh gate,
I rose and on the throne of Saturn sat-
And many a knot unraveled by the road,
But not the master knot of human fate-"

OMAR KHAYYAM



I

THE hours became days, and the days grew into weeks, and the weeks followed one another into a dull and terrible haze of time in which nothing really changed. Gilmore had scooped a shallow pit in the eroding chalk at the edge of a cliff, roofed it with a crude thatched trapdoor which he could close against the black things of night, and he spent the majority of his time there.

For a time, during Indian summer, one day was like another. It was then that Gilmore lost his shirt. He took off the shirt and arranged it carefully and, he thought, safely on the sandy beach, while he waded into the sea to stand motionless in hopes of clubbing an unwary fish for food. A huge and dour gray seagull, a typically thievish knave of a seagull, carried the shirt away. It was a sports shirt, and its gaudy plastic buttons fascinated the gull.

It was a small thing. The thin shirt was practically worthless as a protective garment. But Gilmore took it hard.

He ran wildly after the seagull, and the bird flapped out to sea, packing the shirt in its beak with gull-like greed. Gilmore, unable to swim, ran, screaming, up and down the beach, and when he was exhausted, he fell on his face and sobbed.

During the ensuing few days of Indian summer, Gilmore tried to teach himself to swim. He was unsuccessful, probably because he had no real heart left to put into it. It was pointless, anyway. A man could not swim the Atlantic.

The warm days ended. Winter came. The pools of rainwater in the potholes in the island stone began to have thin crusts of ice, and the rocks became bone-colored with coatings of frost.

Gilmore made hardly a move to thwart the certainty of freezing to death. It was too much of a certainty for him to compete against. It was inevitable. His pants now were frayed into shorts, and he stuffed them with dry seaweed, and tied seaweed about himself with other seaweed for binding until he resembled an ambulatory pile of the smelly stuff. Actually, it did no good, and it soon became definitely established in his mind that he would freeze to death. He began to wait for death almost as one would await a friend.

But rescue got there before death, although at first it was dull and undramatic.

Gilmore was sitting on a stone, contemplating eternity, when a pleasant voice hailed him. "Hello, there," the voice said. 'Are you the proprietor of this heavenly spot?"

A glaze settled over Gilmore's sore eyes, and for a long time he did not turn around. In fact, he did not turn until he had conducted quite an odd conversation, in a small choking voice.

"So you finally got to me," Gilmore said. His voice had the hopelessness of a soul lost in interstellar space.

"Yeah. It took a little time to climb the cliff." The voice contained some pleasant surprise. "I didn't think you had seen us. You didn't give any sign. We were rather puzzled."