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

Gilmore shuddered and said, "I don't always see you, do I?"

"Huh?"

"Us?" Gilmore continued, selecting carefully from the words the pleasant voice had said. "Us? We? Is there more than one of you now?"

"There are eighteen of us," the voice said. "Say, what's the matter with you, fellow?"

"So you went back for more experienced help!" Gilmore went on.

"Eighteen of you!" croaked Gilmore. "Good God! They must have depleted the staff!"

"What staff?"

"The executive personnel in hell!" said Gilmore bitterly.

"Who are you kidding?" the amiably friendly voice inquired.

Now Gilmore swung around, to stare at the stranger, and to lose his composure until he was a shaking, gibbering man. Gilmore saw, standing before him, a tall middle-aged man with a fat ruddy face and a sheepskin greatcoat and a faint odor of good hair pomade that oddly fitted the icy island wind. Gilmore saw beyond the man, on the chopping sea, a sailing yacht of about eighty feet waterline, schooner-rigged, and on the beach a dory with shipped oars and a couple of waiting sailors in thick blue peacoats.

Strangers all. Man, yacht, dory, sailors, all strangers and inconceivable. Unacceptable, an illusion, a figment concocted out of ghastly chicanery, a work of Satan as far as Gilmore could understand.

So Gilmore darted off the rock and fled screaming and whimpering, going as fast as a starvation-ridden string of bones could travel. Dr. Karl Linningen caught him easily, although the doctor was a portly, languid individual who secretly believed that exercise was poisonous.


THE schooner yacht, by name the Mary Too, sailed southward and westward over the heaving cold green seas, eventually rounding to the south of the Canadian-owned island of Campobello, and beating up through the narrowing tidal channel of Lubec, a small fishing village which is the most easternmost settlement in the United States, as far east in Maine as one can travel on dry land.

Dr. Karl Linningen, who was a psychiatrist by profession, and quite deserving of the title eminent, had by that time spent a goodly interval probing at Gilmore's body, and fishing in Gilmore's mind, and Dr. Karl was a puzzled man.

The tide in the rip that squirts past Lubec's stony chin was running a hellish stream when the Mary Too careened in, passed the stone jetty, wallowed about and labored into smoother water just off the docks where the sardine boats unloaded, and dropped anchor.

Dr. Karl immediately prepared to go ashore. Of the several guests aboard, none were doctors, because Dr. Karl felt that a man should get away from the familiar in order to relax. "You turn a race-horse into a pasture with other race-horses, and he's going to continue acting like a race-horse," was the way he phrased it. "When I'm on vacation, I want plow-horses in my pasture. One of the plow-horses was Bill Williams; a sports announcer on the radio, and the others were a broker, a shoe-shop owner, and three insurance men.

"You seem hell-bent to get ashore remarked Bill Williams, noting the doctor's preparations."

"That's right."

"Going to be gone long?"

"Don't know."

"What about our wild boy off the island?" Bill Williams asked. "Want to prescribe any medicine to give him in case you're gone a while?"

"He's the reason I'm in a hurry to get ashore," Dr. Karl muttered. "You can have him." Dr. Karl grinned wryly. "But keep him around until I get back, will you?"

"You mean if he wants to go ashore, tell him he can't?"

"In a gentlemanly way."