"028 (B088) - The Roar Devil (1935-06) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"The pencil," the girl said dryly. "It's covered with a chemical mixture you probably never heard of. It won't kill you, if that's any consolation."
Zachies sighed loudly and fell flat on his face.
THE girl's ankles were still wired. She freed them without particular haste, then used the same tough copper strands to bind Dove Zachies.
The chemical mixture which had made Zachies senseless when he touched the pencil, apparently did not last long, for the man began to stir feebly before the girl finished tying him, so that she had to hold his limbs. She found an upset tool drawer among the laboratory wreckage and from its litter unearthed a roll of black friction tape.
"Got adenoids?" she asked Zachies, who had opened his eyes.
"Naw!" Zachies was shortsighted enough to growl.
The girl grabbed his head, pinched it between his knees and began draping strips of tape across his lips.
"I once heard of a man dying after they taped his lips shut in a robbery," she said conversationally. "He had adenoids."
With Zachies fastened securely, the girl gave attention to the starved young man who was picketed by the rope. She tried Zachies's trick.
"Roar Devil!" she yelled at the young man.
There was enough reaction to prove conclusively that the name Roar Devil meant something momentous to the young man.
The girl now tried to revive the young man enough to talk. She gave him water, forcing it down his throat, and forced down part of a can of corn which she found in the lean-to kitchen. She got nowhere. To her urging to speak, he only blubbered and mumbled.
The young woman apparently did not trust him to remain picketed by the rope, for she used copper wire on his ankles and, after some hesitancy, tape on his lips.
It became apparent that she was going to leave the cabin. Zachies made whizzing noises through his nose and flounced about. The girl, thinking he had something important to say, pulled part of the tape free of his lips.
"What is it?" she demanded.
"You ain't deaf, after all, are you?" Zachies growled.
"Is that all you wanted to know?" she snapped.
"I got to wondering - "
She jammed the gagging tape back in place. Her rifle was hopeless, she saw upon examination. She picked up the submachine gun of Dove Zachies and balanced it thoughtfully.
"Never do to walk into Powertown with this," she concluded, and discarded it.
She picked up the trick pencil which had been Zachies's Waterloo, using a handkerchief so that her fingers would not come in contact with it, and clipped it back in her pocket. Then she left the cabin.
She walked rapidly, and since the sun was hot for this portion of the spring season, she was soon carrying her jacket. She was setting a definite course to the southward, but when a bare knob of a hill appeared off to her left, she angled over to it and used a pair of diminutive binoculars to scrutinize the surrounding country.
It was mountainous terrain - some of the most rugged in the eastern United States. Woodland covered the ridges, leaving few bare spots, but the size of the hills and the sweeping depth of the valleys was almost awe-inspiring.
Directly below, a glittering blue mirror under a line of tremendous cliffs, was a sheet of water. The lake was confined by a towering white concrete dam at the lower end.
Within view from where the girl stood there were portions of two other dams, one of these a structure of tremendous size. This section - hundreds of square miles in area - was the great Powertown Drainage Basin Project.
It consisted of several auxiliary dams and one main dam of vast size. The purpose of these dams was not only the generating of power, but also as a water supply for New York City. The metropolis had become so vast that the older and smaller reservoirs were inadequate.
The young woman seemed to have stopped to rest as much as for any other reason, and now she went on, setting a crow-flight course as nearly as the brush and the precipitous going permitted. This seemed to be a short-cut across the mountains.
Unexpectedly, she stopped. Her face assumed a queerly set expression.
THEN it came, not gradually out of nothingness as it had before, but suddenly, violently, with a whooping moan that sent birds shrieking. It was the roar, fantastic, unearthly, a sound that was like no other. It did not throb, did not travel in waves, and there was no gobbling syncopation of echoes such as might have been set up by an ordinary noise - or if there was, the roaring that was the father of them all drowned out all else.
Then it stopped. Abruptly, like something broken off. And it left behind it a world that did not seem normal.
There was no sound now. Where there had been tumult, there was now profound quiet. The birds wheeled in the sky - and they must have been crying out excitedly. Yet there was no slightest noise audible.
The ordinary silence of the woodland had not fallen. It was more than that. All sound had completely stopped. Then other things happened.
The earth jumped - jumped like a live thing that had been kicked. The girl reeled, flailed her arms trying to keep her balance, then fell. Rocks rolled on the ground like popcorn on the bottom of a pan, only not as violently.
After the first tremor, there were others, but they subsided rapidly in violence. The entire surface of the earth had apparently shifted.
The girl arose from where she had been flung, ran to a tree, eyed it doubtfully, then began to climb.
She was halfway up when, as if an electric switch had been turned on, the world seemed to come alive. Before, there had been utterly no sound. Now there was plenty.
She could hear the scrapings of her own climbing efforts, could hear her own labored breathing. And the birds were making a great uproar. There was something else, too - a distant rumbling. She looked toward the source of that noise.
Below her was the dam which she had viewed earlier. It was collapsing. The central section was already gone. A vast torrent of water poured through. On either side, more of the big concrete wall was rapidly upsetting. The valley below was filling with a writhing monster of water that uprooted trees, toppled along boulders as large as small mansions.
Craning her neck, the girl perceived a house in the path of the flood. Near it was a barn, other outbuildings. A man and a woman, their figures made tiny by distance, ran out of the house and stared up the valley at the wall of water. Then they raced to a small car near by and drove madly for safety, until they were lost to view among trees.
The girl shuddered. It did not look as if the fugitives could escape.
The young woman watched for some time from her vantage point in the tree. She seemed particularly interested in the effect the flood would have when it reached the big reservoir. Would the latter hold?
It held. The young woman waited fully three hours before she became certain.
Then she went on toward Powertown, and when she drew near the small metropolis, she went slowly and furtively, as if extremely desirous of escaping discovery.

Chapter III. THE BRONZE MAN

POWERTOWN was in a nervous sweat, and with reason. It had dawned on the town that fully half of its population was in danger, and that some millions of dollars in property were menaced.
Engineers had originally lain out Powertown so that it was above any normal flood which would result from a disaster to the big dam, which was situated some two miles up the valley. But the engineers had reckoned without the sudden popularity of Powertown.
It had become the rage as a summer and winter resort, due to the attractiveness of the surrounding lakes, and as a result, Powertown had spread down on the floor of the valley until most of the business section was in the path of a flood of any major proportions.
Persons in the streets looked frightened. A good part of the population had fled to the surrounding mountains. Since it appeared that the darn was not in imminent danger of collapse, some of the fugitives were returning.