"031 (B060) - The Majii (1935-09) - Lester Dent.palmdoc.pdbTXT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc gave him one of the machine pistols, and showed him how it operated.
"Thank you," said the dark man.
Doc Savage went out, the door opening weirdly for him, and closing when he had left the vicinity of it.
The bronze man now did something an observer would not have expected. He whipped down the corridor, around a corner, and put both palms against the solid wall.
He held them there for a count of ten, removed them for another ten count, and put them against the wall again.
A few feet away, the wall opened soundlessly. Its mechanism was a combination actuated from a thermostatic device buried in the wall plaster. Heat from the hands was enough to work the combination.
There was a hollow wall space beyond. It held much apparatus. At one point, a tiny red light glowed. Doc went to it, unhooked a telephone handset and plugged the cord into a jack below the light. He had tapped one of his telephone lines which was being used.
He listened a moment. His trilling noise, very vague, with an undertone of grimness, seeped through the confines of the hidden runway. It died quickly.
He threw a switch. It opened the telephone line, cutting it off from the outside.
Another door, cleverly concealed, admitted the bronze man into the laboratory. Soundlessly, he whipped into the library and across it into the reception room.
The small brown man in the turban was holding one of the telephones, impatiently clicking the hook in an effort to raise an operator on the dead wire. He seemed to think that the connection had only failed.
The brown man did not move until Doc Savage took him by the throat with both hands. Then it was too late. He could only writhe and kick and make croakings.
"I suspected you," Doc Savage told him, "all along."
Chapter IX. DOC HAS A WATERLOO
THE brown man's feet and hands made mad motions; he gargled and hacked; his tongue ran out and so did his eyes. The brown of his face became a purplish black.
"You were trying to warn them," Doc told him quietly. "It was likely that you would do that."
The bronze man slackened his grip, and the captive sank down in a chair, pumping air madly with his lungs, and did not resist being searched. His face faded back to brown.
"Would you care to know when you first gave yourself away?" Doc asked.
The man let out several words of the vile profanity of Jondore. His brown visage was an evil map of hate, fear, disappointment.
"When you killed your friend who was pretending to besiege you in the boathouse," Doc told him. "You were afraid I would capture him, and he would talk."
The brown man glared wordlessly.
"It was good acting," Doc Savage told him. "Overdone only in spots. But I had expected you to try for my life earlier. Why did you not?"
The man said, in the tongue of Jondore, more that was uncomplimentary.
"Had I been aware of how little you know of what it is actually all about, I would have killed you," he gritted.
The bronze man studied the other.
"Of course, the idea was to learn how much of your scheme was known, and what measures were being taken against you," he said. "It was not a bad move. But it seems to have backfired."
The turbaned one spoke English.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"You," Doc informed him, "are going to talk. You probably can tell just about everything. A clever fellow like you would occupy a high position in the organization."
The other grinned. It was an altogether hideous grin.
"I would like to wager that even you cannot get anything out of me," he mumbled.
"You told me that jewel thievery is behind this," Doc reminded him. "That in itself proves the jewel theft is not the motive. It is something possibly much moreЧhorrible."
The brown man sat perfectly still in his chair and stared. His eyes seemed to grow bigger, his mouth warped down at the ends; after a little, a wetness came into his eyes. He sobbed once.
"This is horrible," he choked.
Then he leaned forward and buried his face in his bands, making bubbling noises, shoulders heaving.
It was rarely that an actor fooled Doc Savage. But this one was good. He put across his deceptionЧfor all of ten seconds.
Suddenly realizing, Doc Savage whipped forward, grabbed the man and straightened him. Too late. There was a wet, chewed spot on the fellow's immaculate sleeve. Doc held him and turned the sleeve back.
On the inside, between the lining and sleeve cloth, there was a smear of greenish-yellow stuff. Chewing and sucking, the man had gotten it into his mouth through the cloth.
The fellow's eyes were already taking on a dullness.
"It will not kill me," he mumbled. "It will make me unconscious for hours. Nothing can revive me."
He went to sleep.
HE was right, although Doc Savage did not surrender to the certainty until he had worked over the man for some twenty minutes. That state was not insensibility of the common order, but more of a semi-suspension of animation. No known stimulant brought appreciable results.
Doc filled a hypo needle in the laboratory and administered its contents to the fellow. He watched the results closely to be sure of no fatal reaction. The stuff he had given was a drug which would keep the man senseless for daysЧor until the proper reactant was applied.
Satisfied, Doc put the brown man in a ventilated wall compartment where he would be unearthed by nothing less than a virtual wrecking of the place.
Doc went into the laboratory and consulted a weather chart, automatically recorded by his own instruments. It showed a prevailing northeasterly wind during the past few days.
The bronze man used another of the cars from a concealed garage which he maintained in the skyscraper basement. It was a small, plain delivery truck, and he chose it because more delivery trucks were abroad on the streets at this hour than any other vehicle.
He left the truck a short distance from the new slum clearance project excavation.
It was still dark, and the wetness of the heavy dew lay on the streets very much as if it had rained. Out on the river, tugs hooted, and on Brooklyn bridge, street cars made noise.
The excavation was near the foreign quarters, and some rather strangely-garbed persons were abroad. It was an excellent hiding region for the men of Jondore, a spot where their queer garb, their dark skins, would be unlikely to attract attention.
Knowing that the prevailing northeasterly wind would have carried dust from the excavation in a certain direction, Doc began his search.