"033 (B015) - Murder Melody (1935-11) - Laurence Donovan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc whipped the plane over so suddenly the wings shrilled with the strain. The searchlight again pointed upon the glass-like cylinder. He could not distinguish figures clearly inside. The bronze man knew instantly Johnny and Monk were down there.
It would be one of their pistols the girl Lanta was speaking about. Doc decided instantly. He did not know whether his voice could reach the girl. But he spoke quietly into the radio transmitter.
"Push down catch on right side of gun and start drum revolving with thumb on button at top. This will not kill
Ч it uses only mercy bullets."
The answer came back: "Oh, you hear me! I understand. Look upЧhere on the wall. I am Lanta."
Doc again whipped the plane over. The searchlight beam shot across the shining glacial cliff. So small at the distance they seemed to be only large insects, half a dozen figures were outlined against the ice. One small dot was far above the others.
But as the bronze man risked crashing and roared directly toward them, he could see the lower figures were rising rapidly. They apparently were men equipped with the magnetic-gravitational belts.
Though their hands touched the glacial wall here and there, this was only for the purpose of guiding their course upward. Doc caught the wicked gleam of several death music tubes.
Apparently the girl lacked a magnetic belt. The bronze man had a flashing view of her slender figure flattened against the wall, high up. He could see the treacherous fault in the ice by which she had climbed to this point. Her radio communication had come from the same portable device Doc had encountered on the body of the man murdered in the park.
RISKING a head-on crash, the man of bronze shot the plane at the ice wall. His keen eyes brought the girl's delicate features into focus. Her large eyes, straight nose and patrician cast of countenance made her more beautiful than she had seemed in the television window the night before.
A garment of golden cloth was molded to her slim, curving form. Her hair of lustrous black was bound with a single, broad band of the same golden material. Her eyes were of enormous size, shining in the reflection of the searchlight ray.
And in her hands the girl clutched one of Doc's own huge and clumsy-looking mercy pistols.
Doc pulled the amphibian into a nose stall just in time to avoid crashing into the ice. As he did, he saw that three of the girl's pursuers were closing in on her. Apparently she had reached the highest point to which she could climb. Doc glimpsed the shining of the murder flutes.
Compact as it was, the tail assembly of the bronze man's plane cracked a warning so abruptly, he brought the ship around. His own supermachine pistol was in his hand. He saw the girl had not mastered the mechanism of the weapon she held. She was completely cornered.
Doc snapped open the window beside the controls. One wing tip was but a few feet from brushing the ice, as the plane swooped past the glacial wall. Doc's mercy pistol erupted with rattling speed.
The weapon was capable of discharging sixty drugged mercy bullets faster than the most efficient machine gun. As the plane went by, the three closest figures seemed to lose interest in Lanta. Their death flutes flew from their hands.
The bronze man had aimed directly at these weird murder weapons. Not only were the closest men robbed of these, but the mercy bullets slapped into their hands and arms. Almost instantly, they were floating away from the wall. All the strength to hold themselves in position had been taken from them.
The mercy bullets would not kill. But for perhaps two hours the victims would be unconscious. Doc employed this means of overcoming criminal enemies. Usually, when they recovered, they discovered themselves on the way to an institution in upper New York State, where their sick brains would be treated.
After having been cared for by medical specialists employed by Doc Savage, those of criminal tendencies forgot all of their past. They had a new start in life, with their minds made well.
Again Doc banked and pulled the plane around. This time he cut off the motors. Within the cabin sounded the eerie, exotic trilling that came to the bronze man in moments of stress, or of intense concentration and decision. Sometimes he was unconscious of this weird sounding of notes.
And now, as silence fell inside the plane's cabin except for this trilling, Doc's exotic melody mingled with another weird, but slightly shriller, wailing. The girl's other pursuers were close upon her. Two or three were blowing upon the death flutes.
DOC saw the girl shrink back. Still holding the mercy pistol, she attempted to stop her ears. She seemed to be slowly slipping from her perilous hold on the high ice wall.
The bronze man was compelled to bank the plane and come around before he could again employ his own mercy pistol. He throttled the motors into power once more. And as he did, he heard the rippling staccato of a gun.
The plane's light picked out the girl. She was still clinging to the wall. All of the men who had pursued her were floating helplessly close to the ice. The death music had ceased to play. The girl waved one hand, as if directing Doc's attention to the ice field below.
The bronze man slanted the nose of the plane. From the glasslike cylinder two dark figures were running across the flat ice field. Doc identified the tall, angular Johnny and the curiously loping apelike Monk. They were apparently making a dash for the wall on which the girl was clinging.
But Lanta was no longer there. Risking a bad crash, Doc dropped the plane swiftly upon the glacial field. It was not nearly as smooth as it had seemed from the air. Rough hummocks wiped out both retractive landing wheels. The pontoon slid along for many yards. Then one wing tip caught an uneven break in the ice and the amphibian went nosing over, shattering both propellers.
Doc seemed to bound from the plane as if he had been thrown from a catapult. As he alighted on his feet, his cabled muscles cushioned the impact. He slid along, but remained erect. Monk cried out in a high, squeaking voice.
Johnny and the big chemist were halfway from the cylinder to the glacial wall. Looking up, Doc saw the girl Lanta plunge outward. She was falling into more than two hundred feet of space. Then one of the strangest things Doc and his men had ever witnessed happened.
One of the girl's enemies was floating near by and close to the wall. Lack of gravity made him appear like a small, stuffed sausage drifting in mid-air. One of the girl's slender hands had caught his tunic. Her plunging weight started the body downward.
The gravity belt of the unconscious man compensated for the strong downward pull. Doc could hear Monk's amazed gasp.
The unconscious man had saved the girl Lanta as efficiently as if she had been equipped with an open parachute. Her golden curving figure was coming toward them. At this instant, the weird wailing of flutes again broke out.
UNOBSERVED, half a dozen men had been creeping from the glassy cylinder. They had approached within a few yards of Johnny and Monk, concealing themselves in fissures of the glacial field. Doc saw his two companions start a new dash toward the wall. Their pursuers seemed fleeter of foot.
Without warning, the girl Lanta swung up the clumsy mercy pistol. It was aimed at Johnny and Monk. The weapon started spouting bullets. Johnny and Monk were wearing bulletproof vests of overlapping fine scales, invented by Doc. Strangely, the girl seemed to know this.
Monk squealed, "Howlin' calamities, don'tЧ"
One hand slapped at his leg. He pitched to his face, unable to finish his exclamation. Johnny also had fallen. The girl had aimed the mercy bullets at their knees.
The girl Lanta started toward Doc. His own mercy pistol was in his hands. With triumphant cries, the men with the death flutes ran toward them. The bronze man received the full impact of the weird melody. It was dizzying, but his great resistance kept him on his feet.
He brought up the supermachine pistol. One burst and the players of the deadly music would be removed. The girl Lanta had stopped abruptly. She was staring at Doc as he swayed a little on his feet. Her pistol erupted bullets.
The bronze man felt a sting in one leg from a bullet of his own devising. Even then, he had resistance enough to have shot the girl.
But the bronze man lapsed into unconsciousness without having fired the bullet that would have rendered Lanta helpless.
Chapter 7. THE BEWITCHED SHIP
RENNY'S great hands looked like small hams on the controls of the plane. At the moment Ham had been informing Doc they were falling, the motors picked up again.
The streamlined amphibian, similar to that in which Doc Savage crashed on the ice field above Capilano Canyon, was twitched from a near plunge into icy waters. In the blackness of the night the cold gray sea which washed the rocky, forbidding Aleutian Islands, had been only a white-toothed space far below.
Doc's three companions, daringly following the directions given by the SOS calls of the S.S. Narwhal, had seen the peaked shadows of sudden mountains rushing past. Though the plane was equipped with special heating and oxygen devices, the chill of the Arctic crept in.
Renny's booming voice had been the first to announce sighting the distressed ship. The lights of the little steamer had showed as merely a blob of dancing illumination. At times, the ship vanished in vagrant fields of fog which drifted perpetually around the barren rocky chain of the Aleutians.
Then had come Doc's radio call. Ham's announcement they were out of control had only been uttered when their radio reception was blanked out. A vast roaring filled the space around them. Renny's success in snatching the plane from the very tops of the rough and hungry waves left them speechless until the motors were working in smooth rhythm.
Ham jimmied around with the radio broadcaster. All of its elements seemed to be dead. As Renny pulled the plane into a wide circle, they were looking almost directly down upon a cone-shaped island. In the heart of this cone glowed a dull fire.
For the second time in a few minutes the volcanic peak burst into eruption. One side of the small mountain seemed to crumble into the sea. On the resultant tidal wave the small steamship rolled wildly and danced. For a few seconds it appeared as if the ship had been overwhelmed in a rushing wall of water.
Long Tom had been watching the island peak closely. He was an undersized man compared to Doc and the others, and his face had an unhealthy bilious cast. Usually slow of speech he was almost the equal of Doc himself in being sure before he spoke.
Long Tom said suddenly, "Something came out of that crater on that second eruption."
Ham, who was inclined to some sarcasm at all times, most of which he employed to bedevil the now absent Monk, replied.