"044 (B077) - The South Pole Terror (1936-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Monk grinned. There was nothing pleasant about the grin.
"Then we'd better get on our plane," he offered.
"Right," the bronze man agreed. "And we'll take this man Ward, if that is his name."
Ward paled. He gave a fluttering sigh.
"Might as well shoot me," he growled. "We'll drown trying to have that plane pick us up."
THEY did not drown. Doc Savage went below and started a pump forcing fuel out of a vent in the stern. This spread over the sea. It did not flatten the waves out, but it did stop them from breaking. It was the break of a wave that would do damage to the plane.
A few blinked signals with a light, then Ham came down. He leveled off, floated gingerly. The plane was like a big fly approaching a hot skillet.
"I bet Ham wishes he'd practiced up on his flying recentlike," snorted Monk, half anxiously.
Ham was a highly skilled airman. He proved it. He got down without even wetting the wing tip floats.
Doc Savage threw the man Ward overboard, then followed him. Monk came last. The water, covered with oil, was a messy place to swim in. But it was a pond alongside the breaking seas outside the oil area.
They climbed into the plane while it went up and down on the sea, twenty and more feet at a time.
Doc Savage took the controls, jazzed the throttles, then hauled them wide open. He set prop pitch and wing slots for the maximum climb. The ship wallowed down into a trough, up and upЧand up! The sea fell away; the murk of the sky absorbed them.
"Whew!" Monk said. "Habeas, you just shook hands with the old guy with the scythe."
Habeas Corpus, the pig, grunted affectionately, ambled over and calmly bit the simian, Chemistry, by way of expressing satisfaction with Monk's return. Chemistry burst into an uproar which only a member of the monkey family could manage.
"Hey!" Ham howled, and kicked furiously at Habeas.
Habeas dodged with a precision gained of long practice. Chemistry picked up Ham's sword cane, which reposed on the seat, and brought it down with terrific force on Habeas. The pig's squeal put the monkey's earlier racket to shame.
"Hey!" Monk squawled, and threw the handiest thing, a binocular case, at Chemistry.
Ham made a snarling noise and started for Monk, gritting, "I'll skin you alive for that, youЧyouЧorangutan!"
"Come on, you barrister fashion plate!" Monk invited.
Ward, the fake steward, plunged suddenly for the plane's door. He wrenched, got it open and set himself to lunge through into space.
Then he gave a loud gasp and lay down, partially out of the door, but not enough so that he fell.
Monk and Ham, their fracas forgotten, rushed forward.
Monk picked up the wrench which Doc Savage had seized from a cockpit pocket and thrown, knocking Ward senseless. Monk returned the wrench to the pocket.
"We should 'a' kept an eye on 'im," the homely chemist squeaked. "But I was so glad to see Ham that I was gonna beat his liver out."
Ham got Ward back inside, got the door shut.
"What are we gonna do with this client of ours?" he asked.
"Take him to New York and question him," Doc Savage said.
"It won't be easy to gouge out what he knows," Monk hazarded. "The guy was willin' to commit suicide a minute ago, to get himself out of our hands."
Ham asked, "What about Long Tom?"
"We will go over that south-southeast course from Montauk lightship and see what we find," Doc Savage said.
THEY did not find anything, except water and darkness. There was not even much wind, a fact which moved Monk to rumination.
"Queer thing about that wind," offered the homely chemist. "It was only blowing a gale over a narrow area around the liner Regis."
Doc Savage's regular metallic features did not change expression.
"The strange heat which wrought such havoc on the Regis was apparently confined to a narrow patch of the sea," he pointed out. "Heat causes expansion of the air. Cooling and resultant contraction of the air after the heat vanished would naturally cause a wind of some strength."
No more of consequence was said until they had flown the south-southeast course from Montauk lightship, starting far out to sea and working in until they plainly distinguished the winking of the light itself.
It was dark, so Doc Savage had not relied on the doubtful efficiency of their unaided eyes. He had used an infra-ray scannerЧa contrivance consisting of two units, the first being a projector, literally a gigantic searchlight in power, which hurled invisible, fog-and-darkness penetrating light rays outside the visible spectrum. The second unit was a scanner, mechanical and electrical in nature, which rendered the infra-rays visible.
The complicated mechanical thing had shown nothing.
"Take the back course," Doc Savage directed. "We'll try it again."
He turned the controls over to Ham. The bronze man then removed the big film roll from an infra-ray camera which operated in conjunction with the scanner, and began going over the photographs of their back course with a magnifier. He saw, on one of the prints, something interesting.
It resembled a big swordfish fin, except that no swordfish fin would seem that large from such a height. On the edge of the print was automatically photographed the time to splits of seconds, and he calculated the position of the object from that. They flew back.
It was a wing of Long Tom's plane.
Doc Savage landed the seaplane near by, went overboard by the light of a flare, and swam to the wreckage. It was bad. A fragment of a wing, most of the air cells punctured. The lower end, where it had been attached to the plane, was badly mangled. Doc spent time there, examining.
He came back aboard with something in his bronze fingers.
"What's that?" Monk grunted. "A fish scale?"
Doc passed the object over for scrutiny. Monk, looking at it, revolving it in his hands, acquired a puzzled expression.
"Metal," he said. "Or is it? Seems kinda light. Looks as if it had been chipped off something."
Doc asked, "Did you ever see the broken glass from the container inside an ordinary vacuum bottle?"
"Eh?" Monk muttered. "This does look kinda similar. But blamed if I see the connection."
Doc did not elaborate.
They spent a long time hunting for Long Tom's body and did not find it.