"059 (B061) - The Living Fire Menace (1938-01) - Harold Davis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

And in one corner, barely visible, was a crouching figure!
For several moments the bronze man studied the scene intently. Then he flicked off the small television set.
A second later, Doc opened another panel. A queer set of assorted switches came into view. Above them were two huge, oval, mercury tubes. A dull light glowed in the tubes as the bronze man pushed the switches home. A faint hum sounded for an instant, rose to a high pitch, then died out.
Doc walked over, opened the door, and entered calmly into the room where the crouching figure lurked.
A girl glanced up. In her hand she held a small, deadly automatic. Long black curls framed an almost flawless face.
She saw the opening door. She shrieked, raised her gun and fired. In the same instant she hurled two black cylinders she had in her other hand to the floor. The cylinders shattered into many pieces.
"To what am I indebted for your call?" came the low, peculiarly carrying voice of Doc Savage.
For an instant it appeared the girl was going to faint. The gun dropped from her nerveless fingers. Her dark eyes were strained wide, terror showing in their depths.
Frantically, those eyes probed every hidden recess of the room, every dark corner.
They could see nothing.
"AЧa trick!" she breathed.
Strong hands caught her wrists, lifted her easily from her feet.
And if the girl had been frightened before, now she was panic-stricken. She could feel the grip of those hands, knew there must be some one there before her, some one who had grabbed her.
Her tongue stuck to the top of her mouth. She tried to scream, but emitted only a faint moan. Her eyes dropped downЧand her heart seemed to stop.
She could not see her own body either. She, also, had become invisible.
She slumped, inert.
HAD the girl retained consciousness, she would have understood much. She was carried to a small sofa, laid there gently. Then a click sounded from the adjoining room as Doc released the switches he had pressed a few moments before.
Almost immediately he became visible again.
There was nothing supernatural about any of it. The faint sound the bronze man had heard in the hallway had told him some one had broken into his office. The low whisper he had given had merely been the proper tone to operate a familiar robot, a mechanical device that opened a sliding panel in a wall that looked solid.
And while becoming invisible was not commonplace, it was something that had been done before.
The switches he had operated had released a series of short high-powered light waves, known as invisible rays. As those rays struck a human being, that human gradually vanished simply because the eye could not distinguish it when penetrated by the speeding beams. Doc had not invented the process; that had been done by Stephan Pribil, a Hungarian scientist. But the bronze man had improved it, so that invisibility came almost immediately.
The bronze man knelt beside the girl, held smelling salts under her nose. She stirred restlessly, half opened her eyes, only to close them.
"Who sent you here?"
Doc's voice dropped even lower than usual. It held a queer, hypnotic quality.
"IЧI came because I wished to."
The words came from the girl's lips dully, the voice that of a person speaking in his sleep.
"What did you wish?"
"I came to destroy a record I knew you must have. I came to keepЧ"
With startling suddenness the girl pulled erect on the sofa. Fear, tinged with horror, flamed in her dark eyes. One hand pressed against her lips.
"You are in no danger," Doc Savage said quietly.
The girl's eyes sought the bronze man's face.
"Doc Savage," she breathed.
The bronze man nodded. "Now if you will explain who you are, and what you desired here?" he suggested.
Fear returned to her eyes. "IЧI can't! I can't!"
"But you must. It is necessary that I know. Some one has seized two of my men. I must knowЧ"
Doc broke off suddenly. A hideous uproar had burst loose in the hallway just outside the door.
The sounds were almost indescribable. First came the lordly roar of a bull ape, a fearsome sound. It was followed instantly by the shrill grunt of an angered pig.
As the girl's lips parted and her hands clenched, there was a furious burst of fighting. The pig seemed to be going wild as it squealed in rage. The bull ape's roars increased in violence.
There was a sudden, desperate squeal from the ape, then a ripping sound, as if that ape had been torn in two.
The door burst open. A gangling figure with long, apelike arms appeared. It had a titanic chest, with practically no hips, and the small eyes were almost lost in pits of gristle. Coarse, reddish hair covered the skin.
Behind that figure came a lean, dapper man who could have passed as a fashion plate at any time, so well was he dressed. He was waving a cane furiously, his face red with anger.
"That blasted pig can't win all the time!" he roared.
"Meet Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, known as Monk for quite obvious reasons," Doc said, with just a suspicion of a smile. "Pursuing him, dressed in the latest mode as usual, is Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, more often called Ham."
There was sudden silence. The girl's glance went from one to the other of the newcomers with quick comprehension.
"Monk" stopped as if he had run into a ten-ton truck. A slow flush crept over his homely face.
"Ham" grinned openly, his anger disappearing as quickly as it had come. It always amused him to see Monk get flustered in the presence of a pretty girl.
"It was this ape here making all the noise," he explained maliciously. "Somewhere he found an out-of-work radio imitator who taught him to make those hideous sounds. He's been making them ever since, always pretending he's a pig licking an ape."
"At least he hasn't been able to figure out any way for the ape to lick the pig," Monk put in. His thin, childlike voice always came as a shock to those who first heard it. It sounded so out of place compared with his hulking frame.
Doc said nothing for the moment. Monk and Ham were always fighting each other when there was no one else to fight. Their quarreling dated far back to War days.
Yet despite the fact that they never seemed to work, Ham was known as Harvard's gift to the legal profession, an outstanding attorney; and Monk was a gifted chemist.