"063 (B064) - The Motion Menace (1938-05) - Ryerson Johnson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Ham sprang up, and looked very pleased. Chemistry sidled out of the suitcase, then turned around and looked it over gloomily.
The pig, Habeas, came out of the other case, also looked around, and showed his temper by making an abrupt rush at Chemistry, which the latter avoided with the agility of long practice. Habeas sat down and showed long, white tusks indignantly.
Ham complained, "Monk has been sharpening that hog's teeth again! Where's a hammer?"
He got up and walked off, looking.
Long Tom told Doc, "The pets were in the penthouse. The police were all over the House of Penroff building. They had found three dead men. Physicians declare each of the three dead men died in a most remarkable wayЧcomplete stoppage of all internal functions. Heart, lungs, everything, simply ceased working."
Long Tom paused, eyed Doc, and asked, "That's queer, isn't it?"
INSTEAD of answering, the bronze man said, "Penroff and his men were not there?"
"Every one of them got away," Long Tom admitted. "And what's more, they took their private records. They must have had everything set for a sudden flight. They left the radios, the tickers and the telegraph apparatus, of course. The stuff didn't prove anything. Lots of banks have their private communication systems."
"Nothing to indicate what this organization which calls itself the Elders is up to?" Doc queried.
"Not a thing."
"What are the police going to do?"
Long Tom shrugged. "They're stumped."
Ham called from somewhere, "Say, where d'you keep your carpenter tools?"
"Get out of there!" Long Tom yelled. "I got a lot of delicate apparatus in there, and I don't want you upsetting it!"
Ham muttered something.
There came footsteps; then Monk appeared. Monk had a large ear of corn in each hand. He waved the ears.
"What a town!" the homely chemist complained. "Where do you think I finally found some corn? In the Museum of Natural History! And dang near got caught stealing it!"
Long Tom snapped. "I thought you went out to gather information?"
"And vittles for my hog," Monk added. "With them Elders watchin' my laboratory, probably, Habeas's food supply is kinda tied up. I hadda findЧ"
He stopped and scowled at Ham, who had come in with a hammer. "Whatcha gonna do with that, shyster?"
"I intend to perform a dental operation on that hog," Ham said grimly.
Monk's howl would have done credit to a lion which had been stepped on by an elephant. "I'll hit you so hard you'll have to pull down your socks to pick your teeth! I'llЧ"
Doc Savage put in quietly, "What about the Munchen?"
When Monk and Ham started to quarrel, it went on for days.
"The Munchen," Monk said, "is due in Lakehurst in two hours."
"Did you book us on her?" Doc asked.
"Nope," Monk said. "The Munchen is taking no outside bookings, because she is under private charter."
Doc Savage was silent. Outwardly, at least. But his strange, small trilling noise was briefly audible.
"In two hours it will be dark," he said.
"It sure will. It's raining now."
"We'll have to move rather quickly," Doc said.
IN two hours, it was dark, and it was still raining. It was a warm kind of rain, seeming a bit sticky, somewhat remindful of clam juice. There was no thunder or lightning. The rain came out of clouds which were just high enough to clear the sleek back of the Munchen.
The Munchen was nine hundred and sixty feet of proof that somebody besides the Germans could build lighter-than-air craft. She was a hundred and eighty feet thick. She had been launched some six months previously, and had immediately assumed a schedule of regular flights around the world.
Her specialty was passengers who wanted to take a trip around the world by air. So far, there seemed to be quite a supply of them.
Besides Diesel motors and noninflammable gas, private cabins and a promenade deck, the Munchen had a billiard room, a dance orchestra, a floor show with some very snappy lady numbers, and a swimming pool. The swimming pool was not as nutty an idea as it appeared at first inspection. The water in it was really the supply of water ballast which all airships carry.
The Munchen also carried two airplanes in underside hangars, to be launched from the air and received back in the same manner. The planes delivered mail and picked it up from places where there were no facilities for handling a thing like the Munchen.
A factory nobody had ever heard of in a Balkan country which not many more had heard about had produced the Munchen.
The Munchen had arrived from Kansas City an hour ago. All the passengers had been put off, some of them indignantly. The new passengersЧall menЧwere aboard. But one of the four radio operators had not returned.
"Where is the radio operator?" Penroff demanded.
"The fool rushed out to see his girl who sent a note saying she was at the field!" complained the commander of the Munchen. "He has been gone an hour."
"Wait a few minutes," directed Viscount Herschel Penroff. "Then depart, leaving the idiot behind."
Viscount Herschel Penroff now had red hair, a nose the tint of a ripe apple, and a beer drinker's circumference. This disguise was for the benefit of the police, who were looking for him.
The commander of the airship saluted briskly at the command to give the radio man ten minutes.
"Every man of the crew is one of us," he said. "We have bomb technicians and gas experts. We can install the bomb racks once we pick them up at the Manchurian Preparation Area headquarters. It will require no alterations."
"Of course!" snapped Penroff, who seemed to be in a bad temper. "When the Elders had this craft built, all that was prepared for!"
A shout advised them that the radio man was coming. A moment later, two men helped the missing radio operator up the companion, not very gently.
The knight of the wireless key carried under each arm a brown bottle with a long neck, and the corks were loose in the necks of the bottles. The radio man had a duck gait, a breath which would have exploded.
"Good olsh palshy-walshy," he hiccoughed.
"Dump the fool in his cabin!" screamed the commander.
A couple of the crew carried the intoxicated radio operator, who was a meek-looking, entirely bald-headed old gaffer, called "Sparks" in honor of his trade, into his cabin and stuffed him in his bunk.