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

Pat would not have been as confident had she seen the expression on the wrinkled visage of the old owl at the tunnel mouth. He was smiling grimly, and talking to himself.
"It is best that she learn now how hopeless her position is," he chuckled.
He waited. Obviously, he was expecting something to happen. It did.
There was a scream. Pat's voice! Tearing with horror! She screeched again, long, drawn-out, starting loud, and trailing off to an end that was almost a whimper.
The violinlike singing sounds kept on steadily. There was a definitely sinister quality about them.
Pat appeared. Running. Staggering, rather. She did not seem to be wounded. Yet she weaved and could hardly walk. And upon her face was an awful whiteness.
Men were appearing from whatever tasks had employed them. They ran until they saw Pat, after which they stopped and stared.
"Get the physician!" one of them called.
Pat weaved to the hut where she had been confined. She collapsed in the door, and began to wring her arms, to beat them against her sides and against the ground. Her eyes were almost glazed. She mumbled, delirious with agony.
The men gathered around her. With great solicitude, they clasped her wrists and arms and began to knead and pat them. They still didn't forget to bow before each small service.
Pat moaned, "OhЧthatЧthatЧhorrorЧ"
An old man in the background said solemnly, "She knows, now."
"Yes," said another, with equal solemnity. "And she is a nice young woman, with courage. It is sad."
Pat, in her delirium of pain, rolled and mumbled. In her blankness, she seemed to be trying to convey a warning.
"Doc!" she moaned incoherently. "You won't guessЧyou'll never haveЧa chance!"
Her mumblings became weaker and weaker and her movements less and less, as if an unseen beast of silence were slowly swallowing her.
Chapter III. DEATH FANTASTIC
THERE were occasions when Doc Savage would have better been a more ordinary-looking individual. As it was, his appearance was so striking that he could hardly put a foot on the street without being recognized. Almost all New York knew him.
He towered in any crowd. His skin had a distinctive bronze tint. His hair was an unusual bronze hue, only a bit darker than his skin. His eyes were striking, like pools of flake gold always stirred. And the eyes possessed something magnetic.
For the last few weeks, Doc had been molested. People were spying on him. Doormen, clerks, newsboys, taxi drivers. When asked the idea, they freely admitted they were gathering information for a series of articles on the bronze man by a newspaper syndicate. They got paid for each tip they turned in about him.
Doc never gave interviews, so the syndicate seemed to be using this other method. There was no law against it.
So Doc at the moment was using obscure routes to his headquarters on the eighty-sixth floor of the city's most prominent skyscraper. He came out in the skyscraper lobby and beat three autograph-seekers to an elevator.
The elevator operator immediately whisked his passenger upward. He did not say anything.
Doc Savage said, "You are new here, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir," the operator replied as tonelessly as a machine.
"Whose place did you take?"
"Walter's, sir."
"Walter is a nice boy," Doc Savage said.
"Yes, sir."
The elevator reached the eighty-sixth floor. The operator opened the door.
Doc Savage stepped out. Then he reached back into the elevator, grasped the operator and pulled him out. The fellow made noises like a tomcat. He kicked, struck and even spat.
Doc Savage gripped a handful of the left breast of the operator's coat. The coat fabric was a stout weave. Yet it tore away as if it were ancient cheesecloth. Altogether, Doc's fingers got coat, shirt, undershirtЧand a flat pistol and its holster.
The operator continued to fight. He hung limp finally, not because he had given up, but because his strength was gone.
"HowЧhow'd you fall to me?" he asked thickly.
"It came out as a matter of routine checking, a safety-first check, we call it," the bronze man said without emotion. "Walter's parents were called. It developed he has not been home for a week. Each day or so, he telephones to say he is all right, and merely not coming home because he is working overtime."
The operator said nothing.
"Where is the other operatorЧWalter?" Doc Savage asked.
"You won't get nothin' outta me!" the other snarled. "And if you're wise, you'll let me go and forget about it!"
"And why?"
"Because you're stickin' your nose into somethin' a lot bigger than you dream!"
DOC SAVAGE did not look particularly alarmed. He propelled the prisoner to the door of his headquarters suiteЧa bronze-colored panel which bore his name in letters so small as to be hardly noticeable. Inside, there was an impressive anteroom. Beyond was another room, much more vast, which was a library. One if the world's greatest collections of scientific tomes was there.
There was a third room, also huge. The laboratory. The chamber of magic where the man of bronze concocted some of his amazing scientific gadgets.
Doc Savage stopped on the threshold of the laboratory. Something had arrested him. His trilling noise came into being briefly.
The bronze man stepped swiftly to a panel in the wall which looked innocent enough, but which, when opened by some undetected catch, disclosed a number of recording instruments similar to inking barometers. Each was glass-enclosed. They were attached to the establishment's remarkable system of burglar alarms, and registered any furtive entrance into the place.
Every one of the devices had stopped working.
The bronze man whipped a quick gaze over the laboratory. There was just one thing there that should not have been. Stillness! Utter silence.
Doc Savage was carrying on experiments with the effect of electrochemical stimulation on musculature, and he had a number of guinea pigs, parrots, pigeons, in the place. They should have been moving about.
Every one of the live things was dead!
The captive elevator operator looked around. He was scared. He had seen the dead things.
"It's beenЧtheyЧ" He threw back his head and blared out a howl of utter fright. "If it comes back and catches us here, we'll die!"