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

Doc then made an investigation. But his search netted him nothing.
He went down into the street. A policeman was questioning the drivers of the cars which had stopped so suddenly and caused all the mixup. All the men were drivers of the taxicabs which Doc had hired. They were being raked over the coals.
"How the hell do I know what happened, I tell you!" one driver yelled irately. "My hack musta locked gears or somethin'. It just up and stopped!"
"Same here," said another driver earnestly.
"Fishy," grumbled the cop. "Very fishy!"
Several persons recognized Doc Savage and started asking him questions. Doc escaped and went back to the alley. The prisoner was still in the cab, still in the strangely rigid condition.
Doc got into the cab and drove it down to a thoroughfare very near Wall Street. He picked the prisoner up and carried him into a towering office building.
A private elevator served the penthouse. Doc walked in, the rigid man over one shoulder, and said, "Andrew Blodgett Mayfair's laboratory."
The gaping elevator operator let the bronze man and his burden out in an ultra-modernistic hallway. It was doubtful if there was a more flamboyant-looking hall in the city.
Doc stopped and listened.
A man was groaning. Swearing, rather, but he was doing it in a tone so low and full of horror that it sounded as if he were groaning.
DOC SAVAGE lunged for a chromium slab of a door, shouldered it open, and halted.
There was a dazzling, modernistic table of glass and chromium in the center of the room. On the table lay a pig.
The pig was quite a specimen of the genus porker. It had long ears, no body worth mentioning, a tremendous snoot, and wing-sized ears. It seemed to be dead.
"Doc!" squeaked a tiny, boylike voice. "Quick! I've been tryin' to locate you! Habeas! He's dead! Can't you do somethin'? You gotta! Here! Look! Oh, hurry!"
The author of this machine gun volley of pleas was as unusual-looking in his race as the hog he was so anxious about was in his.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair was, as might be expected, called "Monk." His resemblance to an ape would not permit anything else. Back of his forehead, which was not an inch wide, was a brain that had gotten him the repute of being one of the greatest living industrial chemists.
"I was out!" he wailed. "I came back. Somethin' had happened! My clocks had stopped. So had a generator. So had my air-conditioning machine. And Habeas was dead! Doc, do somethin'!"
The bronze man lowered his burden and went to the pig. The shote was Habeas Corpus, and he was no ordinary hog. He was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair's pet, and if not the only trained hog in captivity, he was surely the most adept.
"Adrenaline!" Doc said abruptly.
Monk ran into his laboratory. He knew what the adrenaline was going to be used for, so he brought a syringe with a long needle.
Doc Savage ran the needle of the hypodermic into the pig's heart and squirted in the adrenaline. Then he worked over the shote with skilled fingers.
Monk danced about. He would rather have parted with his right arm than lose the hog.
Doc did not seem to be having much luck. He himself whipped into the laboratory, to come back soon with more chemicals. He began mixing them, administering them, experimenting.
Monk wailed, "I don't savvy what's happenin'!"
"This same thing occurred at my place," Doc told him. "The animals and birds on hand for scientific experimental purposes were all killed. None had a mark on them. You notice that Habeas is unmarked."
"That's what gets my goat!" Monk groaned. "What's done it?"
Doc Savage said quietly, "It is something a good deal more dangerous than anything we ever ran across before."
Monk's small, boylike voice was thoughtful as he said, "That takes in a lot of territory."
Chapter IV. WHISKERED TROUBLE
MONK, unable to stand still, took a stamping turn and almost fell over Doc's prisoner.
"Who's this?" the apish chemist howled.
"Spy," Doc said. "Have not questioned him."
Monk popped his hands together, grimaced.
"Unjinx 'im, Doc," he requested. "I'll make 'im recite for us!"
Doc came over to the prisoner and relieved that strange paralysis by a pressure on the nerve centers.
The prisoner groaned and felt of his neck.
Monk yelled, "Tell us everything you know!"
"Hell with you!" the captive snarled.
The man probably expected a third degree. It was doubtful if his worst fears approached what he did get. Monk picked him up bodily, slammed him against a wall, caught him on the bounce, crashed him to the floor, then picked him up by the ears alone. Monk let loose, hit him in the middle, straightened the fellow with a smash under the jaw.
Monk gloried in trouble. Doc had a policy of never doing any more physical damage to an enemy than could be helped, but Monk had never thought much of the policy.
"Monk!" Doc admonished.
"I know," Monk said. "No unnecessary violence. Right now, my hog has been killed. Why, blast my hide, if this guyЧ"
Thump!
Monk knocked the prisoner against the wall again with a blow, let him fall, then jumped onto him. Sitting on the fellow's middle, Monk grabbed an arm and calmly began to pull the fingers out of joint.
The man, screaming, blubbered, "I'll tell you!"
THE man wailed and stuttered in his haste to get information out.
He was a private detective. Not of the good class. Divorce evidence, bodyguards, strike-breaking, maybe a framing now and then.
An old man with a beard had hired him to watch Doc Savage. The old man with the beard had paid plenty. The elevator operator had been kidnaped but was alive and well, and would be released. He was in a house on West Sixteenth Street. Alone. If the police went there, they could free him.
Monk took off at this point to call the police and tell them to raid the house.