"067 (B083) - The Red Terrors (1938-09) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

THE RED TERRORS
A Doc Savage Adventure
By Kenneth Robeson


Chapter I. THE RED MEN!
A SAILOR named Steve ate an apple, and killed thirty-eight men. By eating the apple, he killed the thirty-eight men just as effectively as though he had taken hold of the trigger of a machine gun and pumped lead into the victims. Steve's process, however, was a little slower and more terrible.
Steve bought his apple off a cart in Majunga, Madagascar. Apple vendors in Majunga have a habit of breathing on their apples when polishing them.
The merchant who breathed on Steve's apple had diphtheria.
Steve was a sailor on the steamer Muddy Mary. Muddy Mary was fairly fittingly named. Some of her crew said she should have been named Creaking Mary, or other things not so complimentary.
The Muddy Mary was an old hag of the sea, and like the old hags of the streets, she wandered around oceans, picking up a nickel here, a penny there.
She picked up Harry Day in Cape Town, South Africa. Harry Day was a man who had peculiarities of physical appearance which made him an easy person to remember; in other words, he was striking.
He had a great quantity of white hair, and each hair was as white as snow and as thick as a banjo string, and usually about six inches long. Every hair on his head also stood on end. His long face was a weather-beaten brown.
The effect was rather like an Indian with a headdress of white feathers. Also, Harry Day was sufficiently tall that he always cocked an eye at a doorway before he went through it, to see if it was high enough.
Harry Day was known all over the world as the deep-sea diver who went down to the U-71 when she lay trapped so deep that no other diver could make it.
Harry Day loaded his deep-sea equipment in the Muddy Mary hold, and the ship hoisted anchor, put out to sea and set a compass course for New Orleans.
The nicest thing that could be said about the Muddy Mary
' s speed was that she was slower than the itch. Even less could be said for her abilities in a storm, but she had one quality in common with the Rock of GibraltarЧevery wave that came along hit her with everything it had, and she could take it.
The six lifeboats she carried could not take it. The storm that hit the Muddy Mary in the middle of the South Atlantic smashed every last lifeboat aboard, tore the life raft off the deckhouse and carried away most of the ring life buoys.
But by that time, the crew didn't care much. There were thirty-eight men, crew and officers, and Harry Day, the only passenger. Three fourths of them were in their bunks with diphtheria. Some of the men in the bunks were dead; the corpses were left lying because no one had time or energy to give them sea burial, what with each man on his feet having to do the work of three on their backs.
Life on the Muddy Mary became a hysteria of fear and fatigue. The unsick were so driven that they could not tell whether they had contracted diphtheria or not. They had dizzy spells brought on by utter tiredness, and were stricken with needless terror lest they had diphtheria.
"Poke" Ames, one of the engine-room black gang, was such a case. At five o'clock, he grew dizzy and nearly fell over. Thereafter he worked silently, mouthed prayers for salvation, and didn't pay attention to his duties.
It was seven o'clock approximately when Poke Ames accidentally closed the wrong valves from the boilers to blow a thirty-foot hole in the belly of the Muddy Mary.
A lot of sea water can come through a thirty-foot hole.
HARRY DAY was in the forehold when the blast came, trying to spike down his heavy cases of diving equipment so that they would not be smashed by being tossed from one side of the ship to the other. He had just succeeded in securing every box so that it would not be broken when the explosion came and blew the cases loose again.
For thirty secondsЧand seconds could be long after an explosion like thatЧHarry Day lay on his back and screamed. He didn't believe, like the American Indians, that you were a coward and a weak sister if you screamed when in pain.
Harry Day was in pain. His left arm had been broken in three places.
When he picked himself up to stagger, still screaming, to the bulkhead door which offered the only exit except a hatch that he couldn't reach, he got the screams scared out of him, for the blast had jammed the bulkhead door. He couldn't get it open! He was trapped! He could tell from the way the floor began slanting that the Muddy Mary would be on top of the Atlantic four or five minutes more at a generous most.
Harry Day didn't want to die. Several newspapermen and an article writer for a magazine had written that the deep-sea diver Harry Day was a man unafraid of death. They were wrong. When he was diving, Harry Day knew what he had to do to be safe, and knew that if he did it, he would be safe.
Right now, he knew he was going to die. He knew nothing could save him. He was trapped in a fast-sinking ship, in a sea so rough that he would not have been any better off on deck. He was going to die.
He wanted to live. The superficial was stripped from everything, and one raw reality was left: death! And Harry Day wanted to live more than he had ever wanted anything, and more than he could ever want anything again. He wanted to live! Even for a minute! A few seconds!
That was why Harry Day, in wild haste, put on the diving suit he used for his deepest work. The suit was alloy steel reыnforced to withstand pressure. It was entirely self-contained; a mechanical "lung" supplied oxygen and purified exhaled air so it could be used again.
Harry Day, wearing the suit, resembled the cartoon pictures labeled "robot". Fortunately the suit was designed so it could be donned without external aid.
There was a telephonic device inside the helmet, and this ran to the amplifier. Earlier in the voyage, Harry Day had been demonstrating the communications arrangement to one of the Muddy Mary
' s officers, and the amplifier and loud-speaker were still attached to the microphone inside the helmet.
In his nervous haste to turn on the "lung", he also turned on the communicator. The result was that every sound Harry Day made inside the all-metal diving suit as the ship sank was amplified and poured from the loud-speaker.
FOR a time, there was only the doomed man's breathing. He was doomed; he knew that. This was an unfrequented part of the Atlantic between South America and Africa, where soundings showed depths of thousands of feet. And Harry Day's diving suit, modern as it was, would not let him descend to a depth of even a thousand feet and live.
Harry Day's breathing was staccato. He panted. He also made a small sound occasionally, the kind of noise that men make when very terrified. Such a sound as soldiers make when watching a bomb fall toward them, or some dogs when they see a man with a club.
The old Muddy Mary was breaking slowly amidships and folding up. The floor slant grew steeper and Harry Day went sliding to one end of the hold. Boxes of equipment slid down and piled up on him. The hatch caved under water pressure. Tons of sea poured in. It was the pouncing roar of a deluge that chased things around in the hold and jostled the diver in his suit.
The old steamer broke completely apart in the middle with loud whistles of escaping air and rotten-egg reports of hatches caving. The two halves then sank. Madly driven waves, fighting bubbles, and flotsam were soon all that showed where she had been.
Harry Day lay in his alloy steel diving suit and waited for the end. He was wishing he hadn't seized these few seconds of life. They were the worst moments he had ever lived.
There was little movement as the ship sank. But the needle on the water-pressure gauge inside the diving suit hood kept creeping up. Harry Day watched the needle with eyes that seemed to be trying to get out of their sockets.
Unexpectedly, Day's half of the steamer rolled over again. There was a great shock as heavy equipment cases toppled across the hold and landed on the diver.
A compressor-case came down on Day's broken left arm. The case weighed three tons. It bent the metal diving-suit terribly, and more bones broke in the diver's arm with sounds like traps catching rats.
Harry Day fainted.
IT was agony that brought Harry Day back to consciousness. Grinding, jerking, electric pain. Because he was so stupefied that he only knew he was being hurt, he yelled out in anger; but the anger turned to fear as he remembered he was in a ship that was sinking.
He had been senseless, but it must have been for only a few minutes, because it would not take long for the steamer to sink deep enough for pressure to crush his diving suit. Then he saw the luminous-dialed watch which was part of the instruments inside the hood.
The watch said it was nearly four hours since the ship sank.
Four hours! That couldn't be. Impossible! The water was thousands of feet deep all over this part of the Atlantic, according to the charts.