Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (49 page)

“Tell me all about it,” invited Pat eagerly.

Monk grinned widely, boasting, “We practically licked the whole Jap army and air force already.”

Pat frowned. “That wasn’t in the papers.”

Talk of newspapers caused Johnny Littlejohn to move to a long director’s table where an assortment of newspapers and magazines were strewn. He began riffling through them, frowning as he realized they were all a month out of date.

Monk asked Pat, “Whatever happened to that Hornetta Hale dame you partnered up with before we left?”

Pat shrugged. “Last I heard of her, she was trying to get machine guns fitted on her private plane, and was talking a wild streak about personally strafing Tokyo.”

The door opened and Doc Savage entered. “Every official in Washington appears to be too busy with urgent war planning to speak with me at this time.”

Ham offered, “They may be upset with us for taking such a long detour home.”

“Conceivably,” admitted Doc.

“Exactly where were you all these weeks?” Pat demanded.

“Mongolia,” said Long Tom.

“China,” thumped Renny.

“All over creation,” clarified Monk. “And places in between.”

“That explains why you all need a shave and haircuts,” quipped Pat. “Stop by my place sometime. It will be my treat.”

The bronze man began issuing orders. “Monk, prepare our largest amphibian for take-off on short notice.”

Monk brightened. “Where are we goin’ next?”

“Where we can do the most good. Renny, a fresh crop of graduates will be released from our College with the New Year. Instead of offering them vocational reeducation, we will encourage the abled-bodied ones to enlist in the armed forces. This will speed up the matriculation process and ensure a steady steam of fresh fighting men for the war effort.”

“While we’re at it,” boomed Renny, “I can fly up there and give them a head start on their basic training.”

Doc eyed Ham next. “Look into legal matters relating to our international operations.”

“Righto, Doc.”

As the trio rushed to telephones, Johnny inquired, “How may I help?”

“You are still recuperating, Johnny. Best you get well. There will be enough to do in the weeks and months ahead.”

“What about me?” asked Pat eagerly.

“A fresh batch of newspapers would be very helpful,” requested Doc. “We are several days behind current developments.”

Pat looked as if she wanted to argue the point, but decided against it. The bronzed girl ran out to buy any newspaper she could find, soon returning with one armload, then rushing out to locate any Extras just hitting the streets.

There were a lot of them. Pat distributed these among Doc’s men, who had scattered over the vast eighty-sixth floor headquarters, leaving Doc and Johnny Littlejohn alone.

Johnny went over the stories as fast as the papers came in, covering his indignation with a scholarly aloofness.

“Not as bad as might be expected,” he admitted grudgingly.

Johnny had carried over some of his disrespect for newspapers from his days as an eminent professor of archeology and geology in a staid eastern university.

“There is no mention of our recent operations,” noted Doc Savage. “Nor of your remarkable discovery, which is just as well.”

“Indubitably,” agreed Johnny. He put the newspapers aside and picked up a notebook on Cadwiller Olden, which Doc stored in the library for convenience. He came to a picture of Olden, which gave the fellow’s exact weight, well under a hundred pounds, and his startlingly tiny measurements.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” Johnny remarked. “I fail to understand this fellow. He was tiny. I would think he would try to have someone around him who was near his own size. Instead, he forever surrounded himself with a bunch of giants.”

“He was a psychological case,” Doc said.

“Obviously.”

“Most geniuses are psychological cases, although some of them hide it so well the world never knows,” the bronze man remarked. “Something in an otherwise ordinary fellow drives him on and on and he becomes a genius, either at some good profession, or outside the law.”

“In Cadwiller Olden’s case, it was his size.”

“Exactly. He was so small he had become terribly sensitive to it. So he became consumed with the idea of dominating others, of having persons much larger than he completely at his mercy. The quickest way he could get power, evidently he decided, was to turn crook, and do a good job of it.”

“The same idea a lot of others have had,” Johnny muttered.

“The penitentiaries are full of fellows who got those ideas,” Doc agreed.

Johnny continued to read. Then, he put the book aside and went to a large terrestrial globe in the library. A red adhesive marker stuck to the globe at a point where the city of Tokyo lay in the islands of Japan.

“I had not noticed this before,” he murmured. “You have been anticipating trouble from this quarter.”

“We have our work cut out for us,” Doc Savage said grimly.

Johnny took from his lapel his monocle magnifier, and started polishing it studiously. This was a certain sign that the scholarly archeologist had something serious on his mind.

Doc Savage noticed this, and caught Johnny’s eye.

“I have been considering all that has transpired in the last few weeks,” Johnny declared. “And I cannot help but admit to my shortcomings and outright failures in the lamentable affair of Tamerlane.”

“You did your best, as you always do,” Doc assured him.

“Perhaps. But many perished due to my overweening thirst for historical knowledge. I cannot ever forget that.” The reedy archeologist abruptly pocketed his glass. “I have been considering leaving the Doc Savage organization,” he added quietly. “Retiring, actually.”

“That does not sound like you, Johnny.”

“Perhaps it does not. But I am a changed man. I am thinking of returning to the classroom, where I can do no further harm.”

Doc eyed him steadily. “You can do more good as part of our group. Now that America is at war, your expertise will be needed more than ever.”

“It is good of you to say that.” There was a catch in the archeologist’s voice. When Johnny tried to resume speaking, his voice broke. He swallowed several times. “I bungled one of the greatest archeological discoveries in history when I assisted in the resurrection of one of history’s worst conquerors. And that was only the beginning of my folly.” His voice was warped with emotion.

Doc told him, “Tamerlane would have been discovered by someone at some point, if not during this present century, in a future one.”

“Yes, I suppose that it true,” admitted Johnny.

“And if you had not summoned me to help, his deferred plans for conquest might have succeeded this time.”

Johnny’s grave face brightened. “I had not contemplated that eventuality.”

Doc added, “Destiny may have placed you in the position to be the man who helped to end the scourge of Tamerlane once and for all.”

“Perhaps you are correct,” murmured the starved-looking archeologist.

A sudden thought struck Johnny.

“I’ll be superannuated!” he said wonderingly. “It has just dawned on me that we have never absolutely determined if the so-called Ice Genius was the actual Tamerlane, or not.”

“It seems inescapable that he was,” advised Doc.

“Then who is the individual buried in his royal tomb in Samarkand?”

“No doubt he was a Mongol who fit the general description of the true Tamerlane, possibly a blood relative upon whom were inflicted injuries consistent with the man whose secret tomb his advisors hoped to conceal against the day he was revived.”

Johnny nodded. “Imminently plausible.”

“It is the only explanation that fits available facts,” Doc pointed out. “Now, let us get to work.”

They returned to studying the globe and began making plans for the battles which lay before them.

About the Author: Lester Dent

THE LIFE of Lester Dent spanned only 56 years on Earth. During that time the world changed dramatically. The pioneer West had not completely passed from the American scene when he was born in 1904. At the age of eight, Lester journeyed from Wyoming to Oklahoma in a wagon train, encountering hostile Indians, bad weather and treacherous quicksands along the way.

The son of homesteaders, he seemed destined for the simple life of a rancher or farmer. But young Les had other ideas, in part fueled by stacks of pulp magazines he found in the bunkhouse of the cowboys who worked his family’s spread.

As an adult, Lester became a telegrapher and later a telegraph maintenance man—a position that in the 21st Century would be equivalent to a computer technician.

In the 1930s, he went treasure hunting in the Florida Keys with a metal detector he built himself. He learned to fly an airplane during the Lindbergh era, but did not own his own personal ship until 1944. Later, he launched an aerial photography service called
Airviews,
which grew until it had a fleet of four planes.

Taking over his father’s dairy farm in the 1950s, Lester brought scientific management to agriculture and Grade A milk to his corner of Missouri and settled down to a life as a gentleman farmer.

An avid ham radio operator, Lester was up on the roof of the house he designed in La Plata, Missouri, fixing the aerial in the Winter of 1959 when he suffered a heart attack. It would later prove fatal.

When he died, the space race has just begun. Lester had once remarked about his Doc Savage novels, “They would be so outdated today that they would undoubtedly be funny. Hell, when I wrote them, an airplane that would fly 200 miles an hour was science fiction. They would be of no interest any more.”

On September 28, 1964, two weeks before Lester Dent would have turned 60, Bantam Books released the first American reprints of his Doc Savage novels since the original pulp magazine had folded in 1949. Had he lived to see these books selling in the millions of copies, no doubt Lester would have been both simultaneously pleased and aggravated, since he was not entitled to receive of a dime of royalties, having sold all reprint rights to his stories. He would never have imagined that in the 21st Century his unfinished Doc Savage manuscripts, premises, plots and outlines would feed the latest revival of the Man of Bronze.

But here we are.

About the Author: Will Murray

WILL MURRAY once had a life goal of reading every Doc Savage novel ever published. But a time he was done, he became interested in unraveling the mystery of the many writers who wrote under the Street & Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson. While doing that work, he discovered there existed an unpublished Doc Savage novel, so Murray devoted his time to locating that lost manuscript and getting it into print.

A year before
The Red Spider
was first published by Bantam Books in 1979, Murray visited Lester Dent’s widow, Norma, in La Plata, Missouri and discovered the outline to an unwritten Doc novel. The idea of writing it himself crept up on Murray slowly, but by the end of 1979 he was hard at work on
Python Isle.

He only meant to write that single novel, but one thing led to another and here we are some 35 years later and Will Murray has now written or coauthored 16 new Doc Savage novels, more than any other writer apart from series originator Lester Dent.

How many more Doc Savage adventures Murray will ultimately pen remains unknown, but since the winds of fate appear to be blowing his way, he hopes to remain in the saddle for many years to come as the Kenneth Robeson of the 21st Century.

About the Artist: Joe DeVito

IN TERMS of really getting to know the character, I came by Doc Savage late. At least by the standards of most Doc fans. As an artist who grew up in the paperback book era, understandably it was those James Bama covers, as opposed Walter Baumhofer’s pulp magazine versions, that first caught my eye. The monumental poses, single light source, limited palette, and the overall simplicity of the compositions, hit me on two levels: they were striking images in and of themselves, and they felt accessible to me artistically when I was just starting out. I thought—I could do this! I would later come to fully understand how complicated it can be to achieve such simplicity, but by then I was already off and running.

Sometime after, there was a fortuitous trip into a Hoboken, N.J. bookstore. There they were: virtually every Bantam Doc edition, all in great shape, for some ridiculously low price—25¢ or 40¢ each. I had never seen them all together before. The impact was immediate. I bought every one on the spot. I moved beyond the covers and actually began to read the novels themselves, starting with the first,
The Man of Bronze.
They were fun reads, clearly of their time, and so evocative, filled with action-adventure, science fiction, over-the-top characters, gadgets and gizmos. One is never too old for that stuff; quite the opposite: it is the kind of thing that keeps a person young at heart in the midst of life’s unavoidable realities.

More years along, here I am working on Doc Savage covers myself. In part, I think it is the subliminal goal of all illustrators, writers and creators of all stripes in the imaginative arts, to become part of, and contribute to, the fantastic world they grew up in. Working with Will Murray on Doc has certainly helped achieve those ends. We are ever mindful of our good fortune to be in a position to pass on the bronze torch into the future.

www.jdevito.com

www.kongskullisland.com

www.novenaart.com

About the Patron: Bob Gasparini

LIKE many of you, I was first introduced to Doc Savage and his five aides by reading the Bantam Books reprints that ran from 1964-1990. Whether you became a Doc fan from the original pulps, the Bantam reprints, Will Murray’s 1991-93 series or more recently through Will’s new Wild Adventures of Doc Savage, all of us who read Doc share a love of adventure, science fiction, suspense and American heroes. The Doc Savage covers have also enjoyed an amazing evolution over the last 81 years, featuring a select number of very talented artists including Walter Baumhofer in the ’30s, James Bama in the ’60s, Bob Larkin in the ’80s, and Joe DeVito since the ’90s.