DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (10 page)

“That is because the entire body has shriveled,” Ham sniffed. “There is almost no muscle tissue in the human hand, so there is less shrinkage.”

“Baloney! That dead mummy has meat-hooks almost the size of—”

The thought hung in the air. Ham looked at Monk and the hairy chemist returned the look. Their faces lost color as a cold, unsettling thought took hold of them.

“Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Monk breathed.

Doc Savage then spoke. His words were calm and controlled, but they had the impact of a dropped anvil.

“These clothes,” the bronze man said with no evident feeling, “belong to Renny Renwick.”

A SICK SILENCE hung in the room.

Monk stared at the inert mummy of the oversized hands with his eyes bugging out like peeled grapes. Ham Brooks, for once, was struck speechless.

Only Doc Savage appeared unmoved by the prospect that their comrade in arms was dead. He stripped the shirt from the mummy, breaking several bones despite taking great pains not to cause further damage to the fragile travesty.

The dryish snappings made Monk wince and Ham Brooks turned green as an unripe apple.

“Renny…” Monk gulped. “It can’t be him.”

Ham gestured with his dark cane. “Notice the untanned circular patch on the left wrist. This person wore a wristwatch.”

“Yeah,” Monk said thickly. “Recently, too. So he ain’t been a mummy for very long.”

Doc examined the shirt labels. Then he went to the cuffs. One cuff had a slightly frayed seam. Doc popped this and out came a bit of what looked like chalk.

Ham gulped. “That—that’s a piece of the special chalk we use to leave messages that can only be read by ultra-violet light.”

The bronze man then removed a boot. Inside, he discovered a label.

“Renny’s?” asked Monk.

Doc nodded. “Renny’s.” The bronze man stood up. His eerie trilling filled the room once more. It possessed a wondering quality this time.

“When did we last hear from Renny?” he asked quietly.

“About a week ago,” supplied Ham.

“This mummy,” Doc said, “appears to have been dead at least a month.”

“Then it can’t be Renny!” Monk whooped.

Doc said, “The circumstantial evidence indicates that it is. More tests are in order.”

“What could have mummified Renny so quick?” demanded Monk.

“You are a chemist. Have you any thoughts?”

Monk scratched his nubbin of a head. “Well, something would have to take all the moisture out of body. Maybe if he was… cooked over a slow fire. Say, look at his hair. There’s no singe marks.”

Ham frowned distastefully. “I do not like to speak of Renny this way.”

The bronze man shut the lid tight and lifted the trunk in both hands, saying, “We will conduct further tests in our lab setup.”

The speed elevator took them to the eighty-sixth floor.

They stepped out into the corridor, Doc Savage conveying the steamer trunk atop one Herculean shoulder as if it were weightless.

“Just one moment,” a blustery voice intruded.

They whirled.

A large man had been loitering in the corridor, face flushed and perspiring profusely. He dabbed at his florid countenance with a monogrammed silk handkerchief the color of lemons, replaced his rimless pince-nez glasses. He spoke up.

“I am C. Startell Pompman, Mr. Savage. I have been attempting to see you for several days without success.”

“You get out of here!” Monk raged.

“Permit me a moment….”

Doc let his golden eyes rest on Pompman, nodded, and said, “Follow us.”

The plain bronze door bearing the name CLARK SAVAGE, JR. in modest letters opened, apparently of its own accord.

Doc Savage entered first. Bones rattled with a dry grisly sound inside the steamer trunk that had come from the Orient.

Most persons privileged to enter Doc’s sanctum usually gawk and rubber-neck at the well-appointed reception room, the massive library, and finally the scientific laboratory as they passed through them. But Startell Pompman was oblivious to all even as Doc set the trunk on a work table in the huge white-walled lab.

“Tell us your story, Pompman,” Doc invited as he went to work with a fluoroscope device much larger than the one previously utilized.

“As I told your men, I am an importer, specializing in curios and artifacts. One unusual specimen—ah—came into my possession in China during the present difficulties over there.”

Doc was taking X-ray pictures of the mummy while Ham paced and fidgeted, shifting his ever-present cane from one manicured hand to the other. Monk had remained in the reception room to make telephone inquiries of Renny Renwick’s last movements.

Pompman continued. “I do not know what this curio was made of, but it resembles crystal, but is intolerably cold to the touch. Moreover, it is a substance never before seen on earth.”

Ham Brooks looked at him incredulously.

“Or so I believe,” Pompman amended.

Doc paused in his work and looked up.

“Why do you think that?”

“I base this assumption on it’s—ah—properties.”

“That is not much of an explanation.”

“I am being careful with my words, Savage. During the course of experimenting with this substance I hired two individuals to assist me. They betrayed me. They absconded with a portion of the artifact, to what end I do not know.”

Doc had resumed his work. He was, of all things, taking fingerprints of the mummy’s surviving fingers. First he inked the fingers. Then he applied them to an ordinary police fingerprint identification card such as are employed by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation.

“Your story so far is composed of drama, not facts,” the bronze man observed.

Startell Pompman mustered his dignity with a haughty lift of his chin. “I fear betrayal. This is a highly delicate matter. I am requesting your help in recovering the lost portion of the artifact.”

“We do not normally engage in business difficulties such as you describe,” Doc said absently.

“But there is more to this than I can reveal.”

“Is your life in danger?”

“No,” Pompman admitted.

“Then we cannot help you.”

STARTELL POMPMAN made fat fists at his sides and seemed on the verge of becoming volcanic once again. The sight of the bronze man going about his work in deep thought seemed to dissuade him from launching into a further diatribe.

“Would it change your mind if I told you I have reason to believe that your man Renwick may have been reduced to that terrible state by the missing piece of my lost curio?” he asked in a throaty tone.

Doc’s trilling wavered briefly. He stifled it.

Ham rushed up and demanded, “What are you trying to tell us, fellow?”

Startell Pompman swiftly changed his tune.

“I—I could be mistaken of course. But what happened to that mummy is something I have seen before.”

“Where?” asked Doc.

“In Shanghai. It was horrible.”

“I don’t believe you!” Ham snapped. “You are saying this to capture our interest, not because it is true! You are desperate.”

Doc interjected, “Your story does seem convenient.”

Startell Pompman sputtered inarticulately.

Monk Mayfair barged in at that point saying, “Doc, I been in touch with British authorities in Singapore. They tell me Renny was discovered missing after a fight in his hotel five days ago. His room was busted up and everything. He ain’t come back for his… duds.”

All eyes went to the mummy on the table. Doc had performed a localized dissection, evidently to expose the stomach and its contents, but was presently examining the fingerprint card under a microscope.

They crowded around him.

“Are they—Renny’s?” asked Ham.

Doc shut off the microscope. “Impossible to tell. The tips of the fingers are too badly shriveled to make useful impressions. But I discovered this item tucked into the excelsior packing of the trunk.”

One bronze finger pointed to a square of parchment of some kind. In what appeared to be octopus ink was brushed a short message in bold strokes suggesting a stick had been used to inscribe them, Oriental-style:

SAVAGE:

UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE TURNED INTO A MUMMY, LAY OFF!

The note was unsigned.

“Lay off!” Ham ejaculated. “Lay off what?”

“There is insufficient information to make conjectures on that score,” Doc Savage advised. “But the situation bears investigation.”

“Whoever wrote that,” Monk growled, “don’t know us very well.”

Doc walked up to Startell Pompman.

“If what you say is true, it is quite a coincidence that you should show up at the same time that this mummy reached us.”

“I have been trying to see you for days.” He levered a chubby arm at Monk and Ham. “Those two buffoons repeatedly rebuffed me. Were I you, Savage, I would fire them forthwith!”

The bronze giant said nothing to that. He did not believe in descending to personalities.

“We are setting off for Singapore immediately to look into the disappearance and possible death of our comrade,” Doc said calmly. “It is up to you whether or not you care to accompany us.”

“Will you assist me in my quest?” Pompman demanded.

“If it ties in with whatever has befallen Renny, yes.”

“Then I will go, for this is very, very important. Of stellar import, I would venture to say.”

That settled, Doc Savage went to a far section of the vast laboratory and shifted certain glasses on wall shelves. As a result, the entire panel valved open, and another revealed a sizable capsule suspended in a tube, much like a pneumatic tube, only on a larger scale.

The suspended car was shaped like a bullet pointing earthward. A hatch stood open, disclosing an upholstered interior.

Doc motioned for Pompman to enter. He looked hesitant, perhaps intimidated by the awareness than the capsule hung suspended over some eighty-six stories of void.

Monk gave him an ungentle shove, and he went sprawling aboard. The others joined him. Lastly Doc Savage stepped aboard and closed the bullet car’s door. By some mechanical means, this caused the outer door to close, sealing the giant pneumatic tube.

Doc said, “Hang on.” Everybody reached for grab straps such as are found on modern subway cars.

With a roaring
whoosh,
the capsule dropped straight down. It seemed to fall forever, abruptly right-angled in a horizontal direction and the passengers were all thrown violently around. The interior of the car was padded against such buffeting. It helped only insofar as to prevent bruising.

At the end of its run, the car ran at a gentle upward incline, stopping with a series of noisy clicks.

The hatch popped and Monk was the first to clamber out.

“Some roller coaster ride, huh?” Monk said. “Once Doc works out all the bugs, whizzers like that one will carry folks between New York and China in an hour flat.”

Startell Pompman had to be helped out. His plump knees had turned to rubber.

“What was that contraption?” he wondered breathlessly.

Monk beamed. “I call it the flea run. That go-devil that brought us here operates by compressed air.”

“A go-devil is a floating device used to clear clogged oil pipelines,” Pompman remarked.

“I kinda grew up in the Oklahoma oil fields,” Monk admitted.

Pompman discovered that he was in a cavernous space resembling an aircraft hangar. There were all manner of craft hangared here, ranging from a true gyroplane to various pursuit and transport planes. All were amphibians. A large part of the hangar was partitioned off, and Startell Pompman got the idea that this housed a dirigible or airship of some kind.

Doc went to a big tri-motored flying boat. It was painted bronze. They prepared it for take-off, removing chocks from the wheels and stowing metal storage cases aboard.

When preparations were finished, the hatch shut closed and the bronze man in the pilot’s bucket was starting the engines. They filled the hangar with a great reverberant thunder.

The giant transport ran its tail about, and slipped down a concrete apron into the water. Great riverward doors opened to allow this. They operated in response to a radio signal from the cockpit.

Once on the water, Doc turned the craft into the wind and opened the throttles. The streamlined ship thundered along, got on step, and vaulted skyward like a great bronze eagle.

“Next stop,” Monk called out, “Singapore!”

FROM NEW YORK CITY to Singapore in the Orient is over ten thousand nautical miles.

Doc Savage pushed his flying boat non-stop to San Francisco, refueled there, and made the hop to Honolulu, Hawaii, across the Pacific in record time. Rarely did the bronze plane drop below two hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. At times, the three giant engines approached three hundred miles per hour. Tailwinds helped.

Inside the streamlined ship, the cabin was electrically warmed and soundproofed to a degree that permitted ordinary conversation. Doc Savage evinced little interest in that. He ran the great motors with the throttles pushed to their pins, seemingly immune to fatigue.

Monk and Ham spelled one another in the navigation bucket.

“This bus sure travels,” Monk muttered sleepily.

Ham queried, “What say, Doc, why not get a little sleep and let Monk and myself carry on?”

The bronze giant shook his head in the negative. He seemed determined to push toward their far destination in the shortest possible time.

Portly C. Startell Pompman kept to himself. In time, the sheer monotony of their voyage began to wear on his nerves and he struck up a conversation.

Ham was seated beside him. It was night over the twinkling Pacific, with the sea and sky a black mirror. Pompman turned to the dapper lawyer and remarked, “Studying the stars?”

Ham blinked his dark eyes. “I was merely attempting to see how many constellations I could identify by sight,” he sniffed.

Pompman clasped puffy fingers over his ample middle. “I myself am a student of the firmament.”

“Is that so?” Ham drawled in a disinterested voice. He had shown no sign of warming up to the big bluff businessman.