DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (4 page)

She ducked out, dived down a passage. Ahead, she heard noise. Bare feet smacking companion steps. The passage, of course, had electric lights. Shouting could be heard coming from the other direction. The way to the deck was blocked.

Fine white teeth worrying her lower lip, Mary Chan hesitated. Her liquid dark eyes fastened on an inviting cabin door. She tried it. Not locked. Bounding in, she saw that it was another store room.

There was a single porthole—highly unusual on a junk. She glided to this.

Ship portholes are not normally sufficient to allow a human form to pass through. But Mary Chan was a little trick of a girl, after the Oriental fashion, and too, the
Devilfish
was no pleasure vessel. Contraband such as the junk ran sometimes had to be ejected overboard in a violent and unprofitable rush.

The porthole was of a diameter that allowed her shoulders and hips—the widest parts of her frame—to slip through once she had made the former small by lifting her arms over her head, and sticking them out the open aperture.

Setting both elbows and palms against the outer hull, Mary Chan began applying herself to the task. After that, it was only a matter of wriggling and squirming while shutting out the rollicking sounds of fight and chaos.

The splash she made entering the water went unnoticed amid the commotion of combat. She surfaced and fell into an animated dogpaddle calculated to make the most headway with the least splashing.

Mary Chan had struck out on a swim for shore and what, although she didn’t know it, was a quest to enlist the aid of Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, as he was sometimes called. The beginning of the quest, rather.

SINGAPORE HARBOR has for centuries been noted for two things, among others. Filthy water. Sharks. The water is not so bad nowadays, since they have taken to hauling their garbage out to sea. But the sharks still hang around. There is a lot of argument about whether or not sharks will attack a human. Some will. Some won’t. It depends on the breed. These were the kind that would. But they didn’t. The girl swam to shore without mishap. She kept all her clothes on. Modern girls do not wear much that will interfere with swimming. Besides, she would need them when she got ashore.

Singapore Harbor is usually thick with rake-masted junks, canoe-like
tambangs,
canvas-covered sampans called
perahus
and other boats that seldom if ever hoist anchor inasmuch as they serve as houseboats. And there is good holding ground farther out for layover docking.

Mary Chan negotiated between these more sparse anchorages, swimming with a practiced ease that made no more splashing than playful leaping fish. The channel she swam along was suitably dark on an ordinary night, draped as it is in moon shadow.

The murk accounted for no one seeing Mary Chan.

Once ashore, she worked down to the waterfront, coming to a wharf where the double-ended little water taxis used by British soldiers and tourists in cruising the harbor were moored. The coolie belonging to the one she hired was not too curious about the water-soaked young lady who was his fare. The unusual often happens in Singapore. Too, Mary Chan spoke perfect Malayan and the darkness made her ivory skin less obvious.

At the Singapore waterfront, Mary Chan paid him with a bill from a small roll which had been hidden in her hair, and she demanded and got her change, which made the coolie angry.

This put the coolie in a cooperative frame of mind several hours later, when a Cockney Englishman accosted him with questions.

“Hi’m lookin’ for a little slip of a Chink girl,” explained the supposed Englishman. “Had kinda pale skin, like a white woman. She’d be likely to be soaked from a swim, she would.”

The coolie acted thoughtful, and the supposed Englishman greased his palm with silver. The coolie took hold of his jaw and looked up at the moon, as if prodding his memory. He kept his hand extended.

The Cockney swapped the silver coin for a gold sovereign, the weight of which seemed to have remarkable tongue-loosening properties. Once the coolie had bitten the coin to assure himself it was genuine, his cackling was voluble.

“Thank you, my man,” said the Cockney. He waited until the coolie had stepped back into his boat before jumping down after him and braining him with the bamboo pole normally employed to propel the awkward craft.

Kneeling at the almost nonexistent rail, Dang Mi—he looked more like Hen Gooch now—held the slumped form of the insensate coolie out of the foul water while he fished about for his gold coin.

Once he had it in hand, he let the man slide into the water, and calmly counted the bubbles until they stopped.

THE girl had by this time secured a fair lead, but the hour was late, and no great number of people were abroad. There had, in recent months, been a reign of curfews with a deadline at midnight, at which hour citizens had to be off the streets. This had somewhat discouraged nocturnal meanderings, and people had not yet resumed the habit.

Mary Chan understood that she would not be hard to locate by cars cruising the narrow streets, provided she kept moving about. Her wet garments would also attract attention. She chose a dimly-lit restaurant in the business section, one with a lot of ornamental flowers, and ducked into a particularly shadowy cranny without anyone noting anything unusual. Being wise, she ordered food, for she had been without viands for some time. She also bought a local English-language newspaper, intending to pretend to read it while her clothes dried.

The purchase of that newspaper was an act destined to affect a good many thousands of lives. Men were to die because of it. Others were to live. And it involved the man of miracles, Doc Savage, in an uncanny mystery.

THE SIGNIFICANT AND resultful item was on the front page of the
Singapore Gazette.

DOC SAVAGE ASSISTANT ARRIVES

It has been learned that the American engineer, Colonel John Renwick, has taken up residence in the Raffles Hotel for an indefinite stay.

The name of Colonel John Renwick is one spoken with renown throughout the civilized world. His engineering feats are legendary. In that regard, he is considered almost without peer. He is also a notable adventure-seeker, when he is not engaged in his profession.

For Colonel Renwick is famed as an associate of Doc Savage, worker of seeming miracles. It is taken for granted that many residents of Singapore have heard of Doc Savage.

Doc Savage, Man of Bronze and individual of more or less mystery, is a fellow to whom fantastic things often happen. Little is known of him, because he goes to great lengths to keep out of the public eye. It is, however, well known that he is almost a physical marvel and a mental genius.

Doc Savage’s profession is undoubtedly the strangest thing about him. Trouble is his specialty—other people’s trouble. He is something of a knight in armor, who travels to the far corners of the earth to aid the oppressed, to right wrongs and to war upon those who operate outside the law.

Doc Savage, it is understood, does not work for pay. Yet, he always had fabulous sums at his command. The source of his wealth is a mystery.

At present, Colonel Renwick is in Singapore to organize construction of a rubber plantation railway. The Hotel Raffles will be his headquarters for the duration of his work here.

There was more of it. The newshawk who had written that story must have been an ardent admirer of Doc Savage. The news story was more about Doc Savage than it concerned Colonel John Renwick.

The item asserted that Doc Savage was a modern wonder man. He had evidently mastered all sciences, from aeronautics to atomic theory. He was called Doc, however, because of his surgical skill. But he was no runty super-brain. His physical development was said to be prodigious.

Mary Chan decided that if half of what was being said about Doc Savage were factual, he was harbinger of what men would be like in the twenty-first century—a combination of Hercules, Sir Galahad and Thomas Edison.

“How very interesting,” she said, beginning to murmur to herself. “I had been planning to talk to the British authorities about this. They would know what to do.”

She frowned, and read the item again.

“On the other hand,” she declared, “I know nothing of this Doc Savage. I have never even heard of him before.”

She sat back and contemplated her shapely hand. Her nails needed a do, she decided.

“I’ve got to stop talking to myself,” she announced firmly, “and start doing things.”

She paid her bill and commandeered a jinricksaw taxi. Dodging autos, trams, and hurling over the ubiquitous open monsoon drainage culverts, it deposited her before the Hotel Raffles after a bumpy ride that included being dragged up flights of stone steps—much of Singapore being built along vertical lines.

At first, the very British clerk—Singapore is a British protectorate, after all—pretended not to have heard of any Colonel John Renwick.

“I believe in getting to the point,” Mary Chan told him.

“A sterling attitude,” agreed the clerk.

“I have only to-night learned of the existence of Colonel John Renwick and, believe it or not, have never heard of Doc Savage, but I believe Doc Savage is the only man who can avert the calamity.”

This caught the desk man’s attention.

“What calamity?” he enquired.

“The end of civilization,” said Mary Chan in an earnest tone of voice.

The desk man stared at her a long time.

Mary Chan asked, “Do you think this is a matter that would interest Doc Savage?”

“Undoubtedly,” said the clerk, scrutinizing Mary Chan’s attractive ivory-complected face.

“Do you think I could see Colonel Renwick?”

“I should,” said the clerk with resignation in his voice, “be afraid to say otherwise.”

“Thank you,” said Mary upon receiving the room number. It was on the third floor so she took the stairs.

COLONEL RENWICK threw open the door after the second knock. He was a towering hulk of a man who had to look down to see who had come calling.

“Hello, Renny,” said Mary Chan, walking in and shutting the door.

Colonel Renwick was surprised. Speechless at first. Then he got suspicious.

“Holy cow!” he said. “What’s your game? I never saw you before.”

He had a rumbling voice that brought to mind something in a cave, and a long puritanical face that appeared constructed for the express purpose of attending funerals.

“Have a seat,” said Mary Chan, taking one herself.

Renny pulled his dressing gown more securely about him.

“I,” he said, “am not a ladies’ man. I’m going to throw you out of here on your ear.”

“Would a million dollars interest you?” asked Mary Chan.

“No,” said Renny. “I’ve got a million dollars. After you get it, it sort of loses its kick.”

It was the truth. About the million, that is.

“It’s my million,” said Mary Chan. “My brother’s and mine. They are trying to take it away from us. I think a good many people are going to get killed. My brother first, then others.”

“Holy cow!” rumbled Renny again. It was Renny’s pet ejaculation, and he applied it to anything that disturbed him.

“The thing involved is—”

Mary Chan stopped. She had glimpsed Renny’s hands. Those hands frequently rendered people speechless. They were fantastic fists, being composed of fully a quart of hard bone and gristle. The Cardiff Giant, probably, had possessed such hands.

“Uh-h-h-h,” said Mary Chan, clearing her throat. “I—ah, well, I need Doc Savage’s help. He can save lives, my brother’s for one. And he can give to the world something that, if
it
gets in the wrong hands, might conceivably change the whole course of civilization.
It
could incite wars, cause calamities. The possibilities for trouble are practically unlimited.”

Renny stared at her. Closely, critically. He shook his long-faced head slowly.

“I guess you’re not,” he said.

“Not what?”

“Nuts. You sound like it. But you better line your story up so it makes sense, or I’ll be inclined to decide you’re an imbecile.”

Mary Chan snapped, “It’s big. It’s bad.”

It was. Renny learned that an instant later, when, with a startling crash, the door fell down. The door was rickety, anyway, and three men had hit it with their shoulders, simultaneously.

The trio shoved in. One was a squat Malay wearing a blue muslin turban and a dirty loincloth whose waistband bristled with numerous saw-tooth knives. Another was tall, thin and very white.

But it was the third of the trio whose appearance captured Renny’s immediate attention. He was a rather round fellow, evidently white, but possessing the white-brown skin of inhabitants of this corner of Asia, with a pair of very Western six-shooters jutting incongruously from his calloused fists.

The words tumbling from his lips were not in keeping with his exotic appearance, either.

“Have a care, Big Fists. We come for the girl, and there’ll be no trouble from the likes o’ you.”

Renny blocked and unblocked his huge fists. It was typical of the big-fisted engineer that he was going to tackle the trio with his bare hands. He had unbounded confidence in those gargantuan fists, and not without reason. It was Renny’s boast that no wooden door had a panel so stout that he could not wreck it with one blow from either fist.

MARY CHAN had been a little soldier up to this point. No tears. No hysterics. But now something went snap, and she let out a shriek and dived for the window. Anyone could see that she was wild for the moment, and was going to jump through the window. It was on the third story, with hard cobbled street below. It might kill her.

So Renny tripped her. She fell, hit a chair, and writhed on the floor, stunned.

In the time it took for Dang Mi to cock his six-guns, Renny reached down and gathered up the Eurasian girl. Sheltering her in his great arms, the big engineer turned and made for a connecting door.

“No guns if we can help it!” Dang Mi warned. “Gun noise’ll bring inquiry, sure enough.”

A serpentine-bladed
kris
chucked into the door jamb, not an inch from Renny’s elephantine shoulder. Another, following on its ornate hilt, buried itself in the door, just as it clapped shut.