Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (2 page)

He wished mightily that he’d enjoyed himself a little more economically while pulling down big money as a magician. His philosophy had been: by the time you got a gob of it, you’re too old to enjoy it, so spend it while you get a kick out of doing so. A lousy enough philosophy, he reflected, and absolutely all wet as witness his present plight for proof.

ARRIVAL of a taxicab outside interrupted further philosophy on his part.

“Gulliver Greene in there?” the taxi driver said loudly.

The young man stepped outside, grinned and admitted, “In person, albeit with his ego slightly frayed.”

The taxi driver somewhat resembled a mink peering out of a hole as he sat in his dark car.

“Yeah. Well, I got a telegram for The Great Gulliver. Is that you?”

“Yes,” Gull Greene admitted, and added, “Ouch!”

“Huh. You sick?”

“In mind only, but let it go. Let’s have the missive you mentioned.”

The taxi driver handed over the telegram, then drove off, and it became quiet around the One-Stop-Duzzit, and dark, too, except under the marquee where five electric bulbs, three red and two white, shed light in a discouraged way. Bugs and miller moths kept tumbling in the night air around the light, and trying out the hardness of the bulbs with their heads.

For some time, Gull Greene did nothing but look at the envelope which contained the telegram. His suspense was exquisite, and there was no real reason why he should prolong it. For weeks, he had waited to hear that his contract with a prominent vaudeville chain was to be renewed at his own figure. At the same time, he had writhed in apprehension lest he be informed they were no longer interested. He even hoped they would repeat an offer at his old salary. He’d been much too cocky, he knew now. Furthermore, he had made other mistakes—he’d been extravagant, hadn’t saved his money, and had grandstanded once too often when he had walked out in a huff because his salary demands weren’t met.

“Three thousand a week!” he gasped, eyeing the telegram which he had not yet dared open. If this wire only said they’d still pay him that! He’d learned his lesson. Any nitwit who would turn down such a sum deserved to wind up filling gas tanks of automobiles at four dollars a week. True, he had worked for years perfecting his magic, and he’d stunned all the professionals at the last meeting of the American Society of Magicians. But so what? Three thousand a week was still—my God, it was a fortune!

Impulsively, he held the telegram above his head in an attitude of divine supplication.

“O have pity on this sinner who has seen the light and let this telegram say they’re offering the old salary of three thousand bucks,” he requested hopefully. “And remember, even less would be happily considered—”

“Keep thy hands high, my good brother,” came solemn advice from behind Gulliver Greene.

GULL promptly did what was spontaneously natural under the circumstances—he jerked his hands down and turned around to stare at the newcomers.

Holdup!
he thought.

It wasn’t. Not exactly. No guns were in sight—there was only a little man, a man who would probably have to stand on tiptoe to look into Gull’s hip pocket. He had a face that had been battered surrounding a mashed-to-one-side nose. The work of fists, Gull imagined.

“Read that telegram yet?” the small man croaked.

“Nope,” Gull said thoughtlessly, his mind busy deciding he had never seen the midget before.

“Then hand it over!” the other ordered.

Gull was particularly struck by a deep, mournful quality in the runt’s voice because it reminded him of a foxhound named Old Blow who often ran foxes near the filling station at night. Gull had often listened to Old Blow and reflected that the mournful baying was the exact sound he himself felt like making whenever he thought of his own idiocy in turning up his nose at three thousand and holding out for—

“Hand it over, snowball top!” rasped the small man.

The mite’s small size and his grim seriousness combined and struck Gull as comical, and he was moved to do something which he later regretted.

“Look,” Gull invited.

He held the telegram out at arm’s length, plucked up the sleeve of that arm, at the same time showing the hand to draw attention to the fact that there was nothing in the hand but the telegram. He cupped the other hand and poked the folded telegram—not yet opened—into it carefully, then rubbed the two fists together in realistic fashion.

“Hocus-magokus,” he said.

He opened both hands and the telegram had vanished.

“Magician, huh?” said the little man.

“Right.”

“So’m I.”

So that explains the queer way he’s acting, Gull thought. He already knew I was a magician. And magicians are balmy coots and always trying some kind of funny business on each other.

“What’s your specialty?” Gull asked with the geniality one magician reserves for another.

“This!” the runt snarled.

He hit Gulliver in the belly. He also kicked Gull three or four times simultaneously; Gull was a little hazy about the exact number of times. He found himself on the floor. He got hold of the midget’s neck. The pygmy grabbed his elbows, did something with his thumbs and Gull’s crazybones.

“Who-o!”
Gull said, and pounded away at the toughest little body he had ever felt. They rolled under the table, and Gull began to win.

The small man started baying for help.

Men commenced popping through the door. Five of them entered, all told. They were flashily dressed, ranged from big down to medium size, and all wore vicious, determined expressions. They rushed to the attack.

Gull had good luck with the first one when he kicked with both feet; the victim whooped, sat down. One fellow grabbed Gull’s right leg. Six glass fruit jars full of oil on a rack came crashing down, breaking. The fighting men wallowed in the oil and glass.

“Hold ’im!” bawled the midget. “He put that telegram in a pull and it went around to the back of his coat.”
¹

The runt got his hands up under the back of Gulliver’s coat, groped and found the standard magician’s pull which Gull had used.

Gull devoted himself exclusively to trying to retain the telegram. He had no idea what the message contained, had even less of a notion of why they wanted it, or who they were. But the unprovoked attack had made him as mad as the proverbial hornet. He felt in the mood to fight them all night rather than give up anything.

The midget freed the message from the pull, but Gull, clutching, got one corner of it. The yellow envelope tore. The small man got most of the telegram, but Gull retained a small portion.

Bounding clear of the mêlée, the broken-nosed runt cast a hurried glance at his part of the telegram. Whatever he read gave him a shock; that was plain. He bayed a violently profane oath, leveled a dwarf arm at Gulliver.

“This bird may know more’n we figured!” he yelled. “We’d better play safe! Hold ’im.”

While the others held Gulliver down, the small man drew a knife, a thing with a very long three-edged blade attached to a handle of polished bone.

Gull Green’s long body became slack; his eyes pinched shut, then jerked open; tendons slowly stood out on his neck. At one point in the fray he had been face down in the spilled oil, and now drops of the amber stuff moved down his face and into the shallow V of his drawn, closed lips. His eyes seemed to become wider and wider even after there was no possibility of them opening farther, and deep grooves grew at the corners of his mouth as his lips pulled tighter and tighter; the oil filled the groove in his lips and flowed on.

“Hold ’im!” warned the hound-voiced midget.

They didn’t. The slippery oil over men and floor helped. Nobody had ever before tried to kill Gulliver Greene, which helped too. Gull’s wild flounce got him free.

Momentum threw him clear, and toward the door. He continued, dived into the filling station. The washroom door gaped open. He pitched through it, banged the door shut, got his feet against it.

Then he reached for the old double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun, which was kept standing in an innocent looking ancient cardboard box behind the washroom. Pointing it at the door, he cocked one barrel and let fly. There was roar, kick, and then a hole the size of his fist in the door.

The midget howled, “Watch that scattergun!” added some profanity, then bellowed, “Didn’t anybody bring a gun?”

Apparently no one had.

“We’ll have another try at him later!” the small man roared. “Clear out of here before he ruins somebody.”

They ran away.

Gull snatched several shotgun shells out of the bottom of the long cardboard box where they were kept, wrenched open the door, and held the gun ready, the other barrel cocked. Once out under the marquee, he located the sound of running feet. It was too dark to see them. He lifted the shotgun, aimed by guess, and pulled the other trigger. He got a small click.

Both barrels of the old weapon had gone off at once the first time, which accounted for the size of the hole in the washroom door.

An instant afterward, he heard an automobile start, and decided it had been parked down the road and was taking the small man and the others away.

GULLIVER GREENE backed inside the filling station, then reloaded the shotgun. He watched the outer darkness intently and listened until the departing car could no longer be heard. Then he became aware of the oil on his lips, in his mouth, and sidled warily, holding the shotgun, to the towel and wiped his face and hands, blotted at his clothing. In hanging the towel on the hook, he got a sidewise glimpse of his face in the mirror over the washbasin.

“Whew!” he said.

The piece of telegram he had retained lay on the washroom floor and he stopped, still watching the outer darkness and listening, on edge from what had just happened.

The fragment of telegram held a few words from what was evidently the last line of the message, although the signature was not included.

—KNOW POSITIVELY THAT CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IS ALIVE.

Chapter II

THE CRIMINAL COLLEGE

THE GOLD-LETTERED sign on the frosted glass door panel read:

ODDITIES

There was nothing more to the gilt legend, no indications of a proprietor or company name, nor what type of oddities was being offered.

Within, a man’s voice yelled hoarsely, “Confound it! Let me out of here!”

Rattling of the closed door indicated the man on the other side was trying to get the panel open. But it seemed to be locked.

In the outer room, stenographers ceased clicking typewriter keys. Secretaries, very neat in their Fall frocks, turned and stared. The brunette on the telephone switchboard abruptly stopped speaking and her rouged mouth fell open.

One stenographer had her desk not far from the closed door to the private office. Her job was an unusual one, she thought. It was to type up newspaper cuttings. The subject of these clips varied. But they all possessed one thing in common. They were out of the ordinary.

Just now she was typing up an odd report of a man who had wandered into a newly discovered cavern in Kentucky. The man had gone into the cavern accompanied by his dog. He had not emerged for three days, claiming to have gotten lost in the winding cathedral of a place. Evidently, he was very fond of the dog, because after gathering up his nerve, the man had gone back in after him. Two days later, the dog had come out. Alone. Curious thing, the dog was by then entirely hairless. No trace of the man had been found to date. And no explanation could be offered for the animal’s uncanny lack of hair.

Typing up the clipping gave her goose bumps, and the stenog wondered if it was true, or the product of a small-town newspaperman’s imagination.

Her employer had told her that these clippings were assembled for various clients. Some were to become fodder for a movie screenwriter’s scenarios. Others were mailed to collectors of oddities, who paid for the service. Still others were interested in unusual subjects and requested anything that touched upon those subjects. Newspapers from all over the globe were delivered to the office for the express purpose of being dismembered by clicking scissors.

After several weeks of employment, the stenographer had privately begun to doubt this assertion.

Now a visitor who had minutes before entered the inner office appeared to be locked in.

A water cooler stood near the door to the inner office. Summoning her scant supply of courage, the stenographer shuffled over to the cooler, ostensibly to get a drink, but actually to try to learn what had gotten the visitor so excited.

She had a good idea of what would happen should she be caught eavesdropping. She would be discharged.

Inside a man was shouting. “Now that I see you two, I know exactly what this is all about!”

The stenographer wondered what two the yelling man could be referring to. Only her employer and his visitor held forth behind that closed panel. No one else had entered since the lunch hour.

The upset man continued his harangue. “I am going to tell the authorities what they would never learn otherwise—the name of the person whose brain is behind the whole thing!”

The stenographer heard the telephone receiver clank forcibly on its hook, then caught the faint whirring and clicking of the dial, as the man attempted to call the police.

Came subdued sounds of a scuffle. Then silence. It sounded as if there were three or four men inside, instead of the two she had seen enter.

Upset by what she had overheard, the stenographer withdrew to her desk and the clipping about the missing unfortunate and his hairless dog.

After a time, her employer stuck his head out of the office door, got himself a paper cup which he filled with water. Looking around for signs that the muffled commotion had been overheard, and detecting none, he retreated to his walnut-paneled preserve.

Glancing through the door while it was briefly open, the stenographer saw clearly that no one else was in the room.

Strangely, the shouting man never emerged.