Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (23 page)

Johnny recounted the events leading up to the conflagration. He employed small words so that everyone could follow him.

At the conclusion of the breathless recital, Renny wondered aloud, “Do you reckon the time-defeating gadget still works?”

“I know it does not,” declared Ham in a stricken voice. He had hooked a tree and climbed down the line to the ground, leaving the tiny airship moored safely.

“What do you mean?”

Ham pointed back into the woods. “Going for a walk, I found a rock face in which was chiseled a message in stone.”

“Go on,” invited Long Tom.

“The writing was Mayan.”

“The Mayans didn’t get this far north,” Johnny insisted.

“I know that!” snapped Ham. “The message was from Doc Savage. He said he was stranded in the past.”

Silence held them all for a time.

In that interval, Johnny remembered the restorative Doc Savage had given him. He went over to Monk Mayfair, and uncorked the vial beneath his broad, laboring nostrils. The snoring chemist awoke, sat up heavily, and peered around with tiny eyes that blinked dully. He began pawing at them.

“Why are my eyes burnin’?”

Renny advised, “Smoke. The old dump caught fire.”

Clambering to his feet, the hairy chemist looked back at the haze-enwrapped Victorian dwelling, and muttered, “I can see that. We’re back. Right?”

“Not all of us,” Johnny informed him.

“Brace yourself, Monk,” Ham said. “Doc is trapped in the past and we don’t know if this house is fit to travel.”

Monk licked suddenly dry lips. He seemed to want to speak, but his wide mouth only made gulping fish motions. He seemed at a loss for words.

Renny strode up and towered over the unfamiliar man with the long neck and straw-colored hair.

“Are you the bozo that invented this contraption?”

“No,” said Herman Bunderson. “I am merely the man who inherited it. I know very little about how the machinery operates, only how to make it run.”

Renny gave the man a hard shove. “Well, get in there and give it your best shot.”

THE INTERIOR of the Victorian was too smoky to permit habitation for very long. They all pitched in and got the windows open, employing their coats to fan the bad air out. Ventilation helped.

Finally, they worked their way up to the conical tower room, where the gyroscopic portion of the mechanism was housed.

It had not exactly melted, but in places, vacuum tubes were blistered, and charred wires sagged sadly.

“Don’t look good,” Renny rumbled. He turned to Long Tom. “What do you say?”

The pale electrical wizard began picking through the melted mess, and the look on his face was not encouraging. He inspected the thing for several minutes, then let out a leaky sigh of resignation.

“Some of this stuff might be replaceable, but I don’t know about these crystals.”

“In other words—” prompted Renny.

“In other words, I’m not sure Doc Savage himself could fix it.”

Gloom pervaded the smoky interior. They filed out of the house to get fresh air into their lungs while they considered options.

Herman Bunderson offered a modicum of solace.

“If it is any consideration,” he said, “the damaged portion of the device merely governs where in time and space the house lands. The displacement circuitry is built into the flooring and walls. It may not have been damaged.”

“Which means what?” asked Monk.

“The house may yet be able to travel through time unimpaired.”

“Without the navigational controls to make sure it goes back to 1829,” grumbled Long Tom, “what good does that do us?”

“I do not know. But it means the situation is not entirely hopeless.”

Ham Brooks had rejoined them by now.

“I think you all should read what Doc Savage carved into the stone,” he suggested.

Reluctantly, for there was nothing they could do of immediate usefulness, they followed Ham into the woods.

As they walked along, the dapper lawyer suddenly remembered something.

“What became of Habeas Corpus?”

Monk grunted, “Big Neck probably ate him by now.”

“The contrary,” countered Johnny. “Doc had rescued Habeas. He was bringing the pig back when the Big Necks set fire to the house.”

“Did you hear that, Monk?” asked Ham. “Habeas is alive in the past!”

Monk refused to be comforted. “That means Habeas died probably a hundred years ago—along with Doc Savage.”

The chilling thought that their bronze leader had perished almost a century before his own birth stilled their tongues.

When they reached the stone face, they saw what Ham had described.

Mayan carvings. They spelled out a simple message in the bars-and-dots number notation of the ancient people, each number corresponding to a letter in the modern English alphabet, so that the entirety of the message constituted a double code.

“Still alive in December, 1829, 5 months since burning home departed. Carry on without me. Doc.”

The signature was etched in English.

Words were unnecessary. But Ham Brooks spoke them anyway.

“This is incontrovertible proof that we were unable to rescue Doc Savage. Otherwise, we would have plucked him out of his predicament before winter had set in.”

THE FIVE who had first met up during the World War had been through innumerable perils and travails over the years of their association. Many times in the past, Doc Savage had been declared dead. And each time, a resurrection had appeared impossible.

Yet in every instance, the seemingly-indestructible bronze superman had resurfaced, still alive, often coming to the rescue of his beleaguered aides.

Now, it seemed that no such miracle was in the offing.

Consumed by depression, Doc’s men separated, walking in different directions, as if wishing to be alone with their inconsolable thoughts.

Over an hour passed before they rendezvoused back at the still-smoky house that stood at the center of their grief, like some fantastic painted tombstone.

Ham Brooks was the first to speak.

“Doc Savage charged us with carrying on with his great work. I move that we dedicate the remainder of our lives to that cause.”

Monk glowered like a gorilla. “We’re givin’ up on rescuin’ Doc. Is that what you’re sayin’?”

Long Tom shoved out his jaw. “I intended to take apart that house until I figure out what makes it tick.”

Renny squinted at his big fists, as if half disbelieving he owned such freakish appendages.

“How long do you think that’ll take?” he rumbled disconsolately.

Long Tom said glumly, “Months. Maybe years. It doesn’t matter. I will spend the time.”

“In the meanwhile, we have Doc’s work to do,” suggested Ham.

Johnny put in, “There is an immediate conundrum.”

Ham looked at him. “Which is?”

“According to Herman Bunderson, no less a personage than Christopher Columbus is running loose in our present era,” he explained.

They gawked at him.

“Try big words,” Renny grunted. “Your little ones aren’t making sense.”

“Bunderson told me part of the story while Doc was searching for Habeas, and Monk was out cold,” Johnny said firmly.

They went and collected Herman Bunderson, who had not wandered far.

The man was reluctant to tell his story, but Monk Mayfair took hold of his shirt collar and shook him a time or two, dislodging his reluctance.

“I inherited the house from my grandfather, Method,” he began. “With it came a journal that told the story of the construction of the Chronodomus.”

“The which?” demanded Renny.

“That was what he called it.”

“It is Latin for ‘Time House’,” supplied Johnny.

Bunderson continued with his story.

“I experimented with the property and discovered that it worked. Then I thought to myself that there must be a way to make money with the discovery. My first thought was to hire it out. There is a man who is a collector of antiques relating to Christopher Columbus. Harvell Braggs is his name. I went to him with my story. Naturally, he scoffed.”

“Naturally,” said Long Tom dryly.

“Braggs lived in the West Indies, where Columbus made his first landings in the New World. I thought to myself that I could prove my value by going back to the time of Columbus and bringing something forward that would prove my claim. In fact, while scoffing at me, Braggs suggested that I do exactly that. So I set out to prove it to him.”

“You personally journeyed back to the time of Columbus!” Johnny exclaimed.

Bunderson nodded. “To Jamaica, to be exact. It was my first serious experiment in time traveling and I found myself in 1503 after the shipwreck of Columbus’ fleet, during his fourth voyage to the New World.”

“Wait a minute!” snapped Ham. “If you can leap backward in time, but not space, how did you travel to the Caribbean?”

“The house can be set up to arrive at a different location, provided the landing spot is safe and level. I traveled to the Caribbean and located a field that has been unchanged for hundreds of years. So I scheduled the house to reappear in that spot.”

They all looked at him, disbelief written on their slack features.

“It worked perfectly,” Bunderson continued, “thanks to the mechanical brain that governs the operation of the temporal dislocator. From there, I was able to find the encampment of Christopher Columbus and his shipwrecked men. By night, I stole into the camp and attempted to plunder some items, but I encountered an unexpected obstacle.”

“Which was?” demanded Ham.

“I had no idea what Columbus looked like. I could not distinguish him from the others in the encampment, and I did not speak Spanish, or any other language Columbus knew.”

Renny thumped gloomily, “After all that, you didn’t find a portrait of Columbus to go by?”

Johnny interjected, “There are no authentic depictions of Christopher Columbus. None.”

Renny’s long perpetually mournful face grew dubious.

“It is true,” Bunderson said. “No one alive knows what Columbus actually looked like.”

“What about all those pictures in the history books?”

“Paintings executed years after Columbus had passed on, by artists who had never laid eyes upon the Great Navigator in the flesh,” supplied Johnny.

“So what happened?” prompted Ham.

“I was spotted. A very imposing man began chasing me, blunderbuss in hand. I fled back to the house, but he followed me in. Just as I was actuating the return to our time, he came bounding up into the tower room. Then we lost all vision as the Chronodomus restored me to the present.

“My sight cleared first,” he continued. “Columbus had dropped his weapon. I seized it, ordered him to stand back. He fled the house, plunging into the woods.”

A long silence intruded while the full import of Herman Bunderson’s words sank in.

“I took his blunderbuss to Harvell Braggs and told my story. He didn’t want to believe me, but the weapon convinced him. You see, it was inscribed with the name,
Don Cristóbal Colón,
which was Columbus’ Spanish name. So we know that the man was in truth the actual Columbus. Braggs organized a search party, hiring a private detective named Ivan Cass to assist, but they never found him. Columbus appeared to have vanished. When Braggs began pressing me for the location of my grandfather’s Chronodomus, I refused to have anything more to do with the matter.”

Herman Bunderson shook himself as he sighed. “Braggs paid me off and swore me to secrecy. I took the money and went my own way.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Renny.

“Two years ago. I have had no contact with Braggs in the intervening time. In that period, I have been concentrating on going back to the Nineteenth Century. There is a treasure in gold coins that was buried in these woods. It had never been found. My goal was to locate the cache. Unfortunately, during one sojourn, I encountered the Big Necks and was made captive. I tried to explain that I needed to return to my house, and that it would take me to the future. I took them to it, but they refused to release me. However, Chief Big Neck entered the house and while he was rifling it, the structure returned to the Twentieth Century, stranding me in his era, and Big Neck in mine.”

“Until Doc Savage stepped in,” observed Ham. “It’s possibly the most bizarre account I have ever heard—in or out of a court of law. But its truthfulness cannot be gainsayed.”

“What flummoxes me,” boomed Renny, “is you have a machine that can jump around in history like a grasshopper, and you waste it searching for loot.”

“Unquestionably dubious thinking,” sniffed Johnny. “Great universities would pay a fortune to have you answer some of history’s most compelling questions.”

Before the bony archeologist could launch into a dry recitation of such inquiries, Monk asked, “What was the treasure?”

Bunderson told them. “Back in 1832, the friendly Fox Indians made a trip to Saint Louis to get $15,000 in gold due them for selling the La Plata area to the whites. A small war party went to collect the money and, on the way back, was waylaid by the Sac Indians. The Foxes were outnumbered. There was a bloody fight. All the Foxes were killed. However, they managed to hide the gold coins, and the victorious Sac could never find it.

“This occurred on the Chariton River, west of La Plata and somewhat south of here. At least two generations of Fox and Sac Indians returned to this site to search for the gold. There is only one authentic recovery—some boys unearthed about a thousand dollars in 1870.”

“Kind of a coincidence that this joint was built close to the treasure,” Monk ventured.

“Not at all. My grandfather was very interested in that gold. He built close to it, hoping to locate it, either in this era or a previous one. He was unsuccessful, of course. I have been carrying on his work.” There was a trace of pride in the man’s tone.

“Because of your blundering about in time,” scolded Ham severely, “the world has lost a great and irreplaceable man, Doc Savage, and one of history’s most famous notables is a castaway here in our century.”

Herman Bunderson hung his head in undisguised shame. “If I had any idea where Columbus is hiding, I would gladly restore him to his proper era in history.”