Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (30 page)

Gull quickly appropriated the weapon, muttering, “Magician’s luck! Twice in a row.”

More drops of rain fell on them, large drops for a while; then they commenced getting smaller. Soon, they were immersed in a misery-inducing Missouri downpour.

Gull shouted over the storm, “Can you pop Cass with your rock if he wakes up?”

“I’ll kiss him with the greatest pleasure,” Spook hollered.

“Then you stay here and watch Saint Pete and Cass.”

“But what—?”

“I’m going to have a look at that roadster and trailer up the road,” Gull bellowed.

“You may get into trouble!”

“That,” Gull yelled, “is probably an understatement.”

GULLIVER strode off, hunched against the rain, and left the road. There was a field of tall corn through which he moved—evidently these were crops the Silent Saints grew for food. They provided good cover through which to pick his way, but rich loose soil made footing tough until he broke free of the waving green stalks.

The pasture which the roadster and trailer had entered was rapidly filling with dancing rainwater. Gull’s shoes began to fill, soaking his socks.

Light came from the trailer windows. Gull waited for a time, but no one moved outside the trailer, so he crept forward, a watery shadow pelted by the ceaseless torrent. He held Cass’ revolver inside his coat to keep it dry.

Gull’s intent listening netted no sound from the trailer. Windows of the trailer were closed, water sheeting over them made it impossible to see inside, although he stood on tiptoes and tried. Then, the revolver in hand, he sidled toward the door.

A fiddle string seemed to break against his right ear.

It was exactly like that. He’d never heard a bullet at inches range before; when they glanced off rocks, they went
pin-n-g!
or made a singing noise. This was a report! And it was a bullet, because the gun noise came after it with a big bump. From the roadster.

Gull went down. Not hit. Not scared, either, surprisingly enough. Suddenly, he felt as calm as a carpenter opening a keg of nails. Lifting his own gun, he aimed deliberately, fired. A man leaning out of the roadster door, plainly distinguishable in the lightning blaze, suddenly lost his grip; he fell to the ground, making a splash.

A man opened the trailer door. Gull fired. The man jumped back into the trailer.

Then that man shot off a gun. Several times. The bullets came through the trailer sides, popping into water and mud near Gull. He rolled. Then he put two lead blobs into the thin hide of the trailer. Someone bawled.

Suddenly, it sunk in to Gull that Christopher Columbus might be in that trailer, a helpless prisoner.

Gulliver Greene did not often obey a wild impulse. But he made an exception now. It seemed like a good time for a falsehood.

“It’s the G-Men!” Gull yelled. “Throw your guns out of there!”

The results were not overly satisfying. Lead came out of the trailer in quantity. Shots bumped dully inside, but the bullets, once outside, made about the noises that a man with pneumonia makes coughing.

“It’s the United States government out here!” Gull yelled.

Technically, it was only a hundred and twenty millionth part of the republic, but the words had the desired effect this time. They struck terror into the trailer. The door popped open, men bounded out and ran.

“Stop! Get your hands up!”

Gull yelled more orders. They were ignored. He fired off the gun. Rain roared down. Water blinded the men. Thunder whooped, cackled, seemed to slam great portals among the clouds. Lightning flashes stabbed eyes. Result was general bedlam, confusion. The men from the trailer ran away. Probably they did think it was a federal raid. The man Gull had winged in the roadster got up and loped lopsidedly with them.

It was the midget with the outsized vocal cords.

They all ran down the road in the direction of the Silent Saints camp which took them toward where Spook Davis was holding the girl and Ivan Cass. Before long, guns began making noise again, then Spook let out a series of squawling sounds.

Chapter XXX

FREEDOM IN BRONZE

LONG TOM ROBERTS was an inveterate tinkerer. He could take apart anything from a radial aircraft engine to an all-wave radio sending and receiving set and restore it to better condition than it had been when he started.

The mechanical brain that governed what old Method Gibbs had dubbed the Chronodomus was a different matter. Aside from not resembling anything he had ever encountered, much of its profuse wiring had melted and fused.

As a first step, Long Tom had pulled out the bad wiring. It was strange stuff. Some of it was the old loom-cord type. But it could be replaced with modern material.

Herman Bunderson paced around nervously.

“Can you make yourself useful?” Long Tom snapped peevishly.

“All I know about electricity, “ Bunderson admitted meekly, “is that you hook dry cells up by connecting the inside post of one to the outside post of the next one, and that when they run down, you could get some more juice out of them by poking holes in their zinc skins and sitting them in a fruit jar of vinegar or sal ammoniac.”

Long Tom frowned. “Are there any spare parts to this contraption?”

“The closets are full of electrical junk, but I don’t know how much of it will help.”

“Gather up everything and dump it out in the hall,” instructed Long Tom.

Bunderson galloped off. Long Tom continued picking apart the damaged wiring, face a knot of concentration.

An hour of so later, Bunderson dropped the last of the extra material at the foot of the tower room staircase and called up.

“This is all of it.”

Reluctantly, Long Tom pried himself from his work and came down to examine the litter of electrical components and other items. Among the debris were replacement wires and vacuum tubes. The latter looked handmade. His sour face began to brighten.

Lugging armfuls of the stuff upstairs, Long Tom set about replacing the useless wiring.

“This is going to be like stuffing an old horse-hair armchair,” he grumbled.

Deep into the day, the electrical wizard toiled. Ordinarily, he relished such challenges. But the thought of Doc Savage trapped in the Nineteenth Century made him rush through it—this despite the undeniable fact that if the renowned electrical genius could get the mechanism to work again, time and distance might not matter.

On the other hand, it might be of tremendous import.

Long he labored, and when Long Tom finished rewiring the device, the slender electrical wizard stepped back and called Herman Bunderson up.

The inheritor of the Chronodomus examined the mechanism from all angles and finally said, “It looks pretty much like it did before.”

“But will it work? That’s the question.”

“I don’t know,” confessed Bunderson, eyeing the concentric and interlocking calibrated rings of brass that resembled an old astrolabe. “Some of these governors appear to be out of kilter.”

“Figured that. The question is—how far out of kilter?”

“I wish I knew,” confessed the other.

“Never mind the electric-eye timer, can you set the controls to send this thing back?”

“Yes.”

“Start it up. Let’s see if it works.”

“The only way to know if it works is to try to go back.”

“That’s the idea. We are going back to get Doc Savage. Set the controls to land on January 1, 1830. Never mind why.”

“But-but if it doesn’t operate properly, we could land anywhere. Anywhere at all. With disastrous consequences.”

Long Tom’s pale eyes challenged those of the other man. “We’ll risk that,” he stated grimly.

Herman Bunderson looked contrite. “I guess after all the damage I have done, I will risk it, too.”

He went to the main controls, began adjusting them, carefully setting and resetting elements until he was satisfied. He consulted an old leather-bound journal, evidently the manual handwritten by his grandfather, the inventor of the temporal displacer.

Finally, Bunderson called out, “Say when ready.”

Long Tom did not hesitate. “Ready.”

A knife switch was thrown and the house lights flickered. Magnetic forces plucked at Long Tom’s wrist watch. He slapped a hand down to hold it in place.

A sensation of dislocation began immediately. It was a downward jolt. The house seemed to rise off its foundation, and before he could find his balance, Long Tom Roberts was swimming in a gray haze in which his vision no longer operated.

This went on for some while. Bringing his watch against one ear, the electrical wizard listened for its ticking. He grunted. The works were running normally. He had wondered if it would function.

The sensation of coming to rest coincided with the return of normal vision.

Long Tom rushed to the tower window.

Where before it was light, now it was dark. Moonlight flooded the landscape outside the window pane. The forest below was spectral with a coating of ice and snow.

Long Tom muttered, “We’ve landed smack in the dead of winter. No telling what year it is, either.”

Taking Herman Bunderson by the collar, he snapped, “Let’s reconnoiter.” Long Tom had to rough the man down the stairs. Bunderson was not eager to encounter any more Indians.

They stepped out onto the railed porch. A bitter snap plucked at their exposed skins. Bunderson began to shiver.

“This looks like the forest by the Chariton,” he decided.

“Right. But
when
is it? That’s what I want to know.”

Stepping off the porch, Long Tom began to stalk around the property. The scorched maroon sides still stank of smoke. Some of the ornamentation that so brought to mind angular spiderwebs had been charred black. The hideousness of the old manse were never more appalling.

He soon found himself ankle-deep in snow. The bitter cold had formed a crust and this rime squeaked when stepped on, breaking easily.

Long Tom produced a flashlight and began investigating the immediate vicinity.

“What are you looking for?” Bunderson asked, excited breath producing cold clouds.

“Signs. Now be still.”

Long Tom was very methodical in his searching. He began with the trees nearest to the house and gave them a good once-over with the thin beam of the generator flashlight, winding it often to resupply juice.

His painstaking effort was rewarded when the glowing dime of light touched a raw cut in the side of an old hickory tree.

Long Tom whistled, once. It was a musical exclamation of pure pleasure.

“Doc made that,” he said, indicating with a pointing finger.

“How long ago?”

“Months. But the arrow points in a specific direction. We will follow that trail.”

“What about the house?”

Long Tom hesitated. “Stay behind and guard it.”

“What if you don’t come back?” asked Bunderson.

“I will come back. And I won’t be alone, either.”

With that, the pallid electrical wizard marched purposefully into the woods.

LONG TOM walked for over an hour by moonlight, but found nothing. These woods appeared untrammeled. He found tracks of bear, squirrel and other woodland creatures.

No human footprints did he uncover.

The night moved farther along and discouragement caused his lean shoulders to sag like rotting timbers.

From time to time, Long Tom ventured a bird call. It sounded like a bobwhite, but the spacing of the piping constituted a code. If Doc Savage heard it, he would reply in kind.

But Doc Savage evidently did not hear it, for no answering call came to Long Tom’s oversized ears.

Finally, compelled by sheer frustration, the puny electrical expert removed his supermachine pistol from his inner holster and pointed it at the night sky. Finger on the firing lever, he pulled back.

The superfirer unleashed a brilliant burst of noisy reports, gunpowder flashes painting the surrounding trees. The blending percussions produced the unique bullfiddle roar the compact weapon made in operation. There was no other sound like it on earth.

Long Tom let the compact drum run empty. Then he lowered the smoking muzzle.

Patiently, he listened.

The snow cover was such that if a man approached from any direction, the creaking and snapping of the crushed hoarfrost cover would warn of it.

Long Tom heard nothing of the kind. Superfirer smoking, dejection settling over his unhealthy looking features, he turned to retrace his steps.

Long Tom covered some leagues south when above his head, tree branches began to spill powdery snow.

He looked up.

And from a branch directly overhead, a startling figure dropped.

An uncouth giant stood before him. Towering, dressed in buckskins with windburned face obscured by a plump beard the color of copper wiring. He might have been an old frontiersman of Daniel Boone’s day, living rough.

Golden eyes burned into his own with an almost feral light.

“Doc?”

“Long Tom,” returned the voice of Doc Savage.

“Doc! You’re alive!”

“Later. Let’s get to the Victorian.”

“We haven’t much time,” Long Tom warned. “I left that Bunderson guy in charge of the works. If anything spooks him, he might take off on us.”

Suddenly, Doc Savage grabbed Long Tom and lifted him off his feet.

“Hey!”

“Hold on,” warned Doc.

Suddenly they were in the trees with the bronze man rushing along branches, leaping from springy bough to bough and covering yawning space so rapidly that the pale electrical wizard had to close his eyes to keep from becoming dizzy.

In his heart, a strange joy danced.

Doc Savage paused only once, and that was to stop at a tree house where he gathered up two items—Habeas Corpus and a makeshift sack which rattled and jingled metallically. It was obvious that the bronze giant had been living in the tree house, awaiting relief.

Chapter XXXI

THE FRONT

GULLIVER GREENE, RUNNING in the direction of Spook Davis’ outcries, felt drained of whatever it was that had made him go through the gunfight with the reckless calmness of a veteran. The aftermath was sudden unpleasant nervous convulsions. A few minutes ago, The Great Gulliver had been as calm as a combination of David with the slingshot, but whatever juice had given him that Penthesilean moment had leaked; the rod had gone limp. Every bullet of the fight was being shot once more in his brain, with disconcerting effects on what he had always considered to be an average amount of bravery.