The Man of Bronze (3 page)

“You mean—” hairy Monk rumbled.

“That my father and I often left each other notes written on that window,” Doc explained. “Watch!”

Doc crossed the room, a big, dynamic man, light on his feet as a kitten for all his size, and turned out the lights. He came back to the black-light box. His hand, supple despite its enormous tendons, clicked the switch that shot current into the apparatus.

Instantly, written words sprang out on the darkened windowpane. Glowing with a dazzling, electric blue, the effect of their sudden appearance was uncanny.

A split second later came a terrific report! A bullet knocked the glass into hundreds of fragments, wiping out the sparkling blue message before they could read it. The bullet passed entirely through the steel-plate inner door of the safe! It embedded in the safe back.

THE room reeked silence. One second, two! Nobody had moved.

And then a new sound was heard. It was a low, mellow, trilling sound, like the song of some strange bird of the jungle, or the sound of the wind filtering through a jungled forest. It was melodious, though it had no tune; and it was inspiring, though it was not awesome.

The amazing sound had the peculiar quality of seeming to come from everywhere within the room rather than from a definite spot, as though permeated with an eerie essence of ventriloquism.

A purposeful calm settled over Doc Savage’s five men as they heard that sound. Their breathing became less rapid, their brains more alert.

For this weird sound was part of Doc—a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of utter concentration. To his friends it was both the cry of battle and the song of triumph. It would come upon his lips when a plan of action was being arranged, precoursing a master stroke which made all things certain.

It would come again in the midst of some struggle, when the odds were all against his men, when everything seemed lost. And with the sound, new strength would come to all, and the tide would always turn.

And again, it might come when some beleaguered member of the group, alone and attacked, had almost given up all hope of survival. Then that sound would filter through, some way, and the victim knew that help was at hand.

The whistling sound was a sign of Doc, and of safety, of victory.

“Who got it?” asked Johnny, and he could be heard settling his glasses more firmly on his bony nose.

“No one,” said Doc. “Let us crawl, brothers, crawl. That was no ordinary rifle bullet, from the sound of it!”

At that instant, a second bullet crashed into the room. It came, not through the window, but through some inches of brick and mortar which comprised the wall! Plaster sprayed across the thick carpet.

D
OC Savage was the last of the six to enter the adjoining room. But he was inside the room in less than ten seconds. They moved with amazing speed, these men.

Doc flashed across the big library. The speed with which he traversed the darkness, never disturbing an article of furniture, showed the marvelous development of his senses. No jungle cat could have done better.

Expensive binoculars reposed in a desk drawer, a highpower hunting rifle in a corner cabinet. In splits of seconds, Doc had these, and was at the window.

He watched, waited. No more shots followed the first two.

Four minutes, five, Doc bored into the night with the binoculars. He peered into every office window within range, and there were hundreds. He scrutinized the spidery framework of the observation tower atop the skyscraper under construction. Darkness packed the labyrinth of girders, and he could discern no trace of the bushwhacker.

“He’s gone!” Doc concluded aloud.

No sound of movement followed his words. Then the window shade ran down loudly in the room where they had been shot at. The five men stiffened, then relaxed at Doc’s low call, Doc had moved soundlessly to the shade and drawn it.

Doc was beside the safe, the lights turned on, when they entered.

The window glass had been clouted completely out of the sash. It lay in glistening chunks and spears on the luxuriant carpet.

The glowing message which had been on it seemed destroyed forever.

“Somebody was laying for me outside,” Doc said, no worry at all in his well-developed voice. “They evidently couldn’t get just the aim they wanted at me through the window. When we turned out the light to look at the writing on the window, they thought we were leaving the building. So they took a couple of shots for wild luck.”

“Next time, Doc, suppose we have bulletproof glass in these windows!” Renny suggested, the humor in his voice belying his dour look.

“Sure,” said Doc. “Next time! We’re on the eighty-sixth floor, and it’s quite common to be shot at here!”

Ham interposed a sarcastic snort. He bounced over, waspish, quick-moving, and nearly managed to thrust his slender arm through the hole the bullet had tunneled in the brick wall.

“Even if you put in bulletproof windows, you’d have to be blame careful to set in front of them!” he clipped dryly.

Doc was studying the hole in the safe door, noting particularly the angle at which the powerful bullet had entered. He opened the safe. The big bullet, almost intact, was embedded in the safe rear wall.

Renny ran a great arm into the safe, grasped the bullet with his fingers. His giant arm muscles corded as he tried to pull it out. The fist that could drive bodily through inch-thick planing with perfect ease was defied by the embedded metal slug.

“Whew!” snorted Renny. “That’s a job for a drill and cold chisels.”

Saying nothing, merely as if he wanted to see if the bullet was stuck as tightly as Renny said, Doc reached into the safe.

Great muscles popping up along his arm suddenly split his coat sleeve wide open. He glanced at the ruined sleeve ruefully, and brought his arm out of the safe. The bullet lay loosely in his palm.

RENNY could not have looked more astounded had a spike-tailed devil hopped out of the safe. The expression on his puritanical face was ludicrous.

Doc weighed the bullet in his palm. The lids were drawn over his golden eyes. He seemed to be giving his marvelous brain every chance to work—and he was. He was guessing the weight of that bullet within a few grains, almost as accurately as a chemist’s scale could weigh it.

“Seven hundred and fifty grains,” he decided, “That makes it a .577 caliber Nitro-Express rifle. Probably the gun that fired that shot was a double-barreled rifle.”

“How d’you figure that?” asked Ham. Possibly the most astute of Doc’s five friends, Doc’s reasoning nevertheless got away from even Ham.

“There were only two shots,” Doc clarified. “Also, cartridges of this tremendous size are usually fired from double-barreled elephant rifles.”

“Let’s do somethin’ about this!” boomed Monk. “The bushwhacker may get away while we’re jawin’!”

“He’s probably fled already, since I could locate no trace of him with the binoculars,” Doc replied. “But we’ll do something about it, right enough!”

With exactly four terse sentences, one each directed at Renny, Long Tom, Johnny, and Monk, Doc gave all the orders he needed to. He did not explain in detail what they were to do. That wasn’t necessary. He merely gave them the idea of what he wanted, and they set to work and got it in short order. They were clever, these men of Doc’s.

Renny, the engineer, picked a slide rule from the drawer of a desk, a pair of dividers, some paper, a length of string. He probed the angle at which the bullet had passed through the inner safe door, calculated expertly the slight amount the window had probably deflected it. In less than a minute, he had his string aligned from the safe to a spot midway in the window, and was sighting down it.

“Snap out of it, Long Tom!” he called impatiently.

“Just keep your shirt on!” Long Tom complained. He was doing his own share as rapidly as the engineer.

Long Tom had made a swift swing into the library and laboratory, collecting odds and ends of electrical material. With a couple of powerful light bulbs he unscrewed from sockets, some tin, a pocket mirror he borrowed from—of all people—Monk, Long Tom rigged an apparatus to project a thin, extremely powerful beam of light. He added a flashlight lens, and borrowed the magnifying half of Johhny’s glasses before he got just the effect he desired.

Long Tom sighted his light beam down Renny’s string, thus locating precisely in the gloomy mass of skyscrapers, the spot from whence the shots had come.

In the meantime, Johnny, with fingers and eye made expert by years of assembling bits of pottery from ancient ruins, and the bones of prehistoric monsters, was fitting the shattered windowpane together. A task that would have taken a layman hours, Johnny accomplished in minutes.

Johnny turned the black-light apparatus on the glass. The message in glowing blue sprang out. Intact!

Monk came waddling in from the laboratory. In the big furry hands that swung below his knees, he carried several bottles, tightly corked. They held a fluid of villainous color.

Monk, from the wealth of chemical formulas within his head, had compounded a gas with which to fight their opponents, should they succeed in cornering whoever had fired that shot. It was a gas that would instantly paralyze any one who inhaled it, but the effects were only temporary, and not harmful.

THEY all gathered around the table on which Johnny had assembled the fragments of glass. All but Renny, who was still calculating his angles. And as Doc flashed the light upon the glass, they read the message written there:

Important papers back of the red brick—

Before the message could mean anything to their minds, Renny shouted his discovery.

“It’s from the observation tower, on that unfinished skyscraper,” he cried. “That’s where the shot came from—and the sharpshooter must still be somewhere up there!”

“Let’s go!” Doc ordered, and the men surged out into the massive, shining corridor of the building, straight to the battery of elevators.

If they noticed that Doc tarried behind several seconds, none of them remarked the fact. Doc was always doing little things like that—little things that often turned out to have amazing consequences later.

The men piled into the opened elevator with a suddenness that startled the dozing operator. He wouldn’t be able to sleep on the job the rest of the night!

With a whine like a lost pup, the cage sank.

Grimly silent, Doc and his five friends were a remarkable collection of men. They so impressed the elevator operator that he would have shot the lift past the first floor into the basement, had Doc not dropped a bronze, long-fingered hand on the control.

Doc led out through the lobby at a trot. A taxi was cocked in at the curb, driver dreaming over the wheel. Four of the six men piled into the machine. Doc and Renny rode the running board.

“Do a Barney Oldfield!” Doc directed the cab driver.

The hack jumped away from the curb as if stung.

Rain sheeted against Doc’s strong, bronzed face, and his straight, closelying bronze hair. An unusual fact was at once evident. Doc’s bronze skin and bronze hair had the strange quality of seeming impervious to water. They didn’t get appreciably wet; he shed water like the proverbial duck’s back.

The streets were virtually deserted in this shopping region. Over toward the theater district, perhaps, there would be a crowd.

Brakes giving one long squawk, the taxi skidded sidewise to the curb and stopped. Doc and Renny were instantly running for the entrance of the new skyscraper. The four passengers came out of the cab door as if blown out. Ham still carried his plain black cane.

“My pay!” howled the taxi driver.

“Wait for us!” Doc flung back at him.

In the recently finished building lobby, Doc yelled for the watchman. He got no answer. He was puzzled. There should be one around.

They entered an elevator, sent it upward to the topmost floor. Still no watchman! They sprang up a staircase to where all construction but steel work ceased. There they found the watchmen.

The man, a big Irishman with cheeks so plump and red they looked like the halves of Christmas apples, was bound and gagged. He was indeed grateful when Doc turned him loose—but quite astounded. For Doc, not bothering with the knots, simply freed the Irishman by snapping the stout ropes with his fingers as easily as he would cords.

“Begorra, man!” muttered the Irishman. “‘Tis not human yez can be, with a strength like that!”

“Who tied you up?” Doc asked compellingly. “What did he look like?”

“Faith, I dunno!” declared the son of Erin. “‘Twas not a single look or a smell I got of him, except for one thing. The fingers of the man were red on the ends. Like he had dipped ‘em in blood!”

ON up into the wilderness of steel girders, the six men climbed. They left the Irishman behind, rubbing spots where the ropes had hurt him, and mumbling to himself about a man who broke ropes with his fingers, and another man who had red finger tips.

“This is about the right height!” said the gaunt Johnny, bounding at Doc’s heels. “He was shooting from about here.”

Johnny was hardly breathing rapidly. A tall, poorly looking man, Johnny nevertheless exceeded all the others, excepting Doc, in endurance. He had been known to go for three days and three nights steadily with only a slice of bread and a canteen of water.

Doc veered right. He had taken a flashlight from an inside pocket.

It was not like other flashlights, that one of Doc’s. It employed no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring and clockwork, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs. There was not much chance of Doc’s light playing out.

The flash spiked a white rod of luminance ahead. It picked up a workman’s platform of heavy planks.

“The shot came from there!” Doc vouchsafed.

A steel girder, a few inches wide, slippery with moisture, offered a short cut to the platform. Doc ran along it, surefooted as a bronze spider on a web thread. His five men, knowing they would be flirting with death among the steel beams hundreds of feet below, decided to go around, and did it very carefully.