"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-07 Quest of Qui" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

RENNY REACTED with the abruptness of a man who had been in danger before. He slammed down and to one side, getting behind a case which held storage batteries.

The steadily ringing alarm clock seemed very loud.

Doc Savage had taken a headlong dive and was lying behind the battery case also. The bronze man's back was to Renny.

Doc's coat was ripped, displaying the fine chain mail undergarment which Doc habitually wore. The knife still stuck in the cloth of the bronze man's coat.

Renny pulled the knife out and looked at it briefly. Short as his inspection was, he noted that the knife was extremely unusual.

Doc Savage had dug a thin tube, as long as a pencil and not much larger than a match, from his clothing somewhere, and he elongated this somewhat, then projected the tip over the battery case. It was a tiny periscope.

The alarm clock jangled steadily.

"Watch it, Doc!" Renny croaked in sudden apprehension. Doc Savage had stood erect. He was staring steadily. There was, for the bronze man, an unusual tenseness about his posture. It was rarely that he showed excitement.

"Look out!" Renny boomed. "Whoever threw that knife may have a gun!"

"There is no one," Doc Savage said.

Their voices sounded eerie over the frantic clangor of the clock.

Renny heaved erect. His eyes roved, as did the machine- gun pistol, which looked small in his enormous fist. He had dropped the strange knife on the floor. He walked forward, searching.

"Holy cow!" he rumbled.

There was no one but themselves. The windows were all closed, because it was windy, a trifle chilly this far up. The windows were hardly ever opened anyway, for air conditioning kept the laboratory at an even temperature that was necessary in some chemical experiments.

There was one door. This was almost at their elbow. No one could have passed through it without being seen.

The thrown knife had come from the other end of the room. There were no doors down there. It was a "cul-de-sac."

Doc Savage was moving about, searching, flake gold eyes roving intently. Renny trailed him. They opened a few cabinets which were large enough to hold a man. These were few in number, since most of the cabinets had transparent glass doors. There was no man in them.

The alarm clock stopped ringing. Doc Savage picked it up with the end of a long pole that had a grabber hook on the end of it and which was ordinarily used for taking bottles off the high chemical shelves.

The bronze man put the clock under an X-ray and examined the fluroscopic screen. It was not an infernal machine.

"Ever see that clock before?" Renny asked.

"No," Doc told him.

"Any finger prints?"

Doc used a vapor method of his own in searching the cheap tin alarm clock for prints. He held it in a chemical vapor which would mingle with the microscopic, oily deposit left by the human hand and cause a color change, together with a thickening of the oily deposit due to precipitation. The method would bring out the most infinitesimal print.

"No finger prints," he said.

Renny knotted his big fists and knocked them together. Their hard bone and gristle made sounds reminiscent of bricks colliding. It was a small habit he had.