"036 (B027) - Mystery Under the Sea (1936-02) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc Savage had found it necessary to release the young woman. She immediately sought to jump overboard; but he caught her, hauled her back, held her as he worked over the engine.
Diamond Eve Post began shrieking.
"Seaworthy!" she hailed in her loudest voice.
"What is it?" demanded Seaworthy from the rail above.
"Sail without me!" the girl cried. "Go on to Taz!"
"
Nix!" Seaworthy barked. "We'll get you away from that bronze guy!"
"Don't be a fool!" Diamond Eve Post shrilled. "Doc Savage seized me to make the Tropic Seas turn back! He thought you wouldn't go on without me!"
Doc was having trouble with the engine. The gasoline seemed to be shut off, and the valve was difficult to locate. He shifted one hand to the girl's mouth for the purpose of silencing her, but was not immediately successful.
"Sail for Taz!" the young woman shrieked at Seaworthy. "If you turn back, Doc Savage will spike the whole business!"
Seaworthy wailed, "But you—"
"I'll be all right!" shouted the girl. "I'll get rid of this Doc Savage! Then I'll charter a plane, and find you at Taz! Or maybe I'll wait until you return!"
Seaworthy objected, "But I don't like the idea—"
"Go on!" the girl shouted.
At that point, Doc Savage succeeded in muffling her. He got the engine started almost simultaneously. The launch was fast. It lifted its nose and moved rapidly, lurching in the swell.
The bulk of the Tropic Seas was speedily lost and there was only the noise of the shouting men aboard to mark its position. But after a time, the night swallowed this, too. It was evident that the Tropic Seas had continued on toward the open ocean, as the young woman had commanded.
Doc Savage told Diamond Eve Post, "Now we will have a long talk and you can explain a number of things."
"You're an optimist," she said.
BY the time they had reached Doc Savage's skyscraper headquarters, it was beginning to look as if the young woman was right, and that she was going to shed no light whatever on the general mystery.
As a matter of fact, she consented to answer only one question. She did this as they were riding up in the elevator.
"What became of the piece you cut out of the rug?" Doc asked her.
"It's aboard the Tropic Seas," she said, maliciously. "You'll never learn what was on it."
The elevator let them out on the eighty-sixth floor, and they swung along the corridor. Immediately, the sound of an altercation came to their ears.
"Just a dumb shyster," insisted Monk's squeaking voice. "You're too bullheaded to admit it, but you know very well they're big at the bottoms for a reason."
"Ridiculous!" Ham snapped. "It is just an inane idea."
It was the sailors' pants argument again.
The two dissenters called a recess and stared in frank amazement at Doc Savage's companion. Monk got up and executed a snappy bow.
"I do not know any one I would be more delighted to see right now," he said.
"I hate to throw cold water," the girl snapped.
"Huh?" Monk blinked.
"Having me here is not going to do you any good," she advised him. "So you might as well get unhappy."
Ham murmured, "A young lady of determination."
"You said it," agreed the young woman.
Ham treated her to a speculative examination.
"She's a bit saucy," he said. "Perhaps if we took her down and let her look at poor Twenty-Thousand-Leagues Verne, it would cool her off."
The girl lost a little of her ruddy color. But she kept her hard exterior.
"What did they do to him?" she asked.
"Burned his mouth with acid, and cut the ligaments of his wrists," Ham recited, callously. "And they did something to him that caused him to get the bends."
The girl swallowed several times.
"There was probably an 'iron doctor' on Captain Flamingo's schooner," she said. "No doubt they put Verne in that, subjected him to terrific pressure, then took him out without decompressing him slowly."
"What is Taz?" Doc Savage queried, abruptly.
The girl cupped her chin in a palm in a mocking attitude of deep thought and murmured sarcastically, "Let's see, what could it be? It might be a three-letter word meaning the first part of Tasmania. But no; that's wrong—"
"That crack fell pretty flat," Monk suggested.
"I'll brush up on my jokes," she retorted.
Doc Savage interposed, addressing Monk, "Do you have that enlargement?"
"Sure." Monk passed it over.
Doc spread the thing out on the table. Considering the smallness of the negative which had been its source, the enlargement was encouragingly distinct. The marks which the dying man had scraped with his toe were plainly discernible.
The girl stared at the picture, gasped, "What is that?"
"A photograph of the rug before your friend Seaworthy went to work on it with his knife," Doc told her.
"Oh!" The girl knotted and unknotted her hands. "Oh!"