"056 (B028) - Repel (The Deadly Dwarf) (1937-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

REPEL
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson

Chapter 1. THE BLOW-UP
WHEN Ethel's Mama blew up, she shook the earth in more ways than one.
Ethel's Mama was on Fan Coral Island in the South Pacific when the lid came off. But probably the first man to discover what had happened was a professor in the laboratory of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, U .S. A. He happened to be watching the seismograph. What he failed to realize was that he had noted something momentous, something that was going to stand the world on its collective ear.
Ethel's Mama was a volcano. On the maps she was tagged Mount Ettilusamauma, but it was easier to say Ethel's Mama. An earthquake apparently started Ethel's Mama off. That was what fooled everybody. It looked like an ordinary earthquake. The Yale seismograph registered the shake at two hours and eleven minutes and forty seconds past noon, Eastern Daylight Saving Time.
The Yale professors said there had been a central earth disturbance about ten thousand miles distant.
A few newspapers carried a paragraph or two.
Then the palm tree landed on the Fan Coral resident governor's house. It happened in the night. It was a big palm tree. Afterward the resident governor's house was not worth rebuilding. The resident governor himself was out on a rum-and-lime spree, or there would have been a vacancy on his country's political pay roll.
How a two-ton palm tree came to be sailing around in the night sky over Fan Coral Island was a question. It was not scorched, so it was not some morsel ejected by Ethel's Mama.
A newspaper reporter who had foolishly quit his job to write a book was on Fan Coral Island at the time. Otherwise the world might never have heard about the palm. The erstwhile journalist sought needed spare change by cabling, or radioing, volcano yarns to every news agency which would take the stuff collect.
The lone newshawk had unwittingly discovered a gold mine.
The uphill landslides were next. When the Fan Coral journalist radioed the story about the avalanches that slid uphill, three of his newspapers radioed right back that they wanted no more of his stuff. They thought he was a goof who was drawing on a not-too-sage imagination.
But it was just what the misjudged journalist said it was. Patches of rock and earth came loose and slid uphill. They were not very big patches. The strips were probably fifty feet wide.
The next night it rained coconuts. And there was no cyclone which could have picked them up and dropped them on Fan Coral City.
Newspapermen from various parts of the Pacific began to drift toward Fan Coral Island by airplane and boat.
A fine yacht named the Fifth Wind turned up in Fan Coral harbor. It belonged to a man named Cadwiller Olden, the crew of the craft said. No one had ever heard of Cadwiller Olden. The cables carried a color story which mentioned the yacht. No one dreamed how important that was going to be.
Ethel's Mama was getting interesting.
FIVE days after Ethel's Mama started erupting, Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks turned up at Yale and asked for the seismograph records. He came near not getting them.
"Ham" Brooks was a Harvard product, admittedly one of the most astute lawyers Harvard had ever turned out, and proud of his Alma Mater. He therefore had no use for Yale, and had said so publicly on occasion.
Marley Brooks, called "Ham," would have been designated as a dude thirty years ago. As it was, the newspapers called him America's best-dressed man. He always carried an innocent-looking black cane.
"But Doc Savage wants the records of the seismograph of the Mount Ettilusamauma eruption," Ham explained.
Doc Savage! That made it different, admitted the Yale officials, who conceivably had heard of Clark Savage, Jr., better known as Doc Savage, the man whom the newspapers called the "Mental Marvel," the "Scientific Genius," the "Muscular Midas," the "Man of Mystery," and other things.
"Doc does not wish newspaper publicity." Ham reminded the Yale officials.
Of course, of course. No newspaper publicity. But some one let the cat out, and the afternoon papers carried it.
Newspaper reporters were lying for Ham at Grand Central Station. Those who did not know Ham by sight had been told to look for a very dapper gentleman who would be accompanied by a very remarkable pet ape named Chemistry.
Ham gave them the slip. He did not have his pet ape along, anyway. Ham had suspected some one would slip. Consequently he got off at the station before Grand Central and waved down a taxi.
Doc Savage was in his remarkable headquarters library and laboratory on the eighty-sixth floor of the city's most impressive skyscraper when Ham entered. Doc had been working with chemicals and wore a rubber smock which hid everything but the fact that he was a giant bronze man with amazing sinews in his hands and neck. He also had a pair of strange flake-gold eyes which had an almost compelling power.
Ham was surprised at the speed with which Doc Savage went to work on the seismograph records. The bronze man used calipers and magnifying glasses on the curves. Then he consulted various instruments of his own and did some mathematical calculations.
Ham was even more startled when he heard Doc Savage make a small, almost inaudible trilling sound, a weird, exotic note which the bronze giant made only in moments of intense mental stress, or in surprise.
"What's up, Doc?" Ham demanded.
The bronze man said absently, "The majority of scientists have always believed it impossible for such a thing to exist. Yet the behavior of that volcano shows that it does exist."
"Eh?" Ham said. "I don't understand."
"Ham," the bronze giant stated, "the world does not know about it yet, but mankind is up against something pretty terrible."
"You mean that volcano?" asked the puzzled Ham.
"Something in the heart of the earth, under that volcano," Doc Savage explained. "The thing has lain there, its presence unknown to scientists. The eruption of the volcano apparently disturbed it, and it would appear that the thing has worked up toward the crater of the volcano with the lava. In a short time it will be out of the volcano, unless my opinion is wrong."
Ham rubbed his jaw. "You talk like this was important."
The bronze man did not answer immediately. When he did, he spoke slowly and grimly.
"It is more than important," he said. "It may well be the most terrible calamity ever loosened on the human race."
Ham swallowed. "But w-what is it, Doc?"
The bronze man considered.
"We will call it Repel," he said. "My opinion is that that is what the rest of the world will call it when it becomes known."
"But that does not explain what it is," Ham reminded.
"I am going to wait until I have made a closer examination on Fan Coral Island before venturing any exact description of Repel," the bronze man said. "We will leave immediately. Get the men together, Ham. And have them take plenty of fighting equipment."
"Fighting—"
"Supermachine pistols and mercy bullets, gas and gas masks," Doc directed. "And the rest of the stuff we usually take."
Two hours later Doc Savage's huge tri-motored amphibian plane was in the air, headed for San Francisco. The ship was streamlined, and could easily hop the Pacific on one fuel load. Doc mapped the course—San Francisco to Hawaii to Tahiti to Fan Coral Island.
With Doc Savage in the plane was Ham and his other four assistants. These were Colonel John "Renny" Renwick, an engineer; Major Thomas J. "Long Tom" Roberts, electrical wizard; William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn, archaeologist and geologist; and Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair, a chemist, who had his pet pig, Habeas Corpus, with him.