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

The coral was giving way. Either it had grown up out of the sand, or it was thin at the base. It was uprooting, not unlike a tree. Bending over. Not as a tree would fall. More slowly. And loosened sand curled in little rivers away from its base.
"We're going!" Renny squawled.
The coral came loose with a distinct groaning noise. It had one long root like a tree, and that scooped up a cloud of mud and sand.
THE rush of water carried the two men along. Renny thought at first that the thing was sucking the water toward it. He knew better now. It was simply throwing water up from the ocean floor—the geyser which they had seen on the surface. It was the water rushing in to be thrown upward that was drawing them.
But what incredible thing could be forcing the water upward? Renny used his flashlight. An instant later he saw it.
Black! A lump! Something as shiny as black diamond, a large chunk with no particular shape. But it had in the top of it a narrow crack, or eye, and out of this poured an incredible, indescribable something that was driving the water upward with an incalculable force.
Renny found himself completely baffled as to the nature of the thing. He had other things to think of, anyway.
He and Doc Savage were thrown helplessly toward the surface in the rush of water. Mauled, battered, temporarily unable to swim, both powerful men floated on the surface for a time.
Their little radio sets had been damaged and were out of commission. And they chanced to be afloat on the opposite side of the geyser, so that Monk and Ham, on the cliff, could not see them.
Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
MONK and Ham waited on the cliff brink in a tension as brittle as an icicle. The little radio sets fitted on their arms, like big wrist watches. They kept their ears jammed to the tiny speakers and their eardrums hurt from listening, but there was no sound. The girl watched closely and quietly.
"Oh, blazes!" Monk croaked hoarsely. "Doc! Doc! Renny! What's happened?"
Both men's eyes strained at the sea. But the rolling clouds of steam had mushroomed, for the moment, over everything.
Ham said something hoarse under his breath. He couldn't have understood it himself.
Farther up on the slope behind the cliff, and to the south, another man also said things. But what he said could be understood. Profanity, utterly disgusted, guttery.
"I can't tell a damnblasted thing except they're goin' after somethin' in the water!" he snarled.
The watcher was the man who had taken the identity of Snowball Eagan, journalist. He ground his teeth and spat on the lenses of his binoculars and wiped them off. That didn't help.
"With Bert croaked, they ain't nobody to help me!" he gritted. "Watta-ell can I do solo?"
He scowled in the direction of Fan Coral City. His face was a window to his thoughts. He was deciding to do something he had thought about doing as a last resort. Into their case he jammed the binoculars. The adhesive tape on his palm had come loose. There was no wound, no scar of any kind, under it. He pasted it back in place.
"I'll ring in help!" Eagan growled. "Lucky I know more about the owner of the Fifth Wind than anybody else around here."
He struck out for the harbor.
There were yachts in Fan Coral harbor. Fan Coral was not exactly a far corner of the world. People had been there before the eruption, small yawls and sloops and ketches. Other yachts had come since Ethel's Mama had erupted. Big ones.
The Fifth Wind stood out among the others like the Empire State building would stand out in Podunk Falls. She was two hundred feet of jewel, three masts, hollow spars, mahogany, chromium.
The price of her tenders would have bought any one of half the other yachts in the harbor. She was schooner-rigged, and her sails were Egyptian silk. She was shallow enough to go where any forty-footer could; centerboards, two, one on each side; and with her new high-speed Diesels she could cruise thirty knots.
There probably wasn't a warship in the world that could overhaul her. She carried two tubby little seaplanes and a catapult. The planes were mostly engine, and they had synchronized machine guns. The owner liked to gun sharks from the air, the sailors had said.
Nobody had questioned that. The sailors didn't look like the kind of fellows one started an argument with. For no sailor of the Fifth Wind weighed less than two hundred pounds.
A bum boat sculled by a brown loafer put Snowball Eagan on the landing stage of the Fifth Wind.
SNOWBALL EAGAN got on deck, and four sailors got in his way. They didn't say anything. He looked over his shoulder and saw two more sailors in his way in case he wanted to go back. He grinned at everybody. They didn't grin back. They were giants.
"I'll talk to Cadwiller Olden," Snowball Eagan said.
"You'd better talk to me first, maybe," said a man who came from behind the stand of the plane catapult.
The fellow's ears grew up to a point, and his jaw out to a lump. His mouth was about like any mouth without lips. He was naked except for shorts. A strip of hair as wide as two fingers grew from his belt straight up to his neck. His knees were knotty, his feet big. From head to foot he was red with sunburn, and almost dripping with some oil he had put on for it. His height would not miss seven feet much.
"Kinda struck me I'd seen you before," he said. He jerked his lump of a jaw at the sailors. "That's why the reception."
Snowball Eagan looked at the man. He looked startled. He stepped close to the man, but not too fast.
"You're Buddy Baldwin," he said, so that none of the others could hear.
"And that," grunted Buddy Baldwin, "makes you practically a dead man."
Snowball Eagan kept his grin. It didn't look as if the foundation was any too firm.
"You haven't seen me, Baldwin. You've seen my picture. I'm Stage Chinkins. But I'm Snowball Eagan now."
"Buddy" Baldwin worked his shoulders under the skin, as a man likes to do when sunburned.
"They damn near got you in Shanghai," he said.
"They damn near," Snowball Eagan agreed. "Only I turned journalist."
"What do you want?"
"A chin with Cadwiller Olden. I got something."
"Talk to me first," said Buddy Baldwin.
"The hell I will!"
"Then over the side you go."
"Maybe you think—Listen, this is big. It's not your size, Baldwin. Mind you, you're a lot bigger guy than I am, but it still ain't your size. Cadwiller Olden might handle it."
"What do you know about Cadwiller Olden?"
"Nothing," Snowball Eagan said dryly. "I never will know nothin'."
"You been hearin' some gossip?"
Snowball Eagan laughed. He laughed heartily. Then he said, "Don't make me laugh! Cadwiller Olden is a big oil man from Oklahoma."