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

Of the brown-skinned native who had tried to seize Monk there was no sign.
Monk yelled outside, "You guys all right?"
Doc Savage moved to the boulder. There was enough room to squeeze out. The others followed him.
Monk, rubbing his eyes, spitting out dust, joined them in staring in the direction of the lava stream.
"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny gulped.
The patch of big boulders was directly before them. The masses of rock had been fairly evenly distributed. But there was nothing even about the way they now lay.
A path more than a score of feet in width had been swept almost clean of loose stone. The rocks had been pushed, as if by a gigantic broom, to the sides, and in the direction of the ledge.
"Blazes!" Monk breathed. "Think how big that thing must be! Some of those rocks weigh tons!"
The others were silent. What had just happened was so fantastic, so impossible, that they could not think of much to say about it.
"What gets me," Long Tom said hollowly, "is that you couldn't see anything! I can't understand that!"
"Well, it was something that was alive," Monk declared. "You saw how it turned me loose when Renny opened up with his machine pistol. Say, where's that native?"
"Gone," said Ham.
"What?"
"He's disappeared."
Monk opened and shut his big mouth several times.
"Maybe that whatchacallit came after the native," the homely chemist mumbled.
Big-fisted Renny peered about suddenly.
"Where's Doc?" he boomed wildly.
THE five men stared about them, then at each other. The bronze man was not in sight. Something pale and cold seemed to flow into the faces of each man.
"Doc!" Renny gulped. "Do you suppose—"
The rest of it stuck in his throat, and his fists made big blocks that might have been marble painted over with a brown stain.
"Doc!" Monk squawled.
"In here," the bronze man said quietly from beneath the ledge.
The five men charged for the opening, got inside, saw the bronze man over the instrument which he had saved, and looked at each other sheepishly.
"As jittery as a bunch of kids in a spooky graveyard!" Renny thumped disgustedly. "What does that contraption show, Doc?"
The bronze man took a moment before answering.
"It is a little surprising," he said. "This is a device to register and measure automatically the presence and strength of certain invisible wave lengths of light such as the so-called infra and cosmic rays, particularly those which have the property of penetrating solids. The device went completely haywire."
"You mean it didn't register?"
"It registered, but the recording lines make absolutely no sense."
Renny boomed, "Say, Doc, you got an inkling of something queer here just by reading the newspapers and looking at that Yale seismograph record. You came here in a hurry. Just what did you expect to find?"
Instead of answering that, the bronze man said, "It might be best if we did something besides talk. Renny, suppose you look around for some trace of that native who tried to make Monk tell why we were here. Johnny might help you."
Renny sighed, realizing he was not going to get any information now. "Righto." The engineer and Johnny walked off.
"Long Tom," Doc suggested, "you might look through the stuff under the tents and see if you can find our capacity field device to detect the presence of prowlers. Maybe it is intact."
The pale-looking electrical wizard delved into one of the collapsed tents and came up with a black box which had a long coil of flexible insulated copper braid attached, as well as a headset. The box had a profusion of knobs. Long Tom tested.
"It still works," he said.
"Bring it," Doc requested. "Monk and Ham might as well go with us, also."
WHEN the bronze man got into motion, it was evident his destination was the stream of flowing lava. He followed the path which had been so fantastically swept clear of boulders. Doc and his aids saw plenty to interest them.
The trail led straight to the lava stream.
"Blast me!" Monk muttered. "What kind of a gollawhoppus can live in melted rock?"
"Gollawhoppus is right!" Ham agreed.
Doc Savage turned toward the sea. The aids began to notice queer things. In several spots, molten lava was splashed high on the banks of the little valley in which the lava flowed. Fires which this liquid hot rock had started had not burned far.
"I hate to think I might be going nuts," Monk complained. "But it looks as if that thing did a lot of jumping around or something and splashed this rock out on the banks."
Ham stopped suddenly, opened his mouth and began to giggle. Finally he laughed loudly and violently.
"Somethin's goofed you!" Monk snorted.
Ham sobered with a snort.
"Nothing of the sort. This—this spirit out of the hot place, or whatever it is—tried to grab you and carry you off, didn't it? It just struck me that Old Nick must be getting so anxious for your company he couldn't wait for you to turn up your toes in the ordinary manner."
Monk glared indignantly, but the best he could think of was, "The place is probably so full of lawyers by now that there's no room!"
Doc Savage stopped.
"Long Tom," suggested the bronze man, "here is as good a place as any to set up your capacity detector alarm. Stay with it, and if any one is following us, the apparatus should register that fact."
Pale Long Tom nodded, moved back from the lava where the heat was not so intense and set up his device.