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

He hardly had the headset on when he shouted sharply.
"There's something moving around here!"
Doc Savage got under cover so suddenly that he seemed to vanish where he had been standing. Monk and Ham were only a shade slower.
They listened. It was hard for their ears to tell much. The flowing lava made grisly sounds. Moreover, fires set by the splashing lava were crackling. Ethel's Mama made an occasional rumble.
"Sure you ain't hearin' the lava in that contraption?" Monk asked.
"No," Long Tom said. "Whatever it is, is coming closer."
Monk produced one of the rapid-firing pistols from an under-arm holster. The weapons had been perfected by Doc Savage, and since they fired anything from gas to demolition cartridges, could do surprising things.
"If it's our invisible friend, I'll be ready for 'im this time!" Monk said grimly.
A peculiar-looking creature came out of the jungle and ambled toward the group. It resembled a member of the ape family, although important anthropologists had disagreed on this. Very striking was the what-is-it's likeness to the homely chemist, Monk. Had Monk been relieved of two hundred pounds or so, he and the ape would not have to be seen in a very thick fog for there to be a case of mistaken identity.
"Chemistry!" Ham exploded, relieved at seeing his pet.
"I got a notion to shoot anyway!" Monk grumbled.
A moment later, Monk's pet pig, Habeas Corpus, appeared, trailing Chemistry. The two looked as if they had just had a fight. They probably had. They got along about as well as their owners.
Long Tom said, "That's what my apparatus located."
Doc Savage appeared from his hiding place and walked toward the sea, following the lava. Monk, Ham and their pets went with him.
Long Tom remained behind with the capacity detector alarm and suspended the braided, insulated aлrial of his device between two small trees. It really was an aлrial in substance. The whole contrivance functioned somewhat on the principle of the old-time regenerative radio receivers which howled when you brought your hand near them. Doc Savage had expended a good deal of his remarkable scientific skill on the device, however, and it was uncannily sensitive.
Long Tom donned the headset and adjusted the dials more carefully. It was very hot, even though he had a tree between himself and the flowing lava. He tried fanning himself with the tropical helmet he was wearing. But the capacity detector gave off little whines each time his hand moved. Long Tom stopped fanning.
The detector, not quite as finely refined, was already in use around New York as a burglar alarm. Rich men had a wire strung around the wall enclosing their estates, and when any one came near the wall a bell rang.
AFTER about ten minutes, Long Tom showed suddenly increased interest in his apparatus. Some one was coming. The feeble-looking electrical wizard got to his feet and loosened his machine pistol.
The weapon was charged with "mercy" bullets which produced unconsciousness. They were chemical-filled capsules which did not do much actual damage.
When the new arrival popped into view, Long Tom nearly dropped his weapon. It was a girl.
A scared girl! Her eyes were big, and she breathed rapidly.
"Come quickly!" she gasped. "It may get away! That is, if it's not dead!"
The big eyes were blue, a nice shade. There was more about her that was nice, too. Her nose, the shape of her mouth. Long Tom had a weakness for slender girls, and this one was certainly slender. She wore stout leather boots, shorts, a khaki blouse and a khaki pith helmet. There was a leather case for a miniature camera and a pair of binoculars slung over her right shoulder and a canteen over her left.
"Don't stand there staring!" she snapped. "I want a witness! Somebody to prove I saw it. I took pictures of it, but they can be faked."
"Er—I don't—understand," Long Tom said uncertainly.
She grabbed his arm. "It's lying in a side canyon up above. I saw you men through the trees and ran down here as soon as I found it and took pictures."
"Who are you?" Long Tom wanted to know.
"Special writer. Don't ask questions. It may move."
Long Tom swallowed twice. "What is it?"
The young woman looked impatient enough to shake him.
"It is about fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and about the same high," she said rapidly. "It's got the most fantastic kind of arms, and a horrible body. It was sort of like a mass of clear glass when I first saw it, but it is getting darker, changing color."
"Good night!" Long Tom exclaimed. "The thing that grabbed Monk!"
"What's that?" asked the girl.
"Nothing!" Long Tom snapped. "Let's have a look at this critter!"
The electrical wizard looked in the direction which Doc Savage, Monk and Ham had taken. The trio were not in sight. Ethel's Mama was making quite a rumble at the moment, and he doubted if they could hear him shout. He decided he could call them later.
He ran up the lava stream bank with the excited young lady.
"There's a big palm tree on the bank of the side canyon where the thing is lying," the girl said.
THE big palm had lost its fronds in the heat. It was a coconut palm. The coconuts still hung in a knot at the top, charred and black, although not a frond remained. At the foot of the tree lay one of those big palm crabs, the kind which have relieved many an unwary native of a hand when he reached for a coconut. It was baked pink and had cracked wide when it hit the ground.
Long Tom looked at the crab and said, "That's just the way I feel, Miss—Miss—" She didn't take the hint, so the electrician came out with it. "What's your name?"
"Alberta. Come on."
They ran past the singed coconut, working around several large boulders, and the girl leveled an arm. The leveling gesture stretched her wrist out of her sleeve and revealed a wrist watch and a band—the band mounted with some diamonds that were nearly as big as the small wrist watch dial.
Long Tom coughed some of the sulphurous volcanic air out, hooked sweat out of his eyes with crooked forefingers, and stared.
"Say, what kind of a gag is this?" he growled.
There was not much of a side canyon. And there was certainly nothing in it. Nothing unusual, at least.
The girl gripped Long Tom's arm. There was more strength in her fingers than Long Tom had thought any woman would ever have. It made his whole arm numb.
"Look!" she shrilled.
Long Tom looked.
He saw a wave of purplish black come out of the back of his brain and break over his eyeballs, and with it there was a phenomenon as if somebody had popped one of those Australian bullwhips over his ears. The ground somehow got up against the side of his face.
"Don't!" he heard the girl cry.
Then the world and everything else went off somewhere.