"062 (B062) - The Pirate's Ghost (1938-04) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

So, in trying to get away from a sight that turned his stomach, Sagebrush Smith walked around—came upon the amazing laboratory. First, he only saw an old adobe hut, and thought: "This is a funny place for one of them things." Then he looked inside and saw that it was really something unusual.
The mud walls had been plastered inside, and the plaster painted white. Around three walls of the room ran a bench, with shelves above and bins below; and the shelves and bins were crowded with nest arrays of copper wire, silver wire, copper rods and silver rods, coils, bakelite insulating panels, bottles, boxes, jars, and innumerable things that resembled radio vacuum tubes, and yet weren't quite like vacuum tubes.
It was very cool in the hut, leading Sagebrush Smith to realize the interior was air-conditioned, exactly like the movie house in Goldfield. He was a little surprised.
He was more surprised as he went along. The box in the center of the room intrigued him. A skylight let moonglow in through the roof and he could see the box. It was about as tall as himself—around six feet—and about a dozen feet long by eight feet wide.
"Creepin' Moses!" said Sagebrush Smith. "It's solid silver!"
It wasn't. His imagination had run away with him. It was lead, he decided, after he gave it a good scratching with the point of his pocketknife.
One whisker of shiny copper tubing stuck up out of the top of the lead box.
After he had moseyed around the thing a while, Sagebrush found a door, and being of an inquiring disposition, he opened the door and went in, after first striking a match.
He looked around the inside of the lead box. He saw a lot of stuff that he didn't understand. In fact, he saw practically nothing that he did understand, and he began to wish he wasn't so ignorant about electricity.
Sagebrush rubbed his jaw and scratched his head and began touching things, but an electric spark jumped out and bit him, and he stopped that.
There was a small box on the floor which aroused Sagebrush's curiosity. He polished the lock on the box thoughtfully with the ball of a thumb. He could see it was the kind of lock you couldn't pick. The box itself was of high-quality steel. Sagebrush tried his jackknife on it, and the metal of the box turned the razor edge of the knife blade, and didn't even scratch. He lifted the box to test its weight, and grunted with the effort.
"Almost as heavy as Hoke McGee's opinion of himself," he remarked.
He went back outside.
"Your layout's got me guessin', pop," he said.
THE old man was propped up on his hands, straining, hurting himself listening to the whispering night sounds of the desert sands. He turned his head, and there was a wild look on his face.
"I think I heard some of them creeping!" he croaked. "Creeping over the sand!"
Sagebrush Smith put the palm of a hand on the nape of his neck, just to reassure himself that the short hairs were not standing on end.
"That's just sidewinders, old-timer," he said.
There was a silence filled with the kind of stillness that only comes in Death Valley—stillness of utter death and time abysmal. Then a breeze, a small lost breeze, came feeling over the dunes, seeking in the mesquite, sifting in the sands, and sighing.
Sagebrush Smith took off his hat, mopped his forehead and grinned foolishly. He felt the need of doing something to break the spell, so he kicked out, like a boy, with one foot. His toe hit a rock.
He peered at the rock, then got down on his knees, brushed sand away and kept on brushing until he had a space cleared the size of a bunk house table. The rock bore grotesque carvings and silly-looking hen-track marks.
Sagebrush Smith got to his feet, kicked around in the sand and uncovered other such rocks. Then it dawned on him that the stones lay all around; some of the huge ones were even the reason for the sand dunes being here.
"We're in one of them mysterious ruined cities or my name ain't Sagebrush," he muttered.
The old man said, "That was in my letter to Doc," very weakly.
"Some fellers that called themselves archaeologists were in Death Valley one time," Sagebrush continued. "They figured there had been cities in here thousands of years ago, but they couldn't figure out much else about them." (These prehistoric ruins, some actually stretching for miles on the heat-seared floor of Death Valley in California, are something of a puzzle to archaeologists. KENNETH ROBESON)
"That is why I came here," the old man said.
"Oh," Sagebrush Smith said.
The dying man closed his eyes for a while and rested. After a moment or two he started talking again.
"Did Doc remember me?" he asked suddenly. "Did Doc remember old Meander Surett?"
"Yeah," said Sagebrush. "'Course he remembered you."
Old Meander Surett closed his eyes. He appeared about as pleased as he could be.
"I'm not suprised that he remembered," he said. "I was one of the world's greatest authorities on electrical research—before I disappeared."
Chapter II. THE MANCAPTIVE
THE desert night was either very still, or it was made weird by the tiny whirls of wind that went scurrying through the sand dunes, although some of the winds weren't so tiny and traveled like Kansas whirlwinds, picking up fine sand, lifting it two and three hundred feet, looking in the moonlight like cinnamon-robed giants hobble-skirting along.
Sagebrush Smith hunkered on his high-heeled boots and felt funny. Not humorous. Just funny. The old man, Meander Surett, was dying, and Sagebrush had started out by agreeing with everything, hoping that would soothe the old fellow. Now he began to see that he was walking into something. Meander Surett apparently had expected some one named Doc to arrive. He thought Sagebrush Smith was one of this Doc's representatives.
Curiosity assailed Sagebrush. He wanted to know who Doc was. He wanted to know the purpose of all that stuff in the adobe hut. He wondered what was in the alloy-steel locked box. He would like to know why the place was located in one of the prehistoric ruins on the floor of Death Valley.
He could not ask any of these questions without exciting Meander Surett and speeding his death.
"Sagebrush," said Meander Surett unexpectedly.
"Yeah?"
"How did they find out you were coming?"
"They? Who do you mean?"
"The men who followed you."
"Oh." Sagebrush Smith hunted in his mind for a lie. "I don't know. I thought maybe you could tell me."
"They've been spying on me for years," the dying man said weakly. "I have been working here for ten years. It was about three years ago that I first noticed them spying. I guess they knew I sent Doc a message."
"Message?"
"Yes. The letter. Doc got it, of course, or he wouldn't have sent you."
Sagebrush Smith swallowed. "Oh, sure," he said.
"I don't know the men who watched me," croaked Meander Surett.
"You'd better be quiet," the cowboy urged.
Meander Surett coughed and bubbled. "Get me the metal box in the lead-insulated experimental chamber."