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

"Yeah. I—well, after that, I didn't know what to think."
For the second time, there came the faint trilling. The sound, Sagebrush decided, was one of the most eerie things he had ever heard.
The bronze man spoke to Monk and Ham. "You might as well head for the railroad with the cowboy and the box."
Monk said, "But—"
"I will go to Meander Surett's laboratory," the bronze man said. "It is of the utmost importance that we know whether or not his story was the product of a demented mind."
The bronze giant arose, moved aside a few yards and stood near a knobby gray clump of jumping cactus. Then, with weird abruptness, he had vanished.
SAGEBRUSH SMITH asked, "Who was that guy?"
"Doc," Monk said, "is Clark Savage, Jr., better known as Doc Savage, the man of bronze."
"Hm-m-m." Sagebrush rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "So that's the gent they write about in the magazines so much."
"You sound a bit surprised," Monk growled.
"Kinda. I didn't figure there was no such hombre." Suddenly Sagebrush whacked his right fist into his left palm. "I still don't think," he yelled, "that he can hit fifty dimes in the air with fifty shots from a six-gun!"
"That," Monk said, "ain't no trick a-tall for Doc."
"You're a liar by the clock!" said Sagebrush. "There ain't no jasper can do such a thing!"
Monk grew indignant.
"Turn this guy's stern my way, Ham," he ordered.
"Why?" asked the dapper Ham.
"He's the hooligan who kicked me," Monk squawked. "I'm gonna reciprocate."
"I can lick both you jaspers!" said Sagebrush rashly.
Ham said to Monk, "You kick this man and I'll take this cane and carve a map of the moon on you. The moon is covered with craters, in case you don't know it, you hairy monstrosity!"
"Who's a hairy monstrosity?" demanded Monk irately.
"You. You're also a fur-encrusted gossoon, and as simple-witted as you look!"
"You keep that up," Monk said, "and I'll wring you out until you resemble your last year's gray spats!"
Sagebrush batted his eyes at them.
"You geezers seem to quarrel a little," he remarked.
Chapter V. SYMBOLS FOR TROUBLE
MONK and Ham stopped quarreling. Monk pointed at the moon.
"Look," he said.
A strange, gigantic insect seemed to be hanging in front of the moon, an insect with a fat body and a set of four wings which it whirled windmill fashion instead of flapping. The insect made a faint, hissing noise. It came nearer, sank close to the dry-wash in which Monk, Ham, and Sagebrush Smith crouched, and they could see the faint glow of light from an instrument panel.
"That ain't like no airplane I ever saw," Sagebrush Smith muttered.
"It's a true gyro," Ham advised him shortly. "One of the very few which ever got beyond the experimental stage. It can rise straight up, come straight down and hang absolutely motionless in the air."
"How does it do that?" Sagebrush demanded, not unreasonably.
"Go study aлronautical engineering for six years, Young Wild West," Monk advised, "and you'd understand it if it was explained to you."
"I can see," Sagebrush said, "that me and you are gonna get along great."
The gyro came to a dead stop overhead, the cabin window opened, and Doc Savage's arm appeared briefly and waved. Then the gyroplane's silenced motors hissed a little louder and it climbed straight up for a few hundred feet, after which the sound it made was almost inaudible. The gyro vanished out over the desert.
Doc Savage turned a knob and caused a hand to move around a dial which was marked with points of the compass. Then he turned switches, and a robot pilot took over the gyroplane and flew it on the compass course which he had set with the dial. Another dial-and-hand device governed the height.
From time to time, the bronze man changed the setting of this to keep close to the stony terrain below. In the space of a few miles, the sides of Death Valley sloped from an altitude of several thousand feet to below sea level.
The weirdness of Death Valley at night was spread below. Far to the right was the white smear of the great borax beds. They seemed only a mile or two distant; were actually more than sixty miles away. Ahead, the Funeral Mountains reared; behind were the Panamint Mountains; and both ranges had a blackness that was a little fantastic.
Doc Savage consulted instruments which had nothing to do with the business at hand—a device for measuring cosmic penetration in this area, an apparatus for checking the characteristics of shorter radio waves at this lower-than-the-sea level. He filed the readings of the instruments for future reference—in his memory.
The bronze man had a prodigious memory, developed as a part of the remarkable two-hour routine of exercises which he had taken with daily regularity since childhood—exercises that accounted for many of his amazing faculties. He was continually experimenting, had a score of projects under way at times. It might be weeks before he got around to using the data he took from the instruments in Death Valley, but so highly was his memory trained that it would serve as well as a notebook.
Doc's next move was to spread old Meander Surett's letter in the glow from the instrument panel. The bronze man's training had made him skilled in many subjects, handwriting being one of them. He knew that it was possible to check the sanity of a person to an extent by the individual's handwriting.
But it was impossible to check old Meander Surett's mental condition from his letter. The letter was typewritten, except for the signature. The signature was legible, and the letter text was rational enough.
The bronze man located Meander Surett's desert laboratory without difficulty. Monk and Ham had given him its location. Since the gyro did not need a runway to rise, as did an ordinary plane, he merely dropped it on the sand.
THE sand was white. In mounds and valleys and ridges and cones, it lay as albescent as bone dust. Jutting here and there, fantastic in the moonlight, was the scattered ruin of the prehistoric city, baffling physical presence of an enigma to scientists. There were other ruins on the floor of Death Valley, and they were as puzzling as this one.
Science knew something of the cliff dwellers of Arizona, the mound builders of the Mississippi valley, the pyramid-makers of Yucatan, because skeletons of the one-time inhabitants had been found. But the only skeletons ever found in these ruins had been those of prospectors who had died of heat that was almost a hundred and forty in the shade.
A sidewinder slid away sidewise, deadly blunt head and little eyes always on the bronze man. A little scorpion curled its stinger-bearing tail menacingly. Coyotes yapped in the distance, like children laughing. The little mouse-bodied bats of the desert floated close and made tiny noises with their teeth; sounds that were like one finger nail being picked with another finger nail.
Doc Savage reached the adobe hut which housed poor old Meander Surett's laboratory. He entered. When he turned a light switch, a motor-generator unit started and the place was flooded with luminance. He looked around.
Doc Savage himself maintained two laboratories—one in the New York skyscraper headquarters, the other in an isolated Arctic spot which he called his "Fortress of Solitude." Both laboratories were remarkably complete. To the New York one came scientists from all over the world to examine, to copy the instruments developed there. The one in the Fortress of Solitude was even more complete, but only Doc Savage had ever seen it.
The bronze man spent three hours in old Meander Surett's laboratory—for he knew he was examining something more complete than anything he had for research into the lesser-known phases of electrical phenomena.
He got out old Meander Surett's letter:
The man was spying on me and tried to shoot me when I caught him, and I shot first with my rifle and killed him. He is buried one hundred yards due west of the door of my laboratory.