"067 (B083) - The Red Terrors (1938-09) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"
What?" one of them gasped.
Long Tom said, "He means that you might as well save your breath."
With which Long Tom and Johnny took a dignified departure. Long Tom remarking audibly, "Hurry up! We promised to talk to Doc in a few minutes. He's waiting."
The newspapermen heard this remark. As a squadron, they fell in and trailed Long Tom and Johnny.
"They're doin' what we hoped they'd do," Long Tom chuckled.
LONG TOM and Johnny entered what looked like a very dilapidated old car parked at the curbing. The machine was a sedan with a body vintage at least ten years outdated, and a general air which indicated its top speed might be at the most thirty-five miles an hour. Paint was peeling off its flanks.
"Some chariot," Long Tom muttered.
"A proficuous conveyance," Johnny said with dignity.
The very tall Johnny drove. Unhealthy-looking Long Tom drew a small case from his pocket, held it close to his cheek and spoke to it in a pleased tone.
"The reporters are all followin' us, Doc," he said. "The coast is clear for you to get away for that vacation."
"Very well, Long Tom," said a voice from the case, which contained a diminutive ultra-short-wave radio transceiver.
Doc Savage's voice was remarkable, even when reproduced by the tiny loud-speaker in the transceiver.
"Anything else for us to do?" Long Tom asked.
"No," Doc Savage said. "Unless something should develop, I will be back in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can reach me at Salisbury, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay."
"O. K.," Long Tom said. "Good luck, Doc, on the vacation."
Long Tom replaced the transceiver in his pocket. He grinned at Johnny.
"That means Doc isn't goin' to his Fortress of Solitude," the electrical wizard remarked. "I'm glad of that. I'm always kinda worried when Doc goes to the Fortress."
For a change, Johnny spoke and used small words.
"Yes," he said, "something may happen to Doc up there sometimes, and that would be bad, because none of us have the slightest idea where this Fortress of Solitude is located, except that it is in the Arctic somewhere."
Long Tom turned around and examined several taxicabs holding pursuing newspapermen.
"Scribes," he said, "here's your surprise."
They fed the dilapidated old car gas, and the old heap came to life and went eighty miles an hour up a boulevard, making hardly a sound. It turned into a side street, took corners, and left the newspapermen feeling foolishly lost.
The scribes went back to Doc Savage's skyscraper headquarters.
"Doc Savage," they were informed, "has left the city."
WHEN an elderly looking gentleman—he had flowing white hair and a neatly clipped white Vandyke beard—arrived in Salisbury, Maryland, center of the oyster industry, no one gave him more than average attention.
The elderly gentleman had only one outstanding characteristic that the public associated with Doc Savage; He was a giant. He habitually walked with a stoop, but even this did not disguise the fact that he had a figure of Herculean proportions.
The newspaper-reading public knew that Doc Savage was a giant man of bronze with straight bronze hair only slightly darker than his skin, and eyes like pools of flake gold that were vitally alive.
The white-haired, white-bearded gentleman who busied himself studying oysters was not recognized as Doc Savage for several weeks.
Doc had intended to return to New York after a brief vacation—if studying oysters could be considered a vacation. However, it was quiet around Salisbury, and a relief not to be plagued by newspapermen and curious people, and Doc remained overtime.
Another reason for staying was the importance of his work in Salisbury. The oyster industry was being menaced by a plague of starfish. The starfish fed on the oysters, using a form of attack on the bivalve that was deadly.
The starfish approached an oyster, which, of course, clamped its shell tight. The starfish would then crawl upon the oyster, fix its sucking feet to the oyster's shell, and begin exerting a pressure which was not great, but which was inexorable.
Eventually the compression overcame the tired muscles holding the oyster's shell closed, after which the starfish calmly turned its stomach inside out, wrapped it around the unfortunate oyster, and began digesting.
Doc Savage hoped to develop a parasite which was a natural enemy to the starfish and thus fight the scourge of echinoderms.
He worked in Salisbury a few weeks; then his identity was discovered, and a swarm of newspapermen arrived. However, there was nothing of much reading value in a scientific attempt to rid oysters of a natural enemy, and the journalists departed.
IT was nine weeks to the day after Doc Savage arrived in Salisbury when a buzzing came from a case which stood in the little shack that the remarkable bronze man was using for his headquarters.
The buzzing meant that one of his men was seeking to get in touch with him by radio.
"Yes?" Doc Savage said into the microphone.
"This is Monk in New York," a squeaky voice said.
The voice was almost childish, but "Monk" was no child. Monk was a man practically as broad as tall, furred over with red hairs that resembled rusty shingle nails, and who could take a half dollar in his right hand and bend its two edges together, then duplicate the feat with his left hand. He was a skilled chemist, was this Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair.
"Doc," Monk said, "you remember that Doctor Collendar who disappeared in the middle of the South Atlantic, hollering something about, 'The thing is red!'?"
"Yes."
"Well, there was a fight on a waterfront street here last night that kinda reminded me of this Doctor Collendar."
"Reminded you? Why?"
"A taxi driver who saw the fight," Monk said, "claimed that there was one white man in the scrap and the fellow was fighting what the taxi man called 'something red.' I saw an item in the newspapers this mornin' and the stuff about somethin' red made me remember Doctor Collendar, so just for fun I went out to see the taxi driver.
"He said it was too dark to tell anything, except that something red was fightin' a white man. Then the white man got loose, and he fled past the taxi driver, and the driver got a good look at him."
Monk paused a few seconds for dramatic effect.
"Just for fun," he said, "I showed this hackman a picture of Doctor Collendar. And what do you think, Doc?"
Monk paused again for drama.
"Never mind the trimmings," Doc suggested.