Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (2 page)

An avalanche was descending on the human avalanche!

All thought of form was thrown to the winds at that point. The riders urged their mounts in whatever direction blind panic dictated. Some broke left. Others right. The riders in the exact center of the skirmish line, predictably enough, got tangled up, trying to cross one another. They fought to keep their mounts from stumbling and lashed them madly to flee.

The avalanche—the real one—took some time to gather itself. It was really roaring along by the time the bandits reached the foot of the ridge.

Thereafter, all effort went into utter flight.

By the time the collapsing top finished its contribution to the base of the ridge, the bandits were a distant pounding of hooves and boil of dust. All fight had been spooked out of them. They would not return.

The Mongol helpers poked their broad stunned faces out of the pit after they felt it safe to do so.

They looked for their boss.

He was calmly returning his mighty weapon to the duffel bag and closing its zipper. A tiny padlock snapped into place.

More than one Mongol gave thought to stealing away with the bag in the dark of the coming night.

None of them ever got the chance. For William Harper Littlejohn was about to make his great discovery—the one he was forever to regret.

Johnny was looking at the change he had wrought in the ridge with his tiny weapon. It had fired explosive bullets, obviously. The ridge stood obscured by settling dust. But behind the dust loomed a dark shape. A darkness inside the shadow that was the shape of the ridge.

The hollow-faced archeologist blinked. His other specialty was geology. Something had been exposed to the light, after how many centuries no one could guess. Abruptly, Johnny hastened to approach, even though the dirt was still settling and there was danger of tumbling rock and loose clumps of red-brown earth.

The hanging-in-the-air dust commenced to thin.

The dark shape was beginning to resolve itself.

“I’ll be superamalgamated,” muttered Johnny Littlejohn. “A chthonic orifice!”

Which, had there been a scholar with a dictionary at hand to translate, meant that Johnny had spied the mouth of a cave, newly revealed.

He was running now. The Mongols were pounding after him, certain that he had gone crazy from the awful noise. It is not wise to leap into the aftermath of an avalanche. One landslide often sets up the circumstances for another and the ridge had looked none too stable from the start.

Oblivious to the shouting and warning cries ringing in the dusty air, Johnny scrambled up the loose side of the ridge, his incredibly long legs sinking up to his knees in the shifting earth. He lost his pith helmet. A boot, after extracting a stuck foot from a soft section of earth, came loose.

Johnny gained the cave mouth with the awkward-looking agility of a granddaddy longlegs spider, which he rather resembled. He stood at the edge of the cave mouth. It looked deep. Very deep. The air coming out had a strange, cold dead smell to it. The dust in the air did not add any pleasantness to the smell, either.

He entered anyway.

Ancient man sometimes inhabited caves, Johnny knew. True, most such caves were found in Europe, but there was no reason that a cave man might not inhabit a Mongolian cave. It was not unheard of. Just never known.

From a pocket, Johnny produced a tiny flashlight. He gave its crank a brisk winding, thumbed the thing on—and the interior of the cave sprang into sudden brilliance!

At first, it looked as if the cave were lined in volcanic obsidian, the kind of glassy black stuff that lava makes when it cools.

Johnny touched an outcropping, fully expected to be cut. Obsidian is so sharp it can be chipped into vicious black blades.

It was not obsidian. It was ice. This was an ice cave—a natural ice cave. This was not unheard of, either. Many ice caves had been discovered. Again, usually in Europe, for some reason.

Johnny continued walking along. He knew the cave could not been very deep. The ridge was not very deep at its deepest part.

At the end of the cave, there was a wall. It was black. The skeletal geologist felt of it. The black came away on his fingertips. Dirt. And behind it, ice. Ancient ice.

Bringing up the bright cone of his flash ray, Johnny twisted the lens and the beam thinned noticeably, seeming to become brighter and more penetrating.

Johnny played the beam against the expanse of ice, endeavoring to see how thick it was. Perhaps to see if there might be cave paintings on the wall—as was sometimes discovered in European caves where primitive humans once dwelt. That was all. He did not mean to set so many heads rolling off so many shoulders by his actions.

What Johnny saw made him gasp instead.

It was something chiseled in the ice. A squiggle, it seemed to be. Mongol, or a related tongue. His heart sank. Although an old language, Mongol is not prehistoric. As far as science knew, Mongol script writing got started about the time of Genghis Khan, the bloodthirsty war chieftain who conquered great portions of Europe and Asia six or seven centuries previous to our own age. This was not a prehistoric cave, probably. Humans had been here in recent centuries.

Then, Johnny came upon a second squiggle and put the two together.

Johnny Littlejohn reached down to his bootless foot and pulled off his sock. He used it to rub at the ice. And so it would later be recorded by the historians, after all was said and done, that by employing nothing more glamorous than a sock, Johnny Littlejohn made his momentous discovery.

He rubbed more squiggles into the light. Mongol script writing, without a doubt.

He read along, mouthing the English translation of the Mongol lines.

“ ‘If I Still Lived, Mankind Would Tremble,’ ” he murmured.

Johnny Littlejohn blinked. Then he became very agitated. Furiously, he started rubbing more dirt off the ice with his sock. When it was too dirty to be of further use, he shed his other boot and used that sock.

William Harper Littlejohn had ruined his tweed jacket by the time he got a large patch of the very smooth ice face uncovered. Then he stepped back and employed his flash to full effect.

There was a shape beyond the ice. It was tall, but not taller than he. But Johnny Littlejohn stood nearly seven feet in height, so that was not much of a slight. It was also quite broad at its thickest part.

It stood—if that was the term—not terribly deep in the ice. In fact, it floated in the ice. Johnny could see an impossibly large—compared to the rest of it—head. There were limbs. That was clear. There were fingers, of a sort. It was difficult to quite see because the ice was rippled and this distorted the thing’s darksome outlines.

The flash picked out two eyes—and that was what sent Johnny stumbling back into the dying light of the greatest day of his entire life.

“Bring shovels—pick axes—any tools you can!” he shouted.

The Mongols looked up at him with blank, moon faces.

Then he remembered himself and switched to their native tongue. “Hurry!” he exhorted.

The tools were brought. The Mongols, curious, but moving with fear in every step, filed in, wonderment on their faces.

They laid the tools at Johnny’s bare feet. Then they saw the shape behind the wall of ice. It might have been the shape—more probably it was the Mongol inscription cut into the ice—that made them bolt from the cave.

They simply ran, leaped from the cave mouth and went rolling and stumbling down in a slide of red-brown earth. That nearly precipitated another avalanche.

Johnny Littlejohn seemed unperturbed by the desertion of his hired hands. Murmuring, “The indigenous aborigines are without exception pusillanimous,” he took up a pick axe in painfully fleshless fingers and went to work on the ice with a will.

The sounds of chopping continued far into the night, without cease.

Chapter II

EXPEDITION

BRIGADIER GENERAL THEODORE MARLEY “HAM” BROOKS was addressing a class in a Manhattan law school that night when he was called to the telephone.

“We are leaving for Mongolia at once,” said a voice. It was deep, cultured and remarkably toned. It also had a compelling power that promised things.

“Why?” exploded Ham.

“Call it research.”

“Research into what?”

“Catalepsy, or suspended animation, as it is sometimes called.”

Ham said, “Something important?”

“Perhaps very important. Perhaps nothing at all.”

“I don’t understand this,” Ham declared. “What—”

“The possible explanation might sound absurd just now,” said the voice. “In fact, the thing is so fantastic that discussion had better await proof. If you wish to go to Mongolia without knowing any more than that, you might get down here in a hurry.”

“Do Monk and the others know?”

“You might,” the speaker said, “give them a call.”

The speaker then hung up.

Ham ran for his innocent looking cane and his impeccable silk hat.

The voice on the telephone had belonged to the man whom the world was beginning to consider possibly the most remarkable fellow who had ever lived—Doc Savage.

Ham the lawyer occupied a rather strange position in the world. He was one of a group of five men who were following a very unusual profession. The aforementioned Monk was one of the five. Johnny Littlejohn was another. There were two more, an electrical wizard, and an engineer, who were busy following their professions. These five men, all experts in their particular lines, worked with and for Doc Savage. They drew no salaries. They were free to quit any time they chose. It was a safe bet that any one of the five would as soon have been shot as quit. They loved excitement. With Doc Savage, they got it.

Doc Savage, individual of mystery and achievement, was engaged in probably the most unique career ever pursued by man. He went to the ends of the earth, righting wrongs, punishing evildoers, aiding the oppressed. The five were his assistants.

It was difficult to describe what sort of a fellow was Clark Savage, Jr., who was best known to the world as Doc Savage. Some considered him to be the greatest scientist of the day. Newspapers called him a champion of humanity and explorer of the cosmos—this last was on the grandiose side, for Doc had never actually left the planet. He was a man of deep knowledge, yet despite his profound contributions to astronomy, anthropology, medicine and other disciplines, his chief reputation was as a philanthropist.

The philanthropy of Doc Savage was of an unusual nature. He did not disburse funds to worthy charities as his main line. Instead, he held forth in an office at the top of the highest skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, where persons with troubles bigger and more complex than anything lawful authorities might handle could appeal. If you had a problem, you took it to Doc Savage. Many were turned away or referred to other agencies. But if a seeker’s troubles were big enough—or interesting enough—for Doc Savage to tackle, he undertook it. Without pay. That was where the philanthropic part came in.

Doc Savage was a combination of Sir Galahad, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan of the Apes and Albert Einstein. It sounded ridiculous in cold print, but a lifetime of intensive study in all worldly disciples, along with a physical development that was breathtaking, had produced a Twentieth Century superman who was destined to be remembered as one of the great men in human history.

Just now, Ham Brooks was rushing downtown to the Wall Street sector of Manhattan, where Monk maintained a swanky penthouse laboratory.

An elevator whisked the dapper lawyer up to the vestibule of the combination laboratory and living quarters. Ham strode to the door of the former, and pushed open the unlocked portal.

The interior was modernistic, the furnishings a little too sumptuous to be exactly tasteful.

The inhabitant of the place was a sight to behold. A clever artist had created a popular comic strip featuring an amiable caveman. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett “Monk” Mayfair greatly resembled that cartoon character. He was as wide as he was tall, boasted of a blunt head that was sunk between near neckless shoulders. Overlong arms hung on either side of his barrel chest. His entire body was furred with rusty red hair as coarse as shingle nails.

Right now, most of that fur was encased in a full tuxedo that had to have been a tailor’s nightmare to custom fit.

“Are you giving a speech somewhere?” blurted out Ham.

“Naw,” snorted Monk. “Got a date tonight.”

A door cracked open, and out of another room poked a long snout that was followed by the homeliest pig in creation. It was a runt, skinny of leg and long of ear. It trotted out and sat down to observe Ham with suspicious eyes like black buttons.

“What the devil is that—that insect doing in there?” snapped Ham. “Shouldn’t he be in his own suite?”

“It’s bein’ remodeled,” homely Monk replied in his normal squeaky voice. “I’m puttin’ in a row of health-ray lamps for his mud wallow. Habeas is lookin’ kinda pale lately.”

“A very good idea,” sniffed the dapper lawyer. “Perhaps some cooked bacon will result the next time he oversleeps.”

The ungainly shoat seemed to comprehend the word bacon, for he trotted up to Ham and began nibbling at the ferrule of his neat black cane. A tug of war ensued, with the immediate result that the elegant barrister had to fight for possession of his stick.

“I hope whatever Doc has in mind,” Ham said angrily, “is interesting enough to make up for the trouble of collecting you.”

“What’s up?” Monk asked, beetling brows working.

“I do not know. But it involves a trip to Mongolia. And if you care to accompany us, I would advise you to climb out of that monkey suit—a term I would never resort to except for the fact that a tuxedo on you is precisely that.”

Hastily stripping off his soup-and-fish, Monk ducked into another room to change. When he returned, he was wearing a shapeless coat of hideous pattern. It elicited a groan of sartorial horror from the elegantly-dressed attorney.

Eyeing Monk’s suit critically, Ham remarked, “That coat of yours has insomnia, hasn’t it?”