DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (19 page)

After a while, Doc sat up and looked at his bronze forearms intently.

His expression told that he did not like what he saw. Pinching a bit of bronze flesh between fingers and thumbs, he pulled it upward. It distended with an elasticity that was disturbing.

The pinch of flesh was slow returning to its normal contour. The bronze man also noticed that the pores of his fine-textured skin were visibly distended.

Doc’s flake-gold eyes became filled with eerie stirrings. Ham was beside him.

“I feel as though I couldn’t get enough water—not even if I drank an entire ocean,” he complained.

Doc explained, “We have been subjected to something that rapidly leached the moisture from our bodies, potentially with fatal consequences if it were not for one thing.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” asked Monk Mayfair thickly.

“The fact that the box was immersed in a large volume of water, which absorbed the brunt of its influence upon the surroundings. Otherwise, it is doubtful that we would be numbered among the living at this moment.”

Mark Chan offered an unsettling thought. “And that is the smaller of the two boxes.”

“The other is much larger,” Mary gasped out.

Doc eyed them. “You have witnessed this phenomenon before?”

Mark nodded grimly. “Yes. It is terrible.”

“What dwells within the box is more terrible still,” Mary chimed in.

“Describe the thing in the box,” Doc requested.

“It is something new,” said Mark.

“New?”

“Never before seen on the earth,” clarified Mary.

“What is it?” pressed Doc, shifting his position carefully. With his thirst in retreat, his bloodied back began aching.

Mark shook his head tiredly. “We do not know, exactly. But it is terrible—more terrible than the worst substance known to man.”

“If not brought under control,” rejoined Mary, “it could wreck the world.”

Doc Savage’s trilling piped up as if agitated. He lacked the strength to make it in full measure. He was still very weak.

They lay on the sand for the greater part of an hour. Although their primary discomfort was lack of water—this despite their prodigious swallowing of fresh water—they seemed to have difficulty with their respiration.

“Lung tissues desiccated,” Doc decided.

“Huh?” croaked Monk. He sounded like a deep-throated frog.

“He said our lungs are so dried up, we are having trouble with our breathing,” enlightened Renny.

That sounded like a satisfactory explanation for their predicament. They were too flagged to doubt it.

Ham thought of a question.

“If that mummy that was shipped to our New York headquarters was not Renny, who was it?”

“A pirate named Poetical Percival Perkins,” grunted Renny.

“Any pirate who went by that moniker deserves anything he got,” Monk decided at last.

“He opened the box and was turned into a mummy so fast he never knew what hit him,” Renny related. “I swapped clothes with him, so Dang would think I was the one who got it.”

“What
did
hit him? That’s what I want to know,” rasped Ham Brooks.

“The Buddha’s fury,” imparted Mark and Mary Chan in unison.

Everyone looked at the twins strangely.

“This is not the benevolent Buddha of old stories,” said Mark.

“This is a wrathful Buddha,” agreed Mary. “He is a glutton for water.”

“And souls,” intoned Mark.

The Chan twins shuddered as if they were connected to one another by an invisible cord. Thereafter, they lapsed into a morose and uneasy silence.

AFTER an hour of this, Doc Savage climbed to his feet and began to trek inland. He motioned the others to remain well behind him. This, they were more than glad to do. No one knew what lay back at the pool and none wished to experience twice the sudden and inexplicable thirst that had almost sucked the very life’s moisture out of them.

Doc Savage advanced with utmost caution. The air by the water was steamy. But as he penetrated further inland, that quality of moisture seemed to shrink. It was as if all the steam had evaporated out of the air, leaving nothing behind it. In fact, there was a touch of coolness to the air coming into his lungs.

Doc employed almost every sense—sight, smell, touch and hearing. Trees as he drew closer to the vicinity of the jungle pool began to look unnaturally dry. Some had cracked their entire length, exposing the inner pulp.

Pirate Island boasted tropical fruit in plenty. Bananas, coconuts, jackfruit, spiny-hulled durian fruit, red rambutans and scarlet mangosteen predominated. All of these tasty delicacies hung dried and shrunken on their vines.

Orchids, of which many grew in profusion, had shriveled into tiny knots that hardly resembled dried flowers. Only their ripe colors told that they had once been tropical blossoms in full bloom.

Everywhere, leaves and palm fronds had collapsed into tiny dry fists.

The farther Doc got to the area they had fled, the thirstier he became. He had begun his journey already thirsty, so this sensation of a growing thirst was one he did not recognize right away.

But as it grew more acute, he pressed himself to go on.

The thirst soon became uncomfortable, then unendurable.

Without any outward hesitation, the bronze man reversed himself and quitted the zone of unnatural dryness.

Coming upon his men trailing not far behind, Doc shook his head firmly and, gesturing with lifted hands, said, “Too dangerous.”

They needed no more discouragement than that. They too were suffering a growing thirst, mouths and tongues as parched as the once-lush vegetation. They reversed course, seeking the psychological comfort of the water’s edge.

“It would be too bad on any pigs down by that jungle pool, huh?” Monk suggested, then watched Ham’s features assume an angry flush.

The dapper lawyer detested pork in any form, which motivated Monk to raise the sensitive subject now and again. Why, was a long story.

Back at the lagoon’s edge, Doc and his men held counsel.

“We have equipment back at the plane that might be useful here,” Doc pointed out.

“What about these pirates?” Ham wondered.

“I will order them to stand guard, but avoid the zone of desiccation.”

Doc issued orders. There was no dissent. Their numbers had been appreciably thinned by the bronze man’s various activities. In fact, there were three fewer of them now. Possibly some had failed to escape the sudden phenomenon at the pool and now lay dead and desiccated in the jungle somewhere.

Doc Savage led his men in a meandering way along the sand-fringed beach of Pirate Island. The sand was very white, and glittered in the sunlight like crushed pearls.

Ham Brooks mused, “By now, that Startell Pompman must have radioed for help. We told him if we weren’t back by a certain time to do so.”

“Who is Startell Pompman?” asked Renny.

“A blustering blowhard of an astrologer,” said Monk. “He tagged along with us. Or Doc let him, I guess.”

Ham explained, “He wanted Doc’s help on a matter.”

Satisfied, the big-fisted engineer said nothing more.

The bronze amphibian was anchored far out, around a hump of land where it would not be seen—except from the vantage point of that hump.

Evidently, it had not been, for it rode its sea anchor, undisturbed. The wings shimmered slightly in the rollers and sea breezes pushed its tail around in lazy half-circles.

A small collapsible rubber raft was located in a copse of kapok trees, and carried to the shore. This is what had ferried Monk and Ham from the seaplane.

They got into it now and began paddling up to the gently bobbing aircraft.

As they approached, they spied something that brought a growl from Monk Mayfair’s throat.

“Hatch door open!”

Doc Savage stopped paddling and said, “Wait here.”

He slipped into the water, began swimming, and soon reached the plane.

Clambering aboard, the bronze man was inside for only brief moments.

When he emerged, it was to wave the others in.

Soon, Doc was helping his men climb aboard.

“Deserted,” Doc reported. “The radio was left on.”

Monk began searching the plane interior as if expecting to find Pompman hiding under a wicker seat—an impossibility, of course.

Ham asked, “Do you think he was picked up by the British?”

“Impossible to tell,” Doc reported. “There is no sign of a struggle, nor did Pompman leave a note.”

Doc looked concerned. But after a thorough search, he seemed to dismiss the matter of Startell Pompman from his immediate thoughts. Instead, he ordered the rubber raft brought aboard and the hatch sealed.

Snapping the powerful motors to life, he recalled the sea anchor with the press of a button; electric motors in the nose did the hauling.

A seaplane on the water is an intractable thing, requiring equal parts seamanship and piloting skills. Doc Savage now proceeded to make handling the unwieldy flying boat seem a casual matter.

Booting the big aircraft about, the bronze man nosed it in the direction of a convenient lagoon, gunned the motors, throwing it up on the beach with practiced skill. The nose of the hull beached itself.

They clambered out.

Doc Savage came last. He was carrying a set of boxes as large as steamer trunks, one under each powerful arm. His amazing vitality appeared to be returning. During his reconnoiter of the jungle pool, the bronze giant had made and applied poultices to his back wounds, using his remarkable knowledge of jungle botany and medicinal herbs. Healing had already commenced.

Renny reached out monster hands to help him with one container.

“Good thinking,” said Renny, suddenly realizing what the big boxes contained.

CARRYING their portage inland, Doc Savage and Renny reached the outer zone of the dry area. The bronze man began unpacking the two trunks.

The first thing to emerge was something that resembled a space helmet as envisioned by Hollywood movie producers. It consisted of a clear bubble composed of a substance devised by the bronze man himself, a material having the composite qualities of glass and metal.

The bulk of the outfit looked more like a futuristic version of a deep-sea diver’s suit. It lacked the lead boots and belt weights, but the two oxygen tanks strapped to the back were substantial, each good for an hour of underwater breathing.

This entire ensemble was an invention of Doc Savage. Although it looked like something designed for undersea exploration—and could indeed serve that purpose in a pinch—it was apparent that it was a high-altitude suit, of a type far in advance of those employed by stratosphere balloon explorers to test the limits of man’s penetration of the upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen and the inhospitable cold is inimical to life.

With Renny’s help, Doc Savage donned this suit. It was all of a piece, with gauntlets and boots separately affixed by an ingenious coupling mechanism, to insure a tight seal.

The helmet attached to a cuirass of an affair that fitted over the shoulders. Renny hooked up the oxygen tanks, which strapped onto the suit’s reinforced back.

Checking about himself, Doc Savage indicted with lifted hand that all was well.

Then he began to trudge into the dangerous zone.

The going was slow, thanks to the bulk and weight of the stratosphere suit. But the intolerable thirst that had plagued him no longer tugged at his throat.

Doc took his time. To stumble and fall would have placed him in the same position as an upended turtle—unable to rise without assistance.

Along the way, he explored. The bronze man found one dead pirate, as he expected to. The man was a shrunken, shriveled corpse like that of a mummy that had died long in the past. His eyes were dry, empty sockets. In his gaping mouth what must have once been his tongue, was now a mass like a tiny dry sponge.

Grim of countenance, Doc pushed on.

When he came to the jungle pool that had been so green with slime and verdant growth, Doc Savage stood stock-still.

His eerie trilling piped up and the surprise lacing it was a mixture of curiosity and wonder. It echoed in the clear dome encasing his bronze head, but penetrated no farther.

The pool itself was more in the nature of a crater now. The floor lay cracked in the manner of a sun-baked desert during August. Death Valley had something of that look.

Of course, this was not a desert, but a tropical jungle. Such dryness was impossible here. But there it was.

In the crater, Dang Mi lay curled up, more like a worm than anything that had once been human. He was a shrunken twist of a thing, resembling a huge piece of beef jerky. Even his crossed leather gun belts had shriveled to strings.

Doc Savage leaned over with care and plucked him off the crackle-finished box. The former captain of the
Devilfish
seemed to hardly weigh anything at all. No trace of moisture was evident in his eyes and the bronze man remembered that ninety percent of the human body consisted of water. So this was no surprise.

The strongbox under him lay in the pit of the crater. There were a few dead dried fish here and there. They hardly resembled fish, but that’s what they were.

With utmost caution, Doc Savage took hold of the blue container. He straightened his entire body.

Doc stood looking at it, and perspiration began to form on his face. This was created by the close-fitting atmosphere suit. But it might also have been the film of fear.

For one of the few times in his life, the Man of Bronze was confronting a thing that baffled him utterly. He stood there a while, possibly torn between caution and curiosity.

In the end, his scientific curiosity won.

Holding the box up to the level of his golden eyes, Doc lifted the lid a crack.

Nothing seemed to happen.

Gingerly, Doc lifted it still more.

He took pains to hold the box so that the early morning sun shone directly into the aperture.

What he saw within gleamed like a fragment of crystal.

Nearby, a roosting bird plummeted from a branch, giving a death cry that was strange, forlorn.

Feeling no ill effects himself, Doc thumbed the lid still farther upward.