THE BLUE PIT
Doc Savage shouldered the hangar doors more widely open. He bent over the radio-controlled plane. After only a short glance, his vast mechanical knowledge told him how the thing operated. He threw a switch and twisted two wires together.
The engine started automatically, and the exhaust, pouring through the whistles, made an ear-splitting din.
Doc drew back. The whistles, of course, had been installed merely to heighten the eerie effect.
He played his flashlight on the wheels before the thing began to move. Stooping swiftly, he disengaged a weed fragment from the air valve. The weed was a South American variety.
This, then, was the stolen “blue meteor” which Shrops had carried across the Pacific and back again in the Chilean Señorita. Mo-Gwei had recovered it.
Apparently, there were no more of the devices.
The monoplane scooted out of the hangar and mounted from the roof. It was so tiny as to be hardly distinguishable in the fitful moonlight—the smoke had now blown away from the mountaintop fortress.
Mo-Gwei had stopped shooting. Apparently he feared Doc was up to some fiendish trick with the blue meteor.
Doc watched the bluish blur that marked the position of the monoplane. The plane dived for a distant mountain-side, struck, and showered azure sparks down the steep slope.
Certain the thing was destroyed, Doc glided across the roof.
Mo-Gwei had gone below.
Doc reached the spot where the Bron-masked fiend had stood, and swept the packed mud with his flashlight. The metal container which he had flung at Mo-Gwei had contained a sticky liquid, something like the stuff which he had planted at the entrance of Shrops’s yurt, but of a more grayish color.
Mo-Gwei had walked through the fluid.
Again, the pockets of Doc’s vest yielded a tiny device. This resembled a magic lantern, made to fit the palm of the hand. Doc switched it on. Apparently, nothing happened. Certainly no visible light appeared.
He turned the lantern on the roof. Mo-Gwei’s tracks instantly sprang out. They glowed like pale green flame.
Doc followed the trail.
His lantern device was a projector of ultra-violet light—rays of a wave-length outside the spectrum visible to the human eye. The material Mo-Gwei was tracking was a substance which fluoresced, or glowed, when exposed to ultra-violet rays. This was not an unusual property, being possessed also by such common substances as vaseline and aspirin.
Doc made great speed, for the trail could hardly have been easier to follow. It was marked ahead in green fire.
He came to the vast room which was tapestried and floored with luxurious rugs—the room in the center of which gaped the open shaft with its blinding halo of blue glare.
Doc’s first view of that shaft maw was not pleasant.
Mo-Gwei stood at the shaft lip.
High above his head, ready to fling into the shimmering azure depths, Mo-Gwei held a bound man—John Mark Shrops.
Nowhere else on the rug-padded floor were there signs of the other captives.
Blue flickered from the shaft maw like from a dragon mouth.
* * * *
Doc Savage carried no gun. He had two reasons for not doing so: In the first place, he never took human life directly, no matter how great the provocation. Secondly, Doc considered the possession of a firearm bad psychology. A man with a gun in his pocket would come to depend upon the weapon, instead of upon his wits. Relieved of the gun, he would be accordingly helpless.
Hence, when Doc found Mo-Gwei holding Shrops over the pit, there was no gun at hand with which to drive lead at the fiend in the Bron mask and yellow robe.
Doc tossed a hand forward in a throwing motion. A small pigeon egg of metal left his fingers and sailed toward Mo-Gwei.
The object burst with a terrific report in the air in front of Mo-Gwei. The blast was deafening, and flash blinding, for this was one of the little noise-and-glare bombs which Doc had used on his visit to the Village of the Mad Ones.
The concussion knocked Mo-Gwei and his burden back from the shaft lip. Both fell to the stone floor. So great was the wind of the explosion that rugs were scooped aside, exposing the stones of the floor.
Doc hurtled forward. The blast of the little bomb should have temporarily blinded and deafened Mo-Gwei.
But the mask must have saved Mo-Gwei. The yellow eyeglass in it had probably kept the glare away to a degree. Mo-Gwei twisted to his feet, clawing his submachine gun from a sling beneath his robe.
His hand found the firing lever. The rapid-firer muzzle spouted flame, noise, bullets. The breech spewed smoking cartridge cases which rained about the foot of the yellow robe.
The slugs gouged mud off the ceiling. Mo-Gwei had started firing without aiming. As a fireman directs a hose stream, the Bron monster swayed the lead torrent toward Doc Savage.
The bronze giant, knowing very well his own ability, realized he could not get to Mo-Gwei before the bullet stream found him. He swerved and doubled low. This put him behind the upraised stone wall around the shaft lip.
Mo-Gwei cackled shrilly and danced over to get Doc in view. He was a trifle slow. Doc got to a side door and dived through.
Doc fell over a not-too-yielding form on the floor.
“Holy cow!” grunted Renny’s voice.
The bronze man scooped the big-fisted engineer up and moved him to one side of the door.
Faint blue light came in from the other room. It disclosed more bound figures.
Rae Stanley, Monk, Ham, Johnny, Long Tom—all were there.
“The guards ran out,” Renny rumbled. “We managed to flop in here. Shrops tried to go the other direction. Mo-Gwei met ’im.”
Doc untied his five men.
“All of you but Monk scatter,” he directed. “Go over this place and clean up such of the outfit as are still on their feet. Monk, you’ll stick here and help take care of Mo-Gwei.”
* * * *
Doc passed gas bombs to his men, and they darted away.
Mo-Gwei was still behind the shaft-mouth parapet in the other room. From this shelter he drove occasional bullets. He seemed afraid to flee, doubtless believing Doc had a gun.
Pretty Rae Stanley crouched behind Doc.
Monk peered into the other room—then drew back as lead popped about the door.
“What’ll we do?” he asked.
“Let him make the first move,” Doc suggested.
Silence fell. It was a deadly quiet. It seemed to get on Monk’s nerves; he broke it with conversation.
“What kind of a joint is this, anyway?” he asked. “Surely Mo-Gwei didn’t build it.”
“It’s a monastery erected above the spot where the blue meteor buried itself, many years ago,” Doc explained.
Monk nodded in the pale blue light reflected from the other room. Doc’s vast knowledge of architecture had undoubtedly informed him of the nature of the building.
“Probably lamas noted the effect of the buried meteor, thought it was an evil spirit, and erected this structure to combat it,” Doc continued. “Then, after many of them were driven insane, they concluded the evil spirit was too strong, and quitted the place. That’s only a surmise on my part, however.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Monk replied.
Mo-Gwei’s gun howled, and its lead battered rock fragments off the edge of the door.
“So the blue meteor is at the bottom of that shaft,” Monk grunted.
“Obviously. It struck just below the tip of the mountain and penetrated deeply. This devil—Mo-Gwei—dug down to it. He is a clever scientist. He evolved a reactionary agent which nullifies the effects of the blue meteor. That is the stuff in the metal cylinders.”
From distant parts of the stronghold loud yells were drifting. The nature of these howls indicated that Doc’s men were overpowering such of Mo-Gwei’s followers as had not been trapped by the blue meteor.
“What is that blue meteor?” Monk asked.
“A highly radioactive substance,” Doc told him. “To answer more specifically will require a lengthy examination in a well-equipped laboratory. My general information I got from observation.”
“You mean it’s somethin’ like radium?”
“On that order,” Doc agreed. He listened intently for any move from Mo-Gwei. “Scientists do not know too much about atomic emissions and ultra-ray phenomena, there being much doubt, for instance, about the source of so-called cosmic rays. It is possible certain stellar bodies give off such rays, just as the sun emits light visible to the eye.”
“When the blue meteor went over, it was a case of meteor stroke instead of sunstroke, huh?” Monk grunted.
“Broadly speaking, it was like that,” Doc agreed. “Even radium has a terrible effect on the brain, as all medical men know, if brought in too close proximity. This blue meteor undoubtedly gave off emanations of much greater violence.”
Doc paused to listen. Mo-Gwei seemed to be moving about—at least, scuffling sounds came from behind the shaft escarpment.
* * * *
“The emanations from the blue meteor simply shocked the human nerve system into a state of paralysis,” Doc continued.
“Any idea what the antidote is?” Monk queried.
“Some substance distilled from the blue meteor,” Doc surmised. “It was in a vapor form. It merely acted as an antidote, a counter-irritant which kept the nerves functioning despite the shock of the blue meteor emanations.”
The scuffling sounds behind the shaft wall were becoming louder.
“What a hideous weapon that blue meteor was!” choked Rae Stanley.
Her face was white; her voice was shrill.
“In the wrong hands, it was,” Monk agreed. “But it’s just about out of the wrong hands, now.”
The girl stared tensely at Doc.
“My father!” she choked. “I have seen no sign of him!”
Doc’s weird gold-flake eyes remained fixed on the other room, and he did not answer.
“My father—haven’t you any idea where he is?” Rae Stanley repeated.
Doc said gently, “Keep a grip on your nerve, Rae.”
Her eyes began to moisten. “You mean——”
“That I’m afraid the news about your father will not be what you had hoped for,” Doc told her.