CORPSE BOAT
Like a hound in search of a scent, Doc set off. He ran in widening circles. He found faint marks that might have been a trail. They led inland. They were lost beyond the following within two rods.
Doc positioned himself in the lee of a boulder the size of a box car. Standing there, sheltered a little from the blizzard, he considered.
An animal would have devoured Victor Vail on the spot! There had been no bits of cloth scattered about, no gory patches on the ice, such as certainly would have accompanied such a cannibalistic feast.
Something else loomed large in Doc’s mind, too. The odor his supersensitive nostrils had detected at first!
Doc’s mighty bronze form came as near a shiver as it ever came.
There had been a bestial quality about that scent. Yet it had hardly been that of an animal! Nor was it human, either. It had been a revolting tang, reminiscent of carrion.
One thing he began to realize with certainty. It had not been the polar bear!
Doc shrugged. He stepped out into the squealing blizzard. Inland, he journeyed.
The terrain sloped upward. The glacier became but scattered smears of ice. Even the snow did not linger, so great was the wind velocity.
Doc crossed a ridge.
From now on, the way led down. Progress was largely a matter of defying the propulsion of the gale.
Snow was drifting here. This was a menace, for it covered crevasses, a fall into which meant death. Doc trod cautiously.
In a day or two, perhaps in a week, when the blizzard had blown itself out, the haze above would disperse, and let the everlasting sun of the arctic summer beat down upon the snow. This would become slush. Cold would freeze it. A little more would be added to the thickness of the glacier. For thus are glaciers made.
Warily, Doc sidled along. He let the wind skid him ahead when he dared. Had he been a man addicted to profanity, he would have been consigning all glaciers to a place where their coolness probably would be a welcome change.
A hideous cracking and rumbling began to reach his ears. He could hear it plainly when he laid his head to the ice under foot.
It was the noise of the icepack piling on the shore. This uncharted land must be but a narrow ridge projecting from the polar seas.
Doc neared the shore.
An awesome sound brought him up sharp. It split through the banshee howl of the blizzard. It put the hairs on Doc’s nape on edge.
A woman’s shrieking!
* * * *
Doc sped for the sound. The snow collapsed under him unexpectedly. Only a flip of his Herculean body kept him from dropping to death on the snaggled icy bottom of the wide crevasse far below.
He ran on as though he had not just shaken the clammy claw of the Reaper.
A white mass hulked up before his searching golden eyes. It looked like a gigantic iceberg cast upon the shore. But it had a strangely man-made look.
A ship!
The ice-crusted hulk of the lost liner Oceanic!
Doc raced along the hull. It canted over his head, for the liner was obviously heeled slightly. A hundred feet, he ran. Another!
He came to an object which might have been a long icicle hanging down from the rail of the liner. But he knew it was an ice-coated chain. The links were a procession of knobs.
These knobs enabled Doc to climb. But the mounting was not easy. A greased pole would have been a stairway in comparison. The blizzard moaned and hooted and sought to pick him bodily from his handhold.
The woman was no longer shrieking.
Doc topped the rail. A scene of indescribable confusion met his eyes. Capstans, hatches, bitts, all were knots of ice. The rigging had long ago been torn down by the polar elements. Masts and wire-rope stays and cargo booms made a tangle on the deck. Ice had formed on these.
The forward deck, it was. A frozen, hideous wilderness! The gale whined in it like a host of ravenous beasts.
Doc reached a hatch. It defied even his terrific strength. The years had cemented it solidly.
The deck did not slope as much as he had thought. It was not quite level, though. He glided for the stern.
An open companion lured him. Snow was pouring in. Half inside, he saw the floor was seven feet deep in ice—snow which had formed a glacial mass through the years.
Doc tried another companion. The door was closed. It resisted his shove. His fist whipped a blow which traveled a scant foot. The door caved as though dynamite had let loose against it.
Doc pitched inside.
A wave of pungent aroma met his nostrils.
It was the smell of the things which had stalked them on the glacier! It was horrible—yet there was a flowerlike quality to it.
Gloom lurked in the recesses of the cabin where he stood. Formerly, it had been a lounge. But the once luxuriant furniture was now but a rubble on the floor. Some fantastic monster might have torn it to bits, as though to line a nest.
Bones lay in the litter. Bones of polar bear, of seal. Flesh still clung to some. Others were half-eaten carcasses.
Doc sped ahead. He shoved through a door.
* * * *
A shuffling movement came from across the room. Doc charged the sound.
There was a squealing noise, ratlike, eerie. A door slammed.
Doc hit the panel. It was metal. It smashed him back. His fists could not knock down an inch of steel. He wrenched at the lock. That defied him, too.
Doc sought another route for pursuit. A companionway deposited him on a lower deck. He went forward.
It was more gloomy here. Doc’s capable bronze fingers searched inside his parka. They brought out a flashlight of a type Doc himself had perfected.
This flash had no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs in felt beds. There was not much chance of this light going out of commission.
The flash sprayed a slender, white-hot rod. Doc twisted the lens adjustment to widen the beam.
Doc went on. His flashlight cast a funnel of white. He stopped often to listen.
The derelict liner seemed alive with sinister shufflings and draggings. Once a bulkhead door banged. Again, there came another of the ratlike squeals.
Even Doc’s sensitive ears could not tell whether that squeal was human! The flowerlike odor was stronger.
He came to a long passage. It was painted white. It might have been used but yesterday. For wood does not decay in the bitter cold of the arctic.
He reached the third-class dining room.
Here his eyes met a sight that would make any man cringe. It was the explanation of the loss of the Oceanic.
The room was filled with bodies—bodies of the passengers and crew of the ill-fated ship. Bullets had done their work, and the northern cold had kept this tableau of carnage inviolate!
Doc thought of Victor Vail.
So this was what had happened during the time the blind man was unconscious!
Pirates, human fiends, had taken over the Oceanic. They were as bloodthirsty a gang as ever swung a cutlass or dangled a victim from a yardarm on the Spanish Main. Wholesale murder, they had committed.
Keelhaul de Rosa, Ben O’Gard, Dynamite Smith—greater villains never trod a deck. And, like the corsairs they were, they had fallen out over the loot.
The whole thing might have been lifted from the parchment chronicles of another century and transplanted to our time.
Doc quitted the hall of murder.
Uncanny whisperings and shufflings still crept through the lost liner. Yet Doc saw nothing. It was as though the tormented souls of those butchered here were holding spectral conclave.
Like that—except for the flowery odor of living things. It was present everywhere.
Doc stepped out into another lounge.
His light picked up movement!
What it was, his sharp eyes failed to detect. The thing dropped behind the massive furniture before more than the backglow of Doc’s light found it.
Warily, Doc sidled along the lounge wall. This was no animal confronting him.
What happened next came without the slightest sound.
Something touched Doc’s bronze neck. It was warm. It was soft, yet it possessed a corded strength.
It encircled Doc’s throat!
* * * *
Doc made one of the quickest moves of his career. He ducked and whirled. But he did not get the beam of his flashlight lifted in time. All he saw was the blank panel of a tightly shut door.
He wrenched at it.
Chug! A hard object hit him in the back with terrific force. Only the sprung steel of cushioning muscles kept his spine from being snapped. He was knocked to all fours. But he did not drop his flashlight.
He sprayed the beam on the lounge. A dozen frothing, hideous figures were leaping toward him.
It was seldom that Doc felt an impulse to hug an enemy. But he could have hugged these.
For their appearance dispelled the sinister air of supernatural foes which hung over the lost liner.
These were but Eskimos!
Doc doused his light. This was something he could cope with. He glided sidewise.
An avalanche of bodies piled onto the spot he had vacated. Clubs—it was a thrown club which had hit Doc’s back—beat vigorously. An Innuit or two squealed painfully as he was belabored by a fellow. They seemed to use the squeals to express both excitement and pain.
Silence fell.
The Eskimos were puzzled. Their breathing was gusty, wheezing.
“Tarnuk!” whined one of the cowering Innuits.
This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant “the soul of a man.” So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
“Chimo!” Doc told them in their own lingo. “Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me.”
This friendship business was undoubtedly news to everybody concerned. But Doc figured it wouldn’t hurt to try that angle on them.
He spoke several variations of Eskimo dialect, among scores of other lingos he had mastered in his years of intensive study.
He might as well have saved his breath.
In a squealing knot, the Innuits bore down upon him. Again, they found themselves beating empty space, or whacking each other by accident.
From a position thirty feet away, Doc planted his flash beam on them. They were in a nice, tight bunch. A great chair stood at Doc’s elbow. No doubt it would have been a load for any single steward who had long ago sailed on the ill-fated Oceanic.
It lifted in Doc’s mighty hand as lightly as though it were a folding camp stool. It slammed into the midst of the Eskimos. They were bowled over, practically to a man.
Those able to, raised a terrific squawling.
They were calling upon more of their fellows outside for help.
Doc saw no object in standing up and fighting an army. If there had been some reason for it, that would be different.
He made swiftly for the forward staircase out of the lounge.
His thoughts flickered for an instant to the strange thing which had touched his neck. It had been none of these queer-smelling Innuits.
He forgot that puzzle speedily.
The staircase he was making for erupted warlike, greasy Eskimos. His retreat was cut off!
There was nothing to do now but make a fight of it.
* * * *
Four of the five Innuits carried lighted blubber lamps. Doc wondered where they had conjured them from. They illuminated the lounge.
“You are making a mistake, my children,” Doc told them in their lingo. “I come in peace!”
“You are a tongak, an evil spirit sent to harm us by the chief of all evil spirits!” an oily fellow clucked at him.
Doc sneezed. He had never smelled an Eskimo as aromatic as these fellows—and Eskimos are notoriously malodorous.
“You are wrong!” he argued with them. “I come only to do you good.”
They threw gutturals back and forth at each other. All the while, they kept closing in on the giant bronze man.
“Where you come from?” demanded one.
“From a land to the south, where it is always warm.”
Doc could see they didn’t believe this.
One waved an arm expressively.
“There is no such land,” he said with all the certainty of a very ignorant man. “The only land besides this is nakroom, the great space beyond the sky.”
They had never heard of Greenland, or any country to the south, Doc gathered.
“Very well, I come from nakroom,” Doc persisted. “And I come to do good.”
“You speak with a split tongue,” he was informed. “Only tongaks, evil spirits, come from nakroom.”
Doc decided to drop the subject. He didn’t have time to convert their religious beliefs.
Doc took stock of their weapons. They carried harpoons with lines of hair seal thong bent in the detachable tips. Some held oonapiks, short hunting spears. Quite a few bayonets were in evidence. These had evidently been garnered from the Oceanic. No firearms were to be seen.
Not the least dangerous were ordinary dog whips. These had lashes fully eighteen feet long. From his vast knowledge, Doc knew an Eskimo could take one of these whips and cut a man’s throat at five paces. Flicking at distant objects with the dog whips bordered on being the Eskimo national pastime.
“Kill him!” clucked the Eskimo leader. “He is only one man! It will be easy!”
The Innuit was underestimating, a mistake Doc’s enemies quite often made.
* * * *
Doc picked up a round-topped table. This would serve as a shield against any weapon his foes had.
He seized a chair, flung it as though it were a chip. Three Innuits were bowled over. They hadn’t had time to dodge. A flight of harpoons and short hunting spears chugged into the table. Doc threw two more chairs. He retreated to a spot far from the nearest flickering blubber lamp. He lowered the table, making sure they all saw he was behind it. Then he flattened to the lounge floor and glided away, unnoticed.
The Eskimos rushed the table, bent on murder. They howled in dismay when they found no one there. The howls turned to pain as hunters in the rear began dropping from bronze fists that exploded like nitro on their jaws.
An Innuit lunged at Doc with a harpoon. Doc picked the harpoon out of the fellow’s hands and broke it over his head. A tough walrus lash on a dog whip slit the hood of Doc’s parka like a knife stroke.
The bronze giant retreated. Thrown spears and bayonets seemed to whizz through his very body, so quickly did he dodge.
His uncanny skill began to have its effect. The greasy fellows rolled their little eyes at each other. Fear distorted their pudgy faces.
“Truly, he is a tongak, an evil one!” they muttered. “None other could be so hard to kill.”
“All gather together!” commanded their leader. “We will rush him in a group!”
The words were hardly off the leader’s lips when he dropped, his blank and senseless face looking foolishly through the rungs of the chair which had hit him.
The harm had been done. The Innuits grouped. They took fresh holds on their weapons.
They charged.
They had hit upon the only chance they had of coping with Doc. There were nearly fifty of them. Despite their short stature and fat, they were stout, fierce fighters.
With mad, bloodthirsty squeals, they closed upon the mighty bronze man. For a moment, they covered him completely. A tidal wave of killers!
Then a bronze arrow of a figure shot upward from the squirming pile.
The ceiling of the lounge was criss-crossed with elaborately decorated beams. Doc’s sinewy hands grasped these, clinging to a precarious handhold as he moved away.
He dropped to the floor, clear of the fight, before he was hardly missed.
But the Eskimos still had him cut off from the exits. They closed in again. They threw spears and knives and an occasional club, all of which Doc dodged. They shrieked maledictions, largely to renew their own faltering nerve.
The situation was getting desperate. Doc put his back to a bulkhead.
He did not pay particular attention to the fact that he was near the spot where the strange, warm, soft object had touched his neck.
With hideous yells, the killing horde of Innuits charged.
A door opened beside Doc. A soft, strong hand came out. It clutched Doc’s arm.
It was a woman’s hand.