DEATH MAGNIFIED
Nothing was said for some moments. The giants made hootings and cluckings of a happy nature. The big fellows apparently had not relished attacking a city ready to receive them. The assault on Milwaukee was more appealing.
In the pit there was stark silence. Renny perspired, and blocked and unblocked his enormous fists. Monk, homely face grim, absently scratched Habeas Corpus behind the ears. The steel-haired girl was rigid, pale. The giant man of bronze alone was devoid of emotion.
They all knew that death crouched outside the pit.
Hack asked his chief, “But how’re we gonna get the giants down to Milwaukee?”
“The planes,” he was reminded. “I have marked the position of lighting plants. We will bomb them. Then we will land on the lake front. From there, the giants can work into the heart of Milwaukee. In the darkness, that will not be difficult.”
“Swell idea,” Hack agreed.
“Dispose of the prisoners,” snapped the master of the giants.
“How?” Hack asked.
“Use a machine gun. Then have the giants fill the pit with rocks.”
Hack loudly directed a human monster to bring him a rapid-firer. This was done. There were clickings, as a fully loaded ammo drum was jacked into the mechanism. Hack appeared on the pit rim.
He was going to do the wholesale murdering himself.
Steel-haired Jean Morris moaned and covered her eyes with her hands. Monk made an animal snarling noise, and crouched as if to leap up at the killer.
Doc Savage rested his strange, flake-gold eyes on Hack.
“I left this pit for a time last night,” he said.
“You can’t kid me!” Hack sneered. “You’re lyin’!”
“The giants heard your voice from the rocks,” Doc reminded him. “The voice was thrown by ventriloquism, as you guessed, but its purpose was to cause them to look away, so that they would not observe my return.”
This startled Hack. He blinked.
The master of the giants had heard the words. His voice rattled from the hollow tube he was using for a disguise.
“What’s this, Hack?”
“He’s kidding us,” Hack growled.
“I was never more serious,” Doc assured them.
“The giants heard a voice all right,” Hack advised his chief. Then the scarlet-necked thug glared down into the pit. “What’d you do when you was outside, bronze guy?”
“When you learn that, it will be too late to help yourself,” Doc informed him without expression.
“Whatya mean?”
“Disaster will have overtaken you.”
The steel-haired girl suddenly removed her hands from her eyes.
“I know what Doc Savage did!” she screamed. “It’s something that will destroy all of you. Take me out of here, turn me loose and I’ll tell you what it is!”
“You hussy!” Renny thundered, and reached hands for the girl.
* * * *
“Get back, you big-fisted hooligan!” Hack gritted from the pit top.
The command was hardly necessary. Renny had already dropped his arms. It had been his intention to clap a palm over the girl’s lips and shut off her words. But it was now too late.
The hollow voice of the leader of the giants joined the discussion. The master villain, however, did not show himself.
“Take the girl out,” he commanded. “We’ll hear what she has to say. We can’t run any risks.”
“You’ve got to turn me loose in return for what I have to tell you,” Jean Morris wailed. “You’ve got to promise that!”
“It’s a promise,” boomed the czar of the giants.
A rope dangled down into the pit like a bronze snake. Hack menaced Doc and his men with the machine gun, keeping them away from the hemp strand. The girl knotted the rope under her arms and was hauled up.
Doc Savage watched her as she reached the top of the pit. When the girl saw the master-sinister of the giants, she started violently and her hands made a fluttering gesture. “Oh—it’s——” she began.
“Shut up!” warned the man’s sepulchral voice.
The girl obediently controlled her surprise. Then she said, “What I’ve got to tell you is in confidence. Have you a place where we can talk in private?”
There was a pause, while the leader of the giants considered. “I’ve got a shack I use for headquarters. That’ll do,” he said.
He and the girl moved away, and their footsteps were soon lost to the ear.
There was something bordering on agony in the looks which Doc’s five men exchanged. The perfidity of the young woman had been a bitter shock.
“I thought there was more to her than that!” Monk groaned. “After all we’ve done for her! Imagine her givin’ us the double-cross!”
“We haven’t done so much for her,” Renny retorted gloomily. “She couldn’t be much worse off than she was down here in the pit.”
Long Tom, somewhat more pallid than usual, asked Doc curiously, “Did you really tell her what preparations you have made?”
“I talked to her last night,” Doc replied.
Monk groaned and sat down on the pit floor.
Comparative silence fell over the men. The six giants remained on guard at the pit. Hack was also present, his machine gun ready in his hand.
The minutes seemed much longer than usual. When voices suddenly reached them, no more than five minutes had elapsed, although it seemed infinitely longer.
The steel-haired girl and the master of the giants were speaking. The voices obviously came from a mechanical loud-speaker, for they were metallic, although not loud. The leader of the giants was not disguising his tones now—and they had a familiar ring!
Doc’s men registered astonishment. There was something about the voice of the master mind that tickled their memories. Monk opened his cavernous mouth, as if to speak the name the voice brought to mind.
But the import of the words which they overheard caused him to keep silent.
* * * *
Apparently the conversation was occurring in the headquarters shack, although the loud-speakers were relaying it from the opposite end of the island.
“What did Doc Savage do last night?” the master of the giants asked.
“He arranged for the giants to learn something,” Jean Morris retorted.
“Learn what?”
“The truth about a point on which you had deceived them.”
“You’re not talking sense!”
“Oh, yes, I am! Savage arranged for the giants to learn that they cannot be returned to normal size.”
“Hell! How’d he find that out?”
“Went through your laboratory. He learned the method by which the size of these men had been increased. He has a vast knowledge of chemistry, and realized instantly that you had been lying to the giants. They cannot be returned to normal size and remain alive for any length of time.”
The master of the giants swore violently, bitterly.
“It’s a good thing I talked to you, sister,” he snarled finally. “If them big boys found out they can’t be reduced, they’d turn on me. How was it arranged for ’em to find out the truth?”
From the pit bottom, Doc Savage and his aids were watching Hack. The thug’s features had become slack, astounded, as he listened to the words relayed by the loud-speaker. These words were not loud enough to reach back to the hut where the girl was being questioned.
The giants on guard had fallen silent. Theirs was a grim, ominous quiet. They had heard every word that had been said.
The widest of grins suddenly overspread Monk’s homely face. He turned to Doc. “How’d you do it?”
“There’s a sensitive microphone planted in the headquarters shack,” Doc explained. “It is connected to my portable radiophone transmitter. There’s a receiver and a loud-speaker hidden near the bunk house occupied by the giants. It’s that loud-speaker you’re listening to now.”
“You concealed the apparatus last night!” Monk grunted.
“Right.”
In his delight Monk bounced up and down, ape fashion.
“I see it!” he howled. “The girl didn’t double-cross us. She decoyed the master mind to his headquarters and got ’im to spill the truth!”
* * * *
Outside the pit things began to happen. The giants made hoarse, violent sounds of rage. It had dawned on them that they were doomed to spend their natural lives as the monstrosities which they now were.
Hack backed from the pit rim with his machine gun. He must have decided to take sides with the giants. Possibly their nearness and their rage influenced this decision.
“The big shot has been lyin’ to us,” he yelled. “What’re we gonna do about it?”
His answer was a thunder of gigantic footsteps as the monsters charged for the headquarters shack.
“Wait!” Hack yelled, and ran after them. “My machine gun may come in handy.”
From other sections of the island howls of the giants arose. Although none of these unearthly sounds were words, their portent was clear. The giants had turned upon their master.
“Make a pyramid,” Doc directed.
His men whipped into movement. Renny took up a crouching position against the pit walls, and Monk sprang atop his shoulders, then the others mounted. As he had done the night before, Doc Savage clambered up this living pyramid to the pit rim and hauled himself outside.
The monster men were converging on the headquarters shack. Some of them had picked up boulders almost as large as washtubs to use as missiles, and these seemed as light as pebbles in their hands. One huge fellow wrenched the covering off a camouflaged shack and tore out a section of iron framework as if it were of thin lath construction. Waving this, he charged with the others.
From the headquarters a machine gun clattered. The master of the giants was using it, and his slugs pommeled one of the oncoming monsters.
The big fellow shook under the impact, but kept coming. The vitality of the Gargantuan man-thing was astounding. Not until the slugs battered his head almost out of shape did he sink, sprawling.
Doc Savage glanced about. Near by lay the rope with which the girl had been hauled from the pit. The bronze man scooped this up and tossed the end down to his companions. They climbed it.
Within some thirty seconds all five stood at his side, Monk carrying the excited Habeas by a leg.