THE FIRE-FACED MAN
Down the corridor a way, and around a corner, there was a plain metal door, the panel of which bore a name in small letters of a peculiar bronze color:
CLARK SAVAGE, JR.
This door whipped back and a tall, incredibly bony man popped out. The man was thinner than it seemed any human being could be and still exist. He wore no coat, and a rubber apron was tied about his midsection. Rubber gloves were on his hands, and one hand held a magnifying glass made in the shape of a monocle.
He peered about, blinking, searching for the source of the shrieks which had drawn his attention. But there was a crook in the corridor and he did not see the form of Hadim immediately.
The bony man absently stowed the monocle magnifier in a vest pocket under his rubber laboratory apron, and advanced. He rounded the corner, jerked up and stared.
Hadim was now motionless on the floor, and his head was angled back in a grotesque posture which no man could attain normally.
The bony man in the rubber apron suddenly snapped a hand to an armpit and brought it away gripping a weapon which somewhat resembled an oversize automatic pistol. He flipped this up and tightened on the trigger; the weapon shuttled, smoked and made a noise like a gigantic bullfiddle. It was a machine pistol with a tremendous firing speed.
One of the sinister green wraiths was still inside the corridor, rolling against the window as if seeking blindly to escape. The stream of bullets from the machine pistol passed through it, disturbing it, fattening it a little, but not destroying it or seeming in any way to affect its unholy life.
The stream of lead broke glass out of the window. The green harpy squirmed through the opening and floated away into the gloom, losing itself over the nest of skyscraper spires.
The skeleton of a man stood very still for a long minute.
“I’ll be superamalgamated!” he muttered finally.
Stooping, he examined the body of Hadim—body, for Hadim was dead. When Hadim’s head was moved, there was a grisly looseness about its attachment to the body, as if it were only connected by a cord no stiffer than a wrapping twine.
The bony man eyed Hadim’s extraordinarily long knife.
“Sixteenth century Tananese,” he decided aloud. Then he employed the monocle magnifier briefly. “Wrong. Tananese, all right, but of modern construction, using sixteenth century methods of tempering and moulding. Most peculiar.”
The wall beside Hadim’s body was of plaster, painted over, and it was scarred with numerous rather odd-looking marks. These came to the thin man’s attention.
“I’ll be superamalgamated!” he gulped again, using what was evidently, for him, a pet ejaculation. He stared harder at the marks. Down the corridor, an elevator door clanked to a stop. Before the door opened, voices could be heard. They were very loud voices, angry. It sounded as if a fight was about to occur in the elevator. The cage door opened and a man came skidding out.
This man was slender, waspish, with a high forehead and a large orator’s mouth. His attire was sartorial perfection from silken topper to the exact hang of his tail coat. He carried a thin, black cane.
He yelled at the open elevator door, “You hairy accident! You awful mistake of nature! You insult to the human race!”
A most striking-looking individual now came out of the elevator. His height was no greater than that of a young boy; his width was almost equal to his height. His face was mostly mouth, with a broken nubbin of a nose, small eyes set in pits of gristle, and scarcely a noticeable quantity of forehead. His long arms dangled well below his knees and the wrists were matted with hair that looked like rusted steel wool.
Had the corridor been a little less brilliantly lighted, the hairy gentleman might have been mistaken for an amiable gorilla.
The hairy man squinted little eyes at the dapper one, and said, “Pipe down, you shyster, or I’ll tie a knot in your neck!”
Then they both saw the tall skeleton of a man down the corridor. They could not help but note his excitement.
“What’s happened, Johnny?” demanded the apish fellow.
They could not see the body of Hadim, which lay around the bend in the corridor.
* * * *
“Johnny,” the bony man—he was actually William Harper Littlejohn, world-renowned expert on archæology and geology—gestured over his shoulder with the monocle magnifier.
“Come here, Monk,” he said, then included the dapper man. “You too, Ham.”
“Monk,” the homely gorilla of a man, and “Ham,” the immaculate fashion plate, advanced hurriedly. A moment before, they had seemed on the point of blows; now their quarrel was suddenly suspended. It was always thus. No one who knew these two could recall one having addressed a civil word to the other.
Monk, whose low forehead did not look as if it afforded room for more than a spoonful of brains, was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, generally conceded to be one of the most accomplished of industrial chemists; while Ham, the fashion plate, was Major General Theodore Marley Brooks, a lawyer who possessed probably the sharpest legal mind ever trained by Harvard.
Monk and Ham, rounding the hallway angle and sighting Hadim’s body with its grotesquely twisted head, jerked to a stop and became slack-jawed.
“Blazes!” Monk sniffed, sampling the air like an animal. “I smell burned gunpowder. Who shot the guy?”
“No one,” said Johnny. “I fired a few shots subsequently.”
Monk ambled over to the body, hands swinging below his knees, and stared intently.
“What’s wrong with his neck?” he asked.
“Broken,” Johnny replied.
Monk asked, “Who broke it?”
“No one,” answered the gaunt geologist. “As far as I can tell.”
“Yeah,” Monk growled. “Then who’d you shoot at?”
“A peculiar, nebulous green corporeity with the optical aspects of a serpentine specimen suspended aërospherically,” said Johnny, his expression not changing. “It bore similarity to a phantasmagoria.”
Monk lifted one hand and snapped thumb and forefinger loudly.
“Now do it again with little words,” he requested.
Johnny had once held the chair of natural science research in a famous university where he had been known as a professor who stunned most of his students with his big words, and he still had the habit. He never used a small word when he could think of a large one.
“A green thing was floating in the air above the body,” said Johnny. “I shot. The bullet went through it, breaking the window. Then the thing floated out through the window and away.”
Monk said unsmilingly, “I always did think those big words would drive you crazy.”
Johnny pointed at the odd-looking marks scratched on the wall beside Hadim’s body.
“The man obviously inscribed these when he felt demise imminent,” he said. “He used the tip of his knife.”
Monk bent over, looked and said, “They don’t mean anything. He just dug the wall with his knife as he was flopping around.”
“Those marks,” said Johnny, “are words, or word signs, rather, of Tananese, an obscure language with an Arabic derivative, spoken in certain parts of outer Mongolia.”
“What do they say?” asked Monk.
And Johnny, who probably knew as many ancient languages, written and spoken, as any half dozen of the ordinary so-called experts on the subject, drew a paper and pencil from his pocket and reproduced thereon the characters which the wall bore, here and there correcting a stroke which Hadim, in his dying agony, had made with slight error. Then Johnny wrote the English translation under the word signs. He passed it to Monk and Ham. They read:
MANY LIVES WILL BE SPARED IF HE OF MOUNTAINS WHO CHARMS EVIL SPIRITS WILL GO TO FISH THAT SMOKES ON WATER WHERE THE KHAN SHAR AND JOAN——
“It ends there,” said Johnny. “You can see the name ‘Joan’ is scratched out in the nearest thing an Asiatic could come to English letters.”
Ham, the dapper lawyer, fumbled absently with his slim black cane, and in doing so, separated the handle slightly from the rest of the cane, revealing that there was a long, slender blade of razor-sharp steel housed in the cane body.
“That sounds silly,” he said. “What does it mean?”
Monk suddenly banged a fist on a knee, something he could do without stooping.
“Remember that radio we got a few days ago?” he demanded. “The message was signed, ‘Joan Lyndell.’”
The gaunt Johnny said sharply, “I have been carrying it around with me,” and withdrawing a radiogram blank from a pocket, he passed it to the others, open for perusal. They had all seen it before, but they went over it again:
DOC SAVAGE,
NEW YORK.
YOUR ASSISTANCE IMPERATIVE ON MATTER INVOLVING THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND POSSIBLY STABILITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. PLEASE RADIO ME APPOINTMENT TIME AND PLACE. MY LINER WILL REACH NEW YORK THREE DAYS.
JOAN LYNDELL,
ABOARD S.S. ATLANTIC QUEEN.
Below the message, written in pencil, was another missive, one evidently penned as an answer to the radiogram. It read:
JOAN LYNDELL,
CARE TRANSATLANTIC LINER
ATLANTIC QUEEN.
SORRY BUT DOC SAVAGE NOT IN CITY AND NOT AVAILABLE TO COMMUNICATION. CANNOT SAY WHEN HE WILL RETURN.
WILLIAM HARPER LITTLEJOHN.
Monk rubbed his jaw and asked, “Connection?”
“Between this message and the dead man?” Johnny shrugged. “He inscribed the name ‘Joan’ on the wall.”
Ham pointed at the wall markings with his sword cane. “But what does the rest of that mean?”
In the manner of a scholar giving a lecture, Johnny said, “The man could not write Doc Savage’s name, so he came as near to describing it as he could. The mountain men in the Tananese region are savages, so ‘He of Mountains’ probably is meant for Savage. And a Tananese doctor is called one who chases evil spirits.”
Monk squinted admiringly. “Maybe there is something besides big words in that head. What about the ‘fish that smokes on water’?”
“A boat,” said Johnny. “A boat in some manner connected with a fish, and probably an oil or a coal burner.”
Ham said briskly, “I’ll see about this.”
He strode down the corridor, opened the door on which was the name “Clark Savage, Jr.,” in small bronze letters, and entered a reception room which held an enormous safe, a costly inlaid table, and various other items of quiet but expensive furniture. Ham picked up a telephone.
With the casual ease of a man who had done the thing before, Ham got a land-line-radio connection to the liner Atlantic Queen. He spoke for some minutes, then hung up.
He did not leave the telephone immediately, but consulted the directory, then made a second call. Then he went out and joined the others.
“His Majesty, Khan Nadir Shar of Tanan, and a young woman named Joan Lyndell were taken off the Atlantic Queen by the tug Whale of Gotham about three hours ago,” he repeated. “I called the owners of the Whale of Gotham. The tug is tied up at a wharf in the Hudson, off Twenty-sixth Street.”
“Whale of Gotham,” Monk grunted. “That would be the ‘fish that smokes on the water.’”
Ham eyed Johnny, then indicated the body of Hadim. “Just what did kill this fellow?”
The thin geologist shook his head slowly. “That is a profound mystery, as great a mystery as the nature of the green body I saw.”
Monk frowned at Johnny, at the rubber apron the tall geologist wore. “Busy, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Johnny admitted. “I am trying to assemble the vertebræ of a small dinosaur of the early Mesozoic——”
“Stick here,” Monk advised. “Me and the tailor’s dream here will go down to this tugboat.”
“Very well,” Johnny agreed, after hesitating.
“If Doc Savage shows up, tip him off,” Monk finished.
* * * *
Monk and Ham, departing, rode down to the basement in a private high-speed elevator which had undoubtedly cost a young fortune to install, and came out in a subterranean garage which held several motor vehicles, ranging from an open roadster of expensive manufacture and quiet color scheme to a large delivery van which, although it did not look the part, was literally an armored tank.
The elevator, the garage, the assortment of cars, as well as the establishment on the eighty-sixth floor—there was an enormous scientific laboratory and a highly complete scientific library up there in addition to the reception room—were all a part of the New York headquarters maintained by Doc Savage.
A strange individual, this Doc Savage. Probably one of the most remarkable of living men. A genius, a mental marvel and a giant of fabulous physical strength.
He was literally a product of science himself, was this Doc Savage, for he had been trained from birth for one single purpose in life—the fantastic career which he now followed. Every trick of science had been utilized in his training. In no sense had he led a life that might be regarded as normal.
Two hours of each day since childhood had been devoted to a routine of intense exercises calculated to develop not only muscles, but physical senses and mental sharpness. All of his early life had been devoted to study under masters of trades, sciences, professions, until he possessed a knowledge that was, to the ordinary man, uncanny.
The result of this studied upbringing was an individual who was a remarkable combination of scientific genius and physical capacity.
Stranger even than the man himself was the career to which his life was dedicated—the business of helping others out of trouble, of aiding the oppressed, of dealing with those evildoers who seemed beyond the touch of the law. For all of which Doc Savage made it an unbending rule to accept no payment in money, under any circumstances.
Long ago, Doc Savage had assembled five men as his assistants, five men who were world-famed specialists in their respective lines, five men who associated themselves with him because they loved adventure, excitement, and because they were drawn by admiration for the giant of bronze who was Doc Savage.
Monk, the chemist, and Ham, the lawyer, were two of the five aides. Johnny, the archæologist, was another. Two others—Colonel John “Renny” Renwick, engineer, and Major Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, electrical wizard—were, at the moment, elsewhere in the city, engaged in the private business which they carried on when not actively assisting Doc Savage.
The present whereabouts of Doc Savage himself was something that no one knew. The bronze man had vanished. He had told no one where he was going. No one, not even his five aides, knew how to reach him. But they were not worried, these five, for they were confident that the bronze man had gone away to some mysterious rendezvous, where he could be alone for intensive study.
And, although Doc’s five aides were not sure, they believed this place to which the bronze man retired, this remote trysting place with reflection which he called his Fortress of Solitude, was located on an island in the remote Arctic. It was certain, though, that no one would hear of Doc Savage until he should return, mysteriously as he had gone.
Monk and Ham, nearing the Hudson River water-front in a coupe which presented no outward hint that it was a rolling fortress with bullet-proof glass and armored body, exchanged comments punctuated with insults.
“We should’ve asked that walkin’ encyclopedia, Johnny, more questions,” Monk grumbled. “Where’s Tanan, the place where this Khan Shar is supposed to be a king?”
“Didn’t you study geography?” Ham asked sarcastically.
“Well, where is it?”
“In Asia.”
Monk scowled. “Do you, or do you not, know where it is?”
“I know as much about it as you do,” Ham snapped.
“Which is not a dang thing.” Monk used a spotlight to ascertain a street number. “What’s this king over here for? And what’s he want with Doc?”
“Nothing was said about the king wanting Doc,” Ham pointed out. “It was this Joan Lyndell who sent that radiogram.”
Monk said, “Wonder who she is?”
“How would I know?” Ham said sourly.
They parked the car and got out. Monk rummaged for a flashlight, but was unable to find one, then they moved away from the machine.
Monk mused aloud, “Wonder what broke that brown-skinned guy’s neck. Wish we’d figured that out.”
Ham began, “Say, you hairy baboon—wuh!” He ended the statement with a sort of choked explosion.
Monk’s jaw sagged, pulling his big mouth open cavernously; his fingers made absent straying movements. His little eyes seemed on the point of jumping from their pits of gristle.
They had been moving along a warehouse side, a wall of brick, unbroken by windows or other apertures. The darkness was intense.
Ahead of them, a face had appeared, materializing with an eerie unexpectedness. This was all the more startling, because the darkness was so thick that neither Monk nor Ham could see the other. Yet they saw the face clearly.
It was a fantastic thing, that face. Its color was not human, but a greenish hue, the tint that comes to meat in the first stages of decay. The green countenance shone with a fantastic luminosity; it was not exactly fluorescent, nor did it seem to have a light playing upon it, yet it was plainly visible.
The face had slant eyes, the contour of the Orient, and when it rolled lips back in a grin, the effect was anything but pleasant, for the tongue in the mouth, which should have been in shadow, was as plainly discernible as the other features. It was the same unholy green.
Monk said, “What the devil?” thickly.