The Phantom City: A Doc Savage Adventure (Doc Savage #10) by Lester Bernard Dent

Author:Lester Bernard Dent [Dent, Lester Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 2020-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

DECOY

The sun was not quite up. It was near enough to the horizon to spread a great scarlet fever over the sky, chasing stars, moon. The fever grew; increasing light bloodied the lazy surface of the Arabian Sea.

Renny, in the Helldiver chart room, lowered an enormous right hand over a coastal map. On the map was a straight red line, starting at the town of Bustan and angling entirely across the sheet. This was the radio bearing which Doc had taken upon Mohallet's transmitter.

Carefully lifting a red-headed glass pin, Renny consulted some figures penciled on a paper, then stuck the pin back in the chart, perhaps a quarter of an inch from the red line.

"About thirty miles!" he said, his vast voice vibrating in the steel cell. "Of course, we don't know where Mohallet was located along that red line. He might have been ashore, even."

Renny, accomplished engineer that he was, had few equals as a navigator. He was setting the course of the submarine.

"I wonder if Mohallet is near this Crying Rock, whatever that is," pondered Johnny, polishing the magnifier half of his eyeglasses.

"We should know before long," Doc told them.

The big bronze man now went out on deck. The sea was calm, but the speed of the Helldiver caused a steady shower of spray to fall along the decks.

Clad only in gym trunks, Doc proceeded to take a two-hour routine of exercises which had been his daily ritual from childhood. They were greatly different from the usual, those exercises; and they were solely responsible for the bronze man's amazing physical powers.

He made his muscles work one against the other, straining until filming perspiration mingled with the sea spray. He juggled a number of many figures in his head, multiplying, dividing, extracting square and cube roots—keening his faculties of concentration.

He employed a mechanism creating sound waves of frequencies so high and low the ordinary human ear could not detect them. Through a lifetime of practice, Doc had perfected his ears to a point where he could hear these sounds beyond ordinary ken. He named scores of different odors after a quick olfactory test of small vials racked in a special case.

He read pages of Braille printing, writing for the blind, which is a system of upraised dots on paper, fingers moving so rapidly that they seemed merely to stroke the sheets. This was to sharpen his sense of touch.

He had many other details in the routine. They occupied the entire two hours, with no time out for rest.

There was no magic about Doc's remarkable abilities. Probably no man had taken such exercises for such a long daily period from the cradle on. Were there individuals who had done so, their strength, agility, and acuteness of senses might have equaled those of Doc Savage.

Long Tom came out on deck when Doc finished. The electrical wizard looked tired. He had been at the radio instruments for many hours—continuously since they had sailed from Bustan.

"Not a peep out of Mohallet's radio transmitter," he reported.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.