Chapter 2 The Stone Men

The two men physically resembled each other. Both were bony to the point of emaciation. But they would not be mistaken for one another, because although they were of different cultures and attire, the greatest difference between them was that one was dead and the other was living. The latter, Dr. William Harper Littlejohn, inspected the former, a mummy of dynastic Egypt. "Johnny" Littlejohn was thinner than it seemed to possible to be and remain among the living. He was also tall--unusually so--and thus a clothesmaker's nightmare. He resembled an oversized scarecrow in his ill-fitting clothes. A maternal woman's first instinct upon seeing the lanky professor of archaeology often was to offer "the poor man" food. Ironically, Johnny could out-eat most adult men. Johnny was among the world's handful of most knowledgeable archaeologists and geologists. He was also one of Doc Savage's aides. He was as famous for the latter as for his expertise in his own fields of science. Bony Johnny bent over the mummy, examining it with a large monocle which was actually a magnifying glass. Such a device often came in useful in his profession, and for many years he had worn the thing over an injured eye, until Doc Savage had repaired the damage several years ago. Artifacts from around the world surrounded the two rail-thin men. Probably every culture--past or present--was represented by some object. Johnny maintained a small private museum in an uptown building that was tall and thin like him. His residence was in the building as well. Many of the exotic artifacts in the large room were Egyptian, one of Johnny's favorite cultures. He had made several expeditions there and the mummy was one Johnny had discovered--as part of a team--twenty years earlier. A series of unfortunate mishaps had befallen nearly all the other members of the party until Johnny was now almost the sole survivor of the expedition. Unfortunately, a sensationalistic press had blown these coincidences out of proportion, claiming an imaginary ancient curse was behind the deaths. A telephone bell clattered loudly as morning light crept slowly into the vast room. "I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny exclaimed as he went to the telephone, noticing for the first time the sun rising. If archaeology and geology were his professions, big words were Johnny's hobby. He had begun using them many years earlier, near the beginning of his career, and found that it got him noticed. Johnny's big words either impressed or irritated people. There seemed to be no middle ground. He had used them mercilessly ever since, to great effect. "An acrimonious consequence of chronography," tall, bony Johnny muttered, looking at his watch. He was, as Alice's rabbit had said, late for a very important date. Johnny Littlejohn hurried to the telephone and picked it up. He listened intently to the words coming over the receiver, then replied, "I failed to chronologize with exactitude." It was his way of saying "I'm on my way". The long, lean geologist quickly grabbed his coat and hat. A suitcase, already packed, was by the door. Picking it up, he left the museum, careful to lock the door behind him as he did so. Many of the artifacts in the bony archaeologist's museum were priceless. Johnny drove downtown in an ancient automobile that might have been an artifact itself. It clanked and rattled, and generally gave the impression it wouldn't survive the short journey. The skyscraper that housed Doc Savage's headquarters was located in midtown, several minutes from Johnny's museum. The sun had not yet topped the impressive Manhattan skyline. It was going to be a pleasant day, warm for one well into in the season of Fall. The skyscraper came into view. It was the tallest skyscraper in the world, over one hundred stories tall, and one of the most impressive, as well. Its construction had taken more than year, and during that time, only a dozen men had fallen to their deaths. The building had used enough steel for five hundred miles of railroad track. Topping the structure was a dirigible mooring mast that had never been used. Accounts of its construction would be told in history books as long as there were such things. Johnny drove to the rear of the building, where deliveries were made. He touched a button beneath the dash of the rattletrap automobile, and in response, a huge section of the stone wall of the skyscraper swung aside, revealing a ramp leading beneath the building. Doc Savage maintained a private garage there, which was supposed to be a secret. Sometimes Doc's fame made it difficult to keep secrets. As Johnny drove down the ramp into the garage, the wall slid shut behind him. He parked his rolling junkyard among the other vehicles there, which counted a long, somber sedan, a taxicab, a delivery truck and others among the ranks. Doc's automobiles were branded with special license plates, in order to facilitate the cooperation of the police force. The plates had low numbers reserved for important personages of the city. Despite their common appearance, all of Doc's vehicles were armor-plated and equipped with short-wave radios. Johnny, suitcase in hand, walked to an elevator in one wall of the basement garage. He stepped inside, pressed a button there. The elevator rose with such swiftness that the lanky geologist's knees buckled. This was Doc's private express elevator that went from the basement garage to his headquarters on the eighty-sixth floor of the skyscraper. It could also stop at the lobby of the building, where its entrance was concealed behind a wall panel. The elevator's speed was somewhat over the legal limit of twelve hundred feet per minute, the maximum rate the Otis Elevator Company had determined was safe. The elevator arrived shortly at its destination. Doc Savage occupied the entire eighty-sixth floor, and there was, therefore, only one door which was marked. This door bore a bronze-colored plaque that read: "Clark Savage, Jr." As Johnny approached the door, it mysteriously swung open, without apparent cause. The bony geologist showed no surprise at this odd event. It was the custom of Doc Savage and his aides to carry a small radioactive token in the shape of a coin, and the door, being gimmicked to respond to the proximity of such a source of radioactivity, automatically opened at its presence. The room behind the door was bare but for a few amenities, which were sumptuous and expensive-looking. Most noticeable was a huge antique safe the size of a large closet. Other than an exquisite inlaid table, the remaining furniture consisted of a few overstuffed, comfortable-looking chairs. Modernistic lights were recessed in the ceiling and an elaborate rug from the Near East covered the floor. It had been a gift from the Khedive of Egypt. On one wall hung a portrait of Doc's father. It was the elder Savage who had originally occupied the suite of offices when the building had first opened years earlier, and they naturally became Doc's headquarters when his father had been killed. One of Doc Savage's great regrets was that he had been out of town when his father had been stricken by the mysterious illness which had taken his life. The room, being in one corner of the famous building, had two walls of windows. This was the reception room, the smallest of the trio of rooms comprising Doc's headquarters. Beyond lay a large library and an even larger laboratory--one of the most complete in the world--which took up two-thirds of the floor. It was in the lab that Johnny found Doc Savage. Next to the bronze man's muscular form was one of a runt, an undersized, puny-looking man. Every part of him was pale--his hair, his eyes, his skin. His complexion was one shared with mushrooms. He appeared sickly, as if he would be lucky if he lasted the day. This was "Long Tom"--Thomas J. Roberts, wizard of the juice, electrical expert extraordinaire--and nothing could be further from the truth. He had never been sick a day in his life, and contrary to appearances, could whip nine out of ten men off the street. And the tenth would know he had picked on the wrong man. He was another of Doc Savage's assistants. The two of them were fiddling with some contraption Johnny did not recognize. Abruptly the thing threw off sparks, and Doc Savage's form blurred as he moved to a switch, throwing it open. The device seemed to die, sputtering and smoking quietly until it was silent a few moments later. "An unpropitious eventuation," Johnny said from behind the two, commenting upon the display he had just witnessed. "Don't you start up," said Long Tom sourly, turning to look at the bony geologist. "I'm enjoying the peace and quiet with Ham and Monk being out of town", he said, referring to two more of Doc's aides. "Ham", Theodore Marley Brooks, legal expert, and "Monk", Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, renown chemist, usually quarreled with the gusto of an old married couple, to the annoyance of the others in Doc's little group. Years of complaining about it to them had done no good. Currently they were out of town, in South America somewhere, their exact whereabouts unknown. The bronze man had private detectives looking for them. "Good morning, Doc," Johnny said. Doc turned and greeted him. Johnny never used his big words on Doc. Whether out of respect for the bronze man or because Doc would understand what he said--thereby taking the fun out of it--was a matter of debate. Long Tom eyed the burnt machine ruefully. "I'll see what I can do about this while you're gone, Doc." He grasped a cane--the result of an injury incurred recently--and limped away toward a storeroom, mumbling softly to himself about what might have gone wrong with the device. Doc Savage collected his luggage from a small living compartment at the back of the lab, which contained a kitchenette with foldout bed and a dressing room. When he returned, Long Tom was back at the workbench, tinkering with the contraption. "You know where we'll be staying if you need to contact us," Doc told him. He named a famous landmark hotel in San Francisco. On the Hudson River bank squatted a large, ramshackle warehouse, part of which extended out over the water. Its brick exterior was faded with age. Above huge metal doors hung a decrepit sign that read: "Hidalgo Trading Company". The building had been constructed during the Great War, and showed its age. The impression was that it had not seen a delivery in some time. It would not be hard to imagine dust and cobwebs inside. But its disused appearance belied the activity therein. The place, in reality, was the private hangar of Doc Savage. Inside was a large tri-motor plane, an autogiro gathering dust and a single-seat speedy monoplane. Off to one side were a large cabin cruiser, a small speedboat and a ten-year old submarine, which Doc had acquired during the course of one of his early adventures that had ended in the Arctic. The sub had a retractable conning tower and two huge runners resembling those on ice skates. Like the autogiro, it had not been used for some time. A small dirigible floated peacefully in a higher section of the warehouse, on the side of the building near the street. Doc Savage readied the huge all-metal tri-motor plane for take-off, while Johnny loaded their gear aboard. The plane was an amphibian, and, after taxiing out great metal doors facing the river, would take off from the water. The plane was painted a nondescript gray. Doc had discontinued the practice of painting his big planes a bronze color earlier in the year, for the sake of conspicuousness. Doc had found that while it was sometimes helpful for criminals to be frightened by his presence, more often than not it was more beneficial to have a certain amount of surprise on his side. In truth, this plane now resembled those he had used in the first years of his career, a decade earlier. Shortly, the waterfront doors opened, and the big plane roared out of the hangar. It lifted off and took to the air, gently banking to the west thereafter. Sleek and powerful, it resembled a great gray bat in flight. That afternoon, the big plane, its speed being more than one hundred miles per hour greater than a commercially available model, touched down at Mills Field, south of San Francisco. Like all of Doc's planes, the tri-motor was equipped with special superchargers. Doc Savage and Johnny found their hired automobile, a large nondescript sedan, and drove into the city. "The cultural diversity of the city is one of the most appealing aspects of it," Johnny commented on the drive northward. His interest in diversity was one of the things that had attracted him to archaeology, although as an intelligent boy on an isolated farm, this manifested itself as a longing to visit far-off places and a desire to mingle with exotic people. San Francisco was somewhat the opposite of this. "Exotic people"--Chinese, Russians and others--had all flocked to one place. Most Americans probably thought of the cultural diversity of the city beginning with the influx of Chinese in the first half of the nineteenth century, who provided cheap labor for the building of the continental railroads, among other things. But in point of fact, both the American Indian and the Spanish were there before "Americans" arrived. It was the gold rush that had made the city cosmopolitan, bringing in people from all over the world. As the major point of entry to the United States on the west coast, almost every foreign gold hunter passed through the city. Many returned and settled down. Johnny didn't need to tell Doc Savage any of this. The bronze man's knowledge of history was greater than his own; just as it was in the professions of every one of his aides. Doc Savage was an expert in virtually every field of science, although it was his early interest in medicine that gained him the nickname "Doc" while he was still a child. A short while later, in their room at the landmark hotel on Nob Hill, Doc telephoned the hotel where Little Jimmy Lannon had said he would be staying. There was no answer. The bronze man got an operator on the line. "Dr. Lannon has checked in, but is not answering at this time. May I take a message?" "That will not be necessary," Doc replied. The sun was a red-orange semicircle on the Pacific Ocean when Doc Savage and Johnny left the hotel for the conference dinner. It was a little chilly, but probably warmer than New York City at sunset in this season. Johnny drove the rented vehicle. "Did Little Jimmy say anything else?" he asked. Johnny, although having met the man once or twice, knew the leathery-looking Lannon only by reputation. "No," replied Doc. "He checked in. That's a good sign," added the skinny geologist. The bronze man remained silent. They arrived shortly at the International Geologists League building, where the dinner was to be held. It was a somber-looking building, made of granite and marble, befitting a place of science. Ornamentation in a variety of gemstones tastefully decorated the structure. The place was lit, but silent. Johnny parked the automobile, and he and Doc walked inside. Back of the foyer was the hall, where meetings and dinners--such as this one--were held. Figures were visible from the foyer, and music wafted into the room from a Victrola. As they approached the room, Doc was the first to notice that none of the men were moving. He walked quickly but carefully to the double oak doors of the banquet hall, watching for anything out of the ordinary, such as an out-of-place shadow, a peculiar smell, anything. Nothing. From the doorway, Doc called out. He got no response. The five unmoving figures had a peculiar sheen to them. Doc--Johnny following--entered the room, and approaching the geologists, slowly came to the awful realization that these men had been turned to stone!

The Stone Death Written By: Jeff Deischer Dedicated to "Kenneth Robeson X" for his encouragement. The Stone Man is a work of fan fiction. Doc Savage is © Conde Nast Back to: Top of Page Index Page Home Page