Chapter 12
The Melting Mystery
Doc Savage finished relating his side of the caper as he completed working on Monk's injuries. The bronze man, trained in the medical arts, had already seen to Ham's wounds while the two aides briefed him on their part in the case. After hearing their story, Doc had called a contact at the local police precinct and requested information about the investigation of McCarthy's murder.
Earlier, the trio had left the thugs' apartment house just as a fire truck was arriving. Doc explained to the firefighters the cause of their being summoned so the truck crew would know what sort of situation they were dealing with.
Next, Doc dashed with Monk and Ham to the nearest phone they could locate -- this one happened to be installed at a neighborhood service station. There, Doc called Renny. The big engineer was still in Norfolk.
"Doc!" the dour-faced giant exclaimed when the bronze man announced himself. "The melting sun thing -- it's struck here!"
Doc asked questions, and Renny quickly filled him in on what he had witnessed. "I also got a sample of sea water from the site," he added. "Admiral Ryan had it sent to a lab in Maryland for analysis. No word back yet on that, though."
"Good thinking," Doc commended Renny. "Tell the admiral he can expect more attacks of the melting thing."
"What!"
"Yes. The crew behind it -- at least, one of them -- is heading back to Norfolk. They may have left some members there already, so whoever caused the earlier attack may still be around and getting ready for more destruction."
"Doc -- this bleeding sun thing -- it's horrible. Admiral Ryan will be rock-chomping mad when I tell him more of his ships and men are going down."
"He can reduce the risk, I think, if he follows these precautions," Doc replied. "Every ship that's seaworthy and can possibly leave the base should do so. They shouldn't be clustered together. Have them get as much distance from one another as possible."
"Okay."
"And have everyone keep a sharp eye out for any unauthorized aircraft."
"Civilian planes?" Renny queried.
"Any craft, including military," Doc warned. "We're not sure how big this thing is or just who's behind it. The admiral's recollection of his erstwhile friend, Captain Blackstone Toy, should lead us to include the likelihood of traitors among our suspicions."
"Holy cow!"
After Renny acknowledged that he would immediately inform Admiral Ryan of Doc's suggestions and signed off, Doc and his two aides returned to their Manhattan skyscraper headquarters.
Now, as Doc finished tending to his own injuries, a call came in on the line from the private detective agency situated on the building's fourth floor. Monk took the call.
"Doc," he relayed, "some starched-whites from the Navy dropped off a package for you."
"Have it sent up," the bronze man directed. "And I have two other tasks for the operatives: First, did Black Cat Jackson stop there for screening before she came up to the eighty-sixth floor? If not, how did she and that gang of thugs circumvent the agency?
"Second, the operatives should initiate a search for Harry Portman."
"Portman?" Monk scoffed. "That low-rent P.I. who's always begging you for work?"
"The same," Doc answered. "Mr. Curly Wolfe had apparently engaged his services to find something or someone. That's how we all ended up at Barlowe's warehouse. And I didn't spot Harry with the crowd that spirited Black Cat Jackson from the smoke-filled apartment house. Harry may have some answers that we need."
While Monk passed along directions to the operative on the phone, Ham asked, "So who is Mr. Tuxedo-and-Goggles, anyway? Any clues?" The lawyer spun a new sword cane through his fingers. His spirits had lifted from the funk brought on by his physical and psychic assaults after he had donned a fresh suit of clothes.
"Well, the tuxedo is no longer part of the picture. I saw its remains in one of the smudge fires at the apartment building," Doc said.
"So he started the fires," Ham noted.
"Apparently," Doc agreed. "As for the goggles -- I think he wears those to protect his eyes from dust. He has no eyelashes, nor any hair at all, for that matter. He may have a condition called alopecia universalis, a loss of all body hair." The bronze man paused. "From your and my encounters with this oddly garbed fellow, he's clearly involved with this mess. HOW he's involved remains unclear. Further, his presence at McCarthy's office seems to implicate McCarthy or his company in the plot."
"Did Wolfe kill McCarthy, do you think?" Ham asked.
"Possibly, but there's no way to know at this time," Doc replied. "And if Curly Wolfe is innocent of that attack, McCarthy's murder may be a coincidence, improbable as that may be."
"So many questions," Ham stated. "For instance, who is this Blind Man we kept hearing about?"
At that moment, an operative from the fourth-floor detective agency arrived carrying the package that the Navy had delivered earlier. Monk accepted the square wooden crate, and Doc directed him to the large laboratory, to which he and Ham followed.
The lab, which for its size was one of the best equipped in the city, sat directly off from the expansive reception area and study. Monk was a remarkably skilled industrial chemist but he rarely accepted work in the field these days -- his love of adventure lured him away from stable jobs so often that the considerable fortune he once owned had dwindled greatly. He would still take a special short-term assignment on occasion, requesting -- and usually receiving -- a large fee. These jobs he accepted solely for the purpose of paying whatever debts he accumulated while indulging showgirls in fast times and furious fun, plus giving in to whatever other whims his capricious lifestyle seemed to demand.
Monk opened the box and looked inside. He faced the bronze marvel standing before him. He frowned, and his fabulously homely features knotted into a tangle of wrinkles.
"This is just a box of rags!" he declared.
"Yes," agreed Doc. "Analyze them carefully. I directed the ground crew to wipe down the plane I arrived in from Norfolk. They used these rags, which may carry residue from whatever is causing these bleeding sun attacks."
A buzzer signaled an arrival at the front door. Ham left the lab while Monk busied himself with preparations. A moment later the lawyer ducked his head back in the lab door.
"It's the police," he informed Doc, who returned to the reception area. There, he found two officers, whom Ham introduced as Officer Cranford and Officer Welch. The two uniformed policemen had pushed two dollies stacked with boxes into the penthouse headquarters.
"Evidence you requested from the McCarthy murder investigation," Officer Cranford explained.
While Doc helped the officers unload the boxes, Officer Welch said to Ham, "Counselor, I thought we told you fellows to take it easy after we helped you out here earlier." He admired a shiner Ham had picked up during his recent travails. "Did you get too close to that firecracker dame you was telling us about?"
Officer Cranford piped up. "Did you find that woman yet? We've been keeping an eye open for her."
Ham stuck his chin out and sniffed. "War Department business," he said.
After the lawyer escorted the two policemen from the headquarters, he and Doc began studying the contents of the boxes. Doc began with an assortment of material taken from the warehouse office in which Monk and Ham had discovered McCarthy's corpse. There were the usual sorts of business papers -- memos, invoices, meeting notes, an informal daily ledger, a phone log. The bronze man quickly scanned each of these, his remarkable photographic memory locking in each detail.
At one point, Ham reached into a box and pulled out the same pulp paper magazine he had previously spotted at the murdered shipping magnate's office. "Dime magazines full of blood and thunder nonsense," scoffed the lawyer. "You'd suppose a fellow of McCarthy's business standing could make better use of his recreational time."
Before Doc could reply, they both heard Monk exclaim from the lab.
"Blazes!"
The bronze giant whipped to the adjoining room, Ham close behind.
The lab was brightly lit for Monk to keenly observe the results of his tests. "These rags in the box -- they're disappearing before my very eyes!" the hairy chemist shouted in his squeaky voice.
Doc and Ham peered into the box, the bronze man cautioning his aides to be wary of getting too close. Just as Monk had described, the shop rags were crumbling away into apparent nothingness.
Doc's trilling filled the room. It seemed to originate in no particular spot, but to emanate from the very air.
Doc snatched up the container and placed it in a large glass-walled cabinet that he quickly sealed, then he reached over and flicked a switch on the wall. An electric pumping sound followed as the air within the cabinet was sucked out, forming a vacuum inside.
Monk looked in. "Too late -- they're all gone."
"That frightful ape face of yours scared them out of existence," Ham suggested.
Before Monk could retort, Doc questioned, "Have you handled these rags?"
"Only with these tongs," Monk replied, "and they don't seem worse for it."
"What have your tests revealed?"
"Not a lot yet -- not before I saw most of the rags boiling away into nothin'." The simian-faced chemist moved over to a small, shallow tray covered by a metal lid, which he lifted. "Hey, this hunk that I was getting ready to soak is still in one piece." He picked up the fabric clipping -- about four inches square -- and showed Doc before dropping it back into the tray.
"These rags had definitely soaked up something from that plane," Monk said. "I don't quite have it broken down. Looks vaguely familiar, though." He pointed Doc to a microscope under which he had mounted a slide bearing a trace of the stuff on a piece of rag.
The bronze man switched on the scope light and peered intently, unmoving for several minutes. After awhile his weird trilling filled the laboratory, then drifted away into silence. When Doc finally lifted his head, he stated simply, "It's gone."
"Gone!" Monk barked.
"I observed the fabric under the lens," Doc explained. "It appeared whole when I first turned on the light. However, the longer I looked, the fabric slowly seemed to dissolve."
"Into smaller pieces?" Ham asked.
"Into -- nothing, apparently," Doc answered, and a rare look of consternation crossed his features. "There was no observable residue."
"Hey!" Monk cried. He looked down at the tray in which he had left the small square of rag uncovered. "This one's gone, too!"
Doc flashed to the vacuum box in which he had left the Navy's rag box. "Look!" he directed.
The sides of the wooden box that faced the outside glass walls of the vacuum box were partly eaten away as if by powerful acid. However, there was no smoke, no sawdust or ashes. Only the nails remained, dropping to the floor of the vacuum box as the supporting wood boards evaporated.
Doc flicked out a long arm and shut off the laboratory lights except for a small safety light that shone dimly in a corner of the room.
In the near darkness, he pulled a flashlight from a drawer within a metal cabinet. He switched this on and twisted the cowling around the lens to concentrate the beam into a narrow and fiercely bright rod of white light. He approached the darkened vacuum box and focused the light as a small, intense circle on the surface of one side of the wooden container.
As Monk and Ham watched, Doc held the beam of light perfectly still. The circle of wood within the light seemed to melt away! First a depression formed in the surface, then it deepened until a hole appeared all the way through the plank wall.
"Blazes!"
Monk's exclamation seemed a signal, for Doc switched off the light. From another cabinet he removed a large tarp, which he draped over the vacuum box before switching the room light on again.
"Clearly, the residue from the rags soaked into the wood, and light causes some violent reaction when it reaches the chemical that Monk has been researching," Doc said. He phoned the air base that he had flown into that morning and checked on the condition of the Helldiver in which he had arrived.
"Everything checks out fine?" Doc said into the receiver. "Keep the craft inside a dimly lit hangar and wash it down thoroughly. Don't send it upstairs for anything, and check its structural integrity twice a day."
He rang off. Monk scratched his head. "I don't get it, Doc," the chemist said. "Whatever this stuff is, it melts huge battleships just like butter -- same with this wood box and those rags. But the nails, my tongs, and that plane are just fine."
The bronze man pointed to the tarp-covered vacuum box. "Clearly these porous materials are easily susceptible to this melting substance. But denser materials -- the nails, tongs, and Navy plane -- must require another catalyst. Something that was added to the large ships that caused them to melt but wasn't present on the Helldiver."
"What could that be?" Ham asked.
"That remains a mystery for now," Doc answered, just as Monk noticed the magazine that Ham still absent-mindedly clutched.
"Hey, I thought you stopped reading Spicy Socialite Stories."
"I never did such a thing!" scoffed the lawyer.
"I know," Monk prodded. "I see you got a copy right there."
Ham frowned and looked at the periodical that he now realized he still held. He sputtered and shook the magazine at Monk. "I've never read such trash! This is evidence!"
Monk's eyes widened. "That's what that maniac Smalley was reading!"
"But this came from the McCarthy evidence box."
Doc asked for the magazine, and as Ham handed it over, a small booklet fell from its pages. As the lawyer retrieved the fallen object, Doc read aloud the name of the dime magazine: "Spicy Sea Stories."
Monk asked, "Does that issue have a Deep-Six Davis story in it?"
Doc glanced at the chemist, then checked the table of contents. "No."
The bronze man flipped through all the pages, committing each to memory. Near the back cover, between two pages that each devoted one column to advertisements, Doc found inserted two slips of paper.
"This seems to be a type of diary or log," Ham said as he browsed the small leather-bound booklet. "McCarthy noted meetings and dealings with various individuals, apparently. There are no names, only initials."
"Are there dates?" Doc asked.
"Yes. Notes seem to have been entered with a span of many months -- and in some cases, years -- between them."
The bronze man continued to examine the slips of paper he'd found in the magazine. Whirlpools of gold seemed to spin within his eyes. "Check the notations for 1934," he directed Ham.
"Here's something. Looks like sometime in late July: 'Mtg HMC.' Then, a couple of weeks later, 'HMC psg LNDN.'" Ham frowned as he scrutinized the pages open before him. "The next entry skips to October."
"And?" prompted Doc.
"It says, '50T JS.' Sounds like a formula or something." Ham looked a question at Monk.
The hairy chemist shook his head. "Nothing I know."
"That's really not surprising, monkey brain," Ham sniffed.
Doc forestalled another outburst between the two aides by asking Ham for further notations from the booklet.
"This one's from December," Ham said. "It repeats the earlier formula: '50T JS.' And for January, February, and March 1935, there are similar notes. '20T HMC,' '40T HMC,' and '50T HMC.'"
"If HMC are a person's initials in the earlier notes, then JS must be a person, too," Monk said.
He looked at Ham just as the lawyer looked up at Monk. Both said the name at the same time: "John Sunlight?"
Doc frowned. John Sunlight had proven to be one of the most difficult characters that the bronze man had tangled with during his career of devil fighting. Sunlight had a face like a mystic and the demeanor of a world-beating dictator with a messiah complex.
"Consider the date, brothers," Doc said. "1934, 1935. We didn't encounter Sunlight until a few years later."
"But he could have been operating beneath our notice long before then," Ham countered.
"Possibly," Doc acceded. "But it seems unlikely he would have had contact with McCarthy in any sort of capacity."
Ham looked puzzled. "You seem very willing to dismiss Sunlight's involvement, Doc."
"It's easy enough to check out," the bronze man said, and he lifted the two pieces of paper he'd found in the pulp magazine. "Deposit slips. These will give us a paper trail to follow." He handed them to Ham.
The lawyer examined the slips. "Deposits to the account of Irving McCarthy -- both for fifty thousand dollars!"
"That matches the notes in the little book," Monk pointed out.
"Ham, follow that trail," Doc directed. "And have an operative from the fourth floor agency contact the publisher of Spicy Sea Stories. Find out who placed this ad." The bronze man showed Ham an ad on the magazine page marked by the two deposit slips:
LOOKING FOR SEA ADVENTURE?
JOIN OUR CREW!
EXPERIENCED SEA DOGS ONLY!
The advertisement went on with its recruiting spiel and directed inquiries to a post office box in Manhattan. "I'll get on it now," Ham said.
"Whadda I do?" Monk asked.
"Monk, contact the Navy. Find out what sort of lab results they've come up with," Doc instructed. "Then, I need you to whip up a new concoction for me."
A smile spread across the chemist's simian features. "Hot dog! I love new concoctions!"
Written By:
Duane Spurlock
based on notes by:
Kenneth Robeson
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