DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (3 page)

Once Percival joined them, the Chans went to claim the dory. The girl clambered aboard while the man held the blue box in a manner suggesting a shield.

“Give it here, twin,” the girl said, reaching out her clumsy-looking gloved hands.

“Careful,” said the other, handing over the box. “Don’t drop it. Especially with all this water around.”

“Water?” Percival said.

“If it falls into water—” the girl said, accepting the box.

“—the world could come to an end,” finished the man. His voice did not sound facetious in any way. In fact, it had a grimly-worried timbre to it.

This impressed Dang Mi. “Didn’t Pandora have a box like that, so the stories go?”

“You’ll be able to reach Singapore in that dink,” the man-twin said as he took hold of the steering post of the motor. “Now give us a shove.”

Dang and Percival fell to pushing on the dory’s prow. The boat backed into the water, became buoyant, and the man-twin sent it puttering around in a circle.

They managed to complete the circle before the girl noticed the dory was filling with water.

The girl gave a very creditable shriek. It would have peeled copra from a halved coconut.

“We’re sinking!” she moaned. “Back to shore—quick!”

“Keep the box shut!” the other howled, as he wrestled the steering post around.

“Come on!” Percival shouted, whipping his long form for the beached dink. Dang pounded after him.

“Petcock?” he puffed.

“Opened it before I got out,” Percival gasped.

They shoved off and were soon within grabbing distance of the returning dory.

“Get out of the way!” the man-twin yelled. “We have to reach dry land!”

“You’ll never make it,” Percival retorted. “Surrender the box!”

“Never!” the girl-twin snapped.

“Do you want to world to come to an end?” Percival shouted back.

“What’re you tryin’ to pull?” Dang asked hoarsely.

“String along,” Percival undertoned gruffly. “The box is as good as ours.”

Dang shut up. The two boats were on a collision course. Disaster seemed inevitable. The water was sloshing about the dory’s interior noisily. It began to wallow.

The Chans, their faces visible behind the clear ports of their protective hoods, wore expressions of utter terror. The girl clung to the blue box on her lap, leaning on the lid, as if she feared it as much as wanting to protect it from the rising waters.

“You’ve only got seconds!” Poetical Percival warned. “Surrender the box or the worst happens!”

The dory was dead in the water now. The only direction in which it was moving was down—straight down to the bottom.

“Give them the box,” the man-twin said in hoarse agony.

“But they’re—”

“Do it!”

The box was handed over. Dang took it. It did not weigh much, but it was not light, either. He set it carefully on his lap and placed his elbows on the lid to keep it down. His skin was beginning the crawl, and he wasn’t sure why. The box was cool to the touch—too cool.

The twins were scrambling from the sinking dory now. It went down under them and they floated there, treading water.

Poetical Percival produced a pistol and employed the business end to menace the almond-orbed twins. The latter held up their hands, and continued treading water.

“Act in haste, repent in Hell,” warned Poetical Percival, indicating with a waggling of his gun that the pair were to come aboard the dink.

The strangely-garbed twins clambered aboard and sat down meekly. They remained in that attitude until the dink was back on the beach and they were all standing on dry land once more.

There, the pair were ordered out of their coverall suits. They complied in sullen, apprehensive silence. Their eyes were a little sick about the edges. They did not take them off the blue box.

Once shed of their unusual garments, they stood clad in nothing more extraordinary than tropical cotton shirts with short khaki pants suitable for a jungle trek. Their skins were smooth and possessed a tint that was something like dusky ivory. Their matching eyes resembled ripe olives. Both sets of orbs regarded their captor with an identical narrow regard that was unnervingly catlike.

“Now what—” began the man-twin.

“—will you do with us?” continued the girl-twin.

“As if we couldn’t guess,” finished the man-twin.

“If you guessed that we’d dry-gulch you on this godforsaken isle,” Dang said, rubbing his already-aching belly, “you guessed dang right.”

The lengthening faces of the twins told that this was what they had guessed. Exactly.

“There’s ample time,” interrupted Poetical Percival, “to commit that crime.”

“What good are they?” Dang shot back. “We got the blasted box.”

“Do we know what’s in it? Besides fog, that is?”

“No,” Dang was forced to admit.

“Then they live,” Percival said firmly and his eyes met Dang’s without flinching.

Ordinarily, Dang Mi took orders from no one, and was further inclined to do something violent to anyone rash enough to suggest what he should do. But Poetical Percival had just raked his chestnuts out of the fire, so he merely scowled and gestured that the white-skinned Oriental twins should be made to accompany them.

Corsairs surrounded the odd pair. They allowed themselves to be marched back to the wreck of their plane under the points of unsettling wavy-bladed Malay daggers called
krises
.

Poetical Percival heaved himself upon the plane in a manner which showed that, for a gawky human beanpole, he was physically strong. Instead of climbing onto the ungainly craft, he went to work searching the plane, probably for loot.

It was then that Poetical Percival Perkins got a hint of the fabulous thing that was the mystery of the infernal Buddha, as it was later known.

Poetical Percival had been inside the plane cabin, rifling it for perhaps five minutes before he popped out. His mouse-shaped mouth was pinched tight. His face was several shades paler than before.

“Better take a look,” he told Dang Mi, in his agitation forgetting his rhymes.

Dang put his head in. A notebook was held up to his face, the pages open to his eyes. He began reading.

For some time, he remained as a man in a trance, half in, half out of the ship. He withdrew his head, and he looked wide-eyed, startled. His lips moved as if making words, but the sounds did not come out.

His pirates, who had drawn near, became frightened at this unusual behavior by a man hitherto without fear. The brown men retreated uneasily—but were careful not to flee all the way into the jungle, for the good reason that some of their companions had been shot for trying to escape. They greatly feared fat, innocent-looking Dang Mi, and they were literally his slaves.

“Hah!” Dang snorted. “This stuff don’t sound reasonable!”

He had the notebook clutched in one plump fist. He cracked it open and started perusing it from the first page. He kept on reading.

DANG MI did not look up from the words for a long time. His eyes were distinctly popping.

The pirates exchanged ugly looks. One ran a finger along his
kris’
razor edge, then cast a meaning glance at the exposed back of Dang Mi’s unprotected neck. Mutiny was in their vicious eyes.

Poetical Percival Perkins made a throat-clearing noise that was entirely unheard by the absorbed pirate chieftain.

Then they all squirmed and looked afraid, and fell to peering at the strange twins. One reached down and touched the Eurasian girl’s hair, then drew his hand back as if he had been stung when Dang Mi suddenly yelled, and spun about.

He was staring at the girl.

“Dang my soul, the thing must be true!”

They returned to the
Devilfish
in relays, using the little dink.

IN DANG MI’S cabin was a hidden safe. A stout one, modern. They locked the strange blue box in that. The notebook they kept out, poring over it for the better portion of an hour.

The almond-eyed Chans stared at them levelly when the pirate pair came slinking into the main cabin, in which they had been kept under guard. Dang Mi and Poetical Percival looked happy enough to purr.

“You’ve been in Shanghai,” Dang accused the Chans.

“Making experiments,” said Percival.

“With the Buddha’s Toe,” added Dang.

The Chans looked at each other, their heads swiveling around as if working off one mechanism. They tried to swap grins. These didn’t quite come off.

“So you’re wise,” growled the man-twin.

“We hope so,” said Poetical Percival.

“What are you going to do about it?” the girl-twin asked calmly.

“All we can,” said Dang Mi.

There was no more to the conversation. The Chans were hauled forward to a cubicle which was normally a cargo hold, for cargo of a nature that was best locked up, lest the crew drink too much of it. This room, in the present situation, doubled excellently as a prison.

“What’ll we do with ’em?”  Poetical Percival wanted to know.

He and Dang Mi had formed a partnership. No words had been exchanged to that effect. It was simply understood.

“Keep ’em until we get our hands on this blasted Buddha business,” said Dang.

“This thing is big.”

“This thing,” echoed Dang Mi, “is dang sure to get even bigger.”

“Do we open the box?”

Dang shook his head. “Not until we know exactly what it is we’re loosing on this poor world.” He clutched his throat. “I don’t want what happened to me to happen again.”

And Dang Mi let his soft body shudder like blood pudding in an earthquake.

IN the cubicle below, the Chans listened to the sounds coming from deck. Noises of a ship being readied to depart. A protracted clanking, grinding noise reverberated. They could feel it from the soles of their feet to their back teeth. The
Devilfish
was weighing anchor.

The busy padding of feet on deck soon abated, and was replaced by the rushing gurgle of water against the junk’s awkward hull. The engine voiced a constant, monotonous thrum.

“The captain of this ark is no Samaritan, Mary,” said the almond-eyed man-twin.

“What a break for us, Mark,” said the girl-twin, wryly.

“They’re wise.”

“Of course.”

“An unscrupulous devil like this could make millions out of it.”

The girl nodded. “It’s sort of out of the pan and into the fire for us.”

“Now, Mary,” muttered Mark Chan. “You’re hinting again that Startell Pompman intends to freeze us out. I wish you would stop these insinuations.”

The girl sniffed.

“I’ll stop insinuating,” she said flatly. “From now on, I’m going to state it as a fact. Startell Pompman is as big a crook as any man on this boat. When we picked him for a backer, we certainly reached out and got a lemon.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“True, brother, true indeed. But you wouldn’t call my suspicions anything less than profound.”

Sounds continued filtering down from above. Bare feet slapped and whetted the deck as the crew went about the task of managing the great sepia sails. Commands ripped out in assorted tongues.

At length, the
Devilfish
was under weigh.

“Dammit,” said Mark Chan forlornly. “I wish we hadn’t got lost in that fog and started to land by this old junk to find out where we were and where Singapore was.”

“Echo,” agreed Mary Chan.

They sat in silence and gloom for a while. It was hot. The place smelled. They were miserable.

“Whoops!” said the girl-twin unexpectedly. “Cheers and jubilation.”

“Eh?”

“I have an idea,” said Mary Chan. “Listen.”

Mark Chan listened, and heard his twin lay down a neat little scheme—neat if it worked—which was to lead them to Colonel John “Renny” Renwick, and through him to that fabulous person, Doc Savage, although the two prisoners had no inkling that it was going to turn out this way.

THERE was a guard stationed outside the cabin. He was unarmed, there being no need for firearms in order to guard two prisoners. He did have a belaying pin stuffed into the elastic waistband of his loose coolie trousers. It was hidden from sight due to the Chinese habit of wearing the shirt tails untucked.

The Chinese passed his time masticating gum-blackening betel nut, and squirting red streams of juice from between the gap in his front teeth into a brass gobboon.

Came sounds from behind the cabin door. Splintery noises. In the middle of expectorating a stream of juice, the guard turned—thereby coating walls and floor with blood-colored liquid.

Directly, the sentry heard more sounds. This time crashes. Glass breaking. And pooling out from under the door of the cabin, oozed a pungent brown liquid.

Realizing that the strange prisoners were desecrating the
Devilfish’s
stock of liquid refreshments, the guard emitted a cackling shriek and fell to unlocking the door.

The lock surrendered and, pulling out his belaying pin, the guard stepped in.

He experienced two simultaneous inconveniences. His legs tripped him up and something broke over his head and assisted him in completing his tumble to the floor.

He landed on his back, shaking warm liquor out of his hair. He looked up to see Mary Chan extracting another bottle of spirits from the splintered packing case. The one that had shattered over his skull finished its breaking when it struck the floor.

They began a great fight.

By now, the guard knew that the twins had stretched a line made of their belts across the cell in front of the door, and he, like a blind clown, had fallen over it. The cut-throat fought handsomely to redeem himself. Dang Mi was not always kidding when he talked about skinning a man alive. The noise of the fight filled that part of the junk.

Pirates began to yell and run toward the spot. They had heard the war.

“Beat it—Mary!” gasped the man-twin, Mark Chan.

At first glance, it does not seem very heroic to run off and leave your twin engaged in a fight. But there was no question about the nerve of either of these twins. They had demonstrated that. And the girl could see that the guard was wiry and as tough as nails and they couldn’t whip him in time for them both to get away. But one might make it. So she tried.