Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

Ramadanoff warned Doc, "Twice you have escaped with your tricks. You will not do so a third time. The movement of a single muscle will bring you death."

Ramadanoff stepped forward, stooped, and ran his fingers quickly around Doc's trouser cuff while the 2 Mongols held a steady bead on Doc's head with those wide-lipped guns. In the left cuff, Ramadanoff's fingers closed on a small metal packet. He detached it with a quick movement and stepped back, holding the article as gingerly in his fingers as though it were a nitroglycerine cap. He deposited it upon the desk top, being careful not to allow it the slightest jar.

He faced Doc triumphantly. "Now, no more tricks. The claws of the tiger are drawn!"

The last words were spoken in a tone somewhat strange. They were jumbled as if the tongue that made them was suddenly under the influence of an intoxicant.

Then the little man with the beard demonstrated that he was an amazingly quick thinker. As lightning strikes, so did the realization of something wrong hit him. And he acted simultaneously. Straight to the door he flung, to literally fall through it.

Doc Savage had been slightly crouched … waiting … knowing what was to come. The mechanism of the little packet was such that it would open shortly after being detached from his trousers cuff. It held some of the anesthetic gaswhich he had developed long ago and which he used so frequently. It was odorless, colorless, and its effects were almost instantaneous.

Doc lunged through the invisible gas. Holding his breath had saved him from the anesthetic gas.

But where the door should have been there was something else. Doc collided with such force against an unyielding surface that he was flung back. He kept his breath in his lungs.

As firmly set as concrete, a smooth metallic surface was now mysteriously substituted for the wooden door which he had bashed in with his fists. He heaved the full weight of his massive shoulders, ramming with all the power of his remarkably developed body. The surface did not budge.

From outside in the hallway sounded Boris Ramadanoff's sardonic — if weak — laugh. His voice filtered in faintly. He had not gotten enough of the anesthetic to overcome him.

"Just a trick, Savage," he snarled. "I managed to press a button on my way out, sliding the steel door into place from within the wall. Did you think I had no more protection for my safety than the wooden door you broke down? You can stay in there and simmer in your own juice — as the Yankees say — or perish in your own gas."

"I will go hack and tell my brother it was a mistake for him to have sent me to New York for you. You cannot be controlled. Very well … then DIE!"

While Ramadanoff's voice droned from the hallway, Doc turned. 3 great strides carried him to the window. There was a grating sound that would have set a man's teeth on edge. It was caused by Doc Savage's fingertips scraping on smooth metal. The same mechanism which had blocked the doorway with heavy sheet steel had similarly actuated a steel window barrier.

With both door and window barred to exit, Doc drove his metallic fist against the plaster of the wall. It was a futile move. He found that the walls had been reinforced with heavy metal back of the plaster.

Still holding his breath against the anesthetic vapor, Doc hurled himself across the room. He had one last hope — the movable panel in the roll-top desk. There was not time to look for the control key which would open the panel. There was time only to crash it in. Swiftly, Doc felt out the boundaries of the stout oak with his sensitive fingers.

Then his fists drummed a mighty tattoo. Fists were not enough. His shoulders lunged. He braced himself against the wall and kicked. His hand drifted out and contacted a heavy chair. He swung it in a wide arc. The chair splintered in a dozen places, but the panel remained unmoved.

Doc was trapped!Not from the gas, however. That would become harmless in a few seconds as it mingled more completely with the air.

Faintly — from an unidentifiable source — voices sounded. The words were not articulate, but Doc could recognize the tones. It was Renny and Long Tom shouting from some part of the building. They had heard the noise and — aware of Doc's presence in the building — they were shouting in the frantic hope that their voices might direct him to their rescue.

They had no way of knowing that the bronze man's situation was as desperate as their own.

Doc could breathe now. The anesthetic gas had dissipated. It was now powerless due to chemical reaction with the oxygen in the air.

Doc flung himself upon the massive roll-top desk. His attack was not chaotic but planned so that he could use every muscle in his powerful body. Wedging himself on top of the writing surface with knees jackknifed in air, feet braced against one end, shoulders against the other … he pushed.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

Muscles bunched and quivered … and suddenly his jackknifed knees went straight. There was a screeching of rent metal as he pried the desk apart. Doc parted the rest of the desk with his hands, making an opening large enough to squeeze through.

He found that the sliding panel had given onto a secret upward passage, converted from an old dumbwaiter shaft. Before plunging in, Doc leaped back into the room and examined the prone bodies of the 2 Asiatics.

He found about what he had expected. Both men were senseless from the anesthetic gas and would remain so for some time.

Turning, Doc bolted for the dumbwaiter shaft. His hands closed on the rungs of a built-in ladder. He streaked upward like an islander climbing a palm.

A partition had been roofed across the shaft at the next floor level. In the side wall in front of him, Doc's probing fingers found a wooden door. His fists battered, the blows ringing hollowly. The door was as stout as the one built into the roll-top desk. It did not yield.

But Doc's pounding occasioned an uproar from the other side of the door. Voices came through in wild clamor.

"Doc, is it you?" That was Long Tom.

"Holy cow, Doc!" That would be Renny.

"Stand back from this door," Doc called.

He jackknifed his body between the door and the opposite shaft wall, using the same kind of bodily leverage he had utilized on the roll-top desk. The door broke in with splintering crash, and Doc was catapulted inside the room.

Beyond the Palisades, the Sun had gone down. Already Broadway was blazing under a sun of its own making. A billion electric bulbs supplied scattered illumination for the rest of the city. But the room in which Doc stood reunited with Renny and Long Tom was dark. Electrical connections had long since been cut off from the outside.

Renny boomed, "The little squirt with the bush on his map yelled at us just before you came. He said … "

" … he's firing the building and leaving us to burn!" Long Tom cut in.

"This trap would go up like a gasoline tank, Doc."

Long Tom added, "We've been trying to break down the door … "

Renny cracked his big fists together and wailed, "I've nearly wore 'em out on that door, Doc! She almost breaks, but not quite."

It was evident to Doc that Renny considered his reputation at stake as well as his life. Renny had long boasted — and backed up his boast — that his bare fists could pound the panel out of any wooden door.

"I smell smoke!" Long Tom gasped.

Doc's sensitive nostrils had already detected the acrid odor of the smoke.

"This building has been fired," he admitted.

"Listen!" Long Tom breathed.