20

DOC SAVAGE

Savage got out, stood before the man, I wondered why Savage had changed stood in the man’s path, and the man came the subject to Spatny, and then I knew. It was sliding along the slick granite side of the because Albert Gross was dead. He was building until he was against Savage, and spread out there on the sidewalk, and his life even then he kept pushing with rubbery legs.

was all gone. His last words had been clear, “Gross,” Savage said to the man.

fine and clear as a politician telling a con-

“Gross, do you know me?”

stituent the high taxes aren’t his fault.

Gross’ knees kept bending forward, “Go through his pockets, Monk,” Doc then back, a little more each time, and he Savage said.

seemed to grow shorter and settle into the pavement.

He

moaned—a

hurt-sheep

sound—as Savage took hold of him and lowI DIDN’T believe it, and I still didn’t be-ered him to the pavement.

lieve it even after we dug up three different Doc Savage

leaned

down

and

people who had seen the black object. One wrenched open the man’s vest and shirt. An of them had seen Gross run into the niche ice pick had done it, it seemed to me. I between the buildings—we looked at the counted seven little pits with scarlet yarns niche and it was there, all right, a kind of ser-coming out of them, and it was dark and I vice alley about five feet wide—and the same could only see a part of his torso.

spectator had seen the black object go in “Holy smoke, why didn’t somebody after Gross. It hadn’t come out. The police help him?” I said.

dug up some more witnesses with the same Monk Mayfair said: “This is New York.

yarn, except that one of them had the black Nobody bothers with anybody else. It’s the thing a hundred feet high. The cops weren’t damndest town that way. . . . They probably any more willing to believe it than I was.

thought he was drunk.”

“Nothing in his pockets,” Monk re-Albert Gross spoke, and I jumped a ported.

foot. I had supposed his voice would be “Nothing?”

made of thin gasps and gurgles, but it was “He’s been gone over with a vacuum strong and bell-clear.

cleaner.”

He said: “I was trying to get to you. Did Doc Savage made me a proposition.

you see the sky?”

“Do you want to go to jail, or do you want to “I saw it,” Doc Savage told him.

go with us?”

“We wanted you to.”

That had been on my mind. I could see “Why?”

I wasn’t going to just walk out of this.

“Listen to me,” Gross said. “It was “Your company satisfies me,” I said.

black, but it wasn’t big. Black, see—maybe We went back to the Parkside-Regent fifteen feet long and not quite as high nor that and paid a visit to Miss Fenisong’s room. She wide. The outside looked sort of fuzzy. It was not inhabiting it. Nobody was surprised.

seemed to keep that shape. It came out, or “We’ll go down to headquarters, and seemed to come out of a doorway, a kind of see what we can work out,” Savage said.

an arcade into a building. There was no ap-He didn’t mean police headquarters, pearance of it flowing out. It just came out, which is what I supposed. We rode down-full-blown. It came to me, or toward me, and I town in silence. They didn’t mention what ducked into a niche between two buildings. It they were thinking about, but I was thinking came right in after me. It was black as hell of Albert Gross, too wide for his suits, too inside the thing. Then I felt sharp things stick-quick to hit people on the head, and now too ing into me, and it didn’t hurt too bad, and full of little holes. We got out in front of a then it hurt like hell.”

building, and when I looked up I realized that “More than one sharp thing?” Doc I’d seen plenty of picture postcards of the Savage asked.

place. I gathered it was a private elevator we “One thing, sticking into me many used; there was no one else in it, and no op-times. I could be wrong, though.”

erator. You pushed a button. It went up as “Then what?”

softly as a whisper in a girl’s throat, and let “I don’t know. I passed out.”

us out into a hall. We walked into a reception Doc Savage asked: “Who is Spatny?”

room, on to carpet that felt like a fall of snow “A great one,” Gross said.

underfoot.

NO LIGHT TO DIE BY