21

There was an enormous ancient safe, This time they didn’t sit back and let a table of inlaid woods that was the most me recite. They had questions, a hundred beautiful thing I’d seen in the way of tables, questions about details. I had always sup-and no furniture that you needed to look at posed my memory was pretty good, and that twice before you sat on it.

I had an eye for details. I was wrong. Five Through a door, there was a library minutes of this, and I felt like a blind cow.

which seemed to have about as many books Doc Savage asked: “What did you do as I imagine the Library of Congress has.

with the part you tore off Gross’ coat?”

Beyond that, past another door, there I told him what trash-can I had stuffed it seemed to be near an acre of floor-space in.

cluttered with the sort of stuff—enameled “Get it,” he directed Monk, and Monk tables, glass tables, chromium thingajigs and left.

thingajigs of glass, trays, retorts, filters, He threw a question at me every other pumps, bottles, phials, coils, tubes, wire—word, and we covered the rest of it. The ma-that you see in moving picture scenes of chine was making a zig-zag mess of lines on laboratories.

a roll of moving graph paper, and he had “Well?” Monk Mayfair asked. He was watched it closely.

watching me.

“Do I pass?” I asked.

I pulled my jaw and asked, “Whose “Ever been in New York before, diggings?”

Sammy?”

“Doc’s.”

“No. I mean, I went through it when I “You mean one guy, all of this?”

was in the army, which I don’t call being “That’s right.”

here,” I said.

“Where are you from?”

“Kansas City.”

THEY fixed a comfortable chair for me, “Why did you leave Kansas City, and Monk brought out a piece of apparatus Sammy?”

that could have been a radio but wasn’t.

“I was getting fired off too many jobs,” I They put the gimmick beside my chair. “Take told him. “I wanted to see if a change of off your coat and roll up your sleeve and sit scenery would change my luck.”

down,” Monk ordered. I did, and they put at-

“What seemed to be the trouble?”

tachments on my hand, around my chest and “Not enough money, too much work, one, the only one I recognized, on my arm and bosses looking down my collar,” I said.

above the elbow. The latter closely resem-

“Everyone has that kind of a problem.”

bled, or was one of those things the doctors “Yeah? Well maybe it’s none of your wrap around your arm to get blood pressure.

business,” I said.

“What’s this?” I asked.

He said: “Maybe you didn’t put it out.

“Lie detector,” Monk said. “Are you Maybe you felt the world owed you a plush worried?”

living.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, but stick to “Why not?” I said. “I spent a lot of time what’s your business, or I’ll stuff the thing in foxholes, and while I’m lying in mud and down your throat.”

being shot at, guys not as good as me drew Monk grinned. “I wouldn’t want one of their hundred bucks a week and saw their the things on me, either,” he said. “Not all the babes every night. Okay, now I want some of time.”

that.”

You had to like the homely baboon. He “Oh, a professional hero.”

was uglier than a mud fence. A mud fence “I resent that.”

would have looked like a piece of silk ribbon “Look,” he said. “There were ten million beside him. But it was an amiable kind of men more or less in service, just about all the homeliness—you felt the same way toward able-bodied men in one generation, just him that you feel toward St. Bernard dogs, about all the men who are going to be capa-who also have faces which don’t take beauty ble of being successful for the next few prizes.

years. That would have been true if there “Let’s have your story,” Doc Savage hadn’t been a war. What would happen if all said.

ten million stood around holding their hands “Heck—again?” I complained.