"I think we are going to be followed yet," the fat man said. "You can prevent that, no?" The driver thought so. He asked, "What's the idea, bub? I ain't looking for no trouble."

  "A matter of another man's wife, and a private detective following me," lied the fat man. "I want to lose the fellow." He calmly added another greenback to the first. "You will assist, yes?"

  The cab driver looked at the second bill and gasped. "Okay," he said. The cab leaped forward. The driver, who was a fat man himself, knew his New York; he could drive, and, once clear of the bridge, he left the parkway, took narrow streets, doubled, twisted. The roadster carrying Paul Cort hung behind them for a time. Then, expertly, the cabbie trapped the other machine in changing lights and a snarl of traffic.

  "That did it," he reported.

  The fat man sighed in relief. "Good."

  "Ain't none of them can stick on my tail when I take a notion," the cab driver boasted. The fat man gave him a street address. "Take me there," he said.

  THE building, in the midtown section, was one of the most impressive in the city, and, at this hour of the day, somewhat crowded in the lobby area. The fat man was careful. He looked everywhere before he got out of the cab, looked everywhere in the lobby, and ambled to the directory listing occupants of the skyscraper.

  Doc Savage's offices were listed on the eighty-sixth floor.

  "Eighty-six," the fat man told an elevator operator.

  "Sorry, sir, no stop at eighty-six," the operator advised him.

  "But I--"

  "You wish to see Doc Savage?"

  "I---Yes."

  "You will have to get a pass from the seventh floor, Room 710," the elevator attendant advised.

  "Well--on seven let me out, yes." The fat man was confused and upset. "Why--I do not understand this," he complained.

  "Merely a formality to keep cranks away from the eighty-sixth floor," he was told. "Oh."

  In the seventh-floor corridor, Dartlic looked around dubiously; for several moments he stood eyeing the corridor, but it seemed deserted. Carefully, moving quietly despite his size, he edged along, looking for 710.

  There was, suddenly, a whispering of feet on the tile floor behind him. He whirled, discovered three men almost upon him, men with knives. His shriek was a small mewing sound of terror, but there was no terror paralysis in the way he moved. Slow as he looked, and despite the suddenness of the attack, he fought with precision and skill. The briefcase he carried whirled, caught a man across the face; the case was evidently heavy, for the man went down. He promptly kicked a second man in the stomach, which seemed an impossible feat for his short legs. In the meantime, he had found an abnormally loud voice and was bellowing with hair-raising volume. "Help!" he bawled. "Help! Murderers! Help! Come and help--"

  Down the corridor--it was room 710--a door flew open. A slender, dapper looking man came out, yelled, "Here! What's going on?"

  The fight broke up then. The fat man, still howling, broke free and ran toward the slender man, and the three assailants took the other direction, toward a stairway door.

  "Get in 710!" yelled the slender man. He went in pursuit of the assailants. All four disappeared down the stairway.

  Presently, from below somewhere, there were shots, about six of them, two together at first, then four somewhat spaced. After that, there was silence in the building, as far as violence was concerned.

  Chapter IV

  SEVEN-TEN seemed to the fat man to be like any other office, although there was no name on the door, only a number, and there was no one in the reception room. He sank, puffing, sweating, trembling until his globes of fat seemed to twitch, in a chair. He fanned himself with both hands, and waited. He looked, in spite of the narrowness of his escape, somewhat restored by the excitement. As if he had at last reached a goal, over considerable obstacles.

  Presently, about five minutes later, the slender, dapper man who had broken up the fight returned to the office. He strode past Orlin Dartlic without saying anything, seized a telephone, and got the police. It developed, from what he was telling the police, that the three assailants had escaped, after taking some shots at him.

  He was, it seemed, Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, an associate of Doc Savage. He was asked about the man who had been the object of the assault.

  "I'll try to find him for you," he said, and looked thoughtfully over the telephone at Dartlic.

  Orlin Dartlic bowed his fat head in appreciation. "A kindness, yes. Thank you," he said when the other finished telephoning.

  "You want the police to know about you?"

  "I--better it would be--first I should see Doc Savage, yes." "I'm Ham Brooks," the slender man said. "I work with Doc." "Yes, I gathered--"

  "What happened?"

  "I--they attacked me--my life I think they want."

  "That was the general idea I got, too," Ham said. "What's behind it? Who are you? Were you headed for this office?"

  "Yes. To me the elevator man say come here. To the eighty-sixth floor he would not take me."

  Ham nodded. "We get a lot of cranks," he explained. "This place is a sort of reception center. Matter of fact, it's a detective agency, a private outfit, which is kept on retainer to see that Doc isn't bothered too much."

  "I am Orlin Dartlic," wheezed the fat man. "I come to see Doc Savage."

  The other nodded. "Okay. I suppose this sort of thing puts you through automatically."

  ORLIN DARTLIC was impressed by Doc Savage. He said he was, too. He said: "Impressed, I am. All my expectations fulfilled."

  Ham Brooks explained, "Doc, this gentleman appeared downstairs and three men attempted, or appeared to be attempting--it darned well looked like the real thing--to do something to him, probably murder him. The attack occurred in the seventh-floor corridor, and the fellows ran. I dashed out without a gun on me, and they got away, after taking a few shots at me. I notified the police of their descriptions." He nodded at the fat man. "I did not say Mr. Dartlic was here."

  "Dartlic, Patagonian advisor to the Argentine government," Dartlic said.

  Doc Savage was--the fat man was standing close enough to realize this--a bronze man of remarkable size and muscular development, and also an individual in whom size and sinew did not seem nearly as impressive as other qualities. The man's eyes, an unusual shade of flake gold, were striking. His voice was striking; so was his manner, choice of words, and his way of approaching matters.

  Dartlic gazed about him. They stood in a laboratory, surrounded by a profusion of scientific equipment, and Dartlic said, "Ah, the very latest you have. The most new, the best."

  "You are a scientist?" Doc Savage asked. He was measuring the fat man thoughtfully.

  "Scientist? Ah, no--yes, in the most modest of ways. A dabbler, a hobby, at my home sometimes." He sighed, producing quite an upheaval in his voluminous body, and indicated Ham Brooks. "I might be dead were it not for Mr. Brooks, yet," Dartlic said. "Those men, they try to kill me. Assuredly, yes."

  "Know them?"

  The fat man hesitated. "I--ah--know them exactly, no." He looked about, selected a chair and collapsed into it. "My story--you hear it, no?"

  "Yes."

  Dartlic sat hunched in the chair, big fists tight about the briefcase. There was a considerable grease of perspiration on his forehead. "A moment," he said. "I organize my words, yes. I am a man badly scared." Ham Brooks sauntered over and, without being very obtrusive about it, flipped a switch that got a wire recording gadget in operation. The device had quite a sensitive pickup, and would record whatever was said in the laboratory. Doc frequently used it to record the second-to-second behavior of scientific experiments which he made, in that way managing to get, he insisted, clues that might have otherwise escaped him in solving a difficult piece of research.

  The fat man mopped his forehead, settled himself, cleared his throat, said, "I begin."

  ORLIN DARTLIC spoke roundly, beginning in a bombastic fashion, as if he was a politician getting ready to do a lot of talking without saying anything he could be pinned down on.

  "These are times such as the world, in the time of man, has not seen before, yet," he said. "Forces of the mind most strange, and forces of terror worse yet, are abroad. There has been murder, mass murder, murder of people one by one. In such times like, a man who is thinking, he gets to feel maybe a climax it comes, that the world faces extinction." He held up both hands. "It is terrified, I am. You must forgive me. I around the bush, go."

  Ham Brooks had perched on the edge of an instrument table. Around the bush go was right, he reflected. He was tempted to suggest that they in a straight line go, but restrained himself Ham had an air of dignity to uphold, a rather phony air which he felt went with his position as one of the most important alumni the Harvard Law School had ever turned out, an attorney with an international reputation.

  Doc Savage said nothing. He was normally a man of not many words; it was not unusual for him, in a questioning session, to keep in the background and say almost nothing but merely observe and listen, weigh and consider.

  The fat man sighed again. He opened his briefcase, explored in it, grunting from the effort of bending his head to look inside. He withdrew an envelope.

  "You photography know," he said. "This negative..." He extended it.

  Doc Savage took the envelope, removed a photographic negative from it, held it to the light, turned it to catch light reflections to see whether there had been retouching done to it.

  "Is not a fake, no?" Dartlic said. "Apparently not."

  "Is not!"

  Ham Brooks leaned forward, said, "Let me point out something now, Dartlic. We are naturally suspicious by nature, and we have formed a little habit of taking nothing for granted. You don't mind, do you?"

  "I--mind?"

  "I'll give you an illustration of what I mean," Ham said, indicating the negative. "I know, for example, that it is quite possible to take a picture, make a print, retouch the print--an expert artist can put almost anything into the print--and then re-photograph the print, and have a negative which seems quite genuine. It is a genuine negative--but of a picture that is a phony, not of the real thing." Ham held up a hand as the fat man opened his mouth. "Mind you, I'm just explaining some questions we may ask in advance. I don't want you to get insulted."

  "Is genuine."

  "All right. You say it is genuine. Now what?"

  Dartlic produced a photographic print from the briefcase.

  "Is print from negative," he said. "More about it you can tell from this, yes."

  The picture was a duplicate of that which had been produced in Dias Escribe, the Buenos Aires newspaper. It showed the lake that Juan Russel had seen, much as Juan had seen it, although there was no plume of smoke.

  "Ham," Doc said.

  "Yes."

  "Will you bring the two clippings from the Globe from File 4, Section 2, subdivision 970?"

  Doc Savage said nothing while Ham was out of the room. He did examine the print again, using a magnifying glass on it, and he carried the negative to an enlarger, put it in the slide, switched on the projection lamp and adjusted the focus to its sharpest point.

  Ham came in with the clippings, one concerning the story of two aviators flying over Patagonia who had seen a vanished lake, and the other a clipping concerning the murder of Juan Russel, Patagonian metallurgist. At Doc's nod, Ham showed them to Dartlic.

  "Is same." Dartlic nodded vehemently. "Is picture from that negative."

  Doc said, "Look at the other clipping."

  The fat man lifted his eyes. "Juan Russel...Why do you connect his death..." "Is there a connection?"

  The fat man bowed his head. "The truth I tell... We do not know... We fear--yes."

  DOC SAVAGE indicated the vastly enlarged picture which the negative was projecting on the white easel surface.

  "You have reason to believe this is an actual photograph of the phenomena?" "Yes."

  "Who took it?"

  "The newspaper story--two aviators, as it say. Two aviators, yes. Their names, Carlos Juarez and Rodrigo Unos. They disappear."

  "Disappear?"

  "Yes."

  "Foul play?"

  "We do not know," Dartlic said gloomily. "They are not to be found, is all. We look. We not find." Ham demanded, "Who do you mean by we?"

  "My department. I am Advisor of Patagonian Affairs. I have government department. They look, the people who work for me."

  Ham frowned. "Do you think there is anything mysterious about these two fliers who took the picture?" The fat man considered this, rubbing his several chins. "Who is to know?" he said finally.

  Doc bent over the projected negative again. He said, bluntly, "If you are building up to an atom bomb scare, you can turn off the steam. Whatever did this, it was not an atom bomb."

  "No atom bomb," the fat man agreed. He spread his hands and appealed to Doc. "You will not be humorous with me, no? The truth tell." His voice climbed a little, and there was terror in it, fear in his eyes. "Could be worse, no? Could be more horrible?"

  Doc switched off the enlarger.

  "It could be," he said, and he was quite sober.

  THE fat man said he had some background he now wanted to give them. Patagonia was a big country, he said, and it was almost a third of all Argentina, much larger than the state of Texas.

  "A fabulous place, yes," he said. "There are ice fields. There are glaciers, and there are huge virgin forests. We have huge waterfalls that could provide immense power, and mountains and pampas, gold in the rivers, oil under the ground, many metals."

  He sounded, Ham reflected, like a representative of the Chamber of Commerce. Ham was wondering just what had sobered Doc Savage; he could see that Doc was impressed and disturbed.

  "And men who are very bad," Dartlic added.

  "Eh?" Ham frowned.

  "I am now explaining why interested my government department is," Dartlic explained. "Oh."

  "First, more background," the fat man said. "There is in Patagonia long coastlines, with many bays and harbors, some explored and some not. In fact, little of Patagonia as a whole has been really explored so far. The ice fields there have never been crossed. Power is there. Metals there. And unlimited space to hide out. You see. No?"

  Ham asked drily, "Where do the men who are very bad come in?"

  "Power," said Dartlic. "You understand what I mean--power? Not the electric kind--the kind that comes from men dominating other men."

  Ham frowned. "Oh, you figure politically?" "Politically. Is right." Dartlic nodded vehemently. "Be a little more specific."

  Dartlic shrugged. "You do not need a picture drawn. There is trouble for long time between Argentina and United States. Ill feelings. Many misunderstandings on both sides. Lies told. Deliberate efforts to cause troubles."

  Ham was skeptical. He knew the Argentine political picture, and he thought most of it was justified. Perhaps not all. He wasn't sure. Nobody could be sure.

  "There are bad men in Argentina," the fat man said.

  "I'm glad you admitted that," Ham told him. "It saves us arguing the point."

  Dartlic looked gratified. "I am glad you understand. These men came, we do not know quite how, but perhaps by submarine, many of them. We are not sure. There were many mysterious submarine stories after the Nazis fell--they may have had basis in truth. Natives, too, came with rumors. We tried to find these men. We could not."

  "Everybody knows," Ham said, "that Argentina is being accused of keeping the Nazi ideology alive... Now, what is the connection with the vanished lake and Juan Russel?"

  "We do not know--definitely." "Eh?"

  "We suspect--strongly."

  "Suspect what?"

  The fat man paused, seeming for the moment like a ham actor about to deliver a punch-line in a bad melodrama. Ham, watching the grave expression on Doc Savage's features, got the feeling that the bronze man considered the thing very serious.

  "Hans Boehl--of him you know?" the fat man asked abruptly.

  THE name meant nothing to Ham Brooks, but he saw Doc Savage's eyes widen, saw a muscle flicker at the corner of the bronze man's mouth, which was about as much astonishment as Doc would show, Ham felt, if the end of the world was unexpectedly announced.

  Doc Savage said, "Hans Randolfe Boehl, Academy Deutchlander Oberscience, established about midway in the war in Munich?"

  "The same." Dartlic nodded.

  "Look here, Dartlic," Doc said sharply. "Hans Boehl was in charge of Axis atomic research. What are you doing, getting back on the atomic bomb theme?" Doc tapped the photographic print. "This is not the work of an atomic bomb."

 

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