UP FROM EARTH'S CENTER.

A Doc Savage Adventure.

by Kenneth Robeson.

"Up from earth's center by the seventh gate, I rose and on the throne of Saturn sat- And many a knot unraveled by the road, But not the master knot of human fate-"

OMAR KHAYYAM.

I.

THE hours became days, and the days grew into weeks, and the weeks followed one another into a dull and terrible haze of time in which nothing really changed. Gilmore had scooped a shallow pit in the eroding chalk at the edge of a cliff, roofed it with a crude thatched trapdoor which he could close against the black things of night, and he spent the majority of his time there.

For a time, during Indian summer, one day was like another. It was then that Gilmore lost his shirt. He took off the shirt and arranged it carefully and, he thought, safely on the sandy beach, while he waded into the sea to stand motionless in hopes of clubbing an unwary fish for food. A huge and dour gray seagull, a typically thievish knave of a seagull, carried the shirt away. It was a sports shirt, and its gaudy plastic b.u.t.tons fascinated the gull.

It was a small thing. The thin shirt was practically worthless as a protective garment. But Gilmore took it hard.

He ran wildly after the seagull, and the bird flapped out to sea, packing the shirt in its beak with gull-like greed. Gilmore, unable to swim, ran, screaming, up and down the beach, and when he was exhausted, he fell on his face and sobbed.

During the ensuing few days of Indian summer, Gilmore tried to teach himself to swim. He wasunsuccessful, probably because he had no real heart left to put into it. It was pointless, anyway. A man could not swim the Atlantic.

The warm days ended. Winter came. The pools of rainwater in the potholes in the island stone began to have thin crusts of ice, and the rocks became bone-colored with coatings of frost.

Gilmore made hardly a move to thwart the certainty of freezing to death. It was too much of a certainty for him to compete against. It was inevitable. His pants now were frayed into shorts, and he stuffed them with dry seaweed, and tied seaweed about himself with other seaweed for binding until he resembled an ambulatory pile of the smelly stuff. Actually, it did no good, and it soon became definitely established in his mind that he would freeze to death. He began to wait for death almost as one would await a friend.

But rescue got there before death, although at first it was dull and undramatic.

Gilmore was sitting on a stone, contemplating eternity, when a pleasant voice hailed him. "h.e.l.lo, there,"

the voice said. 'Are you the proprietor of this heavenly spot?"

A glaze settled over Gilmore's sore eyes, and for a long time he did not turn around. In fact, he did not turn until he had conducted quite an odd conversation, in a small choking voice.

"So you finally got to me," Gilmore said. His voice had the hopelessness of a soul lost in interstellar s.p.a.ce.

"Yeah. It took a little time to climb the cliff." The voice contained some pleasant surprise. "I didn't think you had seen us. You didn't give any sign. We were rather puzzled."

Gilmore shuddered and said, "I don't always see you, do I?"

"Huh?"

"Us?" Gilmore continued, selecting carefully from the words the pleasant voice had said. "Us? We? Is there more than one of you now?"

"There are eighteen of us," the voice said. "Say, what's the matter with you, fellow?"

"So you went back for more experienced help!" Gilmore went on.

"Eighteen of you!" croaked Gilmore. "Good G.o.d! They must have depleted the staff!"

"What staff?"

"The executive personnel in h.e.l.l!" said Gilmore bitterly.

"Who are you kidding?" the amiably friendly voice inquired.

Now Gilmore swung around, to stare at the stranger, and to lose his composure until he was a shaking, gibbering man. Gilmore saw, standing before him, a tall middle-aged man with a fat ruddy face and a sheepskin greatcoat and a faint odor of good hair pomade that oddly fitted the icy island wind. Gilmore saw beyond the man, on the chopping sea, a sailing yacht of about eighty feet waterline, schooner-rigged, and on the beach a dory with shipped oars and a couple of waiting sailors in thick blue peacoats.

Strangers all. Man, yacht, dory, sailors, all strangers and inconceivable. Unacceptable, an illusion, a figment concocted out of ghastly chicanery, a work of Satan as far as Gilmore could understand.

So Gilmore darted off the rock and fled screaming and whimpering, going as fast as a starvation-riddenstring of bones could travel. Dr. Karl Linningen caught him easily, although the doctor was a portly, languid individual who secretly believed that exercise was poisonous.

THE schooner yacht, by name the Mary Too, sailed southward and westward over the heaving cold green seas, eventually rounding to the south of the Canadian-owned island of Campobello, and beating up through the narrowing tidal channel of Lubec, a small fishing village which is the most easternmost settlement in the United States, as far east in Maine as one can travel on dry land.

Dr. Karl Linningen, who was a psychiatrist by profession, and quite deserving of the t.i.tle eminent, had by that time spent a goodly interval probing at Gilmore's body, and fishing in Gilmore's mind, and Dr. Karl was a puzzled man.

The tide in the rip that squirts past Lubec's stony chin was running a h.e.l.lish stream when the Mary Too careened in, pa.s.sed the stone jetty, wallowed about and labored into smoother water just off the docks where the sardine boats unloaded, and dropped anchor.

Dr. Karl immediately prepared to go ash.o.r.e. Of the several guests aboard, none were doctors, because Dr. Karl felt that a man should get away from the familiar in order to relax. "You turn a race-horse into a pasture with other race-horses, and he's going to continue acting like a race-horse," was the way he phrased it. "When I'm on vacation, I want plow-horses in my pasture. One of the plow-horses was Bill Williams; a sports announcer on the radio, and the others were a broker, a shoe-shop owner, and three insurance men.

"You seem h.e.l.l-bent to get ash.o.r.e remarked Bill Williams, noting the doctor's preparations."

"That's right."

"Going to be gone long?"

"Don't know."

"What about our wild boy off the island?" Bill Williams asked. "Want to prescribe any medicine to give him in case you're gone a while?"

"He's the reason I'm in a hurry to get ash.o.r.e," Dr. Karl muttered. "You can have him." Dr. Karl grinned wryly. "But keep him around until I get back, will you?"

"You mean if he wants to go ash.o.r.e, tell him he can't?"

"In a gentlemanly way."

"And in case the gentlemanly way doesn't work, then what shall we do?"

Dr. Karl examined Bill Williams' considerable length, noting there were still a few signs of the old football framework under the lazy lard, and said, "I imagine you could manage suitable restraint, Bill."

"What is the legal leg I stand on while restraining?" Bill Williams asked.

After hesitating, Dr. Karl said wryly, "I could fix that up, I suppose. Mind you, don't cripple him or anything."

"Gad, we sound like pirates consorting." Williams chuckled. "I get the picture. You think it wouldn't be any trouble to prove he was nuts and needed restraining. Righto. I'll keep your wild boy here for you."

Dr. Karl gripped the rail preparatory to swinging over into the dinghy, but turned to remark, "Why callhim my wild boy?"

"Huh? Isn't he?" Williams inquired.

A wry smile touched Dr. Karl's lips. "No more than yours. Not as much. It was your donkeylike work as a steersman that brought us close enough to the witch's cake of a rock that we happened to see the poor looney." He dropped down into the dinghy, it rocked only a little under his expertly balanced weight, and he untied the painter after pulling the little craft along the rail with his strong hands.

"Back in an hour or two, Bill," he said, and took up the oars.

He used the oars in a powerful feathering stroke that sent the blades deep, then brought them back clear and flashing on returns. Dr. Linningen liked the sea, and he was not happy that he saw less and less of it as the years pa.s.sed, nor was he pleased that this Gilmore had intruded into one of his rare vacation voyages. And Gilmore had intruded, all right. From the very first, he had been an article Dr. Karl couldn't ignore. No psychiatrist could have ignored him.

There was too much that was puzzling.

The Customs was in a gray wooden building beside the ferry slip, and Dr. Karl stopped there to check in and explain about Gilmore, and to answer the resulting questions.

"Is he an American citizen?" the official wished to know.

"Born in Kansas, I would say." And when the official's eyes widened doubtfully, Dr. Karl added quickly, 'A matter of accents. I have studied them. The fellow has really told us almost nothing about himself, except to call him by the name of Gilmore."

"You mean he's too crazy to tell you anything about himself, Doc?"

"Crazy? That's too conclusive a word. His mental state hasn't permitted confidences or explanations"

"Be O.K. if I went out and talked to this Gilmore?"

"Go ahead, if you wish. It will do no harm, and probably no good."

"Then I will," the Customs officer said.

Dr. Karl nodded amiably, then changed the subject by asking, "How is the survey on the Quoddy project coming?"

"That engineer from New York, Renwick, is still around here," the official explained. "But they aren't puffing out any information that I've heard." He eyed the doctor curiously. "You read about it in the newspapers?"

Dr. Karl shook his head, said, "Radio." Then he went to the window, one facing north toward the area that had been the scene, some fifteen years before, of the Quoddy project for harnessing the resources of the terrific Fundy tides. A thin fog veiled the area, but he could see the stony islands that had been intended as an anchor for one of the dams that had never been built because Congress had concluded Quoddy was just so much dream stuff. "I happen to know this engineer, Renwick, and his a.s.sociate, Doc Savage," Dr. Karl said suddenly. "That was the reason I asked."

The Customs man straightened; interest splashed over him like a stinging bath.

"Doc Savage?" the man repeated. "You're a friend of Doc Savage?" Dr. Karl turned, lowered a shoulder deprecatingly, explaining, "In a professional sense, only." He prepared to leave, but hesitated when be noticed how the official was staring at him. "Something wrong?"

"I'm sorry," the officer said. He grinned. "This Doc Savage, a man with a reputation like that, you sort of wonder if he's real. Kind of a shock when you run across someone who really knows him."

"Savage is real enough." Dr. Karl moved to the door. "I sort of wondered if he would be around, visiting his a.s.sociate Renwick."

"That would be something," the officer said. He followed the doctor to the door. "That would be something! Well, doctor, I'll look at this zany you picked off a rock and we'll probably let him in on your say-so. Be a shame to keep a guy out of this country just because he's a little nuts, considering some we've already got." The man was chuckling over his joke as Dr. Karl walked away.

THE rooming house stood on the rocky brow of a hill that formed the backbone of the town of Lubec.

An ancient and large house, it had woodwork of teak fetched in sailing ships from the Orient, and could have been bought during the depression for five hundred dollars. The old lady who opened the door peered blankly and asked, "Who?"

"Savage," said Dr. Karl. "Doc Savage. Clark Savage, Jr. The Man of Bronze. All one and the same individual."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the old lady.

"Who is the landlady?"

"That's me."

Dr. Karl looked unsmilingly at the old face that was as crinkled and expressionless as a deflated toy balloon, and in a moment he asked, "Is Colonel John Renwick here? Renny Renwick?"

The old lady took her time. "Him? He over on the work."

"What time will Renwick be back?"

"Maybe about six. Maybe not."

Dr. Karl grinned wryly. "Thank you, madam. Would you tell him Old Doc Linningen called. Tell him also that if he wishes a decent cup of coffee, to drop aboard my schooner this evening sometime."

The old lady stiffened angrily. "What's the matter with my coffee?" she snapped.

Dr. Karl looked surprised, then said, "Why, it's nectar, I'm sure." He had turned away and was halfway to the gate when the old woman suddenly yelled, "I make the best d.a.m.n coffee in the state of Maine!"

and slammed the door.

Grinning, wondering just what the old lady thought the word nectar meant, Dr. Karl walked back toward the waterfront. All routes from the top of Lubec's hill led downward, and presently Dr. Karl began a descent. He found himself walking rapidly, jarringly, as one does down a hill. Then he began running. Not running fast, just taking a series of crow-hops that must have looked rather ridiculous, and really were ridiculous because he couldn't stop himself. Finally, he had to throw out his hands and grasp a picket in a fence, and stopped himself with a jerk. He rested there a moment to recover. "Sea legs," he muttered, putting in words the answer that seemed to explain his descent of the hill. But in a moment, when he began to descend again, he fell to running, and was helpless against it, and brought himself up only by steering against the side of a building. This happened once more, and he was perspiring and upset in his mind when he reached the foot of the street.

Kroeger, one of the crew, had watched him, and he saw Kroeger conceal a grin. Dr. Karl, irritated, snapped, "Dammit, man, I didn't have a drop!"

"I'm sure you didn't, sir," Kroeger said hastily, then added, "I came ash.o.r.e in the other d.i.n.k for supplies.

Shall I give you a tow back to the vessel, sir?"

"No, thanks, Kroeger. I learned to row a boat several years ago," Dr. Karl said with a vehemence which he saw at once was excessively childish. But he did row back to the schooner in excellent style, and would have carried off a triumphant return if Gilmore hadn't started screaming and throwing things at him.

There was little sense to Gilmore's squalling, less to the things he threw. He just hurled what he could get his hands on - an oar, a boathook, a cushion, two life preservers, a lead squid used for mackerel trolling, the bra.s.s cover off the compa.s.s binnacle. Then Bill Williams, bouncing up from below decks, pinned poor Gilmore's arms and stopped the fusillade.

By the time Dr. Karl climbed thoughtfully aboard, Bill Williams had wrestled Gilmore below, and Kroeger had retrieved the thrown articles, except for the squid and the binnacle cover, which sank. Dr.

Karl heard the unmistakable sound of a blow from the cabin, then Bill Williams reappeared, holding his right hand with his left.

"You shouldn't have struck him," Dr. Karl said.

"That's right. I darn near knocked down a knuckle. But that binnacle cover cost good money, didn't it?"

"No more than ten dollars, and he obviously wasn't responsible."

"Ten bucks is ten bucks, and he threw it in the drink," Bill Williams said. He shrugged. "O.K., maybe I shouldn't have hung one on him. Come to think of it, that was kind of silly of me, wasn't it?"

"Why did you?" Dr. Karl asked.